EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT | 'Fraud and Fiction: The Real Truth Behind Fire and Fury'

by Eddie Scarry

 | April 03, 2018 12:01 AM

It's been three months since Michael Wolff's sensational book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, rocked the nation. It continues to have an impact on the White House, even as the author's credibility further deteriorates. Wolff said he's "barely a journalist" and that his job as a writer has "nothing to do with truth." But that comes after weeks of headlines and cable news debate over the most sensational claims in his book, including that President Trump is mentally incapacitated. Fire and Fury wasn't just a political insider book, it was a crisis that confronted the Trump administration and one that was exacerbated by a national news media willing to entertain it. Below is an adapted excerpt from my new book Fraud and Fiction: The Real Truth Behind "Fire and Fury," now available on Amazon, in which I lay out exactly how and why this critical moment in Trump's presidency happened.

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It amounts to media malpractice that would-be respectable news outlets publicized the unsanitary content in Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.

President Trump told me in a recent phone call that he never met with Wolff for his book, but he admitted that at the time, "nobody knew" ousted White House adviser Steve Bannon was doing interviews for it.

Almost everything else in Wolff's book, however, was inaccurate and inconsistent with reality or recklessly disregarded the obvious truth.

The Hollywood Reporter, where Wolff is a columnist, printed excerpts from Wolff’s book, including a portion where Murdoch allegedly hangs up the phone after a call with Trump and says of the new president, “What a fucking moron.”

In the actual book, the quote appears as, “What a fucking idiot.”

Something was either lost in translation between the book and the column or, more likely, it was a small but glaring example of Wolff’s looseness and carelessness with accuracy reflected in a sloppy copy-and-paste job.

Wolff wrote that it was Trump’s tweet in July 2017 announcing John Kelly as his new chief of staff that informed the retired general he would be moving from the Department of Homeland Security, where he had been the director, to manage the West Wing.

“In fact, Kelly—who would soon abjectly apologize to [outgoing Chief of Staff Reince] Priebus for the basic lack of courtesy in the way his dismissal was handled—had not been consulted about his appointment,” Wolff wrote in the book. “The president’s tweet was the first he knew of it.”

But The New York Times reported at the time of the announcement that Trump had “offered the job to Mr. Kelly a few days” before the tweet.

Do we believe the fantastical account in Wolff’s book that Trump made an announcement about the most important job in the White House on Twitter first, or the far more likely scenario that he had consulted Kelly days beforehand?

These should have served as massive warning that perhaps, at the least, Fire and Fury wasn’t a fully honest portrayal of Trump’s White House.

Media: Nah!

Here’s the kind of grilling Wolff got in a January 8 interview on CBS This Morning:

Anchor Jeff Glor: “President Trump yesterday said the book is a fake book. He said you are totally discredited as an author. Is everything in the book true?”

Wolff: “Everything in the book is true.”

Glor: “And your response to that?”

Wolff: “Well, I’m waiting for a nickname [from Trump].”

[Glor’s co-anchors Gayle King and Norah O’Donnell laugh off
camera.]

Glor: “You don’t have one yet?”

Wolff: “Where’s my nickname?”

That’s the aggressive follow-up I hope conservative authors expect from CBS News when they call the next Democratic president mentally disabled, presuming a conservative book like that would even be featured on network television.

Author Ed Klein, former editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine, wrote an equally salacious book about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but coverage of the book was rarely seen outside of Fox News. Klein’s 2012 book The Amateur was, like Fire and Fury, a White House insider account that described Obama as thin-skinned, ill-equipped, and vain. It hit number one on the Times’ bestseller list and stayed there for a month, despite nearly no attention from the mainstream media.

The Amateur included on-record interviews with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, wherein Obama’s incendiary longtime pastor claimed that the Obama 2008 campaign had offered him a monetary bribe in exchange for keeping a low profile before the election.

Wow, that’s interesting!

But a New York Times book review at the time dismissed the revelation, noting that, “any biographical subject has bitter ex-friends and associates.” The review called Klein’s book “skimpy” and, again, “bitter.” 

Klein wasn’t interviewed at all by ABC, CNN, NBC, MSNBC, or CBS. If he had, it’s safe to assume Klein would have received more pointed questions than, “Is everything in the book true?”

By contrast, Wolff appeared on:

• NBC’s Today
• NBC’s Meet the Press
• ABC’s The View
• CBS This Morning
• HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher
• CNBC’s Squawk Box
• CNBC’s Power Lunch
• MSNBC’s Morning Joe
• MSNBC’s Morning Joe (a second time)
• MSNBC’s Hardball
• MSNBC’s The Last Word
• CNN’s Tonight
• CNN’s Smerconish
• PBS’s News Hour

The Los Angeles Times’ politics and culture columnist Virginia Heffernan made the unfortunate prediction that, because Wolff supposedly had a good editor and his book was fact-checked, the book would “withstand whatever charges of journalistic impropriety come at it.”

If there were a penalty for embarrassing yourself with how wrong you can be, the national papers’ opinion pages would be empty. (These are the people, by the way, who think it’s sassy and daring to call Trump “shameless.”) 

Incidentally, Heffernan’s column was ever-so fittingly headlined, “Why believe Michael Wolff? Because, for now, this stuff is too good not to.”

In another dumbfounding chapter of the Wolff saga, he admitted in his book that he was basically talking out of his ass when he recounted a private conversation between Tony Blair and Jared Kushner, in which Blair told Trump’s son-in-law that UK intelligence may have spied on the Trump campaign and Trump himself.

“There was, he suggested, the possibility that the British had had the Trump campaign staff under surveillance, monitoring its telephone calls and other communications and possibly even Trump himself,” Wolff wrote.

The spying supposedly came at the prodding of the Obama administration.

“So,” Wolff continued, “although the Obama administration would not have asked the British to spy on the Trump campaign, the Brits would have been led to understand how helpful it might be if they did.”

You can imagine Wolff verbally telling this story, eyes bulging, and hoping his audience remains distracted by his wild fantasy as he swipes their wallets and watches.

Yes, a former British spy, Christopher Steele, did receive money from the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign via the firm Fusion GPS in order to compile the garbage “dossier” on Trump. Steele, in turn, then paid Russians to tell him bad things about Trump. But that is not the same thing as official British intelligence putting Trump under “surveillance.”

Wolff alleges that the conversation between Blair and Kushner took place at the White House in February 2017 because Blair was “seeking to prove his usefulness to this new White House” and “particularly intent on helping shepherd some of Jared’s Middle East initiatives.”

Mind you, this is Tony Blair, who served as Britain’s prime minister for a decade. And yet, Wolff’s book pushes the idea that Blair needed to suck up to Kushner, who had no government experience and, by the book’s own admission was “more than a little desperate” for advice.

A distinguished former British prime minister is ingratiating himself to Kushner because what? He needs a job? It’s laughable.

Here’s how Wolff washes his hands of any implication he might have in the hearsay he spread: “It was unclear whether Blair’s information was rumor, informed conjecture, his own speculation, or solid stuff.”

Translated for the digital age, Wolff means something to the effect of: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Blair then had to publicly deny the encounter with Kushner, as was detailed by Wolff. “This story is a complete fabrication, literally from beginning to end,” he said in an interview on BBC Radio, acknowledging though that he does know Kushner. 

“I’ve never had such conversation in the White House, outside of the White House, with Jared Kushner or with anybody else.”

And, in a moment of depressing insight perfectly applicable to Wolff’s book and its media reception, Blair bemoaned the state of working in public affairs. 

“The story is a sort of reflection on the crazy state of modern politics,” he said. “Here’s a story that is literally an invention and is now halfway around the world with conspiracy theories attached to it. That’s modern politics.”

That’s modern politics in the age of Trump.

Fraud and Fiction: The Real Truth Behind "Fire and Fury" is available on Amazon.