Everyone talked

'Everyone talked with Woodward': Trump White House braces for new book

Unlike previous administrations, this White House had no process for making officials available to the legendary reporter.

By ANNIE KARNI

Bob Woodward, the legendary Washington Post journalist, was sitting on the couch in press secretary Jay Carney’s office, presenting Obama administration officials with an offer they couldn’t refuse.

It was 2011, and Woodward was working on a book chronicling President Barack Obama’s debt-ceiling negotiations. He pulled out a secret memo written by Peter Orszag, the former budget director, that Woodward had obtained and which held potentially damaging revelations about the administration.

Participating in his project, Woodward said, would give people like Carney the opportunity to respond to such memos. Woodward then pointed to a safe that is kept in the press secretary’s office, which holds classified documents. “I’d like access to everything, including what’s in there,” he said, “some of which I might have already.”

The impression he left on the people in the room that day, according to a person familiar with the episode, was that they didn’t have much of a choice: Woodward knew everything, and if you didn’t participate, you were screwed.

The result was that the Obama administration cooperated in an attempt to shape the narrative to be more favorable to the president.

“We decided to put it all above board so that we at least had some visibility into it,” recalled Dan Pfeiffer, a former communications director for Obama, who said press aides would often sit in on interviews Woodward conducted with senior officials. “We put in place a process to facilitate cooperation to help shape a book that was going to be written.”

Now Woodward is taking on the Trump administration. Simon & Schuster, Woodward’s publisher, announced Monday that it plans to release his 19th book, titled “Fear: Trump in the White House,” on Sept. 11.

But the process for managing the book has not been as formal in President Donald Trump’s White House — in fact, there hasn’t been any process at all. According to half a dozen former administration officials and people close to the administration, Woodward was never officially granted access to the White House or to the president, and the communications department did nothing to help him in researching or writing his book.

For example, when Woodward approached then-National Security Council spokesman Michael Anton, with whom Woodward had worked closely on his books about the George W. Bush administration, about an interview with national security adviser H.R. McMaster, he was officially turned down, according to a person familiar with the request.

The result is what often happens in Trump world: Senior officials, acting as lone wolves concerned with preserving their own reputations, spoke to Woodward on their own — with some granting him hours of their time out of a fear of being the last person in the room to offer his or her viewpoint.

As one former administration official put it: “He hooked somebody, and that put the fear of God in everyone else.”

Another former official added: “It’s gonna be killer. Everyone talked with Woodward.”

According to Simon & Schuster, the book will reveal “the harrowing life inside Donald Trump’s White House and how the president makes decisions on major foreign and domestic policies.” The cover is a striking red wash over an uncomfortably close close-up of Trump’s face.

The book has been kept under wraps, which one publishing source said was the typical MO for the release of a Woodward book: quiet followed by a publicity blast beginning the month before publication.

But it has also stayed secret in a White House where everything seems to leak. Over the past 18 months of the Trump administration, Woodward has not been spotted often on the White House campus, officials said. He did not camp out in anyone’s office, a la author Michael Wolff, author of the best-selling “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.”

Instead, two interview subjects said, he offered Trump officials and outside sources the classic Woodward treatment — inviting them to his home, where he showed them his fabled study and his Pulitzers, and then pressed them to hand over schedules, diaries and notebooks and other documents he needed.

In previous administrations that he’s written about, Woodward has instead been a regular presence in the White House. The past three presidents — Obama, Bush and Bill Clinton — all participated in Woodward projects.

“We cooperated fully, from the president on down, in his first book on the Bush administration,” recalled former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer, who said he was interviewed by Woodward in his West Wing office. “That set the tone. The president is talking, the vice president is talking, we’re all talking.”

The Trump administration was officially participating in another project — a book by the journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. Their “inside the room” books on the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns relied on methods similar to Woodward’s — conducting hours of interviews on background, and then using an omniscient voice to recreate scenes that put readers in the room where the decision-making happened.

Their book on 2016, however, was canceled after sexual harassment allegations were made against Halperin.

Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to a request for comment about the Woodward book. Woodward’s agent, Bob Barnett, declined to comment beyond the publisher’s official release.

Trump allies said they are bracing themselves for a book that will enrage the president — and that he will therefore promote, intentionally or not. Trump’s rage tweets, in the past, have helped to boost book sales, while his promotional tweets about books that depict the administration in a positive light — including those by former aides like Sean Spicer and Fox News allies like Judge Jeanine Pirro, as well as lesser-known fans — have failed to move the needle in the same way.

His tweets about people like Wolff, who he called “a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book” and former FBI Director James Comey, who he deemed an “untruthful slime ball,” are credited with helping those books become international best-sellers. Wolff’s book sold 1.2 million hardcover copies and has been translated into 35 languages. Comey’s memoir, “A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership,” sold more than 600,000 copies in its first week on sale.

“By virtue of it being a Bob Woodward book, it will be an instant best-seller,” said literary agent Keith Urbahn, whose clients include Comey. “The smartest thing Trump could do is to give Woodward the silent treatment. But we know that’s unlikely. So if I’m Bob Woodward, I’m feeling good about things.”

Woodward has been quietly plugging away at his book since before Trump took office. During the campaign, Woodward and Washington Post reporter Robert Costa sat down together for an extended interview with Trump — an interaction that gave Woodward some visibility and entree into Trump world, as well as the imprimatur of being around.

Weeks before Trump’s inauguration, Woodward was also spotted in the lobby of Trump Tower, entering the elevator bank to go meet with senior campaign officials who would soon be making the trek to Washington.

“There’s no secrecy about it,” Woodward said at the time when pressed by reporters about what he was doing. “It’s just that I’m doing my work. It’s something I’m working on long term. I hope you’ll understand.”