The author of the explosive book attacking President Donald Trump has come clean — there was no way to know if what he was writing the truth.
Michael Wolff, the author of the controversial “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” included a small note — a disclaimer of sorts — in the printed copy, it has been revealed.
In the note, the author admits he didn’t know which part (if any) of the book was fact or fiction.
After numerous contradictions, rumors, and flat-out lies from many of the 200 people he interviewed, Wolff said he just wrote down whatever he believed and sent it out to print.
On the book’s tenth page, Wolff included the following note —
Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.
Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.
In other words, Wolff didn’t know what was true and what wasn’t… so he just picked the story he liked (and would sell the most books) and wrote that.
Translation: It could be a total a work of fiction.
Many of the people interviewed for the book, which is a scathing attack on the Trump administration, have called it a lie and said the author made things up.
White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders called the book a “completely fantasy ” and said: “I’m not going to waste my time or the country’s time going page by page and talking about a book that is complete fantasy and just full of tabloid gossip.”
She’s not alone. According to Business Insider, “Other people mentioned in the book have also disputed claims made about them.
“Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who the book said warned Trump that he may be under surveillance from British spies, issued a statement describing the claim as ‘categorically absurd’ and ‘simply untrue.'”
“Anna Wintour, the longtime Vogue editor, also dismissed the claim that she lobbied Trump to be his ambassador to the UK as ‘laughably preposterous.'”
This isn’t the first time Wolff’s books have been criticized for playing fast-and-loose with facts and quotes.
His 2008 book on Rupert Murdoch was criticized by The New York Times over questions of authenticity, for example.
So what did Trump have to say about the controversial attack?
I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2018
There you go.