Trump official boasted to reporter that he gets away with 'very controversial' actions thanks to White House chaos

With all of the coverage of President Donald Trump's baffling tweets and other White House scandals, are there even more uncovered controversies that have simply flown under the radar thanks to the daily chaos spewing from the West Wing?

Axios reporter Jonathan Swan, while doing an "Ask Me Anything" session over at Reddit, hinted that there are lots of aspects of the federal government under Trump that would normally be getting far more scrutiny were it not for all the other scandals that have dominated the first two years of Trump's presidency.

"A senior Trump administration gleefully noted to me a few months ago that their agency was doing things that would be very controversial in a normal world," Swan wrote in response to a question about under-reported stories. "They have almost no oversight from the White House, Trump doesn't care about their issue area, and the national media is obsessed with the Trump tweet of the day."

All told, Swan said that this dynamic is "a bad combination and means they can operate with little scrutiny."

Elsewhere in the Q&A session, Swan was asked how he dealt with reporting on a White House in which everyone is constantly trying to leak and undermine their colleagues.

"People I deal with are constantly trying to use me, and every other White House reporter, to advance their agendas," he said. "The only way to guard against this is to start from the assumption that everything you're told is false until proven otherwise."

Read the whole AMA here.