Trump aides descend into panic over reporters' 'shocking breach' of Situation Room: report
Top Trump administration officials are gripped by fear that two reporters got their hands on audio recordings of meetings inside the White House Situation Room — one of the most secure rooms on the planet — for a forthcoming book, according to Axios.
The outlet reported White House officials believe New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained tapes of Situation Room discussions for their book "Regime Change," due out June 23. Independent recording devices are forbidden in the room, which Axios noted would make such a leak "a shocking breach" of one of the world's most protected settings.
The dread inside the West Wing is as much about the unknown as the known. "We're afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded," one administration source told Axios. "And we have no idea which ones."
The alarm was triggered by book excerpts the Times posted ahead of publication, which included verbatim accounts of several Situation Room meetings on the Iran war and the Epstein files. Axios reported that the authors conducted more than 1,000 interviews for the book, a chronicle of Trump's second term.
Tellingly, Axios noted, White House officials have not disputed the accuracy of the quoted dialogue — including a blunt moment in which Secretary of State Marco Rubio waved off Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's regime-change scenarios for Iran. "In other words, it's bull----," Rubio said, according to the account.
Trump himself is "furious" about the blow-by-blow reconstructions of the top-secret talks, per Axios.
Haberman and Swan declined to comment.
The prospect that the nation's most closely guarded deliberations could surface word-for-word in a commercial book has rattled an administration already obsessed with hunting down leaks — and, by Axios' account, unsure how much of what was said behind those secure doors is now in someone else's hands.