The New York Times obtained a copy of the book, which is a mix of good-time recollections about the earliest days after Trump’s victory and score-settling on the part of the authors and the president.
A new book by two informal advisers to President Donald Trump aims to buttress his claim that he is the victim of a vast conspiracy inside the federal government, and it includes an interview with Trump in which he repeats his unfounded assertion that President Barack Obama was complicit in spying against him.
The book, “Trump’s Enemies: How the Deep State is Undermining the Presidency,” by Corey Lewandowski, the president’s first campaign manager, and David Bossie, a former deputy campaign manager, is scheduled to be released this week.
The New York Times obtained a copy of the book, which is a mix of good-time recollections about the earliest days after Trump’s victory and score-settling on the part of the authors and the president.
Lewandowski and Bossie describe enemies of the president as “embedded” within the government, affirming most of Trump’s publicly stated views about his critics, and about intelligence agency officials who have been involved in inquiries into his campaign. And their interview with the president allowed him to vent some of his deepest grievances.
He offered no evidence for his claim that Obama had knowledge of the intelligence efforts that touched Trump campaign officials. In March 2017, Trump accused Obama of having his “wires tapped” at Trump Tower, the Manhattan skyscraper where his campaign office was located.
“Personally, I think he knew. Yeah. Just remember what they did,” Trump said to the authors. “Let me put it this way: If the shoe were on the other foot, and the same thing happened to him, it would be treason and they’d be locked up for 100 years.”
A spokesman for Obama declined to comment.
In the interview, Trump also made clear that, despite claims from his most senior aides that they had barely focused on an anonymously written Op-Ed in The Times describing a chaotic and dysfunctional White House, some energy was put into figuring out who the author could have been. Ultimately, the list of possibilities outmatched the cast of “Murder on the Orient Express” — a reality Trump recognized.
“We have 3,000 people that fit that description. It’s a lot,” Trump said in the interview. “Senior administration officials, it’s at least 1,000. And the way they worded it, we checked. That means it’s not someone who would be known. This could mean that it’s a person I’ve never met.”
The book has caused anxiety among Trump aides for weeks, as they anticipated that Lewandowski and Bossie would use it to harm some of them with the president after a bruising midterm election cycle.
In reality, the book mostly reserves its shots for former officials like Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary who served in the administration for eight months, accusing him of becoming loyal to Trump only right after the election.
Of officials currently in the White House, Lewandowski and Bossie save the bulk of their animus for the second White House chief of staff, John Kelly, who has tried to restrict Lewandowski’s access to the West Wing.
A theme of the book is efforts by people to prevent Lewandowski and Bossie from helping Trump be himself.
They accuse Kelly of trying to “cage” Trump. But they appear to have left out some of the more confrontational details related to Kelly.
In an interview with Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday” to discuss the book, Lewandowski was asked about a Times report last month detailing how Kelly grabbed Lewandowski by the collar within feet of the Oval Office, a clash that the Secret Service intervened in.
“I don’t want to get into what John may or may not have done, but what I do think is he understands that my position is to support the president and the president’s agenda all the time,” Lewandowski told Wallace.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.from pulse.ng - Nigeria's entertainment & lifestyle platform online
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