Tapper: Wolff’s Book ‘Should Be Met With Skepticism…Riddled With Errors and Rumors’ (original) (raw)

Following the release of Michael Wolff’s explosive and controversial Trump tell-all Fire and Fury, quite a bit of discussion has been devoted to just how accurate the book really is. A number of typos and basic factual errors have been highlighted in the book, and folks quoted in Fire and Fury have come out to claim they never said those specific remarks. During his media tour promoting the book, Wolff has defended the book’s accuracy, stating that “if it rings true, it is true.”

In a monologue this afternoon on The Lead, CNN’s Jake Tapper noted that we are left with a conundrum with this book because we are stuck with “two unreliable narrators” — Wolff and President Donald Trump. Highlighting that the president has claimed that he offered zero access to Wolff for the book, Tapper than contrasted this with Wolff’s assertion that he spoke to Trump for a cumulative three hours during the campaign, transition, and presidency.

Tapper then pointed out that Trump’s allies are trying their best to discredit Wolff, bringing up former White House staffer Seb Gorka’s recent op-ed in which the Fox News pundit unwittingly confirmed that Wolff had tremendous access in the White House while working on the book. At the same time, the CNN host said that Gorka’s complaints with Wolff might not be “poorly founded.”

“Wolff’s reporting should be met with skepticism,” Tapper declared. “It is riddled with errors and rumors. And in his marketing of the book, Wolff made the unbelievable assertion that 100% of the president’s family members and top advisers have concerns about his mental fitness for the job. 100%. That’s simply not true.”

After further noting that there is one paragraph in the book that contains three errors, the CNN anchor concluded by stating how this places readers in a tough position.

“So that’s the conundrum we’re in,” he said. “We have an author who had access, an author who had great quotes, but did he have great facts?”

Watch the clip above, via CNN.

[image via screengrab]

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