Hat tip Chris Paul
Bob Woodward of the Washington Post has published on his website the following statement:
“The media today probably does not dig deeply enough or spend sufficient time onstories. The best way to ensure that sources will be open and honest is to treat them fairly.”
This quote is also the opening statement in the lawsuit filed yesterday by President Donald J. Trump against the journalist and others that alleges they unlawfully profited by selling audio of President Trump obtained during interviews to be used solely for Woodward’s book, Rage.
Yesterday, the Gateway Pundit reported on this lawsuit regarding the year-long interview process and the use of protected tapes and recordings without any accounting to President Trump.
Back in September of 2020, The Gateway Pundit also reported that President Trump was convinced to grant Woodward the interview by Sen. Lindsey Graham. Ironically, Senator Graham strangely appeared with President Trump during a rally in South Carolina on Saturday, just two days before the lawsuit against Woodward was filed.
Woodward was hoping to piggyback off the success of his first book about Donald Trump, Fear, with a follow up book titled Rage. The sequel book did not meet expectations. The suit calls the book a “complete and total failure.”
According to the lawsuit, Woodward then tried to compensate for the failure of Rage by releasing the “raw” interview audio, despite “President Trump repeatedly stating to Woodward, in the presence of others, that he was agreeing to be recorded for the sole purpose of Woodward…to write a single book.”
The problem is, the audio wasn’t “raw” at all. At one point in “Interview 8”, you hear Woodward say “I’m going to turn on my recorder,” despite it already being on without the President’s knowledge.
Unfortunately, that was not the extent of the deception by Woodward. President Trump’s deputy press secretary, Hogan Gidley, recorded the interview with Woodward from his phone and compared it to the “audiobook”. The follow texts are directly from the lawsuit brief. A strike thru represents omitted speech from the audiobook:
In the following exchange between President Trump, Woodward, and Gidley, Woodward starts by saying “You know me well enough to know that I’m neutral…” Keep that in mind.
President Trump goes on to say the Whistleblower Report “was a false report written by a guy whose lawyer is a scumbag, okay? A real scumbag. Look at the background of these people. The Whistleblower Report was a fraud.”
Woodward, who is “neutral”, then left out that part about Rep. Adam Schiff giving a false statement, which likely refers to the transcript he made up regarding the Ukraine phone call, to which Woodward said “I totally understand that.”
Woodward himself goes on to say that he “really wants to understand…” but then admits that he has not read the aforementioned Whistleblower Report. The latter admission is redacted from the “raw” audiobook as well.
Later, Woodward redacts President Trump saying “And, by the way, if anybody looked at that horrible tape with Biden, you’d fully understand that, and he brought up the name Rudy Giuliani, by the way, he did – the President (Zelensky).”
Woodward would go on to also redact this imperative statement: “The only reason I and, by the way, I got approval from Ukraine before I did it, because I was very, I said – Geez, you know, it’s a terrible thing to do. A terrible thing to do. So, we called Ukraine. We said – Do you mind if we release this conversation? And we got approval. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to release it.”
This is, of course, relating to the now infamous phone call with President Zelensky, a foundational piece of evidence in the first impeachment, where President Trump mentions that Biden had a prosecutor in Ukraine fired. Biden has bragged as much:
The entire first impeachment was ultimately predicated in large part to a made up narrative from an anonymous whistleblower that accused President Trump of doing the exact same thing Joe Biden is on the record admitting to doing in the above clip.
“Neutral.”
Chris Paul of the Be Reasonable Podcast and Badlands Media published these findings in the following thread: