Best-selling author Ronald Kessler dropps a couple of bombs in his newly-published book, “The Trump White House: Changing the Rules of the Game.”
Kessler alleges that White House councilor Kellyanne Conway is the source of most leaks, but a close second may be President Donald Trump himself.
“Trump phones Maggie Haberman of the New York Times directly, as well as Philip Rucker of the Washington Post, and Jonathan Swan of Axios, feeding them stories attributed to ‘a senior White House official,’ creating the impression the White House leaks even more than it already does. In other cases, the media has picked up reports on what Trump himself has said to his friends.”
Kessler ist not the first to suggest that President Trump might be his own “anonymous source,” however. A report from The Independent from March 2017 made a similar claim. Following a lunch meeting with the president, four news anchors — Fox’s Bret Baier, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Wolf Blitzer, and ABC’s George Stephanopoulos — attributed the same comment to “a White House official” that ABC’s David Muir attributed to Trump.
In May 2016, The Washington Post reported that then candidate Donald Trump had posed as his own publicist decades earlier, calling media outlets and claiming that his name was John Miller or John Barron.
Trump denied the claims during a phone interview with NBC, saying, “No, I don’t think it — I don’t know anything about it. You’re telling me about it for the first time and it doesn’t sound like my voice at all. I have many, many people that are trying to imitate my voice and then you can imagine that, and this sounds like one of the scams, one of the many scams — doesn’t sound like me.”
President Trump has not yet commented on the veracity of Kessler’s book.