Bob Woodward: I'd Release Book Tapes If Challenged

Bob Woodward said Thursday that he would release the taped interviews he conducted for his damaging book on President Donald Trump's administration "if somebody really wants to challenge me."

"Of course," The Washington Post reporter and author of "Fear" told "CBS This Morning" on CBS News. "Of course.

"But I — again — I've made agreements with people that these sources are going to remain confidential," he said.

Numerous Trump officials, as well as former surrogates and administration employees, have come forward to attack comments attributed to them in the book — and Trump has consistently slammed Woodward's work as "fiction."

"I spent over a year on this," Woodward said. "I have literally hundreds of hours of tapes with people who were there.

"If you've looked at the book, they're very specific incidents," he added. "And it is a kind of — it opens the window."

Woodward shared a Pulitzer Prize for his Post reporting that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974 over Watergate.

"Going back to the Nixon case, any of these books you're going to have what I call this 'survival denial' by somebody who wants to be politically connected with the president," he said. "That's fine.

"But as the great editor of The Washington Post, Ben Bradlee, said, 'the truth emerges.'

"And it does," Woodward said.

"And I've done this time and time again where you get denials."

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