Michael Wolff's new book, "Seige," contains plenty of dishy material about the Trump administration, but a scathing review of the work casts serious doubt about any of its credibility.
The brutal pan in the The Washington Post by Ryan Lizza, a political analyst for CNN and political correspondent for Esquire, hits Wolff for relying too heavily on Steve Bannon among other former Trump administration members — and for careless reporting.
"Wolff's broad conceptual error — that the real heart of Trumpism is heroically being kept alive by Bannon's band of true-believing outsiders — would be forgivable if the book wasn't marred by two more strikes: some cringeworthy errors, and sourcing that is so opaque it renders the extremely fun and juicy quotes sprinkled across every chapter as — sadly — difficult to trust," Lizza writes.
The errors include mistakes about Trump's legal advisers, and more glaringly, about Russia’s hacking of the Democratic National Committee in 2017, the date of which Wolff missed by three months.
"Wolff observes that reporting on Trump is difficult because the president and many of the people who work for him or advise him lie indiscriminately," Lizza writes. "Other reporters have faced this dilemma by maximizing the number of sources needed to confirm the many rumors that swirl around Trump and by generally increasing transparency to retain reader trust . . ."
"Wolff takes a different approach," Lizza writes. "Dramatic scoops are plopped down on the page with no sourcing whatsoever. Would-be newsmaking quotes are often attributed to Trump and senior officials without any context about when or to whom they were made."
"By far the biggest scoop in the book is a document that Wolff alleges is a draft indictment, eventually ignored, of the president from inside the special counsel's office," Lizza points out — a report the office of Robert Mueller denied in a rare on-the-record statement.
A host of errors were also found after the publication of Wolff's "Fire and Fury" in January 2018, the Post reported at the time.
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