Who is Bob Woodward and when is his new Trump book released?
EXPLOSIVE allegations against President Trump are revealed in a new book by legendary Watergate journalist Bob Woodward.
The book, titled Rage and set to be released on September 15, openly critiques the Trump presidency and includes nine hours of recorded conversation with the president.
Who is Bob Woodward?
Bob Woodward is a long-serving investigative journalist, associate editor and author who is best known for his work on the Watergate scandal.
The now 77-year-old is one half of the Washington Post reporting team that helped bring down Richard Nixon's presidency in the early 70s.
The collaborative work of Woodward and Bernstein during the scandal was described as "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time" by long-time journalism figure Gene Roberts.
Their work was brought to the big screen in the critically acclaimed movie All The President's Men which starred Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.
Woodward continued to work for The Washington Post after his reporting on Watergate and is now the paper’s associate editor.
Since Watergate, he has written 18 books on American politics, 12 of which topped best-seller lists.
He often writes exposé books about Presidential administrations and they have become known as a “rite of passage”.
When does Bob Woodward's new Trump book Rage come out?
New bombshell book Rage comes out on September 15, 2020, and is set to give readers an explosive glimpse into the White House.
Woodward's publisher Simon & Schuster has described the book as a "volatile and vivid" look at the "turmoil, contradictions and risks" of the Trump administration.
Rage will reportedly feature accounts of the president's behaviour, thoughts, and actions on national security amid the coronavirus pandemic, economic collapse, and the Black Lives Matter protests.
He also interviewed witnesses, and Simon & Schuster revealed that Woodward obtained "notes, emails, diaries, calendars and confidential documents," which included 25 personal letters between Trump and the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un.
What is Fear: Trump In The White House all about?
Woodward’s previous book on Trump, Fear - released on September 11, 2018 - painted an extremely unflattering picture of the Trump administration, describing it as a “nervous breakdown of executive power”.
Woodward describes several instances where documents were slyly removed from Trump’s desk by administration officials – including chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter – in a bid to stop him signing them.
The book claims that among the documents hidden were those that would have withdrawn the US from the North American Free Trade Agreement and from a trade deal with South Korea.
Chief of Staff John Kelly reportedly raged: “He’s an idiot. We’re in Crazytown. This is the worst job I’ve had”, while Defence Secretary James Mattis likened his intellect to “a fifth or sixth grader” — a child aged 11 or 12.
In an explosive rant, Trump is said to have called Attorney General Jeff Sessions “mentally retarded”, allegedly adding: "He’s this dumb Southerner. … He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”
What did Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein do during the Watergate Scandal?
Woodward teamed up with Carl Bernstein to break the story of the Richard Nixon Watergate scandal in the early 70s.
He was a 29-year-old US Navy Veteran and was only months into his new job as a Washington Post reporter when he was tipped off about Nixon’s connections to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters.
The duo went on to become the most heralded US investigative journalists ever, and the Washington Post won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
They went on to publish a book that described in detail how they held clandestine meetings with their source, nicknamed “Deep Throat”, and the source's exhortations to "follow the money".
Relying heavily upon anonymous sources like “Deep Throat”, Woodward and Bernstein uncovered information suggesting that knowledge of the break-in, and attempts to cover it up, led deeply into the upper reaches of the Justice Department, FBI, CIA, and the White House.
The pair interviewed Judy Hoback Miller, Nixon’s bookkeeper, who revealed information about the mishandling of funds and records being destroyed.
“Deep Throat” was revealed in 2005 as William Mark Felt, Sr, deputy director of the FBI during that period of the 1970s.
Felt met secretly with Woodward several times, telling him of former CIA officer Howard Hunt's involvement with the Watergate break-in, and that the White House staff regarded the stakes in Watergate extremely highly.
Felt warned Woodward that the FBI wanted to know where he and other reporters were getting their information, as they were uncovering a wider web of crimes than the FBI first disclosed.
All of the secret meetings between Woodward and Felt took place at an underground parking garage somewhere in Rosslyn over a period from June 1972 to January 1973.
Prior to resigning from the FBI on June 22, 1973, Felt also anonymously planted leaks about Watergate with Time magazine, the Washington Daily News and other publications.
Following Woodward and Bernstein’s epic scoop, applications to journalism schools reached an all-time high in 1974.
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What has Trump said about Fear?
Trump branded the book a "fraud", full of "so many lies" and denied claims he called his Attorney General "mentally retarded".
He tweeted: "The already discredited Woodward book, so many lies and phony sources, has me calling Jeff Sessions 'mentally retarded' and 'a dumb southerner'.
"I said NEITHER, never used those terms on anyone, including Jeff, and being a southerner is a GREAT thing. He made this up to divide!"
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders issued a statement at the time describing the book as “nothing more than fabricated stories”.