Journalists Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman may have gotten recordings from Situation Room meetings during the second Donald Trump administration for their upcoming book "Regime Change," according to a new report.
Verbatim accounts of several conversations have been published in articles ahead of the book's publication, Axios noted. "We're afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded," a top official told the outlet. "And we have no idea which ones."
Verbatim accounts of several conversations have been published in articles in The New York Times ahead of the book's publication, set to take place on June 23. The journalists conducted over 1,000 interviews for the book, focused on President Donald Trump's second term.
Elsewhere, Axios noted that officials did not dispute the accounts of the conversations detailed in the articles about the book. One of them featured Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying that regime-change scenarios for Iran presented by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were "bulls--t."
Another report claimed that top Trump aides held several meetings in the Situation Room to discuss the fallout of the president's involvement in the files related to disgraced financier and sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein.
One of the meetings featured Vice President JD Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. There, the book claimed, Vance "floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein's longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison."
"It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein," Vance mused, according to the journalists. They went on to say that Vance told those present back then that he "believed all the files should be released as soon as possible."
However, Trump wanted "the whole Epstein issue buried, and he was snapping at anyone who mentioned it. His staff largely avoided the subject in their conversations with him, forced to worry among themselves."
The authors concluded that the "Epstein crisis" exposed "something that some of Trump's closest advisers spent months refusing to see." "The president could break institutions, redirect the federal government against his enemies and bring the world's richest men into the Oval Office bearing tribute. But he could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear."
