Michael Wolff's explosive new book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, has sparked controversy ever since excerpts featuring inflammatory quotes from Steve Bannon were released earlier in the week. While the book is full of juicy accounts from various Trump staffers and former confidants, the author isn't sure everything he printed is entirely true.
According to Business Insider Wolff was clear from the start that "many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another," and that he wants the "the reader to judge" what the truth is. He explains his reasoning on the 10th page of the prologue:
"Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.
"Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true."
Despite being uncertain with the truth of the claims, Wolff says he has hours of interview tapes, including recordings of people who thought they were speaking off the record.
When Steve Bannon's quotes were released earlier in the week, it created a firestorm inside the White House with Trump releasing a scorching statement against Bannon, the White House calling the book "complete fantasy and just full of tabloid gossip," and Trump's lawyers even trying to stop the book from being published.
This latest revelation will only give more fuel to the Trump administration to discredit many of the claims in the book.