It doesn’t seem so long ago that Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury was promoted so heavily by the media hoping to undermine President Trump. Michael Wolff himself claimed his book would “finally end” the Trump presidency.
What ended up happening instead was that Wolff’s book was revealed to be full of fictions. Wolff would eventually admit that the book was full of lies, but the endless coverage of the book, a media blitz most authors can only dream of getting, contributed to a number of anti-Trump narratives being believed by the left, and the Never Trump right. The book ended up selling nearly five million copies.
While any other author who admitted to making up stories for a non-fiction book might be shamed into never writing a book again, Michael Wolff has written a new book, called Siege: Trump Under Fire, which comes out next week. The Guardian has obtained an advance copy of the book, which makes the explosive claim that “special counsel Robert Mueller drew up a three-count obstruction of justice indictment against Donald Trump before deciding to shelve it.” Wolff claims that his findings are “based on internal documents given to me by sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel.”
The draft memorandum quoted by Wolff argues that nowhere does the law say the president cannot be indicted and nowhere is the president accorded a different status under the law than other federal officials, all of whom can be indicted, convicted and impeached.
The document says: “The Impeachment Judgment Clause, which applies equally to all civil officers including the president … takes for granted … that an officer may be subject to indictment and prosecution before impeachment. If it did not, the clause would be creating, for civil officers, precisely the immunity the Framers rejected.”
The memorandum rejected the argument that the burden of a criminal process on the president would interfere with his ability to carry out his duties.
There’s just one problem. Peter Carr, a spokesman for Robert Mueller denies Wolff’s claim. “The documents that [Wolff] described do not exist,” he told the Guardian.
Will Wolff’s target audience care that he’s apparently written another fantasy book that should be shelved in the fiction section? Probably not. Earlier this week, Ian Bremmer, a columnist at Time Magazine, tweeted a fake quote by President Trump that went viral, and defended what did by claiming the quote was “plausible.”
Anti-Trumpers don’t care about facts or the truth. They care about undermining Trump at all costs in order to get him out of office. Michael Wolff (who shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone anymore) is clearly trying to make more money off of this phenomenon.
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Matt Margolis is the author of The Scandalous Presidency of Barack Obama and the bestselling The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama. His new book, Trumping Obama: How President Trump Saved Us From Barack Obama’s Legacy, will be published in July 2019. You can follow Matt on Twitter @MattMargolis
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