Woodward criticized over Trump book handling

Who told him -- US President Donald Trump -- to grant the interviews and why did he?

And should he -- Bob Woodward – have reported earlier Trump's admission in one of the interviews that he intentionally downplayed the severity of the coronavirus threat in the spring to avoid panic?

Those questions were being explored on social media Thursday, the day after CNN and The Washington Post reported excerpts from Woodward's new book, "Rage". The book, to be published Sept 15, is based in part on 18 interviews that Woodward conducted with Trump between December and July, many of them taped by Woodward.

On Wednesday, Trump didn't deny telling Woodward what is in the book, but he called it "another hatchet job".

Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Trump should never have agreed to the interviews. He blamed Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina for encouraging Trump to speak to Woodward.

Graham told The Daily Beast that he did recommend Trump speak with the veteran Post journalist.

"The last book Woodward wrote, Trump said he didn't know that he had wanted to be interviewed. So, I said, well, the guy is a well-known presidential author. And, you know, you got a chance to tell your side of the story. The president agreed and there you go," he said.

Trump learned about that last book -- "Fear" – and called Woodward in frustration, the Post reported at the time. "It's really too bad, because nobody told me about it, and I would have loved to have spoken to you," he said in an audio released by the newspaper then.

Trump made clear to aides, according to the Post, that he would participate in the next book.

According Politico, unidentified senior administration officials at the White House said Wednesday, "Sometimes the president does a nontraditional thing, and you get a surprising result. But I don't think any of us recommended doing it."

"You don't talk the president out of things," another White House official told Politico.

Woodward on Wednesday faced criticism from fellow journalists for not reporting earlier that Trump had admitted withholding from the public the severity of the virus. Some accused him of valuing book sales over public health.

And Trump himself on Thursday questioned why Woodward didn't report his comments earlier to save lives, and used his questioning to say he didn't do so because "he knew they were good and proper answers''.

"Bob Woodward had my quotes for many months. If he thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn't he immediately report them in an effort to save lives?" Trump tweeted. "Didn't he have an obligation to do so? No, because he knew they were good and proper answers. Calm, no panic!"

"Nearly 200,000 Americans have died because neither Donald Trump nor Bob Woodward wanted to risk anything substantial to keep the country informed," wrote Esquire magazine's Charles P. Pierce on Twitter.

"There is no ethical or moral defense of Woodward's decision to not publish these tapes as soon as they were made," John Stanton, the former Washington bureau chief for BuzzFeed, wrote in a tweet. "If there was any chance it could save a single life, he was obligated to do so. Bob Woodward put making money over his moral and professional duty."

"How differently might Trump's supporters have acted if — this whole time — they knew that he knew COVID was a serious threat?" tweeted Jessica Huseman, a reporter for ProPublica. "Woodward could have made that happen in February."

"Why did Woodward sit on this information while Americans suffered and died?" tweeted Jose Antonio Vargas, a filmmaker and former reporter for the Post.

Two journalists at The Post defended Woodward. David Maraniss, an investigative journalist and associate editor, tweeted that "the argument that lives might have been saved had [Woodward] reported this earlier is ahistorical." He also called the tapes of Trump's remarks "an invaluable public service".

Erik Wemple, a Post media critic, said the president might never have made these remarks to Woodward if he thought they would show up hours or days after he said them.

"The choice isn't between Woodward publishing this revelation in September and, say, March," he wrote on Twitter. "It's between Woodward publishing this in September or not at all."

In interviews on Wednesday, Woodward defended not reporting earlier what Trump said.

He told The Associated Press he needed time to ensure that Trump's remarks were accurate.

"He tells me this, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, that's interesting, but is it true?'" Woodward said. "Trump says things that don't check out, right?"

He told AP that Trump called him "out of the blue" in early February to "unburden himself" about the virus, which then had few cases in the US. But Woodward said that only in May was he satisfied that Trump's comments were based on reliable information and that by then the virus had spread nationwide.

"If I had done the story at that time about what he knew in February, that's not telling us anything we didn't know," Woodward said. At that point, he said, the issue was no longer one of public health but of politics. His priority became getting the story out before the election in November.

"That was the demarcation line for me," he said. "Had I decided that my book was coming out on Christmas, the end of this year, that would have been unthinkable."

Woodward told Margaret Sullivan, a media columnist at the Post, that his aim was to provide a fuller context than could be done in a news story.

Sullivan said that Woodward also told her that he didn't have a signed agreement or formal embargo arrangement with Trump or the White House to hold back their conversations until the book published.

"I told him it was for the book," he said — but as far as promising not to publish in real time, or signing such an agreement, "I don't do that."