In the words of Portsmouth, VA City Council member Lisa Lucas-Burke, “I’m pissed like a motherfucker”.
Yeah, imma say it!
While I have had my criticisms of New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman, I’ve stayed quiet about those criticisms, for the most part.
For example, I’ve defended Ms. Haberman against the charges of merely being an “access journalist” because reporters do need some measure of access in order to do their jobs, like it or not. I haven’t liked how Ms. Haberman has utilized her access but, until now, I haven’t said all that much about it.
Until now.
Because the former President of the United States admitted to having committed a crime to Maggie Haberman.
Mike Allen/Axios
The big picture: These are the ones that will get the most attention from the Department of Justice. They're from one of three interviews Trump gave Haberman for the book.
This one was at his club in Bedminster, N.J., on Sept. 16, 2021 — one year ago.
He demurred when I asked if he had taken any documents of note upon departing the White House — "nothing of great urgency, no," he said, before mentioning the letters that Kim Jong-un had sent him, which he had showed off to so many Oval Office visitors that advisers were concerned he was being careless with sensitive material.
"You were able to take those with you?" Haberman asked.
He kept talking, seeming to have registered my surprise, and said, "No, I think that's in the archives, but … Most of it is in the archives, but the Kim Jong-un letters … We have incredible things."
In fact, Trump did not return the letters — which were included in boxes he had brought to Mar-a-Lago — to the National Archives until months later.
So...let me understand what’s being said.
The former President of the United States admitted to having committed a crime to journalist Maggie Haberman. Haberman knew that the president was confessing to a crime (otherwise she wouldn’t have registered “surprise”) and she saved this information for publication in her book over a year later, do I have that right?
Was this reported to Ms. Haberman’s editors at The New York Times?
Did Haberman report this apparent confession of a crime by a former President of the United States to the FBI for further investigation?
Someone also seems to have taken the time to dispatch a few of the reporters at The New York Times and other news outlets onto Twitter to defend Ms. Haberman.
That the former President of the United States confessed to having committed a crime to a journalist on 9/16/21 should have been on the front page of The New York Times, I don’t know, on September 17, 2021...or something like that.
And journalists like Maggie Haberman and Matthew Yglesias and Jonathan Weisman wonder why most people don’t trust the news media.
Yeah, imma say it!