Sebastian Gorka accidentally confirms that Michael Wolff had White House approval

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published 8 January 2018

On Monday, President Trump's former deputy assistant Sebastian Gorka published a column in The Hill defending the president against several explosive claims in Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff's new book about the Trump White House. Gorka's op-ed would likely please the president, as he gleefully bashes the "#FakeNews" and uses a paragraph-long parenthetical to scoff at the "outrageous assertion" that the Trump campaign and Russia worked together during the 2016 election.

There's just one problem: Gorka writes that he met Wolff in the White House on an unnamed person's orders and declined an interview with the author. While that may be exonerating for Gorka himself, given the furor the book has stirred, it directly refutes Trump's claim that he personally rejected Wolff's requests to visit the White House:

So, when I met Michael Wolff in Reince Priebus' office, where he was waiting to talk to Steve Bannon, and after I had been told to also speak to him for his book, my attitude was polite but firm: "Thanks but no thanks." Our brief encounter reinforced my gut feeling that this oleaginous scribe had no interest in being fair and unbiased. [Sebastian Gorka, via The Hill]

Gorka isn't the only Trump ally who remembers Wolff at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.; White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters last Wednesday that the author had "just over a dozen interactions" at the White House.

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Still, Gorka deploys one of the president's favorite linguistic constructions in his efforts to discredit Wolff, calling the author a "partisan self-promoter with credibility issues the likes of which we haven't seen in a very long time." Read the op-ed in its entirety at The Hill.

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Kelly O'Meara Morales is a staff writer at The Week. He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and studied Middle Eastern history and nonfiction writing amongst other esoteric subjects. When not compulsively checking Twitter, he writes and records music, subsists on tacos, and watches basketball.