Trump denies he gave author access and hits out at ‘Sloppy Steve’, as spokeswoman dismisses claims about his stability and fitness to serve 
 
 The US publisher of an explosive new book exposing chaos behind the scenes at the White House has brought publication forward to Friday in defiance of an attempt by Donald Trump’s lawyers to try to shut it down. 
 
 The book’s author, Michael Wolff, tweeted: “Here we go. You can buy it (and read it) tomorrow. Thank you, Mr President.” 
 
 Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House review – tell-all burns all Read more 
 
 Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was due to be released on Tuesday. But after extracts were made public by the Guardian, the White House was thrown into a frenzy. 
 
 Claims in the book about Trump’s mental stability and fitness to serve were dismissed on Thursday as “disgraceful and laughable” by the White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders. 
 
 Trump tweeted that he had never granted Wolff access to the White House and had turned down his requests many times. Describing the book as “phony”, Trump said Fire and Fury was: “full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist”. He said he had never spoken to Wolff: “Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!” 
 
 
 
 Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve! 
 
 The president’s Twitter outburst followed a remarkable personal statement denouncing Steve Bannon, his one-time confidant, whom he castigated as self-aggrandizing and not a critical figure. 
 
 
 
 “Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,” Trump said. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.” 
 
 Sanders said the president was “furious and disgusted” at Bannon’s attacks on his family, which included the claim that Donald Trump Jr’s Trump Tower meeting with a group of Russians who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton was “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”. 
 
 
 
 Play Video 1:18 Fire and Fury: Key explosive quotes from the new Trump book - video 
 
 Then on Thursday, as the White House struggled to contain the fallout from the book, a lawyer for the president sent a letter demanding Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt & Co, “immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination”, or excerpts and summaries of its contents. The legal notice, sent by the Beverly Hills-based attorney Charles Harder, also demanded a copy of the book. 
 
 Harder sent a similar letter to Bannon on Wednesday night, accusing the former chief strategist of violating an employee agreement and defaming the president. 
 
 At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends Michael Wolff 
 
 The Guardian published details from the book on Wednesday after obtaining a copy from a bookseller in New England. New York magazine then rushed to publish a lengthy extract and more details began to emerge as major US publications including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal received copies free from embargo. 
 
 About 250,000 copies of the book had already been shipped, supposedly to be held until Tuesday. On Thursday afternoon, a spokeswoman for Holt & Co told the Guardian publication in all formats was being brought forward to Friday “due to unprecedented demand”. 
 
 A statement from the publisher added: “Henry Holt confirms that we received a cease and desist letter from an attorney for President Trump. We see ‘Fire and Fury’ as an extraordinary contribution to our national discourse, and are proceeding with the publication of the book.” 
 
 
 
 Wolff is due on NBC’s Today show on Friday morning for his first on-the-record interview. 
 
 Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech, privacy and technology project, said earlier Trump’s lawsuit had no chance of success. 
 
 “Even Donald’s Trump’s lawyers aren’t crazy enough to present this to a court,” he said. “It would be extraordinary and unprecedented for a court to respond to these claims by blocking publication. That is not going to happen. 
 
 “I think there is an audience of one for these legal threats and that’s Donald Trump.” 
 
 In a column for the Hollywood Reporter titled My Year Inside Trump’s Insane White House, Wolff gave more insight into what he discovered as he sat “day after day on a West Wing couch” for a year. Administration officials, he suggested, do not believe Trump is capable of fulfilling his role as president. 
 
 “Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions,” Wolff wrote. “It used to be inside of 30 minutes he’d repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories – now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions – he just couldn’t stop saying something.” 
 
 He added: “Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country’s future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all – 100% – came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.” 
 
 In a final anecdote, Wolff wrote: “At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.” 
 
 Much of Thursday’s White House press briefing centered on the book. Sanders said any claims about Trump’s stability were “disgraceful and laughable”. 
 
 “If he was unfit, he probably wouldn’t be sitting there,” she said. 
 
 Trump appeared before the media earlier in the Roosevelt Room, where he was meeting Republican senators about immigration. There were shouted questions from reporters, including: “Did Steve Bannon betray you, Mr President? Any words about Steve Bannon?” 
 
 Trump replied: “I don’t know, he called me a great man last night, so, you know, he obviously changed his tune pretty quick.” 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, pictured with Eric Trump, are central figures in Wolff’s book. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA 
 
 Wolff’s book – “filled with false and misleading accounts”, according to the White House – soared from 48,449th on Amazon’s bestselling books list to No 1. 
 
 'Bannon may already be cooperating with Mueller': tell-all book shifts frame of Russia inquiry Read more 
 
 The author said his book was based on more than 200 interviews, including multiple conversations with the president and senior staff. Sanders claimed Wolff “never actually sat down with the president” and had spoken with him just once, briefly, after Trump took office. She dismissed the book as “trashy tabloid fiction”. 
 
 “Aides thought they had more time to prepare for the book’s formal release,” the Washington Post reported. “Trump spent much of the day raging about the book to top aides, officials and advisers said … As he fumed, some aides were still frantically searching for a copy of the book.” 
 
 On Wednesday, Bannon hosted Breitbart News Tonight on Sirius XM radio as usual, making little reference to the public rupture. 
 
 When a caller brought up the issue, Bannon replied: “The president of the United States is a great man. You know I support him day in and day out.” ||||| Author and columnist Michael Wolff was given extraordinary access to the Trump administration and now details the feuds, the fights and the alarming chaos he witnessed while reporting what turned into a new book. 
 
 Editor’s Note: Author and Hollywood Reporter columnist Michael Wolff’s new book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House (Henry Holt & Co.), is a detailed account of the 45th president’s election and first year in office based on extensive access to the White House and more than 200 interviews with Trump and senior staff over a period of 18 months. In advance of the Jan. 9 publication of the book, which Trump is already attacking, Wolff has written this extracted column about his time in the White House based on the reporting included in Fire and Fury. 
 
 I interviewed Donald Trump for The Hollywood Reporter in June 2016, and he seemed to have liked — or not disliked — the piece I wrote. "Great cover!" his press assistant, Hope Hicks, emailed me after it came out (it was a picture of a belligerent Trump in mirrored sunglasses). After the election, I proposed to him that I come to the White House and report an inside story for later publication — journalistically, as a fly on the wall — which he seemed to misconstrue as a request for a job. No, I said. I'd like to just watch and write a book. "A book?" he responded, losing interest. "I hear a lot of people want to write books," he added, clearly not understanding why anybody would. "Do you know Ed Klein?"— author of several virulently anti-Hillary books. "Great guy. I think he should write a book about me." But sure, Trump seemed to say, knock yourself out. 
 
 Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around — checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch. 
 
 The West Wing is configured in such a way that the anteroom is quite a thoroughfare — everybody passes by. Assistants — young women in the Trump uniform of short skirts, high boots, long and loose hair — as well as, in situation-comedy proximity, all the new stars of the show: Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, Sean Spicer, Jared Kushner, Mike Pence, Gary Cohn, Michael Flynn (and after Flynn's abrupt departure less than a month into the job for his involvement in the Russia affair, his replacement, H.R. McMaster), all neatly accessible. 
 
 The nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment — with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce. 
 
 A new president typically surrounds himself with a small group of committed insiders and loyalists. But few on the Trump team knew him very well — most of his advisors had been with him only since the fall. Even his family, now closely gathered around him, seemed nonplussed. "You know, we never saw that much of him until he got the nomination," Eric Trump's wife, Lara, told one senior staffer. If much of the country was incredulous, his staff, trying to cement their poker faces, were at least as confused. 
 
 Their initial response was to hawkishly defend him — he demanded it — and by defending him they seemed to be defending themselves. Politics is a game, of course, of determined role-playing, but the difficulties of staying in character in the Trump White House became evident almost from the first day. 
 
 "You can't make this shit up," Sean Spicer, soon to be portrayed as the most hapless man in America, muttered to himself after his tortured press briefing on the first day of the new administration, when he was called to justify the president's inaugural crowd numbers — and soon enough, he adopted this as a personal mantra. Reince Priebus, the new chief of staff, had, shortly after the announcement of his appointment in November, started to think he would not last until the inauguration. Then, making it to the White House, he hoped he could last a respectable year, but he quickly scaled back his goal to six months. Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump's public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.) 
 
 Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show — commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet "President Bannon" was less than entirely humorous. Within the first few weeks, even rote conversations with senior staff trying to explain the new White House's policies and positions would turn into a body-language ballet of eye-rolling and shrugs and pantomime of jaws dropping. Leaking became the political manifestation of the don't-blame-me eye roll. 
 
 The surreal sense of the Trump presidency was being lived as intensely inside the White House as out. Trump was, for the people closest to him, the ultimate enigma. He had been elected president, that through-the-eye-of-the-needle feat, but obviously, he was yet … Trump. Indeed, he seemed as confused as anyone to find himself in the White House, even attempting to barricade himself into his bedroom with his own lock over the protests of the Secret Service. 
 
 There was some effort to ascribe to Trump magical powers. In an early conversation — half comic, half desperate — Bannon tried to explain him as having a particular kind of Jungian brilliance. Trump, obviously without having read Jung, somehow had access to the collective unconscious of the other half of the country, and, too, a gift for inventing archetypes: Little Marco … Low-Energy Jeb … the Failing New York Times. Everybody in the West Wing tried, with some panic, to explain him, and, sheepishly, their own reason for being here. He's intuitive, he gets it, he has a mind-meld with his base. But there was palpable relief, of an Emperor's New Clothes sort, when longtime Trump staffer Sam Nunberg — fired by Trump during the campaign but credited with knowing him better than anyone else — came back into the fold and said, widely, "He's just a fucking fool." 
 
 Part of that foolishness was his inability to deal with his own family. In a way, this gave him a human dimension. Even Donald Trump couldn't say no to his kids. "It's a littleee, littleee complicated …" he explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs. But the effect of their leadership roles was to compound his own boundless inexperience in Washington, creating from the outset frustration and then disbelief and then rage on the part of the professionals in his employ. 
 
 The men and women of the West Wing, for all that the media was ridiculing them, actually felt they had a responsibility to the country. "Trump," said one senior Republican, "turned selfish careerists into patriots." Their job was to maintain the pretense of relative sanity, even as each individually came to the conclusion that, in generous terms, it was insane to think you could run a White House without experience, organizational structure or a real purpose. 
 
 On March 30, after the collapse of the health care bill, 32-year-old Katie Walsh, the deputy chief of staff, the effective administration chief of the West Wing, a stalwart political pro and stellar example of governing craft, walked out. Little more than two months in, she quit. Couldn't take it anymore. Nutso. To lose your deputy chief of staff at the get-go would be a sign of crisis in any other administration, but inside an obviously exploding one it was hardly noticed. 
 
 While there might be a scary national movement of Trumpers, the reality in the White House was stranger still: There was Jared and Ivanka, Democrats; there was Priebus, a mainstream Republican; and there was Bannon, whose reasonable claim to be the one person actually representing Trumpism so infuriated Trump that Bannon was hopelessly sidelined by April. "How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!" Trump muttered and stormed. To say that no one was in charge, that there were no guiding principles, not even a working org chart, would again be an understatement. "What do these people do?" asked everyone pretty much of everyone else. 
 
 The competition to take charge, which, because each side represented an inimical position to the other, became not so much a struggle for leadership, but a near-violent factional war. Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day. By late spring, the larger political landscape seemed to become almost irrelevant, with everyone focused on the more lethal battles within the White House itself. This included screaming fights in the halls and in front of a bemused Trump in the Oval Office (when he was not the one screaming himself), together with leaks about what Russians your opponents might have been talking to. 
 
 Reigning over all of this was Trump, enigma, cipher and disruptor. How to get along with Trump — who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. "I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, "like a child." A chronic naysayer, Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him. His billionaire friends then shared this with their billionaire friends, creating the endless leaks which the president so furiously railed against. 
 
 One of these frequent callers was Rupert Murdoch, who before the election had only ever expressed contempt for Trump. Now Murdoch constantly sought him out, but to his own colleagues, friends and family, continued to derisively ridicule Trump: "What a fucking moron," said Murdoch after one call. 
 
 With the Comey firing, the Mueller appointment and murderous White House infighting, by early summer Bannon was engaged in an uninterrupted monologue directed to almost anyone who would listen. It was so caustic, so scabrous and so hilarious that it might form one of the great underground political treatises. 
 
 By July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming Trump himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! "The daughter," Bannon declared, "will bring down the father." 
 
 Priebus and Spicer were merely counting down to the day — and every day seemed to promise it would be the next day — when they would be out. 
 
 And, indeed, suddenly there were the 11 days of Anthony Scaramucci. 
 
 Scaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York — he knew their world. In effect, the couple had hired Scaramucci — as preposterous a hire in West Wing annals as any — to replace Priebus and Bannon and take over running the White House. 
 
 There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind. 
 
 Most succinctly, no one expected him to survive Mueller. Whatever the substance of the Russia "collusion," Trump, in the estimation of his senior staff, did not have the discipline to navigate a tough investigation, nor the credibility to attract the caliber of lawyers he would need to help him. (At least nine major law firms had turned down an invitation to represent the president.) 
 
 There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn't stop saying something. 
 
 By summer's end, in something of a historic sweep — more usual for the end of a president's first term than the end of his first six months — almost the entire senior staff, save Trump's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller — for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing — was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff — without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand. Grim and stoic, accepting that he could not control the president, Kelly seemed compelled by a sense of duty to be, in case of disaster, the adult in the room who might, if needed, stand up to the president … if that is comfort. 
 
 As telling, with his daughter and son-in-law sidelined by their legal problems, Hope Hicks, Trump's 29-year-old personal aide and confidant, became, practically speaking, his most powerful White House advisor. (With Melania a nonpresence, the staff referred to Ivanka as the "real wife" and Hicks as the "real daughter.") Hicks' primary function was to tend to the Trump ego, to reassure him, to protect him, to buffer him, to soothe him. It was Hicks who, attentive to his lapses and repetitions, urged him to forgo an interview that was set to open the 60 Minutes fall season. Instead, the interview went to Fox News' Sean Hannity who, White House insiders happily explained, was willing to supply the questions beforehand. Indeed, the plan was to have all interviewers going forward provide the questions. 
 
 As the first year wound down, Trump finally got a bill to sign. The tax bill, his singular accomplishment, was, arguably, quite a reversal of his populist promises, and confirmation of what Mitch McConnell had seen early on as the silver Trump lining: "He'll sign anything we put in front of him." With new bravado, he was encouraging partisans like Fox News to pursue an anti-Mueller campaign on his behalf. Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is Trump's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family. 
 
 Steve Bannon was openly handicapping a 33.3 percent chance of impeachment, a 33.3 percent chance of resignation in the shadow of the 25th amendment and a 33.3 percent chance that he might limp to the finish line on the strength of liberal arrogance and weakness. 
 
 Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family began, on Jan. 20, 2017, an experience that none of them, by any right or logic, thought they would — or, in many cases, should — have, being part of a Trump presidency. Hoping for the best, with their personal futures as well as the country's future depending on it, my indelible impression of talking to them and observing them through much of the first year of his presidency, is that they all — 100 percent — came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job. 
 
 At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends. 
 
 Happy first anniversary of the Trump administration. ||||| Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings. 
 
 / Updated By Adam Edelman 
 
 Michael Wolff, the author of a new book that gives a behind-the-scenes account of the White House, defended his work Friday, insisting he spoke with President Donald Trump on the record and calling the commander in chief "a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth." 
 
 Wolff, in an exclusive interview on NBC's "Today," said that everyone he spoke to for the book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," described the president the same way. 
 
 "I will tell you the one description that everyone gave, everyone has in common: They all say he is like a child," Wolff explained. "And what they mean by that is, he has a need for immediate gratification. It is all about him." 
 
 Wolff added that "100 percent of the people around" Trump, "senior advisers, family members, every single one of them, questions his intelligence and fitness for office." 
 
 Trump hit back in a tweet late on Friday, claiming Wolff made up stories and used his former chief strategist "Sloppy Steve Bannon" to sell the book. 
 
 Michael Wolff is a total loser who made up stories in order to sell this really boring and untruthful book. He used Sloppy Steve Bannon, who cried when he got fired and begged for his job. Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone. Too bad! https://t.co/mEeUhk5ZV9 — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2018 
 
 Wolff also contended that he "absolutely" spoke to the president during his reporting of the book. 
 
 "Whether he realized it was an interview or not, I don’t know, but it certainly was not off the record," Wolff said. "I spoke to him after the inauguration, yes. And I had spoken to, I mean I spent about three hours with the president over the course of the campaign and in the White House, so my window into Donald Trump is pretty significant." 
 
 Trump, however, said on Twitter Thursday night that he "authorized Zero access to White House" for the author and "never spoke to him for book." 
 
 Responding to Trump, Wolff said Friday that Trump isn't one to talk when it comes to credibility. 
 
 "My credibility is being questioned by a man who has less credibility than, perhaps, anyone who has ever walked on earth at this point," Wolff said. 
 
 Wolff added that he has the evidence to back up his work. 
 
 "I work like every journalist works so I have recordings, I have notes," Wolff said. "I am certainly and absolutely in every way comfortable with everything I’ve reported in this book." 
 
 "Fire and Fury" features behind-the-scenes anecdotes from Trump's White House, including details on how the most powerful men and women in Washington worked to make Trump president — and then turned on one another after he took the oath of office. 
 
 Wolff writes in the book, and explained during his “Today” interview, that top aides said at various points Trump that is “a moron, an idiot.” 
 
 “Actually there’s a competition to sort of get to the bottom line here of who this man is. Let’s remember, this man does not read, does not listen. So he’s like a pinball, just shooting off the sides,” Wolff said. 
 
 President Trump meets with GOP senators in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on Thursday. Alex Wong / Getty Images 
 
 Wolff also revealed how people around the president noticed an apparent decline in his mental stamina. 
 
 “In the beginning, it was like every 25 or 30 minutes, you would get the same three stories repeated," Wolff said about Trump. "Now it’s the same three stories in every 10 minutes." 
 
 Wolff was then asked to elaborate on an anecdote he described in an article in The Hollywood Reporter this week in which he said Trump, at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida over the winter holiday break, didn't recognize old friends. 
 
 "I will quote Steve Bannon — he’s lost it," Wolff said, referring to Trump's former strategist. 
 
 White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, appearing on Fox News Friday morning, said it was "outrageous to make these types of accusations" about Trump's mental health. 
 
 It's "sad that people are going and making these desperate attempts to attack the president," she added. 
 
 Widely reported excerpts from the book have roiled Washington, including claims from Bannon that Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with Russians at Trump Tower in June 2016 was "treasonous" and "unpatriotic." 
 
 The president apparently referred to Bannon as "Sloppy Steve," on Twitter Thursday night. On Friday afternoon, as he left the White House for a weekend at Camp David, he ignored shouted questions from reporters about whether he had read the book himself yet. 
 
 Wolff’s book was released early Friday by Henry Holt, which announced a day earlier that it was pushing up the publication date due to demand. Earlier Thursday, Trump attorney Charles Harder demanded in a letter sent to Wolff and his publisher that the book not be published or disseminated. The book reached No. 1 on the Amazon best-seller list Wednesday. 
 
 A copy of the letter obtained by NBC News cites defamation, libel and "actual malice" among the alleged wrongdoings in the book. 
 
 NBC News has not confirmed much of the book. Wolff has been accused in the past of suspect reporting, most notably in his 1998 book "Burn Rate." In its review, the now-defunct media journal Brill's Content cited 13 people depicted in the book as saying that Wolff invented or changed quotations and that they couldn't recall his taking any notes or recording their interviews.
– The quotes are so incendiary that some are questioning their veracity. But Axios reports Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House author Michael Wolff has "dozens of hours" of tapes to back up statements that appear in the book. And in an excerpt running in the Hollywood Reporter, Wolff (who is the co-founder of Newser) explains just how he got access to them. A June 2016 Hollywood Reporter article may have helped grease things: Hope Hicks emailed Wolff to say Trump was pleased with the cover. Post-election, Wolff says he floated the idea of him coming to the White House "journalistically, as a fly on the wall" to gather information for a future book. Trump seemed disinterested in the idea of a book, but "his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around," writes Wolff. And so Wolff writes he spent each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, scheduled appointments with senior staffers, and "plunk[ed] myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch." The excerpt shares other tidbits—how the Secret Service protested the president's attempts to lock himself in his bedroom; how Trump's post-dinner calls to billionaire pals spurred leaks; how Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought Anthony Scaramucci would be the White House's saving grace—which Trump's lawyer is now trying to block from release. The Washington Post reports Wolff and his publisher, Henry Holt and Co., have been sent a letter that demands they "immediately cease and desist from any further publication, release, or dissemination of the book" or any excerpts; the lawyer also wants a copy and says a libel suit is being considered.