Bob Woodward Wiki, Biography
Donald Trump has sued Bob Woodward for a fraction of less than $50 million, alleging that he did not agree with the veteran Washington Post reporter releasing tapes of their conversations as an audiobook. Woodward’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, and his parent company, Paramount Global, were also named as defendants.
In a joint statement Monday, Woodward and Simon & Schuster said the lawsuit was “without merit and we will aggressively defend against it. “All of these interviews were recorded and recorded with the knowledge and agreement of President Trump. Furthermore, it is in the public interest to have this historical record in Trump’s own words. We are sure that the facts and the law are in our favor.”
The Trump Tapes was released in October 2022, under the subtitle Bob Woodward’s Twenty Interviews with President Donald Trump. Amid generally positive reviews, The Guardian called the audiobook “a passport to the heart of darkness” of the Trump presidency.
Woodward also wrote three print bestsellers about Trump and his administration: Fear, Rage and Peril, the latest co-written with Robert Costa. The interviews that made up The Trump Tapes took place primarily from December 2019 to August 2020, when Woodward was writing Rage.
In the lawsuit filed Monday in the Northern District of Florida, Trump’s attorneys said their case “focuses on Woodward’s systematic misappropriation, manipulation, and exploitation of audio of President Trump.”
They also alleged that a conversation was deceptively edited, citing a comparison to a recording made by Hogan Gidley, a Trump aide, at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on December 30, 2019.
That recording, the lawsuit says, contains an exchange in which Woodward tells Trump, “This again is to get the book out before the election.”Rage was released in the US on September 15, 2020, just under two months before Election Day.
Trump is seeking just under $50 million in damages, a figure his lawyers say they reached by looking at sales of Fear, which “sold more than two million copies, which is the estimated number of copies the tape will sell.” audio.
“Based on the purchase price of the audiotape, $24.99, the damages President Trump has suffered due to Defendants’ actions as set forth herein are estimated to be at least $49,980,000.00, not including punitive damages, attorney’s fees, lawyers and costs.
Trump first complained when the audiobook was released. Appearing on CNN, Woodward was asked about Trump’s claim that he “never got permission from him to release these tapes.”
Woodward said: “Well, they were done voluntarily, it all went on record. He had used some of that before. So he’s president and… so he’s out there. And this is out there to the tenth power.”
Trump begins to accelerate his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, a contest in which he remains the only declared candidate.
He faces legal risk on numerous fronts: over his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, his financial and campaign finance affairs, his withholding of classified records, and a rape allegation by writer E Jean Carroll, who Trump denies. Trump has often sued enemies of the media, including CNN. A lawsuit against the New York attorney general was recently dismissed.
Meanwhile, the section of Trump’s lawsuit against Woodward alleging misleading editing contains an echo of the scandal that made the reporter famous: Watergate, which brought down Richard Nixon in 1974.
In an exchange published on The Trump Tapes, Woodward and Trump discuss Trump’s first impeachment trial, about his reaching out to Ukraine for dirt on political rivals.
Trump says the issue was “peanuts” next to Watergate.
Says Woodward: “But as soon as the Watergate burglars were caught, if Richard Nixon had gone on TV and said, ‘You know, I’m the man on top. I’m vicariously responsible for this. I’m sorry. I apologize.’ would have gone.” Trump says, “Yes, Nixon should have done that… But I can’t, he shouldn’t have done that, because I didn’t do anything wrong.”
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