FEAR leak

That's undoutedly going to be the title to a number of posts now that Bob Woodward's book Fear is officially out. Regarding the mock interview John Dowd conducted to see if Trump could testify before Mueller:

According to Woodward’s book “Fear,” Dowd told Trump that he’d be “fitted for an orange jumpsuit” if he testified.

“Trump goes ballistic, makes things up, starts screaming [...] ” Woodward told late night host Stephen Colbert on Monday. “‘You can’t testify. You- you are disabled.’ I mean, imagine the lawyer- your lawyer, telling you you’re disabled. ‘And you can’t testify because you can’t tell the truth. You just make things up!’”

As Woodward writes [at] end the book: “Dowd knew he couldn’t bring himself to say to the President, ‘You’re a fucking liar.’”

Dowd left Trump’s legal team in March.

  TPM

Woodward writes that Dowd saw the "full nightmare" of a potential Mueller interview, and felt Trump acted like an "aggrieved Shakespearean king."

But Trump seemed surprised at Dowd's reaction, Woodward writes. "You think I was struggling?" Trump asked.

[...]

Despite Dowd's efforts, Trump continued to insist he could testify. "I think the President of the United States cannot be seen taking the fifth," Trump said.

Dowd's argument was stark: "There's no way you can get through these. ... Don't testify. It's either that or an orange jump suit."

[...]

Then, in an even more remarkable move, Dowd and Trump's current personal attorney Jay Sekulow went to Mueller's office and re-enacted the mock interview. Their goal: to argue that Trump couldn't possibly testify because he was incapable of telling the truth.

"He just made something up. That's his nature," Dowd said to Mueller.

[...]

In a statement Tuesday, Dowd denied some of the key anecdotes and quotes attributed to him in the book. He criticized Woodward for fueling an "endless cycle of accusations and misrepresentation."

"I do not intend to address every inaccurate statement attributed to me -- but I do want to make this clear: there was no so-called 'practice session' or 're-enactment' of a mock interview at the Special Counsel's office," Dowd said. "Further, I did not refer to the President as a 'liar' and did not say that he was likely to end up in an 'orange jump suit'. It was a great honor and distinct privilege to serve President Trump."

  CNN

Which is why he quit, eh?

And Trump demeaned former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani to his face, when Giuliani was the only campaign surrogate willing to defend then-candidate Trump on television after the "Access Hollywood" tape, a bombshell video where Trump described sexually assaulting women.

"Rudy, you're a baby," Trump told the man who is now his attorney. "I've never seen a worse defense of me in my life. They took your diaper off right there. You're like a little baby that needed to be changed. When are you going to be a man?"

[...]

His inner circle was worried about "The Big Problem," Woodward writes: Trump's lack of understanding that his crusade to impose tariffs could endanger global security.

But the meeting didn't go as planned.

Trump went off on his generals. "You should be killing guys. You don't need a strategy to kill people," Trump said of Afghanistan.

He questioned the wisdom of keeping US troops in South Korea.

"So Mr. President," Cohn said to Trump, "what would you need in the region to sleep well at night?"

"I wouldn't need a fucking thing," the President said. "And I'd sleep like a baby."

[...]

Woodward reveals that Trump ordered printouts of his tweets and studied them to find out which ones were most popular. "The most effective tweets were often the most shocking," Woodward writes.

Twitter was a source of great consternation for national security leaders, who feared — and warned Trump — "Twitter could get us into a war."

[...]

[Ex-Chief of Staff Reince] Priebus, who was blindsided when Trump announced his firing on Twitter [ed: which is also how he fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson], referred to the presidential bedroom as "the devil's workshop" and called the early morning hours and Sunday night — a time of many news-breaking tweets — "the witching hour."

Trump, however, saw himself as a Twitter wordsmith.

"It's a good thing," Trump said when Twitter expanded its character count to 280, "but it's a bit of a shame because I was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters."

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.