President Donald Trump, showing his
outrage over Bob Woodward's explosive new book, is ordering a real witch hunt in the West Wing and throughout his administration, asking loyal aides to help determine who cooperated with the book.
"The book is fiction," Trump said Wednesday in the Oval Office alongside the Emir of Kuwait.
Even as the President publicly fumes, he's privately on a mission to determine who did -- and didn't -- talk to Woodward, CNN has learned. But no sooner had the search for Woodward's sources begun than yet another devastating portrait of the President emerged, this time via a New York Times op-ed written by an unnamed senior Trump administration official. The White House did not immediately respond to a CNN request for comment on the op-ed.
Before it published, two officials who have spoken directly to the President say he is pleased with the denials of speaking to Woodward offered by chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis.
Trump himself highlighted the denials of Mattis and Kelly, saying that both men were "insulted" by the comments Woodward attributed to them.
"Gen. Mattis has come out very, very strongly...He was insulted by the remarks that were attributed to him," Trump said. "John Kelly, same thing. He was insulted by what they said. He couldn't believe what they said."
In Trump's eyes, what makes or breaks aides who are reported to have made disparaging comments about him is how strongly they push back on the accusations.
Unlike Kelly and Mattis, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson never denied calling Trump a "moron" and a former senior White House official said Trump "never forgave him for it."
But he is also taking note of the silence from several other former administration officials. "He wants to know who talked to Woodward," one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity amid the highly tense atmosphere in the West Wing in the wake of the book...
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