Bob Woodward on Tuesday dismissed a veiled threat from White House adviser Jared Kushner, who claimed to have audio tapes of the veteran journalist.
In an interview on the Today Show, Kushner was asked about comments he made during an interview with Woodward. According to Woodward, Kushner can be heard on tape calling former members of the Trump administration “overconfident idiots.”
Kushner revealed that both men had recorded the interview, and suggested that Woodward’s account was false.
“He’s got tapes of everything, I have tapes of everything,” the White House adviser said. “That was never implied in that regard.”
Later on Tuesday, Woodward responded to Kushner’s remarks in an interview with The Washington Post.
“If you look at Jared Kushner’s quote, he said, well, there were people in the campaign and then suggested he was referring to these ‘overconfident idiots’ in the campaign,” Woodward said of Kushner’s Today Show interview. “In the transcript, it’s clear he’s talking about the administration. The administration is not the campaign.”
“It is kind of this whole idea, you can take facts and kind of turn them and suggest,” he continued. “I’m quite interested in, when Jared says he has tapes, I have tapes. I taped him with his permission. I suspect that he was taping me. He did not extend the courtesy to me that he was taping the conversation.”
Woodward added: “That’s fine. I report accurately what he said in the book.”
According to the journalist, his book includes “more important quotes” from Kushner.
“He says that Trump executed a ‘hostile takeover’ of the Republican Party,” Woodward explained, “that the platforms are written by people who are extremists and it is a disparagement of the Republican Party.”
“Do they look at Trump as a hostile takeover?” he wondered. “Certainly, he’s different. But is it hostile?”
“We will be dealing more and in depth with what Jared Kushner had to say,” Woodward concluded.
