It seems that wouldn’t work all that well. NDA’s are usually used for sensitive issues, and so it would seem that you are not allowed to address anything involved. “Neither confirm or deny” type of stuff.
If you couldn’t get into trouble for telling untruths about a subject covered by an NDA, then it would be trivial to get around the point of it by simply telling all the things that it isn’t.
If I work for the Coca-Cola Company, and I have signed and NDA about their “secret formula”, then I can’t get around it by saying, “Well, they don’t use ‘X’. in their formula.” with that being a lie.
Point is that an NDA that Bannon or any other staffer would have signed would have been a blanket that they cannot discuss things that happened while employed by the trump administration.
Whether you are lying or telling the truth, you would be violating the NDA by talking about it at all.
Even if there was a violation of the NDA, all Trump could do is sue the person who violated the NDA (i.e. the person who actually signed the NDA, e.g. Bannon but not Wolff) for damages, isn’t it?
I don’t know enough about how they work. I’ve only signed them re: IP, trade secrets, etc.
If you reveal some mundane conversation detail, I’m not sure what the damage is. But perhaps someone will be along to school us.
Don’t worry. If Sessions is fired, there is apparently a good backup in place.
*
"Scott Pruitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, has told friends and associates that he’s interested in becoming attorney general, according to three people familiar with the internal discussions.
With rumors swirling that Jeff Sessions could depart the administration and two members of the House Freedom Caucus calling on the former Alabama senator to resign, Pruitt is quietly positioning himself as a possible candidate for the job."*
The story I’ve heard is that Sessions has recused himself from the Mueller investigation. Some Trump supporters in Congress want Sessions to resign so he can be replaced by a new Attorney General who will then fire Mueller and either shut down the investigation or appoint a new investigator who will direct it away from Trump.
Related: Curious about the pricing of the book, I searched ‘Fire and Fury’ and hit ‘shopping’—and got, not only the book, but dozens of ‘Fire and Fury’ articles for sale to supporters of Trump: t-shirts, mugs, tote bags, watches, PJs, etc.
So every Trump fan who sports one of these items will be providing free advertising for Wolff’s book.
(I looked over Scott Adams’ Twitter feed for what he must surely believe: that letting Michael Wolff have access to the West Wing for months, proves that Trump is a genius…couldn’t find any mention at all of the fact that Trump permitted Wolff so much access. Odd!)
What I read (sorry, I’ve read so many articles, I can’t remember where) was that Wolff just hung around and since no one was really in charge, no one asked him to leave or indeed asked him WTF he was doing there. Did anyone else read something to that effect?
On Janis Min’s (his Hollywood Reporter editor) Twitter feed, she recalls that she asked him what they THOUGHT he was doing there, and he basically replied, “I have no idea. No one asks.”
The org that should really be ashamed of this whole situation is the Secret Service. This guy basically walked into the White House and hung out for WEEKS with no apparent official purpose without once twigging their suspicions. If Wolff could manage that, how many foreign countries’ spies managed to attach themselves to the center of power?\
Edited to add: Well, foreign countries’ spies that Trump wasn’t deliberately giving intelligence to, anyway…
Any off you mopes who’re complaining about Sessions, why don’t you just show up at the White House and announce that YOU’RE the new Attorney General. Only Sessions himself will challenge you and you can tell him that he’s been fired. He’ll believe that.
I would think that “Who’s this guy? Is he supposed to be here in the West Wing unescorted? Does he have a clearance?” would be basic “general security for the White House” subject matter.
I don’t think Wolff had access to the President directly, just to everyone around him. Most of what you read from him with respect to something that Trump did I assume comes from interviews of someone else, not from being actually witnessed by Wolff - though there may be a few things that he saw himself. The excerpt from the book that I read seemed like a work of fiction; conversations that Wolff could hardly be a party to were being quoted as if verbatim rather than in generalities. Wolff apparently also likes to embellish his stories a lot, and many of the interviewees may also have had that desire, so I’m assuming much of it is just want people want to say. Conversations Wolff had with Bannon that may be recorded might just be Bannon’s version of Rashomon.
Supposedly Bannon signed him in some days. Some days, he reportedly had a higher clearance–the ‘blue pass’–than any other reporter. (I’m not seeing that in a reputable story–just in tweets and on message boards, so no link yet.)
The entire thing came about, apparently, because of an Accident of Graphics: Wolff wrote a not-very-positive story on Trump that was published in June 2016 in The Hollywood Reporter. But the cover made Trump look “cool,” or so Hope Hicks thought:
I don’t see the cover itself on the Hollywood Reporter site, so here it is:
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/trumpconversation.jpg
…if the cover artist had depicted Trump as a buffoon–to match the tenor of the actual story–then Wolff would never have gotten his pass to the White House. Because, of course, neither Hope Hicks, nor Trump, actually read the story. But since the cover made Trump look ‘cool,’ Hicks and Trump assumed that anything Wolff wrote, or might write, would also make Trump look ‘cool.’
Thus the importance of the graphic arts in world history.
