Of all the details about Donald Trump in Maggie Haberman’s new book “Confidence Man,” the New York Times reporter said the former president was most riled by her reporting that he tore up and flushed papers down White House toilets.
“I think that was what upset him the most,” Haberman told Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s broadcast of “The Late Show.”
“He had an immediate and pronounced and angry reaction to that reporting when I put it out many months ago,” she continued. “He issued a statement, it was a phone call to the world, and I think his exact statement was, his question was, ‘Who would know that?’ Which I think was actually a literal question that he was asking, but he asked it out loud.”
Trump in response to the story “spent some time asking his aides, ‘What do you think of that reporting?’” Haberman added. “Usually that’s because he’s trying to figure out whether something is damaging to him or not or how much more could be there.”
When Haberman initially broke the news, Trump denied the claim. The reporter later tweeted photographs of papers, with what appeared to be Trump’s handwriting on them, clogging up toilet bowls.
Watch Colbert’s full interview with Haberman here: