New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman revealed that former President Donald Trump “called me the other day” to rant about his court cases — but it didn’t go the way he might have wanted it to.
Trump’s court appearances over the past two weeks have been astounding. Trump was present at an appeals court session where his legal representative contended that a president might direct Seal Team Six to kill a political opponent without being prosecuted if he was first impeached and found guilty.
Subsequently, he participated in flamboyant court proceedings in the fraud case initiated by Attorney General Letitia James and overseen by Judge Arthur Engoron. He also embarrassed himself during the most recent trial for defaming E. Jean Carroll, whom a court has already found he sexually molested and defamed.
However, as it turns out, he attempted to wriggle her ear before all of that, and she declined to tell much about it.
On this week’s edition of CNN’s King Charles, Haberman revealed to co-hosts Gayle King and Charles Barkley that despite his anger over her book, Trump called her “the other day” to talk about his “attacks on judges” and about Ms. Carroll:
KING: You wrote a book about him. Do you have a rapport with him still? You seem to have had a rapport with him. HABERMAN: Well, I covered him and, you know, I dealt with him a lot as a subject who I covered. He was very angry about the book. I had a lot of reporting in it that made him very upset and he has continued to vent that upset. But the way he is is he will always engage with a reporter eventually if he sees some reason to. And so he called me the other day.
KING: He called you the other day?
HABERMAN: Yes, for the first time in a long time. And I wrote him —
KING: To say what?
HABERMAN: He wanted to talk about these cases and these trials that he was going to. Because I was writing a story about how, you know, politics in the courts were going to converge again in January. This was a couple of weeks ago. And he called to say that he wanted to attend all of these trials and to talk, you know, again about his attacks on the judge and the civil case and to talk about E. Jean Carroll, much of which I didn’t report on.
But he thinks he’s his own best comms director and his own best defender, and you’ll see more of that I suspect.
In the article in question, Haberman spent several paragraphs describing things Trump said, but only directly quoted nine words in all.
