Sarah Huckabee Sanders said that Michael Wolff "never actually sat down with the president" and that their interaction was limited to a five- to seven-minute conversation. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Sanders: '95 percent' of interviews for book on White House authorized by Bannon

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Wednesday that a vast majority of the interviews cited in an explosive new book on the Trump presidency were held “at the request” of former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

“So far from what I can tell of the roughly just over a dozen interactions that he had with officials at the White House, I think close to 95 percent were all done so at the request of Mr. Bannon,” Sanders said during the White House press briefing, referring to the author of the book, Michael Wolff.


In an adapted excerpt published by New York magazine on Wednesday from the forthcoming book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” Wolff cites more than 200 interviews with sources in and out of the Trump administration in detailing internal strife in the West Wing. The report says the conversations for the book were conducted “over a period of 18 months with the president, most members of his senior staff, and many people to whom they in turn spoke.”

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Sanders added that Wolff "never actually sat down with the president" and that their interaction was limited to a five- to seven-minute conversation.

In a separate excerpt obtained by The Guardian , Wolff writes that Bannon labeled as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” a meeting among Donald Trump Jr., top Trump campaign officials and a Kremlin-linked lawyer in Trump Tower.

The reports, which depict a chaotic White House, were disputed by Sanders, who said nothing to reduce tensions between the White House and Bannon.

“I know that the book has a lot of things so far of what we’ve seen that are completely untrue,” she said.

Trump, in a scorching rebuke, personally lashed out at Bannon for what he said was Bannon's pretending to “have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency,” Trump wrote in the statement. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

Sanders echoed the president’s response in downplaying the significance of Bannon’s role.

“And I think in the actions that Steve took, the president was clear that it didn’t have a lot of influence on him or the decision-making process throughout his time at the White House,” she said Wednesday.

According to an explanation attached to the New York magazine article, Wolff had “no ground rules placed on his access, and he was required to make no promises about how he would report on what he witnessed.”

