NEW: Maggie Haberman Knocks Down Critics Who Claim She Held Back Scoops For Book

Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for The New York Times

In an interview with Erik Wemple of The Washington Post, New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman knocked down criticisms she hurt America by withholding scoops for her book.

Haberman has been making the rounds to promote the release of her controversial but much-buzzed-about book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.

One subject that hasn’t come up on the publicity tour: consistent complaints that Haberman should have reported some of the more momentous scoops — such as Trump telling an aide “I’m just not going to leave” — as they occurred. One legal expert racked up viral engagement by suggesting Haberman committed a felony by failing to report something from her book immediately.

But Haberman did address that specific criticism in an interview for Wemple’s Erik Wemple Blog as part of a lengthy column defending her.

In the case of that “not going to leave” scoop, it’s a pretty open-and-shut case:

In an interview with the Erik Wemple Blog, Haberman said she worked with the Times and her publisher to get the news out when it was most relevant. In the case of the Trump quote about hunkering down at the White House, for example, the author said that if she’d nailed it down around the time it was uttered, she would have published it. As it turned out, she got it during her reporting for the book — “well after” the conclusion of Trump’s second impeachment trial, in which it would have been a relevant item.

And in other cases, Haberman took heat for scoops that she actually did give to her newspaper, which were reported when she learned them — like the infamous toilet scoop:

In a February 2022 Times story with four bylines, Haberman reported that “staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — leading them to believe that Mr. Trump had attempted to flush documents.” This particular revelation, says Haberman, stemmed “a zillion percent” from her book reporting — not her Times beat work — so she got it into the newspaper long before the book was published. Yet the hordes still threw penalty flags for holding. A representative gripe on Twitter: “Y]ou should have reported on what you found out when you found out, instead of waiting to cash in on a book deal.”

Wemple notes that in a Times article that included another scoop that would end up in the book, they even added an editor’s note explaining: “The stark warning — the only time Mr. Short flagged a security concern during his tenure as Mr. Pence’s top aide — was uncovered recently during research by this reporter for an upcoming book, ‘Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,’ to be published in October.”

Much of the criticism appears to stem from people making assumptions about when Haberman learned of these scoops, and to some degree, about what kind of revelation — with what kind of attribution — you can build a news story around.

Wemple signed off his column with a simple response to all the criticism, from Haberman: “People are entitled to say what they want. I’m going to keep doing my job.”