Well, this is timely: October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election by Devlin Barrett.

“The 2016 Election, which altered American political history, was not decided by the Russians or in Ukraine or by Steve Bannon. The event that broke Hillary’s blue wall in the Midwest and swung Florida and North Carolina was an October Surprise, and it was wholly a product of the leadership of the FBI. This is the inside story by the reporter closest to its center.”

The Washington Post has an excerpt.

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October Surprise: How the FBI Tried to Save Itself and Crashed an Election

• Hardcover Book
• Barrett, Devlin (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 336 Pages - 09/22/2020 (Publication Date) - PublicAffairs (Publisher)

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Michael Schmidt has an interesting story in his new book about the scramble to learn what was in John Bolton’s unpublished book during the impeachment of President Trump, Axios reports.

Writes Schmidt: “I received a call from a man I had never heard of. He said that several years earlier he had sat next to my father on a train and he had followed my work. The man said that he worked as a private investigator of sorts in the Washington area and he had been trying to figure out what Bolton had written in his book.”

He continued: “A friend had told him at a Rotary Club meeting that Bolton was taking sections of his book and sending them out to friends to review and comment on.The friends were then mailing them back to him, and he was throwing them in his trash. Bolton had apparently done this because he did not want to create an electronic record of his correspondences. The man said that he had been scouting Bolton’s wife’s office and their house on the nights he put his trash out. After Bolton moved the trash onto the street, he went through it. … He said Thursday morning was trash pickup day in Bolton’s neighborhood.”

Donald Trump v. The United States: Inside the Struggle to Stop a President

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Schmidt, Michael S. (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 423 Pages - 09/01/2020 (Publication Date) - Random House (Publisher)

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A must-read: The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

How a friendship forged on the Houston Country Club’s tennis courts put a restless middle-aged lawyer on the path to power.

Texas Monthly has a fantastic excerpt.

The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Baker, Peter (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 09/29/2020 (Publication Date) - Doubleday (Publisher)

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Tony Schwartz, who ghost-wrote The Art of the Deal for Donald Trump, is out with a new audiobook, Dealing with the Devil: My Mother, Trump, and Me.

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Dealing with the Devil: My Mother, Trump, and Me

• Audible Audiobook
• Tony Schwartz (Author) - Tony Schwartz (Narrator)
• English (Publication Language)
• 09/10/2020 (Publication Date) - Audible Originals (Publisher)

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“The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into whether President Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton unlawfully disclosed classified information when he published a memoir this summer, a case that the department opened after it failed to stop the book’s publication this summer,” the New York Times reports.

“The department has convened a grand jury and subpoenaed for communications records from Simon & Schuster, which published Mr. Bolton’s memoir, The Room Where It Happened, a highly unflattering account of his 17 months working in the Trump administration.”

Wall Street Journal: “The development underscores the unusual nature of the Trump administration’s battles with both its own former senior officials and the publishing industry, and is one of the biggest such escalations to date.”

President Trump told Fox & Friends that he read Bob Woodward’s book, Rage: “I actually got to read it last night. I read it very quickly, and it was very boring.”

When asked if it was accurate, he said: “It’s okay, I mean, it’s fine.”

He added: “I read it. It’s like lightweight reading.”

Rage

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Woodward, Bob (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 466 Pages - 09/15/2020 (Publication Date) - Simon & Schuster (Publisher)

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David Frum: “A Bob Woodward book is a record of a sequence of transactions. In exchange for access and information, Woodward offers Washington power holders the opportunity to disparage their rivals and aggrandize themselves.”

“But be warned that a Woodward proposition is never guaranteed. It comes hedged with dense, finely printed terms and conditions.”

CNN has obtained excerpts of a 10-minute conversation between Bob Woodward and President Trump on August 14, the final interview for Woodward’s book, Rage, in which Trump peppered the veteran two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist with questions about the book and what exactly was in it.

Just over an hour later, Trump tweeted that Woodward’s book was “fake news.”

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Rage

• Hardcover Book
• Woodward, Bob (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 480 Pages - 09/15/2020 (Publication Date) - Simon & Schuster (Publisher)

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Bob Woodward told Savannah Guthrie on the Today Show that he will release the audio recordings of his interviews with President Trump that are “relevant.”

Said Woodward: “The microphone is also a microscope.”

Bob Woodward told CNN that he has 10 hours of audio of interviews with President Trump for his new book, some lasting more than half an hour, spread over 19 taped phone calls, often initiated by Trump.

There were originally reported to be only 18 interviews.

Coming next month: Undaunted: My Fight Against America’s Enemies, At Home and Abroad by John Brennan.

Undaunted: My Fight Against America's Enemies, At Home and Abroad

• Amazon Kindle Edition
• Brennan, John O. (Author)
• English (Publication Language)
• 464 Pages - 10/06/2020 (Publication Date) - Celadon Books (Publisher)

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