Conservative news chief details call with "p---ed off" Trump
Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of the long-running conservative website Newsmax, says he talked to President Trump over the weekend and hasn’t “seen him this p---ed off in a long time.”
“I spoke with the president twice yesterday about the wiretap story. I haven’t seen him this p---ed off in a long time,” Ruddy wrote in a Sunday column.
On Saturday, Mr. Trump claimed, without evidence, that former President Obama had wiretapped his phones before the election.
White House surrogates flooded the airwaves to then defend the allegation, which Obama has denied. However, the administration had offered no evidence that any wiretapping took place, and the charge has been dismissed by former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, among others. On Monday, House Oversight chairman Rep. Jason Chaffetz, a Republican, told CBS This Morning that he had “thus far..not seen anything directly that would support what the president has said.”
“When I mentioned Obama ‘denials’ about the wiretaps, he shot back: ‘This will be investigated, it will all come out. I will be proven right,’” Ruddy wrote. The White House has since asked for an Congressional investigation into the president’s claims.
Although several senior White House staffers, including chief strategist Steve Bannon, are veterans of Breitbart, a rival of Ruddy’s Newsmax, Ruddy is considered well-sourced within the administration.
Ruddy tweeted that he had a private meeting with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus last month, and according to Politico, subsequently met with Bannon for a private dinner.
