A big leak rattles the White House
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The massive leak of President Trump's private schedules, which dropped yesterday in the weekly Axios Sneak Peek newsletter, set off internal finger-pointing and speculation more fevered than any since the New York Times' anonymous op-ed.
The big picture: White House insiders said the leak sowed chaos. Cliff Sims, the former White House official who wrote the dishy "Team of Vipers," told me: "There are leaks, and then there are leaks. If most are involuntary manslaughter, this was premeditated murder. People inside are genuinely scared."
- Madeleine Westerhout — the director of Oval Office operations, who sits outside Trump's door — tweeted: "What a disgraceful breach of trust to leak schedules. What these don’t show are the hundreds of calls and meetings @realDonaldTrump takes everyday."
- The N.Y. Times' Maggie Haberman tweeted: "A White House aide is weaponizing his schedules, which says a lot about how people in the White House feel about the man they work for."
What happened: The three months of schedules, Axios' Alexi McCammond and Jonathan Swan report, give unprecedented visibility into how this president spends his days.
- The schedules show that Trump has spent around 60% of his scheduled time over the past three months in unstructured "Executive Time," which includes tweeting, newspaper-reading, TV-watching and phone calls.
Go deeper:
- Read 95 pages of private schedules.
- The main story: Trump's first meeting of the day — usually around 11 or 11:30 a.m. — is often an intelligence briefing or a 30-minute meeting with the chief of staff.
- Why it matters: What we learned about Trump.
- How time was scheduled for Clinton, Bush, Obama.
