Michael Goodwin: Leaked and classified Situation Room talks demands a criminal probe from ‘furious’ Trump

What took them so long?

Reports are surfacing that White House aides are suddenly alarmed over the likelihood that top secret conversations on national security were taped and leaked to the New York Times.

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Axios quotes an administration source as saying that, “We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded, and we have no idea which ones.”

The outlet also writes that, “We hear President Trump is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts.”

The president has every right to be furious, but he shouldn’t stop there.

Situation Room meetings are classified, and the mere possibility that details of conversations, including those about the goals and strategy of the Iran war, were leaked demands a criminal probe.

Yet so far, there’s not been a peep from the Department of Justice, despite that Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, and Kash Patel, the head of the FBI, were on speakerphone for one of the secret meetings, according to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

Play-by-playback

The minimal and belated White House anger appears to be driven by the fact that their book is slated for publication next week.

Titled “Regime Change,” it promises to go “Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.”

Published by Simon & Schuster, it is advertised on the same Amazon page as three other anti-Trump screeds.

One of which is titled “Liar’s Kingdom,” a second that likens the president to a mafia leader and another asserting that Trump is following “in the footsteps of Adolf Hitler.”

What, you expected fair and balanced publishers?

The Situation Room focus of the Times authors, according to articles published in the paper, involves three key meetings there.

The first is said to have taken place on July 17, 2025, at around 6 p.m. when Trump’s inner circle met there.

The paper did not publish anything on that meeting until last week, when it said “Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files.”

To add credibility to their report, Haberman and Swan spotlight details, writing, “Vice President JD Vance took a seat at the head of the table in the John F. Kennedy Conference Room of the Situation Room complex.

“ ‘This is a huge problem,’ he told the group.”

Then came the roster of others on hand: White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, White House counsel David Warrington, press secretary Karoline Leavitt, deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich, communications director Steven Cheung, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, with Bondi and Patel on speakerphone.

First sign of trouble

When the Times published details in April of two February meetings about the run-up to the Iran attack, that was the moment when alarm bells should have been ringing and was the time to find the leaker.

But once the book is published, it will be too late to put the genie back in the bottle.

If the White House tries to take action then, sales will skyrocket as a thumb-in-the eye to Trump.

Besides, as Axios noted, “None of the reporting has been disputed” by anyone in the White House.

The dereliction is stunning.

As I wrote in April, just days after the Times published an article under the headline, “How Trump Took the U.S. to War With Iran.”

It began with Netanyahu’s February’s arrival at the White house, where he supposedly met privately with Trump, before the setting shifted to the Situation Room, where the American national security team gathered with the two leaders.

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In the height of irony, the Times wrote that “the gathering had been kept deliberately small to guard against leaks. Other top cabinet secretaries had no idea it was happening.”

The reporters wrote that Trump didn’t take his usual seat at the head of the table, but instead took a seat on one side, facing the large screens mounted on wall, and directly opposite the Israeli leader.

Other Israelis, including the director of Mossad, were said to be shown on the screen behind Netanyahu as he laid out his vision of how the regime could be toppled and the war won.

As the Times tells it, the reactions of Trump’s team were mostly negative at a second meeting the following day that involved only Americans.

They were identified as the president and vice president, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, War Secretary Pete Hegseth and Susie Wiles.

Again, the article contained what were supposedly direct quotations from nearly everyone in the room.

The most pointed ones were from Ratcliffe, Rubio and Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

The article said Ratcliffe described Netanyahu’s claim in the first meeting that an attack would lead to quick regime change in Tehran as “farcical.”

Then, according to the Times, Rubio added, “In other words, it’s bulls–t.”

Next came a long quote attributed to Gen. Caine while he was speaking to the commander-in-chief: “Sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.”

Trump reportedly said he was very interested in accomplishing two parts of Netanyahu’s presentation, described as “killing the Ayatollah and Iran’s top leaders and dismantling the Iranian military.”

Undercut on Iran

The article’s emphasis on Netanyahu’s plan helped to fuel the emerging narrative on the left that Netanyahu had hoodwinked Trump into the war, and that America was doing Israel’s dirty work in attacking Iran.

That view carries distinct tones of classic antisemitism as it blames Jews for everything wrong in the world, and continually holds Israel to a double-standard relative to other countries, even on national security.

The Times also ignores the key fact that Trump has been consistent in his entire public career in arguing that Iran cannot be allowed to have nuclear weapons.

Other presidents thought that was a good goal, but were not wiling to take military action even when the mullahs persisted in promising to get nukes and destroy Israel and the US.

That feckless failure to act explains how Iran was able to terrorize the region for nearly 50 years with its weaponry and proxy terror groups.

Clearly, Trump has not completed the mission, and not everything has gone according to plan or promise.

His frequent claims that a lasting peace was just around the corner, when it was not, have damaged his standing.

But it must also be said that he is the only president who dared to use American fire power to break the mullahs’ arsenal and murderous aims for domination.

All Americans, even those at the New York Times, should hope and pray he succeeds.

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