A shocking new report in Axios claims that top White House officials believe that leaks in the West Wing now penetrate the president’s top inner circle of advisers, who may have provided reporters from The New York Times with recordings of conversations inside the Situation Room.
The report, published on Sunday, details the freakout going on behind the scenes at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, where top administration officials are bracing for the release later this month of Regime Change, the latest installment from two of the most well-sourced reporters in Washington, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
According to Axios, officials now believe that secret recordings were made of conversations between Trump’s top aides in the Situation Room and other locations, the former of which would represent a serious breach of message discipline and the first such case of unauthorized recordings from that room, one of the most secure places on earth, leaking to the media. It would also represent a massive breach of White House security protocols.
“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” an administration source told Axios. “And we have no idea which ones.”
The White House did not immediately return a request for comment from The Independent on Sunday.
But the story comes as Trump continues to watch his efforts to reach a peace agreement between the U.S. and Iran be mired in delays and setbacks, thanks to continued hostilities between Iran and Israel caused by Israeli attacks on Beirut and Hezbollah targets around Lebanon. The notion that secret recordings could exist of the innermost debates and conversations between Trump’s advisers and strategists could further complicate an already difficult situation.
On Sunday morning the president urged Israel to stand down after new Israeli strikes were reported in Beirut.
“This could be the beginning of a long and beautiful peace — Let’s not blow it!” he wrote on Truth Social. “This morning’s attack on Beirut should not have happened, particularly on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal with Iran. Israel has the right to defend itself against threats, but the attack it was responding to was very small and meaningless, nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and should not disrupt this important process.”
Excerpts from Haberman and Swan’s book released last week detailed another crisis that consumed the Trump White House back in 2025 — the Jeffrey Epstein issue. Their upcoming book lays out, among other reporting, a critical White House Situation Room meeting in July of 2025 chaired by Vice President JD Vance where top officials plotted a response to the growing furor around the Justice Department’s decision to halt releases from the Epstein case files.
The administration’s response to the Epstein issue confounded many of the president’s most vocal and loyal supporters, who supported calls from the likes of Vance and FBI Director Kash Patel for the case files to be released as they campaigned for Trump in 2024. In the months following the July 2025 meeting, the administration eventually complied with a congressional discharge petition to force the files’ release, but officials maintain that the evidence implicates no one beyond the now-dead Epstein and his imprisoned girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump’s own rhetoric around the files did not help the matter for his team, as he took to publicly reprimanding Republicans for caring about the issue which so many of his allies and surrogates had raised hell about during the campaign, seemingly not understanding the issue’s importance with particularly younger Republicans, independents and Democrats.
Leaks within the Trump administration have been a persistent issue for this president, dating all the way back to his first term.
