Senior White House officials are gripped by concern that two New York Times reporters may have obtained audio recordings of classified Situation Room meetings for a forthcoming book on the Trump presidency, according to Axios.

Top officials believe Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings for their forthcoming book, “Regime Change,” which covers Trump’s second term and is set for publication June 23. The authors conducted more than 1,000 interviews for the project.

Independent recording devices are not permitted in the Situation Room. A confirmed leak of that nature would represent a major breach of protocol and would place many of the administration’s top officials under immediate suspicion.

“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 alarm was triggered by verbatim accounts of several Situation Room meetings included in book excerpts the Times published ahead of the June 23 release date, covering both the Iran war and the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Tellingly, White House officials have not disputed the accuracy of the quoted dialogue, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s blunt dismissal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s regime-change scenarios for Iran. “In other words, it’s bull—-,” Rubio said, according to the account.

The excerpts also revealed that Vice President JD Vance described the Epstein files as “a huge problem” and urged their release, while White House communications director Steven Cheung called a potential pardon for convicted trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell a “huge P.R. problem.” White House counsel David Warrington had floated the pardon idea, according to the account.

Trump himself is described as “furious” about the blow-by-blow reconstructions of the top-secret talks. Haberman and Swan declined to comment.

Axios noted, however, that the recordings may not be necessary to explain the level of detail in the book. Bob Woodward pioneered contemporary political journalism by including reconstructed dialogue in his books drawn from the memories of people present in the rooms where events occurred.

“Regime Change” is described by its publisher as being based on hundreds of interviews and reporting from inside the administration’s most closely guarded settings, taking readers into the Situation Room and secret Oval Office deliberations behind the Iran war, border enforcement, and other major policy decisions of Trump’s second term.

The episode draws comparison to an earlier security lapse. Last March, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg was inadvertently included on a Signal chat in which Trump officials discussed plans for U.S. military strikes in Yemen just prior to the strikes being carried out.

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