Daily Beast Publishes Harp Letters; No Independent Confirmation

Nobody outside that chain has verified them

Snopes, a center-rated fact-checking outlet, examined the letters Friday and declined to rate them. "Given that Wolff obtained these letters from anonymous sources, we are unable to confirm or disprove their authenticity independently," it wrote. "Until more information comes to light, we will keep this claim unrated."

Snopes did find that details inside the letters line up with the public record: Getty Images photographs show Harp on the Turnberry course in May 2023, and White House communications adviser Margo Martin, who is named in one letter, posted Instagram images from the same golf course. The U.K. tabloid the Mirror published 2023 photographs that appear to show Harp running on foot after Trump's golf cart.

That is circumstantial corroboration of the trip. It is not verification of the documents.

The Frank notes the coverage pattern plainly: the story has been carried overwhelmingly by left and center-left outlets, and the handful of center- and right-rated pieces in circulation cover the reaction — a Snopes fact-check, a Maggie Haberman TV appearance, a Jimmy Fallon sketch — rather than the letters themselves. No center or right-of-center outlet has independently confirmed the material.

The separate clearance question

Running alongside the letters is a distinct story about Harp's security clearance. The Guardian reported Aug. 20 that the White House faces questions over a clearance for her. A separate Snopes fact-check examined the claim that she worked at the White House for more than a year without one and noted the claim originates in an MS NOW article based on four unnamed sources inside the White House.

The Daily Beast reports Harp is a $150,000-a-year special assistant and executive assistant who sits outside the Oval Office, is widely described as Trump's gatekeeper, and was among the small group with Trump when he left Air Force One in Turkey. Those details also rest on that reporting and have not been separately confirmed here.

Where this stands

Two letters have been published in full by one outlet, sourced to one author, who sourced them to unnamed campaign staff he will not identify. The White House has called the coverage a smear without saying whether the letters are real. The leading fact-checker on the story has left it unrated.

Until someone outside that chain authenticates the documents, that is the whole of it.

Sources: The Daily Beast, Snopes, The Guardian (as cited by Snopes), Mediaite, The Independent, Raw Story, Slate, TMZ, Daily Mail.