Top White House officials suspect that New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan obtained audio recordings from inside the Situation Room for their forthcoming book about President Donald Trump's second term, a breach that, if confirmed, would constitute a violation of the integrity of one of the most tightly controlled rooms in the federal government.

The book, "Regime Change," is scheduled for release June 23 by Simon & Schuster and draws on more than 1,000 interviews.

Verbatim dialogue from several Situation Room meetings appeared in Times excerpts on the Iran war and the Justice Department's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, both published ahead of the book.

Independent recording devices are barred from the Situation Room, and an administration source told Axios, "We're afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded. And we have no idea which ones."

The Epstein excerpt described White House Counsel David Warrington raising the possibility of a presidential pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell during a Situation Room discussion, a suggestion others in the room sharply opposed.

The Iran excerpt included Secretary of State Marco Rubio dismissing regime-change scenarios pressed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying, "In other words, it's bullshit."

White House officials have not publicly disputed the quoted dialogue.

The fear inside the West Wing is less about any single exchange than about not knowing the universe of what was captured.

Axios reported that Trump is "furious" over the blow-by-blow accounts and that Haberman and Swan declined to comment. The reporters have not said how they reconstructed the conversations.

Audio is not the only plausible explanation.

Bob Woodward built a long career on detailed in-room dialogue stitched together from participants' memories, and Axios noted that Haberman and Swan would not have required recordings to produce the level of detail in the excerpts.

The administration has already faced questions this year about handling of sensitive material, including the March 2025 episode in which a journalist was inadvertently added to a Signal chat among senior officials discussing imminent U.S. military strikes in Yemen.

Whether any recordings exist, and how the book's accounts were sourced, are likely to drive scrutiny well past publication day.

The practical question for the White House is who in those meetings spoke to the authors or carried a device that should not have been there.