On his show Wednesday night, Fox News host Tucker Carlson revealed that a source with knowledge told him that The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward scored an interview with President Donald Trump because Senator Lindsey Graham, R-SC, pushed for it.

Excerpts of Woodward’s soon to be released book were published by The Washington Post earlier this week, suggesting the President downplayed the coronavirus threat when he knew it was “more deadly” than the flu and other seasonal viruses.

Sen. Graham’s office responds: Senator Graham’s office noted that the President’s White House aides were charged with the approval process and in the end it the final decision rested with Trump.

Graham’s office reiterated that the Senator is a staunch defender of President Trump, saying Trump fully cooperated “with Woodard for this book,” while Chiefs of Staff Mick Mulvaney and Mark Meadows allowed the interviews.

President Donald Trump responded forcefully to the allegations. He stated that he sought to never sow fear among the American people.

In an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity Wednesday night, Trump said that as “the leader of the country, I can’t be jumping up and down and scaring people. I don’t want to scare people. I want people not to panic, and that’s exactly what I did.”

The biggest question for many is why did the President agree to do such an interview with a journalist from a paper he regularly calls “fake news” for writing opposition pieces about him and members of his administration, one that sometimes even writes more glowingly of terrorist leaders. Moreover, Woodward already wrote a scathing book about Trump in 2018. Carlson says it’s Graham who orchestrated the interviews for Woodward’s forthcoming book.

“It was Lindsey Graham who helped convince Donald Trump to talk to Bob Woodward,” Tucker said. “Lindsey Graham brokered that meeting. Lindsey Graham even sat in on the first interview between Bob Woodward and the President. How did that turn out?”

He added, “Now, remember, Lindsey Graham is supposed to be a Republican, so why would he do something like that. You’d have to ask him. But, keep in mind that Lindsey Graham has opposed, passionately opposed virtually every major policy initiative that Donald Trump articulated when he first ran from ending illegal immigration to pulling back from pointless wars, to maintaining law and order at home. Lindsey Graham was against all of that more than many Democrats.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, one of the nation’s leading voices on the President’s Coronavirus Task Force, also defended Trump on Fox Wednesday. He said there was no discrepancy between what the President discussed behind closed doors and the message he delivered to the American public.

“I didn’t get any sense that he was distorting anything. I mean, in my discussions with him, they were always straightforward about the concerns that we had. We relayed that to him and when he would go out, I’d hear him discussing the same sort of things,” Fauci explained to Fox’s John Roberts.

Trump slammed Woodward on Twitter Thursday morning for keeping his quotes private “for many months,” adding “If he thought they were so bad or dangerous, why didn’t he immediately report them in an effort to save lives? Didn’t he have an obligation to do so? No, because he knew they were good and proper answers. Calm, no panic!”