In the US, the White House has been stung by a leak of transcribed telephone conversations earlier this year between President Donald Trump and his Australian and Mexican counterparts.
The conversations with Malcolm Turnbull and Enrique Pena Nieto respectively are extremely combative, and bear out earlier press reports that indicated the calls had not ended well.
The President's new Chief of Staff, General John Kelly, is continuing in his efforts to stabilize the chaos that has dominated the White House over the last 6 months.
But in the latest entry from his Washington Notebook, our US correspondent Simon Marks says there are still plenty of indications that the White House is operating abnormally.
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There was a remarkable moment in the daily White House Press Briefing on Wednesday….and now the cameras are allowed once again to roll on those briefings, it is available for all to see.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the newly-minted press secretary who has, previously, shown an unprecedented willingness to lie from the White House podium….was asked, whether it's ok for the White House press secretary to lie.
Her answer: lying would not be appropriate behavior for someone in her publicly-funded position.
It has come to this in Washington: reporters needed to get that on the record, because the lies from the White House just keep mounting.
Only last week, the President claimed he'd been telephoned by the head of the Boy Scouts organization and told the speech he'd made to their annual scouting jamboree - widely criticized by observers for its political content - was the best speech any President had ever made at the event.
But it turns out…there was no congratulatory phone call…nor any kind of outreach from the head of the Scouting Movement.
The claim — repeated during White House press conferences — was a lie.
Then there was another phone call of which the President was especially proud….from Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.
He had apparently telephoned the White House to congratulate Donald Trump personally on America's new immigration crackdown, and the reduction in the number of people illegally crossing the border in to the US..
The problem with that: the phone call never happened…..the Mexican President denied ever making it.
The White House eventually conceded that it hadn't happened either.
There's more.
Remember when President Trump did make a phone call to the Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull?
News reports back in January at the time indicated it went disastrously….with the President abruptly terminating it after a furious row over whether he would honor an Obama administration agreement to resettle refugees housed in Australian detention facilities.
The President accused the media, at the time, of lying about the nature of his call.
Now the Washington Post has published a transcript of the call….and the world can see that it went even worse than had previously been reported.
Odd things like this keep happening: there was the President's speech last week to police officers in which he appeared to give them permission to rough up suspects, regardless of the presumption of innocence the Constitution guarantees them.
"He was only joking" the White House insists….but they can't explain why so many police forces across the country apparently didn't get the humor and immediately instructed their employees to ignore the President's remarks.
Finally there is the case of President Trump's description of his new Washington home.
Golf Magazine….never really known for its political coverage….quoted members of the Trump golf club in New Jersey who said they had heard the President explain that he spends so much time among them because - in his words - the White House "is a real dump".
He now denies saying it…."the White House is one of the most beautiful buildings (homes) I have ever seen" he wrote on Twitter, adding "FAKE NEWS said I called it a dump. Totally untrue".
Is the President lying?
Or are the members of his golf club lying?
Only one of them can be telling the truth….and observers here in Washington, increasingly troubled by the President's erratic behavior, unreliable memory and growing pattern of false claims find it very difficult any longer to give him the benefit of the doubt.
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