Omarosa White House recordings slammed
BRIDGEWATER, N.J. — Former presidential adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman said yesterday she secretly recorded conversations she had in the White House, including her firing by chief of staff John Kelly in the high-security Situation Room.
It was a highly unusual admission, which immediately drew fire from allies of the president and national security experts.
Parts of her conversation with Kelly were played on the air when she appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to promote her new book, “Unhinged,” which will be released next week.
“Who in their right mind thinks it’s appropriate to secretly record the White House chief of staff in the Situation Room?” tweeted Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.
In the recording, which Manigault Newman quotes extensively in the book, Kelly can be heard saying she can look at her time at the White House as a year of “service to the nation” and referring to potential “difficulty in the future relative to your reputation.”
Manigault Newman said she viewed the comment as a “threat” and defended her decision to covertly record it and other White House conversations, describing it as a form of protection.
“If I didn’t have these recordings, no one in America would believe me,” she said.
The Situation Room is a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, where the nation’s most consequential foreign policy decisions are made, and staff are not permitted to bring in cellphones or other recording devices.
“I’ve never heard of a more serious breach of protocol,” said Ned Price, who served as spokesman of the National Security Council in the Obama administration. “Not only is it not typical, something like this is unprecedented.
“The Situation Room is the innermost sanctum of a secure campus,” he said, describing the breach as part of a culture of disregarding security protocols in the Trump White House.