President lashes out at ex-adviser over book, recordings
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump lashed out at Omarosa Manigault Newman on Monday, saying his former White House adviser — who is promoting a tell-all book and airing secret audio recordings —“got fired for the last time.”
Trump labeled Manigault Newman “wacky” on Twitter and said Chief of Staff John Kelly called her a “loser & nothing but problems.”
He added: “I told him to try working it out, if possible, because she only said GREAT things about me — until she got fired!”
Trump’s pushback came after Manigault Newman released another recording Monday. Aired on NBC’s “Today” show, it was purportedly an excerpt of a phone conversation between Trump and her after she was fired from
the White House. It appears to show Trump expressing surprise, saying “nobody even told me about it.”
On Sunday, Manigault Newman told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that she surreptitiously recorded a number of conversations in the White House for her own protection. The show aired portions of a recording of her firing by Kelly in the high-security Situation Room.
Critics have denounced the recordings as a serious breach of ethics and security. The voice on the recording released Monday appears to be Trump’s. The White House has not denied it, but The Associated Press has not independently verified it is the president. The AP has independently listened to the recording of Kelly and Manigault Newman.
Trump acknowledged Monday that the president of the United States should perhaps not engage in a public war of words with an ex-employee, saying he knows “it’s “not presidential” to take on “a lowlife like Omarosa.” But he added: “This is a modern day form of communication and I know the Fake News Media will be working overtime to make even Wacky Omarosa look legitimate as possible. Sorry!”
Responding to Trump’s tweets on NBC, Manigault Newman said: “I think it’s sad that with all the things that’s going on in the country that he would take time out to insult me and to insult my intelligence.”
She added: “This is his pattern with African-Americans.”
Trump later tweeted that Manigault Newman has a “fully signed Non-Disclosure Agreement!”
It was not clear exactly what he was referring to. White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway said Sunday on ABC that there are “confidentiality agreements” in the West Wing. Trump’s campaign said that in the 2016 race she “signed the exact same NDA that everyone else on the campaign signed, which is still enforceable.”
While the latest recording has Trump indicating he was unaware of her firing, Manigault Newman said on “Today” that he may have instructed Kelly to do it. She offered no evidence.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said Monday: “I’m not going to get into the tick-tock of who knew what when, but the president makes the decisions.”
Manigault Newman, whose book is out this week, suggested there was more to come: “There’s a lot of very corrupt things happening in the White House, and I am going to blow the whistle on a lot of them.”
Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, said on “Fox and Friends” Monday that Manigault Newman may have broken the law by recording private conversations inside the White House.
“She’s certainly violating national security regulations, which I think have the force of law,” Giuliani said.
But experts in national security and clearance law said that, while she seriously violated SCIF rules — and would likely be barred from ever being granted a security clearance — she probably didn’t break the law unless the conversations she recorded were classified.
“None of us have been able to identify that it would be illegal if unclassified,” said Mark Zaid, a Washington attorney, who has focused on national security law.