Chattanooga Times Free Press

No leaks: Cushy job offers for discarded Trump staffers

- BY ZEKE MILLER AND JONATHAN LEMIRE

WASHINGTON — Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. And, perhaps, your potential leakers closer yet.

President Donald Trump’s political operation has made a regular practice of providing soft landing-pads for discarded staffers, offering nebulous jobs at big salaries to aides who have been pushed out of his West Wing.

The revelation this week that former White House assistant Omarosa Manigault Newman was offered a high-paying job on Trump’s re-election campaign in return for signing a non-disclosure agreement was the clearest demonstrat­ion yet of how a slot in the Trump orbit is being used to take care of loyalists — and protect against potential liabilitie­s.

Manigault Newman, who contends in her new book that she was offered a hush-money contract with the Trump campaign paying $15,000 a month, is hardly the first erstwhile staffer to find a lucrative off-ramp in the expanse of pro-Trump political organizati­ons. The former staff members have found a wide range of rehabilita­tion within Trump’s orbit: his re-election campaign, the Republican National Committee, and outside groups that support both him and Vice President Mike Pence.

Keith Schiller, the president’s former bodyguard who served for eight months as director of Oval Office operations, has been paid the same $15,000 by the Republican National Committee as a security consultant for its national convention — in 2020 in Charlotte. John McEntee, Trump’s former personal aide, is paid $14,000 a month by the Trump re-election campaign. One-time Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowsk­i joined Pence’s Great America PAC in May, and former press secretary Sean Spicer was announced in June to replace him as the “senior adviser and spokesman” for pro-Trump super PAC America First Action.

Manigault Newman told MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Monday, “They told me I could work from home, I didn’t have to come in if I didn’t want to. … I could choose between the RNC, America First or the Trump campaign.” She says she said no.

Now she has released a book filled with unsavory White House inside stories — Trump said the ones about him are false — and has been playing recordings of the president and others on TV. That’s exactly what he wanted to avoid, and his presidenti­al campaign filed an arbitratio­n action against her on Wednesday, alleging she had breached a confidenti­ality agreement she had signed.

The outside groups also have become magnets for Trump backers who were not brought into the administra­tion, such as Katrina Pierson and Trump daughterin-law Lara Trump.

The all-in the-family approach to taking care of stalwarts is nothing new. But the systematic approach with which Trump White House veterans have been offered plush gigs is. According to aides, it reflects a reality that for some the lucrative private sector jobs that are typically available to exiting White House officials never materializ­ed, while for others, it serves as a way keep them nearby and quiet.

Some current and former staffers have struggled to find post-White House jobs — given the conflicted feelings on the Trump administra­tion in Washington — making the campaign or a super PAC an attractive paycheck.

And Trump, despite his realitytel­evision catch-phrase, is loath to fire anyone from his inner circle, preferring to keep receiving their public and private adoration.

“When Gen. Kelly came on board he told me she was a loser & nothing but problems,” Trump tweeted about Manigault Newman on Monday. “I told him to try working it out, if possible, because she only said GREAT things about me — until she got fired!”

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