U.S. President Donald Trump continues to face the walls of his questionable staffing and associate choices closing in around him. The Daily Beast now reports former White House Office of Public Liaison communications director Omarosa Manigault-Newman to have secretly recorded conversations while working in the White House, some of which feature Trump himself.
The reporting confirms earlier rumors. She’s coming out with a new book called Unhinged, and in the process of promoting her work, she’s played the tapes for people. Sources described the tapes as featuring mundane, everyday conversations, although with those tapes remaining private at present the exact full nature of their content can’t be immediately determined. In one excerpt of her book that became available ahead of release, she bemoaned Trump’s supposed “mental decline,” so in theory, some of the tapes could feature examples of that.
Some of the tapes could also feature evidence of work that she claims to have done while in the Trump administration to push out “leakers.” She claimed to have had allies in her work in Ivanka Trump and the long departed White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci. At least one targeted former Trump official — past assistant press secretary Michael Short — blasted Omarosa’s allegations that he was a legitimate target of that anti-leaking crusade.
He described allegations of being a “leaker” inside the early Trump administration as more about “coloring people with an expletive rather than having any substantiation for the charge itself,” adding:
‘I was never confronted about being responsible for an unauthorized leak during my tenure. No one has presented a shred of evidence that I was responsible for unauthorized leaks.’
Omarosa wouldn’t comment to the Daily Beast, and her book’s publisher Simon & Schuster would not confirm the existence of tapes. They only asserted that they believe to be able to back up the account relayed in her book, explaining:
‘Without commenting on the specific contents of UNHINGED, we are confident that Omarosa Manigault Newman can substantiate her highly-anticipated account of life inside the Trump White House.’
Omarosa’s book is hardly the first time that the Trump administration and the president in particular have been burned by those who at one point enjoyed the Trump circle’s confidence.
In recent weeks, it came out that former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen had secretly recorded conversations including with Trump. One tape circulated in the media featured the two of them discussing buying up the story of former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who says she had an affair with Trump.
The president was enraged at the revelation of Cohen’s tapes, tweeting:
‘What kind of a lawyer would tape a client? So sad! Is this a first, never heard of it before?’
Michael Wolff, although never an actual Trump staffer, turned purported access to the Trump team into his own biting book earlier this year.
Called Fire and Fury, its allegations prompted the infamous assertion from the president that he’s really a “stable genius.” That assertion has been easily disproved by the president’s documented thousands upon thousands of lies.
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