Special Counsel for the Russia investigation Robert Mueller’s team has been talking to everyone they can as they work to uncover what exactly happened during the 2016 U.S. elections. If former Trump staffer Omarosa Manigault-Newman is to be believed, those efforts are well founded.
Confirming Tuesday that she’d spoken to Mueller’s team once before, she asserted that Donald Trump himself “absolutely” knew about emails Russians had stolen from the Democrats before their release to the public.
She declined to go into great detail about what she meant, but she did tell MSNBC’s Katy Tur:
‘I think that he should come clean with the American people. I think that he should be honest about what he did during the campaign and what he continued to do in the White House.’
She added:
‘I am going to expose the corruption that went on in the campaign and in the White House.’
Watch below:
BREAKING: Omarosa tells @KatyTurNBC that Trump “absolutely” knew about the hacked emails before WIkiLeaks released them.
She says Trump knew what was coming out before they were released and that Trump campaign members were instructed to bring them up as much as possible. pic.twitter.com/h63weQCpxS
— Caroline O. (@RVAwonk) August 14, 2018
Her presently unfolding blitz of media appearances corresponds to the release of her new memoir, Unhinged, which chronicles her time working for Trump. After having first entered his orbit via a part in his reality show The Apprentice, she joined the Trump presidential campaign. She was revealed as the head of black outreach for the campaign in mid-2016 at the time of that year’s Republican National Convention.
What her time in Trump’s political circles allowed her to witness continues to unfold as time goes on. Besides the claim about Trump having pre-existing knowledge of the stolen emails, she’s also made a number of more salacious claims.
She says, for instance, that there’s a tape of Trump using the n-word to disparage blacks on the set of Trump’s old reality show. Trump countered that claim as part of a days-long rebuttal of the former staffer that included him calling her a “dog” and a “crying lowlife.” Ever loyal — for now — White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders asserted Tuesday that Trump calling Omarosa a dog had “nothing to do with race.”
There are plenty of other examples of the president as a racist — and a sexist — as Omarosa claims, though. He’s called immigration a threat to Western civilization, and he’s routinely disparaged women and dismissed them as worth little more than their appearances.
Her claim that Trump knew about the stolen emails before they went public is less supported, although no doubt of great interest to authorities.
Tens of thousands of emails stolen from the Democratic Party went live on the web in June and July of 2016, prompting the resignation of the DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz and casting the party into disarray. In July 2016, Trump made his infamous call for Russia to find emails supposedly missing from Hillary Clinton’s private servers — and, according to court filings made by Mueller’s office just this year, the Russians aimed for those emails for the first time that very day.
So, there’s already a public appearance of cooperation on some level between the Trump campaign and Russia. The above-cited example is just one of many. Trump has also recently been alleged to have known about a meeting his son Donald Trump Jr. had with a lawyer he’d been promised would bring dirt from the Kremlin on Hillary. Trump promised dirt on Hillary in some public remarks at that time — although he, of course, claims to have not known about the meeting.
Where there’s smoke, there’s most often fire though. The Trump campaign began a legal campaign to silence Omarosa on Tuesday, filing for arbitration and asserting that she has violated a nondisclosure agreement covering her work with Trump. She may have already shared any relevant info she has with Mueller, though.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
