Former White House staffer and “Apprentice” star Omarosa Manigault Newman on Sunday played a recording of what she characterized as White House chief of staff threatening her to depart the White House in a “friendly” manner, or else face “difficulty” with her “reputation.”
EXCLUSIVE: @OMAROSA tells @chucktodd that John Kelly firing was a "threat" pic.twitter.com/y53SZm0uzL
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) August 12, 2018
The mere fact that Manigault Newman, who has a new book out, managed to secretly record the White House chief of staff — and purportedly in the White House situation room, no less — is itself newsworthy.
Elsewhere in the interview, Manigault Newman said she was “complicit with this White House deceiving this nation,” and that she was “totally complicit” in aiding the President blame both white nationalists and anti-racist protesters for the violence in Charlottesville last year.
WATCH: @OMAROSA tells @ChuckTodd during an exclusive interview "I was complicit" in White House deceit. #MTP pic.twitter.com/F7l3cVqahf
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) August 12, 2018
“I had a blind spot where it came to Donald Trump,” she said. “I wanted to see the best in him. And obviously I felt miserably, because after that he gets up and he says that there are good people on both sides when he should have been denouncing what we saw as clearly racist, Nazis, going against the grain of this country.”
Manigault Newman didn’t resign her position in the White House after Charlottesville, though, instead staying on for several months before being fired in December of last year. (She previously falsely claimed she had resigned.)
“I was so much a part of this, and I accept and I admit that I was,” she said.
“This book is riddled with lies and false accusations,” White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has said, in part, about the book. Trump called Manigault Newman a “lowlife” Saturday.
Manigault Newman explained Sunday that she’d resisted leaving the White House because “I was working to try to find someone who could take my place,” noting the White House hasn’t hired another African American presidential aide since her departure.
Elsewhere in the interview, Manigault Newman said she’d personally heard the “n-word tape” — of the President using the racial slur during a taping of “The Apprentice” — though she said she heard the audio after the book was completed. She’d previously claimed to NPR’s “Morning Edition,” incorrectly, that her book describes her listening to the tape.
“I have heard for two years that it existed, and once I heard it for myself it was confirmed what I feared the most, that Donald Trump is a con and has been masquerading as someone who is actually open to engaging with diverse communities,” she said Sunday. “But when he talks that way, the way he did on this tape, it confirmed that he is truly a racist.”
