AP: Omarosa has 'treasure trove' of tapes, videos, texts to back her anti-Trump book
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Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman is declaring she “will not be silenced” by President Donald Trump, remaining defiant as her public feud with her former boss shifts from a war of words to a possible legal battle. (Aug. 14)
AP
WASHINGTON — Bad news for an already alarmed White House: Omarosa Manigault Newman has more than just secret audio tapes to release; she’s got a “treasure trove” of evidence she’s prepared to dribble out to torment President Donald Trump.
A person with direct knowledge of her records told The Associated Press on Friday that the former Trump loyalist-turned-determined Trump foe has a stash of multimedia evidence – audio tapes, video, emails, text messages and other documentation – to support her claims in her tell-all book, “Unhinged,” about her brief time as a top aide in the Trump White House.
Manigault Newman has made clear that she plans to continue selectively releasing the evidence if Trump and his associates continue to attack her credibility and challenge the claims in her book, published on Tuesday.
She’s already dribbled out audio recordings of conversations, and video clips, texts or email could follow, according to the person who described what Manigault Newman has called a multimedia “treasure trove.” The person was not authorized to discuss the issue publicly and asked for anonymity.
“I will not be silenced. I will not be intimidated. I’m not going to be bullied by Donald Trump,” the fired Trump aide told the AP this week as she seemed to dismiss a threat from Trump’s campaign.
She spoke to the AP hours after Trump’s campaign announced it was filing an arbitration action against her and her publisher, alleging she’d violated a signed agreement with the campaign that prohibits her from disclosing confidential information.
On Wednesday, in an interview on MSNBC, Manigault Newman hinted she has more tapes and will make them public “when the time comes.”
“Every time the Trump people challenge me, I’ll bring the receipts,” she said.
She told PBS in a separate interview this week: “I have a significant amount, in fact, a treasure trove, of multimedia backup for everything that’s not only in “Unhinged,” but everything that I assert about Donald Trump.”
And on Friday, The New York Times reported she may have as many as 200 secretly recorded tapes of conversations in the White House, citing unnamed White House aides worried about what she might release next as she continues her scorched-earth book promotion tour attacking Trump. She’s accused Trump of being racist and suffering from a mental decline.
Manigault Newman has already released audio tapes of secretly recorded conversations, including clips of a phone call with Lara Trump, the president’s daughter-in-law, that she says supports her claim that Trump officials offered her a $15,000-a-month job on the 2020 reelection campaign as a way of silencing her, after she was fired from the White House in December.
The White House has countered by branding Manigault Newman a disgruntled former staffer with credibility issues who is now trying to profit from a book based on false attacks against a fellow reality-TV star she once called her mentor and admired for more than a decade.
Trump lashed out at his former favorite, calling her a “lowlife,” ”wacky and deranged” and a “dog” in a series of angry tweets this week.
Her publisher, Gallery Books and its parent Simon Schuster, dismissed threatened legal action from Trump’s campaign, saying it is confident Manigault Newman can back up her book and that it was acting “well within” its rights to publish and promote the book.
“Unhinged” has spent the past few days at No. 2 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list, trailing only Rachel Hollis’ lifestyle book “Girl, Wash Your Face.”
Manigault Newman was director of communications for a White House office that networks with various constituency groups until she was fired last December by chief of staff John Kelly, citing “significant integrity issues” during a meeting in the White House Situation Room that Omarosa secretly recorded under circumstances she has not made clear.Â
Before joining the administration, Manigault Newman handled African-American outreach for Trump’s presidential campaign. She has known Trump since 2003, when she became one of the most controversial contestants on Trump’s TV show, “The Apprentice.”
Manigault Newman also alleges that tape exists of Trump using a racial slur while working on “The Apprentice” but has produced no evidence that it exists. Trump has been denying this for nearly two years, reiterating on Twitter this week that “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary, and never have. She made it up.”
AP National Writer Hillel Italie in New York contributed to this report.
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The female contestants from NBC’s new reality show ‘The Apprentice,’ appear in this undated publicity photo. Jessie Conners, left, Katrina Campins, Eveka Vetrini, Omarosa Manigaul-Stallworth, Heidi Bressler, Kristi Frank, Amelia Henry, and Tammy Lee.
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