When fired FBI director James Comey said, “Lordy, I hope there are tapes,” was he praying for a supergroup?
Two intimates of Donald Trump now claim to have secretly recorded conversations with him. In addition to lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen, former “The Apprentice” star and fired White House official Omarosa Manigault Newman says she has recordings of Trump. She also claims that Trump used racist remarks during her time in the White House.
Manigault Newman, who was dramatically sacked by White House chief of staff John Kelly last December, is releasing the memoir “Unhinged: An Insider Account of the Trump White House” next week. In the book, she writes that Trump is a “racist, misogynist and bigot” and that she surreptitiously used her smartphone to record conversations with him.
During the 2016 campaign, it was rumored that outtakes existed from Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice” in which he used the n-word. No such tapes have surfaced. In her book, Manigault Newman says those allegations are true, the Guardian reports. She says she heard Trump use a slur against Filipinos, in reference to White House adviser Kellyanne Conway’s husband, George, who is half-Filipino.
In the book, Manigault writes of her “growing realization that Donald Trump was indeed a racist, a bigot and a misogynist. My certainty about the N-word tape and his frequent uses of that word were the top of a high mountain of truly appalling things I’d experienced with him, during the last two years in particular.”
Of her firing, she writes: “It had finally sunk in that the person I’d thought I’d known so well for so long was actually a racist. Using the N-word was not just the way he talks but, more disturbing, it was how he thought of me and African Americans as a whole.”
Manigault Newman’s credibility has long been questioned on both sides of the political aisle. But on Friday, the “Washington Post” said staffers have heard several of the tapes and that they back up some of Manigault’s claims.
“To be clear, Omarosa lacks credibility, and makes some outlandish claims in her book. That said, she seems to have brought (at least) some receipts,” tweeted Ashley Parker, the Post’s White House reporter, on Friday afternoon.
To be clear, Omarosa lacks credibility, and makes some outlandish claims in her book. That said, she seems to have brought (at least) some receipts. —> https://t.co/exyIHqgP9A
— Ashley Parker (@AshleyRParker) August 10, 2018
In a statement, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the book “is riddled with lies and false accusations.”
“It’s sad that a disgruntled former White House employee is trying to profit off these false attacks, and even worse that the media would now give her a platform, after not taking her seriously when she had only positive things to say about the President during her time in the administration,” said Sanders.
Manigault Newman is due to appear on “Meet the Press” on Sunday, kicking off a media blitz about the book.
