Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, on Friday bashed Omarosa Manigault-Newman as “not credible” despite her claim to having tapes showing President Trump using racial epithets.
Omarosa’s new book, UNHINGED, reportedly reveals that the president used the N-word “multiple times” while filming The Apprentice, and she cites three unnamed sources as saying there is a recording to back her claim up. She also wrote that she had a “growing realization that Donald Trump was indeed a racist, a bigot and a misogynist” during her time working with him.
While Manigault-Newman’s newfound anti-Trump activism has excited opponents of the current administration, not everyone is convinced that she isn’t just profiting off her former proximity to the president—especially given her previously unhinged remarks attacking Trump’s detractors.
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“So Omarosa when you said: ‘Every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump’ does that now include you? Oh, and I guess [Trump] being a racist wasn’t enough to stop you from working for him. #notcredible,” former RNC chair Steele wrote on Twitter.
Omarosa then responded to Steele with a threat, asking him if she should “share what [he] SAID about [former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus] and #45 during our call? #GetSome.”
Steele then said she sounded “like Trump with a threat [he] could give a rat’s ass about.” He added: “I think pretty much everybody knows what I think about those two characters because I’ve said it publicly—daily.”
He continued, writing that Manigault-Newman’s “opportunism belies [her] now plaintive pleas and fake victimhood.”
The potential Apprentice tapes Manigault-Newman teased could be a part of the show’s outtakes, which have been long sought-after for allegedly showing Trump saying “outlandish things that had ended up on the [show’s] cutting-room floor.”
It is unclear who is in possession of the archival footage but, according to Vanity Fair, it could be in a “secure vault at NBC Studios in Universal City,” or in a “completely different vault belonging to MGM Studios,” or stored elsewhere in a “secure facility.”
The Guardian reported that Manigault-Newman wrote how the racial slurs were “the top of a high mountain of truly appalling things” she experienced with the president. Her book will reportedly say: “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.”
She also recalls in UNHINGED that Trump, while president, called George Conway—top White House aide Kellyanne Conway’s husband, who is half-Filipino—a “flip” and a “goo-goo.” Both terms are derogatory names for Filipinos.
George Conway, for his part, called Omarosa’s claim “not credible” and “ridiculous.”
“Instead of telling the truth about all the good President Trump and his administration are doing to make America safe and prosperous, this book is riddled with lies and false accusations,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said of Omarosa’s tapes and forthcoming book. “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.”
The Daily Beast was first to report that Manigault-Newman has recordings and has played them for other people. One source said they heard a tape containing “anodyne, everyday chatter” between Omarosa and the president, and that the recordings would represent a “dramatic betrayal of trust” from Omarosa, who has known President Trump for years.
In addition to Omarosa’s tapes, Trump was recently hit with the news that his former personal attorney and fixer Michael Cohen had secretly recorded the two of them discussing payment for former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who claims she had an affair with the president and had her story bought by the National Enquirer.
