With Bob Woodward’s new book climbing the best-seller charts ahead of its official release this week and all of Washington still obsessing over that anonymous op-ed in The New York Times, it’s possible Omarosa Manigault Newman is starting to feel a little left out.
The author of Unhinged returned to The View on Monday morning armed with yet another secret audio recording that she says was made inside the White House. Introduced by Whoopi Goldberg as someone who went from one of Trump’s “biggest defenders to one of his biggest nightmares,” Manigault-Newman came out swinging against the president.
“You cannot silence someone when they're coming forward to expose corruption,” she said of the Trump team’s arbitration action against her. “I'm going to keep on fighting.”
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And yet as eager as Manigault Newman has been to trash her former boss now that she’s out of the White House, The View’s co-hosts did not let her off the hook for being his staunch defender in the past. Abby Huntsman asked why she stayed in her job so long if she was so “miserable” and Sunny Hostin called out her hypocrisy of praising Trump’s supposed inclusiveness in the past and now labeling him a “racist.”
In reference to the alleged “N-word” tape, Manigault Newman said, “I don't hold the tape. I've heard the tape. They've been talking about releasing it. I suspect they're going to release it around the midterms.” She did not disclose who she meant by “they.”
“I was in a toxic relationship with Donald Trump and I regret that I was so complicit,” she added. “You know, Hillary Clinton was robbed and I was a co-conspirator in that robbery. And I will regret that for the rest of my life, that I was a co-conspirator along with the rest of the folks who helped this con man get into office.”
It wasn’t until later in the show, after Manigault Newman reiterated who she believes wrote the Times op-ed (Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff Nick Ayers) and shared the code texts she and her White House colleagues would use to mock the president (#TFA for “25th Amendment” and the orange emoji), that she brought out the new tape.
“When Donald Trump got bored, which was very often because his attention span was very short, he would sometimes try to figure out what meetings were taking place in the White House and he would crash those meetings,” she explained. In this particular meeting, which she said occurred in October of last year, Trump was “still talking about Hillary Clinton.”
“I think Hillary is getting killed now with Russia. The real Russia story is Hillary and collusion,” Trump can be heard saying on the tape before arguing that the Clinton campaign made an illegal campaign finance violation by allegedly spending $9 million on a report to prove he had colluded with Russia. After getting affirmation on that claim from Hope Hicks, he adds, “So the whole Russia thing I think seems to have turned around, what do you think, Sarah?”
“Absolutely,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders replies, dutifully.
“You knew he wasn't telling the truth but folks still cheered him on,” Goldberg said. “You said that lying is second nature in the White House and you had to repeat everything he said. So, do you think y'all knowingly lied to the American people?”
“Oh absolutely,” Manigault Newman said. “I would have left that meeting where you just heard Donald Trump discuss how to obstruct justice by going through a law firm so that he could protect whatever crime and he was insinuating that Hillary did this. We now know that he did that with the National Enquirer and possibly Stormy. We would have to go out and repeat verbatim what you just heard, that Hillary Clinton was involved with the Russia collusion, that she was engaged in some criminal activity. Because he said it, we would repeat what the president said.”
“We would go out as you heard Hope Hicks, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and repeat those lies,” she continued. “She would repeat those lies from the podium in the press room.”
