Hours after denying a Washington Post report that said he masqueraded as his own spokesman decades ago, Donald Trump on Friday reportedly hung up on reporters from the newspaper asking questions about the controversy.
Post reporters were 44 minutes into a phone interview Friday afternoon discussing the presumptive GOP presiedntial nominee’s finances when they asked Trump if he ever employed a spokesman by the name of John Miller.
“The phone went silent, then dead,” the newspaper reported. “When the reporters called back and reached Trump’s secretary, she said, ‘I heard you got disconnected. He can’t take the call now. I don’t know what happened.'”
The story published on Friday included audio of a man with a similar tone and cadence to Trump claiming to be John Miller, a spokesman for the businessman, during a 1991 phone call with People magazine reporter Sue Carswell.
“It’s absolutely Donald Trump,” Carswell, who left the magazine in 1994 and has written for other outlets recently, told NBC News in a preview of an interview set to air Friday night on “NBC Nightly News,” adding there’s “no doubt in my mind” that it was Trump whom she spoke with during the 1991 interview.
Trump listened to a portion of the audio during a phone interview early Friday on NBC’s “Today” show, saying he didn’t know anything about it and then denying it was his voice in the audio obtained by the Post.
“It doesn’t sound like my voice at all,” Trump said, claiming the voice was someone imitating him.
Asked during a combative interview on CNN’s “Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer if Trump ever employed a man named John Miller or John Barron, Trump spokeswoman Katrina Pierson responded, “I’m not sure.”