Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman on Monday released new tapes of President Trump in a private meeting talking about former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s ties to Russia.
Manigault Newman played the audio recording on ABC’s “The View,” prefacing it by saying it is from an October 2017 meeting with the White House communications and press teams.
{mosads}”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,” Manigault Newman said. “This was a meeting with the entire communications staff and the press shop. We were meeting to talk about tax reform or his trip to North Korea.”
“He came into the meeting, he sat down, and he starts rambling from topic to topic, none of it makes sense,” she said. “And this is in October of last year, so this is … twelve months after the election, and he’s still talking about Hillary Clinton.”
In the tape, Trump claims the “real Russia story is Hillary and collusion,” a statement that he has made in public multiple times. He alleges the Clinton campaign paid $9 million for an unidentified “phony report.”
When White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says it is “closer to $6 [million],” Trump says she is wrong, adding the money was “spent through a law firm.”
“That way, they can’t trace it,” he says. “But they traced it. One thing in this business is they trace it.”
“The reason a law firm is because this way you don’t have to give any papers,” he adds. “But they found out, it’s definitely illegal and it’s illegal from a campaign standpoint, from a campaign financing standpoint.”
At the end of the tape, Trump looks to his staff for affirmation.
“So the whole Russia thing, I think, seems to have turned around. What do you think, Sarah?” he asks.
“Absolutely,” Sanders can be heard replying.
Manigault Newman said the tape backs up her claims that Trump is mentally unstable.
The former Trump ally and co-star of reality television show “Celebrity Apprentice” has released multiple tapes from her time in the White House. In one tape, chief of staff John Kelly can be heard firing her in the Situation Room; in another, Trump acts surprised to hear that Manigault Newman has been fired.
She has been releasing the tapes as part of a media blitz following the release of her tell-all White House memoir “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House.”
“Do you think y’all knowingly lied to the American people?” Whoopi Goldberg asked Manigault Newman on “The View.”
“Absolutely,” Manigault Newman replied. “We would have to go out as the comms team and repeat verbatim what you just heard.”