Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman on Monday released a new tape of President Trump featuring a private discussion about the deadly ambush in Niger last year that left four U.S. soldiers dead.
Manigault Newman played the tape from October 2017 on “MSNBC Live with Craig Melvin.”
{mosads}Trump can be heard on the tape calling the military a “rough business” and saying that the militants who carried out the ambush are “rough, too.”
“They got attacked by 50 real fighters,” Trump says on the tape. “These were people in many cases that were in the Middle East, that now go to Africa to try and, you know, cause problems there.”
About 12 U.S. soldiers and 30 Nigerien soldiers were ambushed by about 50 militants in the October 2017 attack. In addition to the four U.S. soldiers, five Nigerien soldiers were killed.
Trump also can be heard saying on the tape that he wouldn’t “want to be a terrorist right now,” eliciting laughter from the staffers who were in the room.
“It’s not a laughing matter,” Manigault Newman said on MSNBC. “We lost four American soldiers.”
It was the second tape released Monday by Manigault Newman, who earlier played a tape on ABC’s “The View” that featured Trump talking about former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Russia.
The tape Manigault Newman shared on MSNBC appeared to end where the tape she shared on “The View” begins. At the end of the tape shared on MSNBC, Trump can be heard claiming that the “real Russia story is Hillary and collusion,” which is where the tape that Manigault Newman played on “The View” begins.
The ex-White House aide and former contestant on Trump’s reality television show “Celebrity Apprentice” has released a series of tapes that she recorded while working in the White House.
She first began sharing them with news outlets as part of her media blitz to promote her memoir “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House,” a tell-all from her time in the White House.