Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman claimed President Trump knew about stolen Hillary Clinton emails before they were released by WikiLeaks and that she’s been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.The new claims are the latest twist from her media tour to promote her new book, “Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House,” on sale Aug. 14.Earlier, Newman dropped audio of a 2016 conversation among herself, former Trump campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson, former communications director Jason Miller, and Lynne Patton, now a regional director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The conversation regarded Trump allegedly using the N-word on the set of “The Apprentice” during his time as the reality show's star in the early 2000s. (Newman herself met Trump on that show about 14 years ago, and they remained so close that Trump brought her onto his campaign and into the White House.)Her cascade of secretly recorded conversations, which she’s released to the media over the past three days, has also sparked Trump’s ire on social media. In a series of tweets, he called her a “dog,” “crazed” and “deranged," also saying he gave her a White House job because "she only said GREAT things about me."The Trump campaign filed an arbitration action against Newman on Tuesday with the American Arbitration Association in New York, accusing her of breaching a 2016 confidentiality agreement, a campaign spokesperson confirmed.NBC reported that a portion of her book alleges that White House chief of staff John Kelly shut down attempts to provide aid to Puerto Rico following Hurricane Maria, while also accusing Trump of referring “to Puerto Ricans with derogatory terms many times.” Newman also claimed the president is in mental decline. Then, she said during an NBC interview with Katy Tur that there’s “a lot of corruption” in the campaign and administration.
“The Trump campaign has filed arbitration against you, do you believe you violated your 2016 agreement?” Tur asked.
“I don’t believe that I violated it, but I’m going to leave that to the lawyers to sort that out. It’s interesting that he’s trying to silence me. So, what is he trying to hide? What is he afraid of? If he hadn’t said anything that was derogatory or demeaning to African-Americans and women, why would he go to this extent to try to shut me down?”
“I think he should be afraid of being exposed as the misogynist, the bigot and the racist that he is,” she added. She wouldn’t comment on whether she had more tapes of conversations regarding the president, or whether she intended to release them.
When asked if she had been interviewed by the special counsel, Newman said she had. “I will just say this: There’s a lot of corruption that went on both in the campaign and in the White House, and I’m going to blow the whistle on all of it.”
Tur later asked Newman if Trump had known about the hacked emails before they were released by WikiLeaks. “Absolutely,” Newman responded.
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Newman was fired from the White House in December. During a White House press briefing Tuesday, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump was “voicing his frustrations” when he called Newman a dog in his tweet.
“I think it’s really sad what she’s doing at this point,” Sanders said of Newman.Cover: Omarosa Manigault Newman, former assistant to President Donald Trump and author of "Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House", appears in an exclusive interview on "Meet the Press" in Washington, D.C., Sunday, August 12, 2018. (Photo by: William B. Plowman/NBC/NBC NewsWire via Getty Images)