According to a report by Axios, former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman used her personal phone to tape conversations with her colleagues, including “all the Trumps”
Manigault Newman had two devices — her government issued phone and her private phone, which she apparently kept on record during her time in the West Wing.
An anonymous source told Axios, Manigault Newman “wouldn’t write me on email or text me — many [conversations] happened on Facebook Messenger (she didn’t want what happened to Hillary Clinton and her emails to happen to her).”
In an August interview with CBS This Morning, Manigault Newman said she went to such extraordinary measures and recorded private conversations because she’s the “kind of person who covers her own back.”
“In Trump World, everyone lies,” she explained. “Everyone says one thing one day and they change their story the next day. I wanted to have this type of documentation so that in the event I found myself in this position where, as you said, they’re questioning my credibility, saying they never discussed the N-word tape, they had never heard these accusations, the president had never heard these accusations, when, in fact, this tape proves that they discussed it at high levels of the Trump campaign.”
So far, Manigault Newman has released taped conversations with Donald Trump, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and she’s said there are many more on the horizon.
Manigault Newman isn’t the only one dropping tapes, however. On Tuesday, The Washington Post released a recorded conversation between Trump and venerable journalist Bob Woodward.
During the conversation, Trump complains that he wasn’t interviewed for Woodward’s new book, Fear, which takes a look at the unraveling administration.