WASHINGTON (AP) — The Latest on former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman (all times local):
11:30 a.m.
President Donald Trump’s campaign is filing an arbitration action against former aide Omarosa Manigault Newman alleging breach of a secrecy agreement.
A campaign aide tells The Associated Press that it is filing the claim with the America Arbitration Association in New York, claiming her explosive new book and media tour breached her 2016 confidentiality agreement with the campaign. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Manigault Newman has acknowledged signing a confidentiality agreement with the campaign in 2016. She wrote in her book that after being fired from the White House in December 2017 was offered a $15,000 per month position with the Trump re-election effort in exchange for signing a new confidentiality agreement. She says she declined that offer.
—AP reporter Zeke Miller
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7:35 a.m.
President Donald Trump is calling his former adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman a “dog.”
Manigault Newman has released several audio recordings from her time as a Trump assistant at the White House, including one with the president in which he said nobody told him she had been fired. Manigault Newman also says she has heard audio tape of Trump using the N-word.
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted: “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General Kelly for quickly firing that dog!”
That’s a reference to Trump’s White House chief of staff, retired Gen. John Kelly, who fired Manigault Newman in December 2017 in a conversation she viewed as a “threat.”
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12:20 a.m.
President Donald Trump and Omarosa Manigault Newman have returned to their roles as reality TV boss and villain as they spar over what she claims the president said and what he contends his former White House aide is making up.
Manigault Newman says she heard an audiotape of Trump using the N-word. The president counters that the word isn’t in his vocabulary and calls her “wacky and deranged” and “not smart.”
Their war of words touches on sensitive issues in Trump’s White House, including a lack of racial diversity among senior officials, security in the executive mansion, and a culture that some there feel borders on paranoia.
In an unusual admission, Trump says the public back and forth is perhaps beneath a person in his position.
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