Former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman unveiled yet another secret West Wing recording Monday in which President Trump accused Hillary Clinton of colluding with Russians before the 2016 presidential election.
“I think Hillary is getting killed now with Russia. The real Russia story is Hillary and collusion,” the president said on the tape.
“Somebody told me it was $9 million they spent on the phony report. Yeah, someone just said she’s far worse for the country than we thought, she didn’t know her own campaign was spending 9, did you see?” he said, referring to money paid to Fusion GPS, which hired British ex-spy Christopher Steele to prepare a damaging dossier on Trump.
“Nobody knows who spent. I heard it was 5.7, now they say it was 9. It was spent through a law firm so that way they can’t trace it. The reason they used a law firm, you don’t have to give any papers,” he continued.
“It’s definitely illegal and it’s illegal from a campaign financing standpoint. So the whole Russia thing I think seems to have turned around. What do you think, Sarah?” he asked spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
“Absolutely,” she replied.
His comments came during a meeting of the White House press shop in October 2017, and echo other public statements in which he accused Clinton of being in cahoots with the Kremlin.
Trump, Manigault Newman added, has taken desperate measures to shut her up. “He has sicced his entire legal team on me. They want to shut me down,” she told the hosts of “The View.”
But, she added: “I’m going to keep on fighting.”
She also charged that Clinton “was robbed” in the 2016 presidential election and that she’s speaking out now in part because she feels complicit in what she called a robbery.
Asked if she knew who wrote an unflattering op-ed about the president published a week ago in the New York Times, she pointed the finger at Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, without offering evidence.
A day earlier, the former “Apprentice” star told MSNBC that she and other White House staffers and family members used a special hashtag to communicate when Trump was acting more “insane” than usual.
“Whenever he did something that was just so insane and so crazy and unhinged, when he would flip positions from one hour to the next, we’d just hashtag it ‘TFA’ and keep moving. I’m a little embarrassed to tell you how often when I went through my text chains from the White House I saw the hashtag,” said Manigault Newman — who, before she was fired by chief of staff John Kelly, was the highest-ranking African-American working in the White House.
The hashtag referred to the “25th Amendment,” which includes a section that allows the vice president and a majority of cabinet secretaries to declare a president “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
She repeated the allegation on “The View.”
“It was the way we coped and the way we would deal with his flip-flops. In the morning he would take one position. By the afternoon it would be something completely different. The way we coped would be — and I’m embarrassed to say this. We would use the orange icon.”
Sanders knocked down Manigault Newman’s claims from Sunday in a statement.
“Everyone, even the media, knows she has no credibility. The idea this ever happened is completely ridiculous and just further shows that she will say and do anything to try and be relevant,” she charged.
Manigault Newman had earlier charged that Trump used the N-word on the set of his reality show.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Special counsel Robert Muller’s investigation into Russian election meddling and possible collusion with the Trump campaign remains ongoing. There is no investigation into Clinton.
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