On Thursday, Omarosa Manigault Newman released a secret tape of a conversation between her and Lara Trump during an interview with MSNBC’s Craig Melvin.
Lara Trump, the senior adviser of President Trump’s 2020 campaign and Eric Trump’s wife, can be heard offering Manigault Newman a job working alongside her for $15,000 a month—a figure totaling $180,000 a year.
The tape opens with Mrs. Trump referencing what she considers a troubling New York Times article—the Times’s Maggie Haberman believes it to be this one—in which Manigault Newman is quoted having said she has “seen things that made me uncomfortable” over the course of her work for Trump, and that she has a “profound story that I know the world will want to hear.”
“It sounds a little like, obviously, that there are some things you’ve got in the back pocket to pull out,” Lara Trump says on this new tape, referring to the article. Mrs. Trump then notes that all the money raised for the campaign comes from small donors, and offers to match Manigault Newman’s White House salary of $179,ooo. Manigault Newman told Craig Melvin that the recording is proof of “an attempt” to “buy my silence, to censor me, and to pay men off.”
President Trump’s former bodyguard, Keith Schiller, was also offered a 2020 campaign position that pays $15,000 a month, according to CNN. He left the White House in September 2017 for “financial reasons,” began receiving $15,000 a month for “security expenses” in October, and was interviewed as part of the Russia investigation in November.