Shocking evidence emerged Sunday that fired White House aide Omarosa Manigault secretly recorded White House Chief of Staff John Kelly in a classified area of the White House.
Omarosa appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” to discuss allegations — made in her new tell-all book — that President Donald Trump is suffering from a debilitating mental illness and regularly uses racial slurs in conversation with White House employees.
To offer proof that she did record conversations in the White House, Omarosa played a tape of her own firing on “Meet the Press,” recorded, Omarosa claims, in a highly-classified area of the White House commonly known as a “situation room.”
WATCH: Omarosa releases secret tape of John Kelly firing from White House #MTP pic.twitter.com/KtNEiuPkqz
— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) August 12, 2018
She justified the action by saying that White House employees need to constantly watch their backs.
This is crazy: Omarosa secretly recorded Chief of Staff John Kelly IN THE SITUATION ROOM pic.twitter.com/08AWjEpqJb
— Robert Maguire (@RobertMaguire_) August 12, 2018
“This is a White House where everybody lies… you have to have your back,” she told Chuck Todd.
“If I did not have this recording, people would still believe the false, incredible story that I was running around the White House … that I tried to charge the residence of the White House. People would still think that I was trying to set off alarms,” she continued. “So yes, I recorded myself and I have no regret about it.”
Kelly is heard on the tape suggesting a “friendly” parting of ways, a statement Omarosa says she interpreted as a “threat.”
“I think it’s important to understand that if we make this a friendly departure, we can all be, you know you can look at your time here in the White House as a year of service to the nation,” Kelly says. “And then you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future, relative to your reputation.”
If Omarosa did, indeed, record Kelly in a “situation room” (or “SCIF”), that could represent a major breach of not just protocol, but security. It means Omarosa brought her own cell phone, hackable by any foreign government or criminal organization, into one of those most secretive areas in the United States.
Omarosa went on to accuse the White House of “deceiving the nation” by hiding the president’s “mental decline.”
White House spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway fired back at Omarosa on ABC’s “This Week,” suggesting Omarosa’s story has “changed” since she left the White House and that the first Conway heard of Omarosa’s trouble with the president was in excerpts from her forthcoming book.