The U.S. Justice Department is suing former Melania Trump senior advisor and former friend Stephanie Winston Wolkoff for allegedly violating a nondisclosure agreement she signed while working at the White House.
Wolkoff secretly taped conversations between herself and Mrs. Trump and leaked them to the media to promote her new book “Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady.”
The suit asks that profits from Wolkoff’s book put into a government trust, according to Reuters.
“The Justice Department alleged in the suit that Ms. Winston Wolkoff violated a nondisclosure agreement she had signed with the government when she agreed to volunteer to help Mrs. Trump in the early months of the administration,” The New York Times reported Tuesday. “The pact forbade her from disclosing confidential details she learned during her time working for the first lady, the lawsuit said.”
According to the suit, “Wolkoff has been, and will continue in the future to be, unjustly enriched in the amount of profits, advances, royalties and other advantages resulting from publicity given to the unauthorized disclosures contained in her book.”
“This was a contract with the United States and therefore enforceable by the United States,” argued Justice Department spokeswoman Kerri Kupec, the Times said.
Lorin L. Reisner, a lawyer representing Wolkoff said in a statement that the suit “is entirely meritless.”
“It represents an effort by the Trumps to enlist the D.O.J. to pursue entirely personal goals and interests,” said Reisner. “The position staked out in the lawsuit also violates the First Amendment.”
After teasing the secret recordings to the press for numerous months, Winston Wolkoff went on CNN airwaves in early October to drop some of the audio and promote her book. As noted by The Daily Wire, the recordings, clearly intended to hurt Mrs. Trump, inadvertently made the First Lady look good, especially to conservatives.
During the CNN interview where some of the secretly-recorded audiotapes were leaked, Wolkoff consistently insulted the First Lady and President Trump, stating that Mrs. Trump is “complicit in everything that’s going on,” adding that “we are watching our democracy turned into a dictatorship at this point. And it’s a brainwash type of cultish,” and “The traditions of First Lady and President have gone out the window with this couple,” The Daily Wire noted.
“I think that after watching the debate the other evening, and how disgraceful and how upsetting it was to see our leader act in such — I don’t even have the words to express how blatantly rude it was to act that way, like to see Melania walk on stage, to smile at him and gesture at him and to be okay with that type of behavior,” Wolkoff continued. “I mean, the most important voice right now should be Melania’s voice. She has no voice as his wife. I mean, the one woman that we need more than ever isn’t coming to the plate because she has no ability to do so.”
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