Omarosa Manigault Newman, the once-loyal aide to US President Donald Trump, said today that she believes he was lying when he claimed in a phone call last December that he knew nothing about her dismissal. / CNN
President Donald Trump's bitter fight with a former top White House aide has highlighted his aggressive and unconventional use of nondisclosure agreements to prevent current and former government employees from revealing secrets or disparaging him or his family.
The latest uproar centres on claims in a book by former senioradviser Omarosa Manigault Newman that the Trump campaign offered her a US$15,000 ($22,000)-a-month job in exchange for signing a broadly worded agreement that would have barred her from disclosing details of her time at the White House.
Trump shot back in a tweet yesterday that "Wacky Omarosa already has a fully signed Non-Disclosure Agreement" - the first apparent acknowledgment by Trump that he has used such documents as president.
Dozens of White House aides have signed NDAs in exchange for working for Trump, who has long relied on such agreements in his business career, according to current and former administration employees.
But NDAs have not been widely used by past administrations outside the transition time between presidents, in part because most legal experts believe such agreements are not legally enforceable for public employees.
Copies of Trump NDAs obtained by the Washington Post or described by current and former aides lay out breathtakingly broad prohibitions on behaviour and appear to be drawn heavily from similar contracts used in the past by the Trump Organisation, the President's family firm.
Under one agreement from the 2016 campaign, signers promised not to "demean or disparage publicly" Trump, his company or any member of his family - and also not to assist any other politician exploring a federal or state office. An agreement circulated in the White House last year barred signers from sharing any information they had learned in the building, according to several aides who signed the document.
Former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman during an interview on the Today show. Photo / AP
And the agreement proposed to Manigault Newman after her firing from the White House would have forbidden her from releasing derogatory information not only about Trump and his family, but about Vice-President Mike Pence and his family as well.
The rampant use of such nondisclosure agreements underscores a culture - fostered by Trump himself - of paranoia, leaks, audio recordings and infighting that has pervaded his dealings for decades and continues into his presidency, according to current and former aides. "It's the people you hire, the way they behave and the way the president treats them that creates its own NDA," said Ari Fleischer, press secretary to George W. Bush. He praised some of the President's policies but said, "Your eyes get a lot of exercise from rolling."
Manigault Newman, who is in the midst of a publicity tour for a tell-all book, said she refused to sign an NDA in exchange for the campaign job and has begun releasing recordings of her West Wing conversations, including one in the Situation Room, where she was fired by Chief of Staff John Kelly.
Manigault Newman told PBS NewsHour she signed previous NDAs for the Trump Organisation and for the 2016 campaign but never signed one in the White House.
The NDA that she declined to sign prohibited sharing information "including but not limited to the assets, investments, revenue, expenses, taxes, financial statements, actual or prospective business ventures, contracts, alliances, affiliations, relationships, affiliated entities, bids, letters of intent, term sheets, decisions, strategies, techniques, methods, projections, forecasts, customers, clients, contacts, customer lists, contact lists, schedules, appointments, meetings, conversations, notes and other communications" of "Trump, Pence, any Trump or Pence Family member, any Trump or Pence company, or any Trump or Pence Family Member Company."
President Donald Trump. Photo / AP
The proposed agreement also said her nondisclosure promise would last forever, even if the agreement and payments did not.
Trump tweeted that Manigault Newman was a "lowlife" whom he kept on as a top White House employee because she flattered him publicly, even as others told him she was a problematic, truant "loser".
A number of White House aides were urged to sign NDAs in early 2017 by White House Counsel Donald McGahn, according to current and former aides, who requested anonymity to discuss internal West Wing deliberations. Trump was obsessed with leaks to the news media and repeatedly demanded that McGahn draft the agreement, the aides said.
Initially, McGahn told Trump he would not draft or give aides the NDAs because they were not enforceable, White House officials said. But in the end, McGahn created a document that said aides would not divulge any confidential or nonpublic information to any person outside the building at any time, according to three people who signed it.
The process, like much in the West Wing, was haphazard. Dozens of senior aides signed the documents, but some were assuaged before signing by McGahn, who said they were unenforceable. Others, however, said they were never given documents to sign.
Aides no longer are asked to sign when joining the Administration, according to current and former officials.
Trump was pleased with the agreements, which he saw as a continuation of his business practices. In an April 2016 interview with the Post, Trump said he supported making federal employees sign NDAs.
" ... When people are chosen by a man to go into government at high levels and then they leave government and they write a book about a man and say a lot of things that were really guarded and personal, I don't like that," Trump said.
But the use of such agreements is seen as highly unusual by experts outside Trump's White House.
"The NDAs of which the President is fond cannot help control the backbiting, turmoil and mistrust that roils this White House," said Bob Bauer, a professor at New York University Law School, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama. "In fact, his futile resort to these documents is a symptom of the very problem he is trying to solve - and that he is responsible for creating."
