No matter how much the president loves them, the government can only enforce nondisclosure agreements for classified information.
Part of the outrage on the president’s part seems to be over Manigault Newman breaking what Trump saw as a promise not to talk about her time working for him. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway told ABC News: “We have confidentiality agreements in the West Wing — absolutely we do.” And Manigault Newman claims in her book that Trump’s reelection campaign offered her a $15,000-a-month salary in exchange for signing a confidentiality agreement... I have reviewed one document that is purportedly a version of the White House NDA. It appeared to be nothing more than a Trump Organization document that was modified to apply to White House staff — in fact, it still had a provision that in any litigated dispute, the parties agreed that New York state law would apply, language that no standard federal document would ever have used... It was also publicly reported that one early draft of a White House NDA contained a provision that imposed a $10 million fine to be paid to the federal government if the signatory shared confidential information... While the term “confidential” in D.C. parlance is part of the national security classification framework, in these NDAs, it referred to potentially derogatory and unclassified information pertaining to the president... These NDAs also ignored earlier guidance from the Office of Management and Budget that any NDAs should contain whistleblower protection provisions, clauses that would be contrary to the clear message desired by this administration... his campaign entity, Donald J. Trump for President Inc., rather than the U.S. government, has reportedly filed for arbitration against Manigault Newman seeking millions for a violation of a 2016 NDA... The NDA allegedly required her to keep proprietary information about the president, his companies or his family confidential and to never “disparage” the Trump family “during the term of your service and at all times thereafter.” This clause is in direct conflict with the legal precedents governing federal employees, but how an arbitration body will interpret constitutional questions is anyone’s guess... In an April 2016 interview with The Washington Post, the future president said he supported making federal employees sign NDAs.“I think they should,” Trump said. “. . . 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.”.. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy said the “very word ‘secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings.”
Bill Shine Likely as Next White House Communications Director
Bill Shine, a former Fox News executive who was close to Roger E. Ailes, the network’s ousted chairman, is expected to be offered the job of White House communications director, according to four people familiar with the decision.
Mr. Shine, who was forced out as co-president at Fox News last May for his handling of sexual harassment scandals at the network, has met with President Trump in recent weeks about taking the West Wing communications job, which has been vacant since Hope Hicks left the job in March.
.. Mr. Shine’s reluctance to walk into a chaotic West Wing.
.. As recently as a month ago, Mr. Shine didn’t want the job
.. The former television executive was reluctant to deal with all the scrutiny, part of which could focus on his own connection to the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News
.. widely seen as one of the top executives and protégé to Mr. Ailes.
.. A Long Island commuter and son of a New York City policeman, the unassuming Mr. Shine was viewed inside Fox News as embodying the network’s typical viewer, urging producers to run segments on bread-and-butter issues that would appeal to conservatives.
.. He was also known as a loyal taskman for Mr. Ailes
.. so devoted to his bosses that Rupert Murdoch .. once privately described Mr. Shine to other executives as a “fine company man.”
.. Mr. Shine was accused in several lawsuits of covering up Mr. Ailes’s behavior and dismissing concerns from women who complained about it.
.. Several former employees at Fox News reacted with alarm — but not surprise
.. few people internally were concerned about the accusations that Mr. Shine played a role in concealing Mr. Ailes’ behavior, in part because some staffers think Mr. Shine was just doing his job to protect the company.
.. enjoys powerful allies inside the president’s inner circle.
.. He is close with Kellyanne Conway, the White House counselor, who is said to have advocated for him
.. Mercedes Schlapp, a communications adviser to the White House, was seen initially as a favorite for the job, in part because of her good relationship with the chief of staff, John F. Kelly.
.. it would add to the ties between Mr. Trump and the Fox News network
.. Mr. Shine is also close to Sean Hannity, the Fox News host who has the president’s ear.
‘Tired of the wait game’: White House stabilizers gone, Trump calling his own shots
Other than Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, the lone remaining enforcer is Kelly. But his power as chief of staff has been diminished. Officials said the days of Kelly hovering in the Oval Office morning to night and screening the president’s calls are over. Trump is largely circumventing Kelly’s strict protocols.
The president recently reached out to some people Kelly had sought to excommunicate, calling former communications director Anthony Scaramucci to banter about politics and inviting Lewandowski and Bossie to dinner in the residence.
“He’s rotating back to the people who actually like him and is more willing to take advice from those people,” Scaramucci said. “They’re more honest with him, and he’s more comfortable with them.”
Allies said Trump is reverting to the way he led the Trump Organization from his 26th-floor office suite at Trump Tower in Manhattan. There, staffers were functionaries or lawyers, and many of his advisers were outside the company — rival business leaders, media figures and bankers. Back then, Trump controlled his orbit himself from behind his cluttered desk, relying on assistant Rhona Graff to field calls.
.. Ascendant in the West Wing are advisers who play to Trump’s gut: Kudlow on tax cuts and deregulation, Bolton on a muscular approach to foreign affairs, Peter Navarro on protectionist trade policies, Stephen Miller on crackdowns on undocumented immigrants and Kellyanne Conway on an open press strategy and tangling with reporters.
.. Like Conway, Bolton and Kudlow are seasoned cable news commentators who share Trump’s hard-charging instincts and have no illusions about his governing style. Officials said they are expected to cater to the president’s wishes and seek to avoid the internal knife fights that have befallen many a Trump aide.
.. “Gary was really good, but I don’t know if Gary ever embraced the Trump economic ideas. He was more of a traditional Democrat or moderate Republican. Kudlow is a real cheerleader for the tax cuts in a way Gary never was, although he helped get them passed.”
.. Trump has been frustrated by news stories of White House tumult and has ordered aides to contest the notion that there is chaos.
.. “The top story, number one, is Stormy Daniels,” King said he told Trump. “I told him it’s utterly ridiculous. I just came back from Hamburg, Germany, and they were just laughing at us.”
A Reckoning with Women Awaits Trump
Omarosa Manigault-Newman, the unforgettably forgettable former White House aide in charge of nothing at all, tearfully confessing her global despair. “It’s not going to be O.K.,” she said.
.. Bannon, who is partial to grand pronouncements, acknowledged the political stakes, not least for the President. “You watch. The time has come,” he said. “Women are gonna take charge of society. And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch. This is a definitional moment in the culture. It’ll never be the same going forward . . . The anti-patriarchy movement is going to undo ten thousand years of recorded history.”
.. When Rob Porter, the White House staff secretary, left his job after charges, and evidence, of abuse from his two ex-wives became public, the President showed not a trace of sympathy for anyone but Porter himself.
.. This was striking. One former wife had obtained a protective order against Porter; the other presented the F.B.I. with a photograph of herself with a black eye, the result, she said, of a beating Porter delivered her while on vacation in Italy. And yet Trump went to great lengths, in a public statement, to sympathize with the “tough time” that Porter was enduring, to praise the “very good job” he had done, and to express confidence that he had a “wonderful career” ahead of him.
.. Trump responded with similar fellow-feeling when charges were levelled at Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly, late of Fox News, and Roy Moore, the right-wing former judge who had seemed headed to victory in an Alabama Senate race. (Trump, of course, is unforgiving when it comes to Democrats like Al Franken and John Conyers.)
.. Kellyanne Conway, whose defenses of Trump’s most preposterous statements are sometimes so tortured that they become the stuff of late-night satire, could not bear to back the President on this one. She told CNN that she saw “no reason not to believe” Porter’s former spouses. “In this case, you have contemporaneous police reports, you have women speaking to the FBI under threat of perjury,” Conway said. “You have photographs, and when you look at all of that pulled together, Rob Porter did the right thing by resigning.”
.. It has come to the point when even Trump’s closest aides know that a reckoning is coming. It’s not going to be O.K.