White House: we cannot guarantee there's no tape of Trump using N-word 
 
 As the remarkable public spat between Donald Trump and former adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman continued on Tuesday, the White House was unable to guarantee that no recordings exist of the president using the “N-word”. 
 
 
 
 Omarosa says Trump is a racist who uses N-word – and claims there is tape to prove it Read more 
 
 At a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Sanders was asked if she could say no such recordings would emerge. 
 
 “I can’t guarantee anything,” she said. 
 
 Sanders cited the president’s tweets on the matter and said: “I can tell you that the president addressed this question directly.” On Monday, Trump wrote: “I don’t have that word in my vocabulary and never have.” 
 
 On Tuesday morning, he added to earlier tweets when he wrote: “When you give a crazed, crying lowlife a break, and give her a job at the White House, I guess it just didn’t work out. Good work by General [John] Kelly for quickly firing that dog!” 
 
 Manigault Newman, a former contestant on the reality TV show The Apprentice, is promoting a memoir, Unhinged. She has released two secret recordings related to her firing from the White House late last year and another related to the claims that Trump used the “N-word” during his career in reality TV. 
 
 Sanders said she had never heard Trump use the racial epithet in question. 
 
 In an interview on MSNBC on Tuesday afternoon, Manigault Newman introduced another angle to the row when she confirmed earlier hints that she has been interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller. The former FBI director is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election and links between Trump aides and Moscow. 
 
 “I have” been interviewed, Manigault Newman said, though she said her “hands are tied” over any discussion of what she was asked. 
 
 Earlier in the day, the Trump campaign accused her of breaching a 2016 non-disclosure agreement. 
 
 In a statement to CNN, the campaign said it had “filed an arbitration against Omarosa Manigault Newman, with the American Arbitration Association in New York City, for breach of her 2016 confidentiality agreement with the Trump campaign”. It is the first legal action the campaign has launched since Manigault Newman revealed details in her tell-all book about her time as a Trump campaign adviser and senior White House aide. 
 
 On MSNBC, Manigault Newman said: “I don’t believe that I have violated [an NDA], but I’m going to leave that to the lawyers to sort that out. It’s interesting that he’s trying to silence me. So what is he trying to hide? What is he afraid of? If he hadn’t said anything that was derogatory or demeaning to African Americans and women, why would he go to this extent to try to shut me down?” 
 
 I think he should be afraid of being exposed as the misogynist, the bigot and the racist that he is Omarosa Manigault Newman 
 
 Asked if there were any more tapes the president should be “afraid of”, she said: “I think he should be afraid of being exposed as the misogynist, the bigot and the racist that he is.” 
 
 Of Trump calling her a “dog”, she said: “I think that it just shows you that if he would say that publicly, what else would he say about me privately? He has absolutely no respect for women, for African Americans – as evidenced by him instructing the chief of staff to lock me for two hours in the Situation Room to harass me, to threaten me. 
 
 “He’s unfit to be in this office and to serve as the president of the United States.” 
 
 At the White House briefing, Sanders said Manigault Newman was a “self-serving someone who blatantly cares about herself more than our country”. 
 
 Sanders also insisted that Trump’s decision to call Manigault Newman a dog and his other criticisms of prominent African Americans were not racially motivated. 
 
 “This has absolutely nothing to do with race,” she said, “and everything to do with the president calling out someone’s lack of integrity.” 
 
 She also complained about reporters only asking about “a few of the things that the president has said negative about people who are minorities” and said Trump was “an equal opportunity person who calls it like he sees it and always fights fire with fire”. 
 
 Play Video 0:40 Former Trump aide claims to have heard recording of him using N-word – video 
 
 Manigault Newman’s recent TV appearances, and her claim to have heard a tape of Trump using the N-word and other racial slurs during filming for The Apprentice, have clearly infuriated the president. 
 
 Did Omarosa break the law by secretly recording Trump and Kelly? Read more 
 
 On CBS, Manigault Newman revealed a third tape she said recorded a 2016 conference call among Trump aides discussing how to address potential fallout from any release of tapes that allegedly contain Trump using the N-word. The campaign aides had previously denied any such conversations took place. 
 
 In the recording, then campaign spokeswoman Katrina Pierson can be heard saying: “I am trying to find at least what context it was used in to help us maybe try to figure out a way to spin it.” Later in the conversation, she says: “He said it. He is embarrassed.” 
 
 On Monday night, Pierson said on Fox News the call “did not happen”. But in a statement on Tuesday, she said she had been seeking “to placate Omarosa to move the discussion along”. 
 
 Manigault Newman’s decision to record conversations has attracted controversy. When Kelly fired her in December in the White House Situation Room, she secretly taped the conversation: an apparent breach of security protocol. ||||| The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has said Omarosa Manigault Newman's new memoir is "riddled with lies." Mark Wilson/Getty Images 
 
 President Donald Trump and another official slapped away Omarosa Manigault Newman's claims that she heard Trump say the N-word in a recording taken years ago during the filming of the NBC reality show "The Apprentice." 
 
 Before Monday, Manigault Newman publicly had said only that she had heard such a recording existed, but in an interview with the MSNBC host Chris Matthews on Monday night she suggested she had since heard it. She has unleashed a barrage of criticism against Trump in recent days amid the release of her tell-all book, "Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the White House." 
 
 Trump on Monday night seemed to deny having ever used the N-word. 
 
 Writing on Twitter, he said Mark Burnett, the "Apprentice" producer turned MGM chairman, had "called to say that there are NO TAPES of the Apprentice where I used such a terrible and disgusting word as attributed by Wacky and Deranged Omarosa. 
 
 "I don't have that word in my vocabulary, and never have," he continued. "She made it up. Look at her MANY recent quotes saying such wonderful and powerful things about me - a true Champion of Civil Rights - until she got fired. Omarosa had Zero credibility with the Media (they didn't want interviews) when she worked in the White House. Now that she says bad about me, they will talk to her. Fake News!" 
 
 Omarosa Manigault Newman with Donald Trump. Carlo Allegri/Reuters 
 
 Manigault Newman, the former communications director for the White House Office of Public Liaison, told Matthews she heard Trump say racially derogatory remarks, specifically the N-word, "multiple times" in a three-minute recording. 
 
 She added that the remarks were made in reference to Kwame Jackson, a black contestant on the show. 
 
 "It sounded as if he used it every day," Manigault Newman told Matthews of the N-word. "It rolled off his mouth." 
 
 Manigault Newman said that it was during the 2016 campaign when she first heard such recordings may have existed and that she was shocked. 
 
 "My first reaction to it was, 'This can't be true,'" she said, adding: "My first instinct was to protect him and not to dive deeper because I just dismissed it as untrue." 
 
 Manigault Newman apparently went on to investigate such recordings, however. Also Monday evening, HuffPost cited multiple sources as saying Manigault Newman had actually told at least three Trump aides back in December that she had already heard a recording taken during "Apprentice" filming in which Trump had said a racial slur. 
 
 HuffPost cited three anonymous Trump aides as saying she had told them the recording was played for her in the White House by Troy McClain, a former "Apprentice" contestant. 
 
 McClain acknowledged meeting with Manigault Newman at the White House in December but laughed at the notion that he played the tape for her, according to HuffPost. "You've got to be bulls------- me. Is this a joke?" he reportedly said. 
 
 The idea that Manigault Newman had heard such a recording as far back as December contradicts her public statements. During promotional interviews for her book before Monday, she had said she heard incriminating recordings existed but had not listened to any. She then suggested in Monday's MSNBC interview that she only recently heard the three-minute recording, and she did not indicate who was in possession of it but suggested the person might be keeping it to hurt Trump in the November midterms. 
 
 The former "Apprentice" contestant Kwame Jackson on Fox Business. Fox Business/YouTube 
 
 HuffPost cited multiple sources as saying Manigault Newman had told them in December that an "Apprentice" producer named Bill Pruitt had been in possession of the tape containing the audio she had heard. 
 
 During the 2016 campaign, Pruitt teased the existence of incriminating recordings of Trump from "Apprentice" filming, but HuffPost said he denied having possessed any such tapes. 
 
 Lynne Patton, a regional director at the Department of Housing and Urban Development who said she spoke with Pruitt on Monday, released a statement emphasizing that rebuttal. 
 
 "Based upon her conflicting accounts and the newfound information ... it should be abundantly clear to everyone that not only is her book a complete work of fiction, but that the existence of this elusive 'N-word' tape is a figment of her imagination and merely a destructive took of manipulation applied on when it best serves her interests," Patton said in her statement. 
 
 Manigault Newman launched a media frenzy amid the release of a memoir that paints the Trump administration in an unflattering light. On Sunday, she released an audio recording of what she said was a discussion between her and the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, inside the Situation Room, sparking security concerns for officials who are not supposed to bring recording devices into the secure room. 
 
 "But I will say this to you, I was complicit with this White House deceiving this nation," she said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday. 
 
 "They continue to deceive this nation by how mentally declined he is," Manigault Newman said, adding: "How difficult it is for him to process complex information. How he is not engaged in some of the most important decisions that impacts our country. I was complicit, and for that I regret." ||||| Omarosa says Trump is a racist who uses N-word – and claims there is tape to prove it 
 
 Donald Trump is a “racist” who has used the “N-word” repeatedly, Omarosa Manigault Newman, once the most prominent African American in the White House, claims in a searing memoir. 
 
 The future US president was caught on mic uttering the taboo racial slur “multiple times” during the making of his reality TV show The Apprentice and there is a tape to prove it, according to Manigault Newman, citing three unnamed sources. 
 
 Trump has been haunted from around the time of his election in 2016 by allegations that outtakes from the reality TV show exist in which he is heard saying the N-word and using other offensive language. 
 
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 In her book, Unhinged, a copy of which was obtained by the Guardian ahead of its publication next week, the former Apprentice participant insists that the reports are true, although she does not say she heard him use the word herself. 
 
 She also claims that she personally witnessed Trump use racial epithets about the White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s husband George Conway, who is half Filipino. “Would you look at this George Conway article?” she quotes the president as saying. “F**ing FLIP! Disloyal! Fucking Goo-goo.” 
 
 Both flip and goo-goo are terms of racial abuse for Filipinos. 
 
 Critics have previously questioned Manigault Newman’s credibility and are likely to accuse her of seeking revenge against the administration after her abrupt dismissal last December. 
 
 Attack ads, lawsuits, insults and fights: Trump's charged history with race Read more 
 
 At the time, she writes, she felt a “growing realization that Donald Trump was indeed a racist, a bigot and a misogynist. My certainty about the N-word tape and his frequent uses of that word were the top of a high mountain of truly appalling things I’d experienced with him, during the last two years in particular.” 
 
 Recalling her sudden and unceremonious departure, she writes: “It had finally sunk in that the person I’d thought I’d known so well for so long was actually a racist. Using the N-word was not just the way he talks but, more disturbing, it was how he thought of me and African Americans as a whole.” 
 
 Trump hosted NBC’s The Apprentice from 2004-2015 before running for the presidency and still likes to laud his high ratings. 
 
 His insurgent election campaign was rocked in October 2016 by the release of an Access Hollywood tape in which he bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy”. The media firestorm prompted Bill Pruitt, a producer on the first two seasons of The Apprentice, to tweet that there were “far worse” tapes of Trump behind the scenes of the show. 
 
 Further allegations emerged that Trump had used the N-word in the recordings. Then, following the New York property tycoon’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton, the actor and comedian Tom Arnold claimed to have the video of Trump using racist language. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest The White House staffer Kellyanne Conway and former aides Hope Hicks and Omarosa Manigault Newman at a press briefing last year. Photograph: Alex Wong/Getty Images 
 
 “I have the outtakes to The Apprentice where he says every bad thing ever, every offensive, racist thing ever,” Arnold told the Seattle-based radio station KIRO. “It was him sitting in that chair saying the N-word, saying the C-word, calling his son a retard, just being so mean to his own children.” 
 
 But Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which owns the rights to the reality TV show, and its British creator, Mark Burnett, have resisted pressure to release the footage because of “various contractual and legal requirements”. 
 
 Once close to Trump, Manigault Newman was among his most high-profile supporters during the election campaign and drew a top salary of $179,700 as director of communications for the White House office of public liaison. She held her April 2017 wedding at Trump’s luxury hotel, close to the White House. 
 
 Hers is the second memoir from a former Trump administration member, following that of the ex-press secretary Sean Spicer, but it was always expected to be less adulatory. This week the Daily Beast reported that she had secretly recorded conversations with the president and “leveraged” this while seeking a book deal. On Sunday she is due to appear on NBC’s flagship political show Meet the Press. 
 
 Some commentators have struck a note of scepticism about her book. Brian Stelter, senior media correspondent at CNN, wrote in an email newsletter: “Is former ‘Apprentice’ star Omarosa Manigault-Newman a reliable source of info about the Trump White House? Buckle up for debates about that in the coming week. Because she’s about to betray Trump in a new tell-all book.” 
 
 For its part, the White House has previously dismissed criticisms from her. In February the deputy press secretary, Raj Shah, said: “Omarosa was fired three times on The Apprentice and this was the fourth time we let her go. She had limited contact with the president while here. She has no contact now.” 
 
 In the book, she recalls how in late 2016 Trump’s team held a conference call and scrambled for how to respond to the tape but it never came out. Then a source from The Apprentice contacted her and claimed to be in possession of it. Trump was in office and Manigault Newman continued to investigate. 
 
 She continues: “By that point, three sources in three separate conversations had described the contents of this tape. They all told me that President Trump hadn’t just dropped a single N-word bomb. He’d said it multiple times throughout the show’s taping during off-camera outtakes, particularly during the first season of The Apprentice.” 
 
 Recalling that she appeared on the first season, Manigault Newman reflects: “I would look like the biggest imbecile alive for supporting a man who used that word.” She says she confided in the former White House communications director Hope Hicks, who said, “I need to hear it for myself,” and continued to ask her frequently about what progress she was making. 
 
 She believes that Hicks told the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, that Omarosa was close to getting her hands on the tape, and this gave him cause to terminate her job, though he found a different pretext. 
 
 Four months after her departure, she spoke by phone to one of her Apprentice sources. “I was told exactly what Donald Trump said – yes, the N-word and others in a classic Trump-goes-nuclear rant – and when he’s said them. During production he was miked, and there is definitely an audio track.” 
 
 Manigault Newman also recalls her interactions with Trump during the filming of The Celebrity Apprentice in late 2007 – a time when the little known Democrat Barack Obama was in the ascendent. “During boardroom outtakes, Donald talked about Obama often. He hated him. He never explained why, but now I believe it was because Obama was black.” 
 
 Former Apprentice star on leaving Trump's White House: 'I've seen things that made me uncomfortable' Read more 
 
 In January, Trump was widely condemned for reportedly dismissing Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “shitholes”. Manigault Newman describes a similar experience that appears to support that account. When she told Trump that she was going to Haiti, she writes, he demanded: “Why did you choose that shitty country as your first foreign trip?” 
 
 He added: “You should have waited until the confirmations were done and gone to Scotland and played golf at [his course] Turnberry.” 
 
 In another damning passage, she describes his “broken outlook” and how “the bricks in his racist wall kept getting higher”, wondering if he did “want to start a race war”. She adds: “The only other explanation was that his mental state was so deteriorated that the filter between the worst impulses of his mind and his mouth were completely gone.” 
 
 The book comes days after Trump faced renewed allegations of racism over his persistent descriptions of the congresswoman Maxine Waters as having a “low IQ” and CNN journalist Don Lemon as “the dumbest man on television”, as well as criticism of the basketball star LeBron James. This weekend marks the first anniversary of the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, that erupted in deadly violence; the president claimed there were “very fine people on both sides”. 
 
 Elsewhere in Unhinged, published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Manigault Newman takes aim at Trump’s sexism. Recalling more outtakes from The Apprentice, she says he asked personal questions about female contestants such as “What do you think she’s like in bed?” and “Do you think she’s sexy?” He allegedly asked male contestants: “Who you think would be better in bed between the two of them?” 
 
 Asked about the allegations in Manigault Newman’s book, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said: “Instead of telling the truth about all the good President Trump and his administration are doing to make America safe and prosperous, this book is riddled with lies and false accusations. 
 
 “It’s sad that a disgruntled former White House employee is trying to profit off these false attacks, and even worse that the media would now give her a platform, after not taking her seriously when she had only positive things to say about the president during her time in the administration.”
– President Trump insists that the "terrible and disgusting" n-word is simply not in his vocabulary—but White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders says she "can't guarantee" that recordings of him saying it will not emerge. "I can tell you that the president addressed this question directly," she told reporters Tuesday, per the Guardian. She denied that Trump's attacks on former Apprentice contestant and White House adviser Omarosa Manigault Newman, who says she has heard recordings of Trump using the slur, were motivated by racism, reports the New York Times. "The fact is the president's an equal opportunity person that calls things like he sees it," Sanders said. In an interview with MSNBC Tuesday, Manigault Newman confirmed that she'd been interviewed by Robert Mueller's investigators, though she declined to discuss details. Asked about Trump calling her a "dog," she said: "I think that it just shows you that if he would say that publicly, what else would he say about me privately?" Asked if there were more tapes Trump should be afraid of, she said the president should worry about being exposed as the "misogynist, the bigot, and the racist that he is." Manigault Newman, who's being sued by Trump's campaign organization for allegedly violating an NDA, provided a recording to CBS News in which Trump staffers appear to confirm the existence of an n-word tape and discuss the potential fallout.