Trump, Citing TV Producer, Says Racial Slur Tape Doesn't Exist
Trump, Citing TV Producer, Says Racial Slur Tape Doesn't Exist
(Bloomberg) -- U.S. President Donald Trump said the creator of “The Apprentice” confirmed that there was no tape in which Trump uttered a racial slur, as former White House aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman has charged in recent days.
Trump wrote Monday night on Twitter that “.@MarkBurnettTV 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,” the tweet continued. “She made it up.”
Mark Burnett was the creator of “The Apprentice,” the NBC show that made Trump a reality TV star. Burnett made no mention of the interaction on his Twitter account.
Manigault-Newman became a celebrity herself as a contestant in the program’s first season. She also appeared in two “Apprentice” spinoffs.
Manigault-Newman -- the director of communications for the White House Office of Public Liaison before she was fired last year by Chief of Staff John Kelly -- has been promoting a book about her time in the West Wing.
In several interviews, she has accused Trump of being a racist and a misogynist and said that he was mentally unfit. She claimed that a tape captured Trump making racial slurs during the run of “The Apprentice.”
On NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Omarosa said Trump never made such comments in her presence, but that she had “heard his voice” on tape “as clear as you and I are sitting here.” The White House has fiercely denied Manigault-Newman’s account and Trump himself has lambasted her several times on Twitter.
In a tweet earlier on Monday, he said he wanted to ensure the “Fake News Media” doesn’t lend her story an air of plausibility. “While I know it’s ‘not presidential’ to take on a lowlife like Omarosa, and while I would rather not be doing so, this is a modern day form of communication,” he said.
To contact the reporter on this story: John Harney in Washington at jharney2@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Wayne at awayne3@bloomberg.net, Brendan Scott, Karen Leigh
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