Omarosa Manigault, director of communications for the White House Public Liaison Office, attends the daily news briefing on Oct. 27. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Omarosa Manigault: the villain, the honorable, the unemployed.
After just under a year of serving as the White House’s director of communications for the Public Liaison Office — while doing a scant amount of actual liaisoning — Manigault has left the building. And the whiff of drama is trailing in her wake. Whether she strutted out of the West Wing with stilettos blazing or was escorted out by security, one thing is clear: She made her mark.
Staying true to her reality-show roots, Manigault, who first stole hearts and spurned haters when she arrived on the scene as the devil du jour of “The Apprentice,” never let her hefty title or proximity to the president outshine her story line.
So as the postmortems of Manigault’s tenure in the White House begin to pile up, we offer a timeline of the former Trump insider’s greatest (or worst) hits. Consider this an unofficial outline for Manigault’s next book, one of the “other opportunities” she plans to pursue, according to a person close to her.
February 2016: Tamara Holder vs.Manigault. While just a regular ol’ Trump supporter appearing on cable news to burnish her former boss’s credentials, Manigault calls out Holder, a Fox News contributor and critic of Trump, for having “big boobs.”
June 2016: The former “Apprentice” star, still without an official role in the presidential campaign, dubs herself Trump’s “Valerie Jarrett,” telling a crowd of women at a business conference that she was “the person who pulls him back when he goes too far.” She adds, “I told him to stop calling Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas.” (Sage advice that obviously had an expiration date.)
July 2016: While serving as then-candidate Trump’s director of African American outreach, Manigault, who is an ordained minister, gets engaged to Pastor John Allen Newman of Jacksonville, Fla. The two have been dating for less than a year.
January 2017: Manigault officially joins the White House team.
February 2017: Manigault vs. Nordstrom shoppers. While hunting for a wedding dress, Manigault is accosted by two women who aren’t fans. “These fat ladies won’t stop following me,” a person recalls Manigault telling employees at the Tysons Corner shop. One of the women allegedly calls the White House staffer “Trump’s whore.” Security is called.
Later in February 2017: Manigault vs. journalist April Ryan. The epic beef between the two former pals kicks off when Ryan, a longtime White House correspondent, accuses the White House aide of trying to “physically intimidate” her outside of then-press secretary Sean Spicer’s office. Ryan adds that Manigault verbally threatened her, to which the White House aide responds, “Fake news!”
April 2017: Manigault dips her toe back into the reality pond with an appearance on TLC’s “Say Yes to the Dress.” According to White House financial disclosures, in exchange for her appearance, she “received a wedding package which included a wedding dress, custom veil, and accessories with an estimated value of $25,000.”
June 2017: Manigault vs. the Congressional Black Caucus. In an attempt to actually liaise and invite caucus members to the White House, the Trump aide still manages to ruffles feathers. The former reality-TV star signs the invitation to legislators as “the Honorable Omarosa Manigault,” a honorific that is generally not used when referring to oneself.
August 2017: Manigault vs. the National Association of Black Journalists. During a contentious appearance at the group’s convention in New Orleans, Manigault tells the crowd during a panel discussion about her work in the White House, saying: “I fight on the front lines every day. If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu.” Things do not go well.
September 2017: Manigault vs. April Ryan (again). During the Congressional Black Caucus’s annual gala, Ryan and her co-host, comedian Anthony Anderson, joke that Manigault had “some trouble getting in at the door.” Although it turns out she was there, the White House aide and Ryan later go at it on Twitter. Manigault claims that the veteran reporter’s “big break” came because of her and Trump. Ryan responds, in part, “You need to worry about your job and why the entire room booed you last night!”
December 2017: The White House announces that Manigault has tendered her resignation. The reality-show alum remains uncharacteristically silent on Twitter. But Ryan, her former pal, does not. According to the White House journalist, Manigault was fired by John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff. Manigault is nothappy, to say the least, according to Ryan.
Instead, Mr. Rosenstein mounted a step-by-step defense of Mr. Mueller’s conduct. He noted that department rules prevented Mr. Mueller from taking political affiliation into consideration when hiring for career positions, and he distinguished between officials holding political views and making investigative decisions out of bias. He said Mr. Mueller would be careful not to allow the latter.
“We recognize we have employees with political opinions. And it’s our responsibility to make sure those opinions do not influence their actions,” Mr. Rosenstein said after Representative Steve Chabot, Republican of Ohio, read out the names of members of Mr. Mueller’s team and political contributions they had made to Democratic causes.
“I believe that Director Mueller understands that, and he is running that office appropriately,” Mr. Rosenstein added.
Asked by Representative Bob Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who chairs the committee, why he remained satisfied with Mr. Mueller, Mr. Rosenstein replied:
“Based upon what I know, I believe Director Mueller is appropriately remaining in his scope and conducting himself appropriately, and in the event there is any credible allegation of misconduct by anybody on his staff, that he is taking appropriate action.”
Mr. Rosenstein’s stance signaled that despite the mounting assault on Mr. Mueller by Mr. Trump’s supporters, the fundamental dynamic surrounding the special counsel had not changed: If Mr. Trump were to try to fire Mr. Mueller based on any developments so far, the president would likely first have to fire or force the resignation of Mr. Rosenstein and then hunt for a replacement willing to carry out his orders, echoing Richard Nixon’s so-called Saturday Night Massacre during the Watergate scandal.
Republicans repeatedly pressed Mr. Rosenstein to appoint a second special counsel to investigate political partisanship in the department in its handling of the Trump-Russia investigation or in last year’s decision not to charge Mrs. Clinton with a crime over her use of a private email server while secretary of state — an idea that has been promoted heavily by commentators on Fox News and elsewhere in recent days.
Mr. Rosenstein said he could not appoint another special counsel without a credible allegation of a potential crime to investigate.
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The campaign against the special counsel, at the very least, provides a rallying cry for the president’s supporters to counter the drumbeat of news about Russian interference in the election and possible links to the Trump campaign. And a move by the Justice Department to show reporters the text messages that are the subject of an ongoing inspector general’s inquiry served to fuel the Republican campaign against Mr. Mueller.
Mr. Rosenstein confirmed that in addition to sending the messages to Congress the night before his testimony, the Justice Department had invited reporters to view the messages it was giving to lawmakers. That was a rare step, although officials in previous administrations have sometimes done so to avoid selective or misleading leaks from Capitol Hill.
On Wednesday, the deputy attorney general was pressed by Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York, about who authorized the messages’ release. Mr. Rosenstein said that he had approved the step after consulting with the department’s independent inspector general, Michael Horowitz. His answers left ambiguous any distinction between merely providing them to lawmakers — who would essentially be free to leak them — and making them directly available to the news media.
“Our goal, congressman, is to make sure that it is clear to you and the American people that we are not concealing anything that’s embarrassing to the F.B.I.,” he said.
Ian Prior, a Justice Department spokesman, said that the texts were released in response to requests from lawmakers and after a review that determined that doing so would be lawful and ethical.
“The department ensures that its release of information from the department to members of Congress or to the media is consistent with law, including the Privacy Act,” he said in a statement.
Mr. Mueller, a registered Republican appointed by President George W. Bush to direct the F.B.I., has long had critics in the most pro-Trump corners of the House and the conservative news media. But in recent weeks, as his investigation has delivered a series of indictments to high-profile associates of the president and evidence that at least two of them are cooperating with the inquiry, those critics have grown louder and in numbers.
Moreover, the voices of doubt are no longer confined to the party’s far-right wing. They include Republican mainstays like Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa.
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Representative Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, rattled off a list of high-ranking F.B.I. officials and questioned whether they had politically motivations. Credit
Pete Marovich for The New York Times
“I was the lone voice in the wilderness, and now I have a robust chorus behind me,” said Representative Matt Gaetz, a first-term Florida Republican who has emerged as one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal defenders on Capitol Hill.
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The president’s own legal team also appears to be part of the campaign. Jay Sekulow, one of Mr. Trump’s outside lawyers for matters related to the Russia investigation, told Axios that mounting evidence warranted the appointment of a second special counsel to look at conflicts of interest in the Justice Department.
In an interview, Mr. Sekulow cited a Fox News report that Bruce Ohr, a senior Justice Department official, had been demoted for not disclosing meetings with officials from Fusion GPS, the investigative firm behind a controversial dossier of opposition research on the Trump campaign. Republicans have repeatedly charged that the F.B.I. may have relied on the dossier to obtain a warrant to secretly monitor Americans.
Republicans see further evidence of bias in an email sent by Andrew Weissmann, one of Mr. Mueller’s top deputies, in January telling the acting attorney general, Sally Q. Yates, that he was “so proud and in awe” of her decision not to defend Mr. Trump’s travel ban in court.
Democrats say the pattern is becoming clear: As Mr. Mueller moves closer to Mr. Trump’s inner circle, Republicans try to discredit federal law enforcement and undercut the eventual findings of the special counsel. The Republican effort may also be intended to blunt the political repercussions should Mr. Mueller be fired, Democrats say.
Representative Jerrold Nadler, the Judiciary Committee’s senior Democrat, called the new Republican demands “wildly dangerous” to American institutions.
“I understand the instinct to want to give cover to the president,” he said. “I am fearful that the majority’s effort to turn the tables on the special counsel will get louder and more frantic as the walls continue to close in around the president.”
Perhaps more portentous is the restive Senate, a less partisan body where Mr. Mueller’s appointment in May was greeted with relief. Skepticism about the special counsel’s investigation is starting to take root there, too.
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“He’s got a tough job to do, but it seems he’s running far afield,” said Senator Richard C. Shelby, a long-serving Republican from Alabama. “Maybe it’s part of what he can do, but I thought he was going to investigate the Russian influence in the election, and it seems like he is going after a lot of other places, too.”
Mr. Graham, who a year ago was a leading Republican voice for a thorough investigation of Russian campaign interference, seems to have shifted his focus as well.
“I will be challenging Rs and Ds on Senate Judiciary Committee to support a Special Counsel to investigate ALL THINGS 2016 — not just Trump and Russia,” he wrote on Twitter.
