Shannon Stapleton/Reuters
Omarosa Manigault-Newman released a tape to MSNBC of Lara Trump offering her $15,000 a month to work for Donald Trump’s 2020 campaign and be “positive” about the president. “I saw this as an attempt to buy my silence, to censor me and to pay me off,” Manigault-Newman said in an interview on MSNBC Thursday. The tape was recorded days after she was fired from her job as a White House adviser, Manigault-Newman said. “It sounds a little like, obviously, that there are some things you’ve got in the back pocket to pull out. Clearly, if you come on board the campaign, like, we can’t have, we got to,” Lara Trump, President Trump’s daughter-in-law, says on the tape. After an interjection from Manigault-Newman, she continues, “Everything, everybody, positive, right?” NBC News reports that its reporters listened to the entire tape, and that these excepts are not taken out of context. On a different part of the recording, Trump discusses payment. “The money that we raise and that pays salaries is directly from donors, small-dollar donors for the most part. So, I know you, you were making 179 at the White House. And I think we can work something out where we keep you right along those lines,” she says. “Specifically, let me see, I haven’t even added up the numbers. But we were talking about, like, 15K a month. Let me see what that adds up to. Times 12. Yeah.” Manigault-Newman claims in her new book, Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House, that the Trump campaign offered her hush money.