Rudy Giuliani: If John Kelly Wanted to ‘Hurt’ Omarosa, You Would Know

Rudy Giuliani was talking about the tapes Michael Cohen secretly made of his conversations with Donald Trump on Fox & Friends Monday morning when co-host Ainsley Earhardt said, “Speaking of tapes…”

She was talking about another Trump confidant who felt they needed to record Trump as a contingency plan: Omarosa Manigault Newman, who has started to release tapes she made of the president and Chief of Staff John Kelly before her new tell-all book Unhinged hits stores on Tuesday.

Asked if Manigault Newman is “breaking the law” by releasing audio of the moment Kelly fired her in the Situation Room, Giuliani said that she is “certainly violating national security regulations.” But more importantly, he added, he is violating the president’s trust.

“I mean, Donald Trump made her,” he continued. “What kind of ingratitude is this?”

In the tape released Monday morning, Trump can be heard reacting in surprise to the news that Manigault Newman had been fired by Kelly. “Nobody even told me about it. You know they run a big operation, but I didn’t know it. I don’t know that,” Trump tells her on the tape. “Goddamn it. I don’t love you leaving at all.”

There are really only two explanations for his reaction to the news. Either Trump was completely unaware of the high-level staffing decisions being made by Kelly on his behalf or he was lying to Manigault Newman. But Giuliani sees another option.

“You can tell from the tape, he thought she resigned,” Giuliani said, calling Trump’s reaction “perfectly natural,” explaining that “most of the things about her never came to” the president’s desk.

As for Manigault Newman’s charge that Kelly threatened her on her way out of the White House, Giuliani said, “If Kelly wanted to hurt her, or anybody around the chief wanted to hurt her, it would have been in the Washington Post the next day.”

“It’s important to understand that if we make this a friendly departure,” Kelly can be heard telling Manigault Newman on the tape, “you can go on without any type of difficulty in the future relative to your reputation.”

As it is, Giuliani said, the only thing that came out about her was that “everybody in the White House think she’s a backstabber.”

Following Giuliani’s Fox & Friends appearance, President Trump finally shared his thoughts about the situation on Twitter, calling the woman he hired to be a senior member of his administration’s communications staff “wacky” and “not smart.”

He added: “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 and I know the Fake News Media will be working overtime to make even Wacky Omarosa look legitimate as possible. Sorry!”