Omarosa is not the most credible former Trump White House staffer, but she seems to be right about one thing. The one-time Apprentice villain was fired from her White House job at the beginning of this year after reportedly doing little in the way of real work and abusing her West Wing privileges. Now Omarosa is hawking a new tell-all book in a characteristically outrageous manner: teasing explosive claims about President Trump, playing secretly recorded conversations with her boss on national TV, and saying she was offered “hush money” by the Trump campaign not to publish her exposé of her tenure.
Omarosa’s last claim, however, prompted Kellyanne Conway to confirm on Sunday what has long been rumored: that staffers have signed non-disclosure agreements as part of their employment at the White House. “It is typical, and you know it, to sign an NDA . . . in any place of work,” Conway said on ABC News’ This Week. “I’m told [Omarosa] signed them when she was on The Apprentice, certainly at the campaign. We’ve all signed them in the West Wing.”
To my knowledge, that’s the first time a White House official has admitted that these public officials have signed NDAs. Press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has said in that past that White House employees have signed a required “ethics agreement,” but has declined to elaborate.
Trump has long used such legal agreements in his business, and he suggested during his campaign that he would continue to use them with White House staffers if he were elected president. In May, the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus cited a single source who claimed to have signed one and even provided the columnist with a copy of the NDA’s language, which held the staffer to nondisclosure long past the end of the Trump administration.
But as I wrote at the time, such NDAs are of dubious legality and are almost certainly unenforceable:
There’s also the fact that unauthorized leaks have more or less continued at the same pace over the last year. People in the White House talk to reporters frequently and without apparent fear of reprisal. The very idea of an NDA in the White House is, as one lawyer interviewed by Marcus said, “crazy.”
