During a briefing on Tuesday, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders declined to comment on questions surrounding the unprecedented use of non-disclosure agreements for senior White House staff, which some employees were asked to sign at President Donald Trump’s behest in order to discourage disparaging comments about him, his family, and his business at future dates.
Both President Donald Trump and White House counselor Kellyanne Conway have acknowledged in recent days the existence of non-disclosure agreements for senior West Wing employees, as they have pushed back on claims that are highly critical of Trump from Omarosa Manigault Newman throughout her publicity tour to hawk her new book, Unhinged.
Asked whether she had signed an NDA, Sanders, responded, “I’m not going to get into the back and forth on who has signed an NDA here at the White House. I can tell you that it’s common in a lot of places for employees to sign NDAs, including in government, particularly anyone with a security clearance.”
While NDAs are common in some parts of the private sector and in government work when it pertains to sensitive or classified information, such agreements have not historically been imposed on White House employees with the intention of limiting unclassified, post-employment speech about the president, his family, or his business—which is what the Trump administration’s NDAs reportedly appear to represent. (THE WEEKLY STANDARD has requested a redacted copy of the NDA from the White House; the White House has not responded.)
Former high-level staffers from the Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama administrations all told TWS on Monday that they had signed NDAs pertaining to confidential information, but they had never been asked to sign NDAs of the type the Trump administration has used during their employments. And national security lawyer Mark Zaid, who works frequently on cases involving NDAs and free speech, said in an interview that he had never before seen a government NDA that broadly addressed unclassified information until he laid eyes on a version the agreement put forward by Trump’s White House.
Zaid asserted that if the final draft of such an agreement indeed applied to unclassified information, it would be an unconstitutional infringement upon free speech.
Sanders pushed back on the notion that the agreements represent anything out of the ordinary.
“Despite contrary opinion, it’s actually very normal, and every administration prior to the Trump administration has had NDAs, particularly specific for anyone that had a security clearance,” she reiterated to reporters.
Multiple reports have claimed that Manigault Newman, in her role as communications director for the Office of Public Liaison, did not have a security clearance.
