President Trump’s escalating digs at ex-aide Omarosa Manigault Newman over her gossipy new tell-all have brought new scrutiny to this White House’s unconventional—and, arguably, unconstitutional—policy of requiring staffers to sign non-disclosure agreements to prevent them disparaging the president.
The rule extended not just to those public-facing West Wing regulars, like Apprentice star Manigault Newman or former press secretary Sean Spicer—but also to lower-level recruits less likely to shop a White House memoir.
“We had to sign them when we went into the building,” said one former White House and former Trump campaign staffer, who described the practice as just a part of this president’s modus operandi going back many years. “Everyone I’ve seen was two or three pages and it’s straight-up No talking bad about Trump or his family,” he added.
The NDAs were administered by the ethics lawyer in the White House counsel’s office, Stefan Passantino—who appears to have foreseen from Day 1 the coming wave of ex-staffers’ seeking to cash in with tell-alls of their own. “I remember Stefan told us when we signed it that if you write a book it has to be approved by the White House and Trump before you publish it—if you want to actually make money off of it,” this staffer recalled to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. The NDA stated that staffers would have to forfeit to the government any earnings from an unapproved book.
That may have applied to Sean Spicer, too. He has denied signing a “no-disparagement” NDA like the one Manigault Newman described. But when asked whether he sought approval before his book The Briefing went to press, Spicer told TWS, “The president was aware of my book.” (TWS then asked whether he’d shared a manuscript with the White House, but Spicer did not reply.)
The White House press office did not immediately respond when asked to confirm whether Manigault Newman and Spicer signed these forms—nor did they furnish a redacted copy of the NDA requested by TWS.
The former staffer who spoke to TWS said his agreement was similar to the Trump NDA previously described by Manigault Newman and the Washington Post. Its signing was “snuck in with” new staffers’ initiation, which also included other “actual forms you had to sign for the legitimate process of being onboarded”—as a result, few gave it a second thought. “Everyone just wanted to get inside. They were like, F*ck, okay, I’ll sign whatever. Just get me out of this,” he said.
“When we all got onboarded one of the things we had to do for our official ethics briefing was sign an NDA,” the staffer said—but they could not keep a signed copy for themselves. “Everything got taken away as soon as we signed it.” When asked about this part of the policy, the staffer explained: “You’re thinking this operates like a real legitimate business or campaign where everything you sign you get a copy of.” In Trump’s White House, “You’re dealing with something completely different.”
Something “completely different” from how government normally operates, certainly, but it’s nothing new in Trump’s world. However, apart perhaps from Spicer’s praise of the president, the policy hasn’t proved particularly effective so far. “He wants to control information coming out, he doesn’t want anything unflattering coming out—which of course leads to more unflattering sh*t coming out,” as the ex-staffer puts it.
