As part of this ongoing Omarosa scandal we’ve now discovered that she and other members of the Trump campaign and White House have signed Non-Disparagement Agreements. These agreements are flatly unconstitutional as they are a violation of the 1st Amendment Rights of government employees and also their Whistle-blower protections.
Non-Disclosure Agreements in relation to a national security clearances are common, but they do not cause a prior-restraint problem on the 1st Amendment. A private groups Non-Disparagement Agreement can not function in a government context.
Despite the problems with the agreement the Trump campaign is demanding $Millions from Omarosa because of her book and public statements criticizing him.
The Washington Examiner reports that Trump allies are citing an agreement that Omarosa supposedly signed before joining the campaign in which she agreed to never “disparage” the Trump family “during the term of your service and at all times thereafter.”
One Trump campaign source tells the Examiner that the campaign is seeking “millions” of dollars in retaliation against the former Trump staffer, while also hinting that it might go after the “ill-gotten profits” that she makes from her book, “Unhinged: An Insider’s Account of the Trump White House.”
“Ill-gotten” gains? You mean like all the Ill-gotten gains that Trump received from Russian intelligence? Look, hey, can we have the White House back first if that the rule now?
What this means is that any question posed to a person who has signed one of these private NDA’s — they can’t honestly answer without putting themselves into a contractual problem.
This subject came up specifically as Erin Burnett talked to Katrina Peirson just yesterday when they discussed whether Trump had been recorded calling Apprentice Season One winner Kwame Jackson a “N*gger.”
Are you willing to stay the president has never and would never use that word?” Burnett asked the spokeswoman.
“I reject the question,” Pierson responded. “How can you sit there and ask somebody if they know anything that’s not about themselves? I can say the exact same thing [White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders] said — I never heard him say the word.”
“So basically, if you had heard him say the N-word, you wouldn’t tell me about it anyway,” Burnett said.
[...]
“I’m telling you the truth,” the spokeswoman replied. “I’m not up here to lie. I’m telling you the absolute truth. I signed an NDA with the campaign because everybody did.”
Now just to add one point of context, the first African-American winner of the Apprentice during Season Four, Dr. Randal Pinkett — who along with other former contestants have denounced Trump’s candidacy — had complained about being mistreated because when he won Trump had called him lazy and asked him to share his first place with a pretty young white woman.
The first African-American winner of The Apprentice claims that Donald Trump made 'racist' and 'insulting' comments to him during the taping of the reality show.
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Randal Pinkett said: 'After Donald declared me the winner and said, "Randal, you're hired," he asked me a question that he had never asked any contestant prior and never asked of any contestant after me. He asked me if I wanted to share a title with the white runner-up.'
He then added: 'The better question is: Why did Donald ask me to share? And my only answer is that he did not want to have an African-American have a clear, clean, full victory.'
That other person was Rebecca Jarvis, a 23-year-old white woman who now works for ABC as the network's Chief Business, Technology and Economics Correspondent.
Pinkett went on to say that asking him to share his title with a young, white woman was not the only thing Trump did which upset him during the show.
'Leading up to my finale, Donald was interviewed by US Weekly and when the interviewer asked asked what he thought about the two of us, he said that he thought I was lazy and he thought that she was beautiful,' said Pinket.
He also stated that after he began working for Trump following his win he never once encountered any 'executives of color' within the organization.
'I never sat in a room with another person of color over my entire year there other than the person I saw in the mirror,' said Pinkett.
The bottom line is that Trump actually using the word on camera is pretty much a formality.
And frankly, none of Trump’s people should be speaking before the public or on the news without disclosing whether they’ve signed on of Trump NDA deals, which tells us whether they basically able to even tell us the truth or not.
Wednesday, Aug 15, 2018 · 8:25:37 PM +00:00 · Frank Vyan Walton
This seems to me to be directly related to Trump revoking the security clearance of former CIA Director John Brennen as punishment for his having dared to “disparage” Trump. This is clearly and nakedly retaliation for their use of free speech. The fact that this Enemies List now includes Lisa Page, Peter Strzok, James Comey and Andrew McCabe who all as former FBI employees already left their clearances at the door when they left the department, as well as threatening the clearances of former CIA Director MIchael Hayden, former DOJ Acting Attorney General Sally Yates, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice and DOJ Official Bruce Ohr — are worse than just annoying, this could be considered potential witness tampering and intimidation for those who may be involved in future testimony against Trump in the Mueller investigation.
But it doesn’t include former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn who was convicted of lying to the FBI.
He’s making things worse for himself, not better.
Wednesday, Aug 15, 2018 · 10:41:50 PM +00:00
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Frank Vyan Walton
And so it goes:
This point was highlighted hours earlier during MSNBC’s interview of another Trump 2020 spokesperson, Marc Lotter.
Regarding the NDA he signed to work for Trump, MSNBC’s Katy Tur asked Lotter, “If you are not allowed legally to disparage the president or his family or anything that they have to do with, any company that they have or asset that they have, why can we believe anything that you say?”
Lotter replied by arguing that if he ever felt he was in a position that compromised his integrity, “then I wouldn’t work for that candidate any longer, and that’s just not something I’ve come across.”
Tur pressed the issue. “Even if you wouldn’t work for them any longer — say something happened while you were there that horrified you or appalled you or you felt was illegal — you can’t talk about it,” she pointed out. “So again, why should we trust anything you say, when you are legally bound to say good things about the person you’re coming on to talk about?”
Lotter replied by noting that “if there was something that wrote to a criminal level,” his NDA wouldn’t prevent him from communicating with “the proper authorities.”
Saying the N-word, however, is not a crime.
Here’s the thing tho, even if it was a crime — like say coordinating and conspiring to use illegal stolen materials from a foreign governments intelligence service to help your campaign — would any of these guys be able to admit what really happened without facing legal court challenges for violating their campaign NDA?
Or to put it another way, isn’t every claim that “There was no collusion” basically a contractual obligation for them to say?