White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said on Tuesday that she could not guarantee that there was no recording of President Donald Trump saying the N- word.
“I can’t guarantee anything,” she told MSNBC reporter Kristen Welker during the daily White House press briefing. “I can tell you that I’ve never heard it.”
Sanders repeatedly deferred to President Trump’s own denials of using the term and insisted that the president’s record spoke for itself.
“Just look at the economy alone. This president since he took office in the year-and-a-half that he’s been here has created 700,000 new jobs for African-Americans,” she said. “That’s 700,000 African-American that are working now that weren’t working when this president took [office].”
Former presidential aide Omarosa Manigault Newman has said she has heard Trump saying the N-word on tape while he starred on “The Apprentice.” Former “Apprentice” contestant Penn Jillette has told Vulture he recalled Trump saying “racially insensitive things” during the series.
Manigault Newman is promoting her book “Unhinged,” a scathing tell-all about her life in the White House. She said she heard a recording of Trump saying the N-word after she left the White House.
“I did not hear it until after I closed the book and I had an opportunity to fly out to California and the person allowed me to hear it,” she told “CBS This Morning” on Tuesday. “Had I heard it when I was working in the White House I would have left immediately.”
Since Sunday, Omarosa has also been releasing releasing audio recordings of intimate moments from within the White House. She shared a recording Tuesday which she said featured several panicked campaign staffers discussing how they would spin a Trump N-word tape emerging.