Sources say top officials were asked to sign a non-disclosure agreement prohibiting such books without the express permission of the president.
Long before Omarosa Manigault Newman lodged explosive claims against her former boss, President Donald Trump’s White House foresaw the potential problems with ex-staffers’ tell-all books.
Embedded in the White House’s two-page non-disclosure agreement was a seemingly innocuous clause that prohibited top aides from disclosing confidential information in any form including books, without the express permission of the president, according to a former administration official and an official familiar with the document.
And if aides violated those terms, the non-disclosure agreement stipulated they would have to forfeit to the U.S. government any royalties, advances or book earnings. It’s not unusual for former administration officials to negotiate with the White House over the anecdotes and insider details of their books. But the terms of the White House’s NDA — and even the decision to compel government officials sign an NDA at all — are unprecedented.
NDAs are not typically used for federal government workers including White House officials because presumably they are supposed to serve the public and the institution of the president, not any one particular person.
The White House required all of its political appointees to sign this broad-ranging agreement as a condition of employment, a move mostly championed by the president who has leaned on these agreements dating back to his days running the Trump Organization, according to interviews with eight current and former administration officials and people close to the White House.
But Manigault Newman says she refused to sign it.
…….
The White House’s agreement, however, is the most lenient of the suite of Trump political non-disclosure forms.
It instructed aides to keep all information confidential, even long after they’d left their jobs, and indicated anyone who violated it could be sued for “damages” – though it did not specify any financial amount, according to three former administration officials who described the broad outlines of the document. Other than that, the White House NDA largely referenced existing law and criminal statutes about classified information, which would have applied with or without the NDA.
A copy of the Trump campaign non-disclosure agreement, obtained by POLITICO, went much further and included a non-disparagement clause to ensure staffers did not release information, confidential or detrimental, about Trump, his business, his family members including grandchildren, and even family members’ companies.
One of the former administration officials said Manigault Newman would face more legal exposure from any non-disclosure agreements she likely signed during the campaign, or during her appearances on Trump’s reality shows like “The Apprentice” because those carried more legal heft.
…….
But to lawyers and ethics experts, the Trump White House’s use of non-disclosure agreements is unprecedented — and another sign of the way Trump is tweaking the norms of the presidency. For one, experts worry that the agreements violate the First Amendment by attempting to restrict the speech of key political appointees. It also seems like an attempt to import the practices of the corporate world, like the Trump Organization, onto the public-facing White House.
“You want to have people inside the government who feel empowered to reveal wrongdoing,” said Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a non-partisan group devoted to government transparency. “The White House NDA is probably not enforceable, but it is also not harmless because it does create a chilling effect, and it is yet another example of trying to get public employees to have a loyalty oath to a person rather than to the integrity of the government.”
……
- Discussion
You must be logged in to reply to this topic.