Omarosa Manigault-Newman taped several conversations with fellow employees and specifically with President Donald Trump over many years. There are reportedly so many conversations she taped that it's prompting Trump allies how she was able to keep the surveillance secret for so many years.
According to Axios, the recordings were almost always done on her personal cell phone. The recordings became the basis for her New York Times bestselling autobiography about her experience in the White House and the Trumps.
The Axios source explained that the oversight and loyalties in the West Wing are lax, to say the least. Newman isn't the only staffer to gather information about their time. Several staffers reportedly "took careful notes for future deployment."
Omarosa "wouldn't write me on email or text me — many [conversations] happened on Facebook Messenger (she didn’t want what happened to Hillary Clinton and her emails to happen to her)," the source told Axios.
Like many in Washington, Omarosa carried two phones, a personal one and government-issued one. She would record the conversations on her work phone and play it on speaker-phone to record with her personal phone. Before she went into a meeting she would hit the record button. She claimed that she made the recordings to "cover her butt."
Before leaking became such an omnipresent occurrence, carrying around a personal phone wasn't such a big deal. That changed when leaks exploded in stories throughout the Beltway.