Watching Kellyanne Conway Leak to the Media

Vanity Fair runs an excerpt from Team of Vipers by former White House aide Cliff Sims in which Kellyanne Conway lends him her personal MacBook to type up a statement defending her against charges of leaking to the media.

I sat down and started slowly pecking out a statement. While working in the White House, I found that I’d grown so accustomed to writing in Trump’s voice that writing for other people had become somewhat harder than it nor­mally would have been. I was already getting off to a slow start, but I was also getting distracted by the nonstop stream of iMessages popping up on the screen. At that point, personal phones had not yet been banned in the West Wing, so Kellyanne was sitting at her desk texting away. And since her iMes­sage account was tied to both her phone and her laptop, which she must not have even considered, I could inadvertently see every conversation she was having.

Over the course of 20 minutes or so, she was having simultaneous conversations with no fewer than a half­-dozen reporters, most of them from outlets the White House frequently trashed for publishing “fake news.” Jour­nalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Politico, and Bloomberg were all popping up on the screen. And these weren’t policy conversations, or attempts to fend off attacks on the president. As I sat there trying to type, she bashed Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon, and Sean Spicer, all by name.

I was sitting there, watching this, totally bewildered. I was supposed to be writing a statement, defending her against accusations that she had done almost exactly what I was watch­ing her do that very moment.