“Top White House aide Kellyanne Conway, describing herself as ‘a powerful woman,’ aggressively and disparagingly told a female reporter that it was improper to write about her husband and threatened to investigate the reporter’s personal life,” the Washington Examiner reports.
The audio and transcript of the phone call are available.
Kellyanne Conway escalated attacks on the four congresswomen who have been the subject of President Trump’s racist tweets, telling Fox News that they represent a “dark underbelly” of the country.
Said Conway: “What the president is doing is, we are tired — sick and tired — of many people in this country. Forget these four. They represent a dark underbelly of people in this country of people who are not respecting our troops, are not giving them the resources and the respect that they deserve.”
President Trump told White House counselor Kellyanne Conway to ignore a congressional subpoena, the Washington Post reports.
Kellyanne Conway called the spat between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and four female freshmen Democrats a “major meow moment,” mocking the “huge catfight” over border aid spending between the speaker and four of her highest-profile caucus members, Politico reports.
The House Oversight Committee voted to authorize a subpoena for White House counselor Kellyanne Conway “after she failed to show for a hearing on a government watchdog’s findings that she broke the law dozens of times,” the Washington Post reports.
“The House Oversight Committee will vote on Wednesday to authorize a subpoena for White House counselor Kellyanne Conway for testimony connected to her violations of the Hatch Act if she does not voluntarily show up to the committee’s hearing,” Axios reports.
Special Counsel Henry Kerner told the Washington Post that his recommendation that a political appointee of Kellyanne Conway’s stature be fired was “unprecedented.”
Said Kerner: “You know what else is unprecedented? Kellyanne Conway’s behavior.”
He added: “In interview after interview, she uses her official capacity to disparage announced candidates, which is not allowed. What kind of example does that send to the federal workforce? If you’re high enough up in the White House, you can break the law, but if you’re a postal carrier or a regular federal worker, you lose your job?”
Politico: “In a remarkable scene, the president proceeded to name-check senior White House staff and advisers in the Roosevelt Room who he said had attended Wednesday’s scuttled session on infrastructure initiatives with Democratic congressional leaders — which Trump abandoned after declaring that the lawmakers could not simultaneously negotiate legislation while investigating and threatening to impeach him.”
Trump asked adviser Kellyanne Conway: “Kellyanne, what was my temperament yesterday?”
She replied: “Very calm. No tamper tantrum.”
“Kellyanne Conway escalated a feud with Nancy Pelosi on Thursday, accusing the House speaker of treating her like “her maid” following the previous day’s disastrous meeting on infrastructure,” Politico reports.
Said Conway: “When she was finished I said, respectfully, ‘Madam Speaker, would you like to address some of the specifics the president talked about.'”
According to Conway, Pelosi shot back: “I don’t — I talk to the president, I don’t talk to staff.”
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.
White House counselor Kellyanne Conway dismissed her husband’s New York Times op-ed that argued President Trump’s appointment of Matt Whitaker as acting attorney general was unconstitutional, telling Fox News: “I offer my advice to the president in private. I don’t need to put it on the opinion pages because I’m counselor to the president.”
White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said that widespread predictions of a “blue wave” of Democratic victories in next month’s midterm elections should be taken with a hefty grain of salt because they emanate from the “same geniuses” who all but guaranteed a landslide win for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Politico reports.
Said Conway: “Let’s not forget the same geniuses that predicted a huge romp by that woman who lost in 2016 are the same people predicting a huge win by the Democrats this time. So we have to be a little bit cautious.”
“How in the world will I know the answer to that? I’m not answering questions as to who will be in the White House at the end of the year”
— Kellyanne Conway, in an interview on ABC News, refusing to speculate about whether Attorney General Jeff Sessions will remain in office.
“Kellyanne Conway has never actually wanted the job of White House communications director, according to sources who’ve discussed it with her, but Axios has learned that she left many in the White House communications team this week with the impression that she’d be leading the team in some capacity.”
“She told the staff that the President had asked her to take a more active role in communications. She didn’t directly address any of the communications director speculation but many in the room were left with the impression that she’d be taking a leadership role going forward.”
“Kellyanne Conway’s husband has begun deleting a series of tweets he posted in the last month that are critical of President Trump,” CNN reports.
“George Conway, a conservative lawyer Trump once considered nominating as solicitor general, deleted several tweets that called attention to Trump’s legal woes, his difficulty in finding his next communications director and the White House’s later debunked denials of staff shakeups.”
“Kellyanne Conway is moving closer to accepting President Trump’s offer for her to succeed Hope Hicks as White House communications director, if only on an interim basis,” The Atlantic reports.
Said one official: “It’s becoming increasingly difficult for her to say no.”
“The official said that First Lady Melania Trump and Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff have both encouraged her over the last few days to reconsider Trump’s offer.”
The Office of Special Counsel informed the White House that Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway violated the Hatch Act on two occasions, The Hill reports.
“Appearing in her official capacity, Conway endorsed and advocated against political candidates, the watchdog said, referring its findings to President Trump for disciplinary action.”
New York Times: “More than a dozen high-profile departures later — and amid tumult, scandal and an ever-unfolding investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia — Ms. Conway, 51, is one of the few remaining prominent aides from the campaign. In a White House with the highest turnover rates in decades, she has survived by knowing when to step back from the spotlight, keeping the president’s ear, focusing on a policy issue significant to the poor and working class, and maintaining an unflinching loyalty to President Trump even as she outmaneuvers rivals on the staff.”
“The public criticism hasn’t abated, but Ms. Conway’s skin is thicker than it used to be.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
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