Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that pollster Kellyanne Conway, a counselor to President Trump, would oversee White House efforts to combat the opioid overdose epidemic, BuzzFeed News reports.
However: The White House has not yet released a strategy on how to approach the crisis, nor has a head of the Office of National Drug Control Policy been appointed.
Kellyanne Conway has taken steps to sell her political consulting firm, Bloomberg reports.
“Conway received the right to defer capital gains taxes for her sale of the Polling Company/Woman Trend… She had valued her 100 percent stake in the firm at between $1 million and $5 million on a personal financial disclosure form that the White House released in March.”
“Kellyanne Conway, whose official title is counselor to the president, declined on Sunday to say whether she and all of the White House staff would report directly to newly-installed Chief of Staff John Kelly after a shakeup in the White House last week that included Reince Priebus’ ouster,” NBC News reports.
Said Conway: “I will speak with General Kelly and the president about that, as will Mr. Scaramucci.”
Anthony Scaramucci has previously said that he reports directly to the president.
“Not everyone is college material. Not everyone has to graduate from a four year college with a mountain of debt and very few prospects.”
— Kellyanne Conway, quoted by The Hill.
Playbook: “Kellyanne Conway was overheard talking about her West Wing co-workers to fellow revelers at a party. Conway was having an off-the-record conversation with a group of reporters and other attendees at the British Embassy at their election-night watch party.”
She said President Trump told her to “go out there and say ‘Jim Comey is going to have to wait and see about the tapes.'”
“Conway also mimicked Reince Priebus urging White House aides to stop leaking, and wondered aloud what Marc Short — the legislative director — does all day. She also said she is ‘the one catching the slings and arrows in the West Wing.’ The source who heard Conway created a Twitter account about the evening, naming it @kellyanneleaks and posting photos and tweets from the event. Two other sources confirmed Conway’s remarks.”
Kellyanne Conway “is the latest Trump administration official to skew the Washington, DC’s average single-family home price with her purchase of a Northwest mansion,” the Washington Business Journal reports.
“Via an LLC, Conway, the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign, and her husband, attorney George Conway, paid $7.785 million for the 15,000-square-foot home in Massachusetts Avenue Heights. The deal closed May 17, though the deed wasn’t recorded until this week.”
Conway told Mansion Global: “I’m the poorest kid on the block.”
“Morning Joe” host Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough claimed that White House counselor Kellyanne Conway felt “so dirty” supporting President Trump on their show that she once said she needed to “take a shower,” the Washington Examiner reports.
Said Brzezinski: “She would shill for Trump in extensive fashion and then she would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off and she would say ‘Blech, I need to take a shower,’ because she disliked her candidate so much.”
Scarborough claimed Conway once said, “I don’t believe in this guy. He’s just my client. It’s just a paycheck… I’m just doing this for the money.”
CIA Director Mike Pompeo “mocked those who fear intelligence officials conduct surveillance through microwaves, saying the agency tries to ignore such claims,” Politico reports.
“While White House counselor Kellyanne Conway suffered blowback last month when she suggested microwaves could be deployed as surveillance devices, the CIA said later Thursday that Pompeo was not directly referencing Conway’s controversial comments.”
“You can turn on the TV — more than you can read in the paper because I assume editors are still doing their jobs in most places — and people literally say things that just aren’t true.”
— Kellyanne Conway, quoted by Elle, as the audience at the Newseum burst into laughter.
New York magazine has a good profile of White House adviser Kellyanne Conway:
Horrified critics of the president are often surprised to find that, in person, it’s very difficult to dislike Conway. With her airy voice and cheeky sense of humor, she’s charming and magnetic almost in the manner of a particularly gifted retail politician, and without the alien creepiness that actually being a politician sometimes requires. She’s a chronic oversharer (one with top-secret security clearance) who will let you in on the most intimate details of her existence in casual conversation.
She’s also pathologically social, her life a hamster wheel of meetings, briefings, appearances, interviews, events, and cocktail parties — something that separates her from someone like, say, [Steve] Bannon. ‘I have enough friends,’ Bannon told me. ‘I’m not doing this to have friends. I don’t socialize a lot, I don’t bring people into my life. This is like being in the Navy, this is like a duty. I don’t enjoy this every day. This is not living; this is a kind of existence.’
Wired: “It’s true that lots of things can be turned into listening devices. It’s also true that attackers can compromise internet-connected gadgets. And yes, the WikiLeaks data outlines various (alleged) CIA methods of compromising cellphones and Samsung TVs to surveil targets.”
“Kellyanne Conway isn’t even the only one who associates microwave ovens with government spying. ‘Is the CIA listening to me through my microwave oven, and through my TV, and through my cell phone,’ asked late-night host Stephen Colbert of former CIA and NSA head Michael Hayden last week. (The answer was ‘no,’ at least if you’re an American citizen.)”
“Still, it must be said: Microwave ovens are not an effective spy tool.”
Kellyanne Conway suggested to the Bergen County Record that the “surveillance” of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign may be broader than the unsubstantiated wiretaps he claimed.
Said Conway: “What I can say is there are many ways to surveil each other. You can surveil someone through their phones, certainly through their television sets — any number of ways.”
Conway went on to say that the monitoring could be done with “microwaves that turn into cameras,” adding: “We know this is a fact of modern life.”
“Has anyone seen the controversy around Kellyanne Conway and the couch in the Oval Office? Come on, people. You remember the ’90s. That couch has had a whole lot of worse things. Come on now.”
— Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), quoted by the Washington Post., referring to this photo of Conway.
“Kellyanne Conway, once the most visible spokesperson for the Trump White House, has been sidelined from television appearances for making statements that were at odds with the administration’s official stance,” CNN reports.
CNN: “To a press corps frustrated with Spicer’s aggressive attacks on reporters and tenuous relationship with the facts, the press secretary’s imminent demise is a compelling narrative. But the most senior members of Trump’s staff say the rumors are wrong.”
“So where is the narrative coming from? Spicer declined to comment on the record for this article, but Bannon and Priebus dismissed the leaks about his fate as scuttlebutt from lower level staff… Many people sympathetic to Spicer in and out of the White House believe otherwise. Five of these sources think the person behind the leaks is Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s ever-visible White House counselor. Though they offer no hard evidence, they say Conway is trying to offload blame for administration setbacks on Spicer to prove she is the more effective public advocate and earn a lasting place in the President’s inner circle.”
Mika Brzezinski of “Morning Joe” said she will no longer allow White House adviser Kellyanne Conway on the show because she’s not credible.
Said Brzezinski: “I know for a fact she tries to book herself on this show; I won’t do it. Every time I’ve ever seen her on television, something’s askew, off, or incorrect.”
She added: “I will say: Kellyanne Conway does not need to text our show, just as long as I’m on it because it’s not happening here.”
“I don’t know who had access to my account… I denounce whoever it is. It will be immediately deleted. Everybody makes mistakes.”
— Kellyanne Conway, quoted by BuzzFeed, after she retweeted a white nationalist on Twitter.
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.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.