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At a party at the British Embassy, while chatting with Ambassador Kim Darroch and guests who were reporters, Kellyanne Conway began criticizing her coworkers. According to a Politico article, she mimicked Priebus and his efforts to stop leaks. She also questioned what legislative director Marc Short does all day.
“No leaks, guuuys,” Conway allegedly mimicked Priebus as saying. Mocking him, she quoted him as saying at a staff meeting, “I’m upset because there’s someone working on a story who pronounces it RAYNSE instead of REINCE.”
Conway immediately enlisted Sean Spicer to try to paper over her comments, but the fact was she was a constant leaker to the press about her own colleagues. Through friends of reporters who received them, White House aides saw texts from Conway purporting to leak information about them.
Technically, a leak is accurate information given to reporters without authorization. But Conway often provides reporters with information that disparages her colleagues. According to Trump aides, Conway is the number one leaker.
In a White House interview with me, Conway, apparently forgetting that she was speaking on the record, said far worse things about Priebus than what she had said at the British Embassy, remarks so cutting and obviously untrue that out of fairness I am not including them here.
While Conway likes to claim that appearing on TV takes up only 5 percent of her time, in fact, beyond attending some conferences, no one knows what she does in the White House. Nor, despite the title, had she been campaign manager.
“We had to give her a title to put her on TV,” Bannon says. “She can’t make decisions, and in a campaign, you just got to make a million decisions.” In fact, “The Republican National Committee was the campaign, and Trump was our candidate. Those few people working around Trump were part of that operation around Trump, but they were a Trump candidate operation. They were not a Trump campaign operation.”
After Trump was in the White House, in an interview with New York magazine, Conway said, “When I want to talk to him [the president], I go talk to him,” meaning she can waltz into the Oval Office unannounced. “Eighty-five percent of what I discuss with him will never be revealed…. I don’t need to talk to him through the TV. I just go in and talk to him.” The article noted, “In conversation, she is eager to explain that she’s in important meetings, important events, and privy to important information.”
But Bannon says, “Kellyanne wasn’t in any policy meetings, very rarely in the Oval. Never around when decisions were made.”
In the same vein, Omarosa Manigault had no real job. Her title of communications director for the Office of Public Liaison did not exist before Trump said he wanted her to join the White House staff. She rarely spoke with Trump. However, she always made it a point to show up at events covered by TV cameras and would occasionally help out.
Conway brilliantly articulates Trump’s policies on TV and effectively skewers the mainstream media’s coverage of the Trump administration. But Trump pounced on her flubs, such as saying there are “alternative facts” on the issue of crowd size at Trump’s inauguration. She later said her comment was a mistake.
At one point in February 2017, Trump took Conway off the air, saying, according to Bannon, “She can’t hit the fastball.”
When asked about it, she claimed to the press that she was off the air because of family commitments.
“I don’t think I have to explain myself if I’m not going on TV if I’m out with four kids for three days looking at houses and schools,” the counselor to the president told Fox News’s Sean Hannity. She added: “A lot of my colleagues aren’t trying to figure out how to be a mother of four kids, I assure you.”
Personable, witty, and chatty, Conway grew up in the southern New Jersey town of Atco. Conway’s Irish father owned a small trucking company, and her Italian mother worked at a bank. They divorced when she was three.
“I grew up in a house with my mom and her mom, and two of my mother’s unmarried sisters,” Conway told me. “So four Italian Catholic women raised me. I grew up in a house where we never had a single political discussion, ever. We had pictures of like the Last Supper and the family dog on the wall.”
Conway admits to winning the 1982 New Jersey Blueberry Princess pageant, leading her to choose the Secret Service code name Blueberry. But she says it is more relevant that in 1987, she was named the World Champion Blueberry Packer. For eight summers beginning at age twelve, she packed blueberries on a farm and was known as the fastest at the job.
Conway traces her conservative outlook to growing up in a household “where family and faith and self-reliance were premier. We were not encouraged or allowed to complain or talk about what we didn’t have.”
In her senior year in high school, Conway watched the nominating conventions on TV.
“I thought I’m going to have a great deal of commonality with Geraldine Ferraro,” she remembers. “But I found myself much more riveted with and in agreement with what Ronald Reagan had to say and what the Republican Convention had to say. His messages were optimistic yet sensible and realistic.”
In 1989, Conway graduated magna cum laude from Trinity Washington University and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa. She studied at Oxford University, then obtained a law degree from George Washington University Law Center.
After practicing law, she began her polling career at the Wirthlin Group, a GOP polling organization that worked for Ronald Reagan. She moved on to Luntz Research Companies, then founded The Polling Company in 1995. Her clients have included Newt Gingrich, Microsoft, ABC News, American Express, the National Rifle Association, and Major League Baseball.
Ivanka, Don Jr., and Eric as well as Jared were opposed to Conway being hired in the first place. While Bannon had thought Conway would be fine pretending to be campaign manager but actually doing nothing but appearing on TV, he did not want her in the White House, either, because she could not make decisions. Ultimately, Trump hired her, but with no specified role.
Apparently the children and Jared thought that early on, she displayed disloyalty toward Trump, refusing to go on TV after his Access Hollywood tape came out, allegedly trying to line up paid TV deals, and privately making disparaging comments about Trump to Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski of MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
“This is a woman, by the way, who came on our show during the campaign and 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,’ ” Brzezinski said on the show. “Because she disliked her candidate so much.”
Scarborough echoed her comments, noting that Conway confided after being interviewed on air that she had only taken the job for money and that she would soon be done defending Trump.
“From day one, Jared and Ivanka wanted to give it to Kellyanne,” Bannon says. “They tried to get her fired.”
“They thought that she was disloyal because she was using the last week of the campaign to have a bunch of meetings to shop herself [to networks],” a Trump aide says. “And they just also didn’t think she really did anything.”
Yet instead of reporting to Priebus, Kellyanne reported directly to Trump, along with Bannon, Gary Cohn, Stephen Miller, Hope Hicks, Sean Spicer, and Ivanka and Jared.
Aside from Conway’s disparaging comments, as part of their vendettas against one another, Trump White House staffers regularly feed misinformation to the press. As an example, Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush wrote in the New York Times, “The president’s first chief of staff, Reince Priebus, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, made only a cursory study of the structure and history of the West Wing, much to the disgust of a half-dozen Obama administration officials who offered to coach him but were, for the most part, politely rebuffed.”
In fact, Priebus met twice with Denis McDonough, Obama’s chief of staff, and often consulted with former chiefs of staff Andy Card and Josh Bolten from the Bush administration, James Baker from the Reagan administration, and Rahm Emanuel from the Obama administration. In addition, Priebus had a luncheon meeting in the White House with twelve former Republican and Democrat chiefs of staff going back to Jimmy Carter’s administration.
Nor were widespread press reports that Trump humiliated Priebus by ordering him to swat a fly true. The story had its origin in the fact that the West Wing, built on a swamp, is beset by flies. Trump hates flies. Staffers use air-pressured salt guns called Bug-a-Salt to kill them. Priebus was attacking an especially annoying fly in the Oval Office when Trump said jokingly, “Kill it! Kill it!”