Lawyer For Omarosa's 'Unhinged' Publisher To Trump: Being Embarrassed Isn't A Legal Claim

Simon & Schuster's outside counsel Elizabeth McNamara penned a fiery response to the president's legal team.
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The publisher behind Omarosa Manigault Newman’s new book, Unhinged, dismissed “hollow threats” leveled at the company by President Donald Trump’s campaign legal team.

CNN reported Thursday that Simon & Schuster’s outside counsel Elizabeth McNamara wrote a fiery letter responding to the Trump campaign’s filing for arbitration earlier this week. The campaign claimed Manigault Newman, a former reality star and Trump administration aide, violated a 2016 nondisclosure agreement.

“My clients will not be intimidated by hollow legal threats and have proceeded with publication of the Book as [scheduled], McNamara replied, according to CNN.

“While your letter generally claims that excerpts from the book contain ‘disparaging statements,’ it is quite telling that at no point do you claim that any specific statement in the book is false,” McNamara wrote. “Your client does not have a viable legal claim merely because unspecified truthful statements in the Book may embarrass the president or his associates.”

McNamara is familiar with responding to Trump lawyers. Earlier this year, she fought back when lawyers for the president sent publisher Henry Holt and Company a cease-and-desist letter over journalist Michael Wolff’s book Fire & Fury: Inside The Trump White House, arguing the book was libelous.

“Mr. Trump is the President of the United States, with the ‘bully pulpit’ at his disposal,” she wrote at the time. “To the extent he disputes any statement in the book, he has the largest platform in the world to challenge it ... Though your letter provides a basic summary of New York libel law, tellingly, it stops short of identifying a single statement in the book that is factually false or defamatory.”

She also responded to a cease-and-desist letter Trump’s lawyers sent in 2016, after the president’s former co-author Tony Schwartz criticized the president on “Good Morning America.”

Manigault Newman has recently been promoting her book, which she wrote after getting fired from the White House last year. She’s also released audio of conversations she secretly recorded during her tenure as one of Trump’s staunchest supporters, including parts of conversations with chief of staff John Kelly and another with the president himself.

The former White House aide has also been making explosive, unverified claims about the president, his family and his administration. Trump responded on Wednesday by calling Manigault Newman “a dog” in a tweet.

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