WASHINGTON _ Omarosa Manigault Newman says she overlooked what she considered a hostile White House environment so she could tackle important issues affecting African-Americans, including an effort to revamp the federal office that supports historically black colleges and universities.
Instead, Manigault Newman insisted she be appointed director of the HBCU office despite any significant higher education experience, angering black lawmakers and college presidents and leading to months of delay, according to six people with knowledge of the situation.
"She wanted to be the point of contact for everyone and if it couldn't be her, it was going to be no one," a congressional aide said. The six people McClatchy interviewed spoke on condition of anonymity to give accounts of private meetings.
As assistant to the president, she had the power to block prominent African-Americans from being hired for the HBCU initiative and other administration positions, they say, as she tried to remain the top black adviser in the Trump White House.
But some black Republican leaders were so worried about her outsized influence that they arranged a call with Vice President Mike Pence's office to urge the administration to listen to others, including former U.S. Rep. J.C. Watts and former administration official Kay Cole James, according to two people, one of whom is a former congressional aide who helped organize the call.
Kevin Rome, president of Fisk University, a historically black institution in Nashville, said Manigault Newman made her role known when she communicated with him by phone, letter or in person during a trip to Washington in February 2017: If he wanted anything from the Trump administration he would need to go through her.
"She was very clear," he said.
Johnny C. Taylor Jr., who stepped down last summer as president and CEO of the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which represents the nation's publicly supported historically black schools, said several university presidents told him that Manigault Newman "told them they had to go through her to get anything," he said. In February, two months after Manigault Newman was fired, President Donald Trump named Taylor chairman of his HBCU advisory board.
Manigault Newman, who gained fame in the first season of Trump's reality show "The Apprentice," continues to make headlines as she promotes her scathing new memoir, Unhinged: An Insider's Account of the Trump White House that accuses Trump of being racist, unstable and unqualified to be president.
She declined to be interviewed on the record for this story. Trump has lashed out at Manigault Newman since she started her book tour, calling her a "dog" and "a crazed, crying lowlife," while his re-election campaign has sued her, claiming she broke a non-disclosure agreement. But the White House would not answer specific questions about Manigault Newman for this story. Instead, it issued a statement outlining Trump accomplishments that include a $45 million increase in funding for HBCUs and historically low unemployment rates among blacks.
"He's strongly committed to seeing these incredible institutions of higher learning succeed because President Trump wants to ensure HBCUs can prepare students to be competitive for top economic opportunities and good, high-paying jobs," White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said.
In her book, Manigault Newman blames Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whom she calls "woefully inadequate and not equipped for her job," for hurting the HBCU office, which was first opened in the 1980s and is designed to increase the number of contracts the federal government awards to such colleges.
That's in part because she said DeVos, early in the administration, described black colleges as "real pioneers" of "school choice," ignoring the fact that racial segregation laws forced the creation of higher education institutions specifically for black students. Later, she said, DeVos tried to cancel an HBCU conference in September 2017 because an executive director had not been named. Taylor said he and others asked DeVos to cancel it.
But in interviews, nearly 10 people involved in the Trump administration, higher education and Congress said Manigault Newman, not DeVos, created problems for the 100 HBCUs that serve 300,000 students, some suffering from budget cuts, low endowments, aging facilities and fiscal mismanagement.
Even before Trump's inauguration, Manigault Newman, director of African-American outreach for his campaign, and Sam Clovis, a national co-chairman and policy director for his campaign, started to work on an executive order for Trump to sign and solicited names of possible executive director candidates.
But some say Manigault Newman, who attended two HBCUs _ Central State University in Ohio and Howard University in Washington _ began expressing an interest in the executive director job around the time Trump decided to move the office from the Department of Education to the White House. She already had been speaking for the initiative and running both monthly inter-agency meetings and gatherings of HBCU advocates and presidents.
Manigault Newman served as communications director of the Office of Public Liaison, earning $179,700 a year, but insisted she should oversee the HBCU initiative too, the six people said. One person said she wanted to be put in charge of the issue the same way White House Counselor Kellyanne Conway was tasked with supervising the administration's response to the nation's opioid crisis.
Another congressional aide familiar with the situation said there was a delay in naming the executive director because Manigault Newman wanted the job, and "there was some conversation about how many roles a person can serve in."
A higher education expert also familiar with her actions said she was trying to line up organizations to support her appointment. But most of the people interviewed said she lacked experience and they didn't want her for the job. Eventually, they said, she stopped pursuing it.
Other candidates were considered, including Jarrett Carter Sr., founder of the website HBCU Digest, and Leonard Haynes, a longtime educator who had run the HBCU office a decade ago and has since been appointed to another job in the Education Department.
Black lawmakers and college presidents grew frustrated with the slow pace of the search. It wasn't until mid-September 2017 that Johnathan Holifield, a consulting firm co-founder and former NFL player, was named to the job. Even then, Manigault Newman continued to try to run HBCU meetings, though Holifield pushed back, several people said.
The White House provided a list of HBCU achievements but declined to define Manigault Newman's influence.
The biggest accomplishments are financial. Congress has increased spending by 14.3 percent, including millions of additional dollars for graduate programs, relief for eight schools experiencing financial difficulty relating to capital improvements and forgiveness for four schools that received loans after Hurricane Katrina. The administration lobbied for those efforts.
Twenty-seven federal agencies have created HBCU agency plans but the administration said it's too soon to determine whether the HBCU office has been able to increase the number of federal contracts black schools have received.
But it was never just about HBCUs. Some black leaders were frustrated that Manigault Newman billed herself as Trump's gatekeeper on black issues, insisting every item go through her.
They complained when Manigault Newman ran a meeting between presidential transition officials and 100 black leaders at an invitation-only event in January 2017.
A couple months later, they were still worried that Trump was only listening to Manigault Newman, a self-professed Democrat and early supporter of Trump's eventual rival Hillary Clinton, so they arranged the call with Pence's office.
"She told them black Republicans failed black people and their time was done. That rubbed people the wrong way," said the former congressional staffer. "She doesn't speak for black Republicans, staffers, members as a whole. Trump shouldn't just listen to her."
And the disdain for her was bipartisan. The mostly Democratic Congressional Black Caucus rejected a meeting invitation from her in June 2017 when she sent them a letter signed "The Honorable Omarosa Manigault" _ a title usually reserved for presidents, members of Congress, ambassadors and other dignitaries _ and never White House staff.
James, president of the conservative Heritage Foundation who served in three previous Republican administrations, is one of a handful of leaders who have publicly accused Manigault Newman of blocking her from serving in the Trump administration.
"It was Omarosa," James said in a interview for a Politico podcast earlier this year. "The way it was described to me is she approached the whole thing like it was 'The Apprentice.' ... So she looked around Washington and said, 'OK, who do I need to get rid of first?'"
