On Monday night, former Trump campaign spokesperson Katrina Pierson went on Fox News and flatly denied taking part in an October 2016 call with other top Trump campaign officials in which they strategized about how to spin a recording of Trump saying the N-word on the set of The Apprentice.

Host Ed Henry read Pierson the account of that October 2016 call as described by Omarosa Manigault-Newman in her new book, then asked her, “Did that happen?”

“No Ed, that did not happen,” Pierson, who now serves as a spokesperson for Trump’s 2020 campaign, said with a chuckle. “It sounds like she’s writing the script for a movie. You know, I’ve already been out there talking about this — that is absolutely not true.”

Life sometimes comes at you fast. Less than 12 hours later, CBS played a recording that Omarosa says is secretly recorded tape of the October 2016 call — which confirms Omarosa’s account of what happened.


On the tape, Pierson can be heard saying of Trump’s alleged N-bomb, “I am trying to find out at least what context it was used in to help us maybe try to figure out a way to spin it.”

“He said it,” Pierson adds. “He is embarrassed.”

POTUS says former White House staffer @Omarosa lied when she called him a racist who has said the N-word on tape. But a new recording, obtained by @CBSNews overnight, seems to back up Omarosa's story that several Trump advisers discussed an alleged tape during the 2016 campaign. pic.twitter.com/tV3R6P2TvE — CBS This Morning (@CBSThisMorning) August 14, 2018

After CBS played the tape, Pierson abruptly reversed course, releasing a new statement on Tuesday confirming that the Trump campaign did indeed strategize about a tape of Trump saying the N-word. But she still attempted to pin blame on Omarosa.


“In her secret tape recording of me, it was one of many times that I would placate Omarosa to move the discussion along because I was weary of her obsession over this alleged tape,” Pierson wrote.

Over the course of three statements, @KatrinaPierson has gone from denying the account in Omarosa’s book and calling it a “script for a movie” to confirming it, but claiming that the things she said were to “placate” Omarosa. This is her latest statement: pic.twitter.com/pf3hhPrJS6 — Abby D. Phillip (@abbydphillip) August 14, 2018

What Pierson did not explain in her statement, however, was why she lied about the October 2016 call on Fox News the night before.

Trump, meanwhile, responded to the tape by smearing Omarosa as a “dog” and a “crazed, lying lowlife” on Twitter. That attack came hours after Trump posted bizarre tweets that denied the existence of tapes of him using the N-word on the set of the The Apprentice, but stopped short of saying he never used the slur.