Former White House aide Cliff Sims says in a new book that Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway is a “cartoon villain brought to life” who often bad-mouthed her colleagues to the media.
Vanity Fair obtained excerpts from “Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House,” in which Sims accuses Conway of texting reporters negative messages about White House staff.
Sims says the messages popped up in real time on Conway’s computer while he used it to write a White House response to the hosts of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” who had criticized Conway.
“She was having simultaneous conversations with no fewer than a half-dozen reporters, most of them from outlets the White House frequently trashed for publishing ‘fake news,’ ” Sims said of Conway’s text messages that he observed.
“Journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Politico, and Bloomberg were all popping up on the screen. And these weren’t policy conversations, or attempts to fend off attacks on the president,” Sims added. “As I sat there trying to type, she bashed Jared Kushner, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon and Sean Spicer, mentioning each specifically by name.
Ex-W.H. aide Cliff Sims says that he once watched Kellyanne Conway iMessage no fewer than a half-dozen reporters over the course of 20 minutes to, among other things, bash Kushner, Priebus, Bannon, and Spicer. All by name. https://t.co/1YpxTJmgTs
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 24, 2019
Responding to Vanity Fair’s story about Sims’ book, Conway said the magazine is ignoring the “the real leakers” in the White House.
“The real leakers, past and present, get much more positive press than I do. While it’s rare, I prefer to knife people from the front, so they see it coming,” Conway said in a statement to Vanity Fair.
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Sims wrote in his book, in an excerpt provided by Vanity Fair:
“As I watched Kellyanne in operation over our time in the White House, my view of her sharpened. It became hard to look long at her without getting the sense that she was a cartoon villain brought to life. Her agenda—which was her survival over all others, including the president—became more and more transparent. Once you figured that out, everything about her seemed so calculated; every statement, even a seemingly innocuous one, seemed poll-tested by a focus group that existed inside her mind. She seemed to be perennially cloaked in an invisible fur coat, casting an all-knowing smile, as if she’d collected 98 Dalmatians with only 3 more to go.”
The White House has not responded Sims’s accusations.