As Hurricane Dorian neared the Florida coast, President Donald Trump had a few things to say about a recent White House administration controversy on Twitter before retweeting information about the storm.
In a Saturday morning tweet-storm, Trump included a tweet saying he forgives his former personal assistant Madeleine Westerhout for telling members of the press at an off-the-record dinner that the president doesn’t like to take pictures with his 25-year-old daughter Tiffany because he perceives her as overweight.
“While Madeleine Westerhout has a fully enforceable confidentiality agreement, she is a very good person and I don’t think there would ever be reason to use it. She called me yesterday to apologize, had a bad night. I fully understood and forgave her! I love Tiffany, doing great!” the president tweeted.
Read more: The glamorous life of Tiffany Trump, the president’s lesser-known youngest daughter
The New York Times reported that Westerhout, 28, resigned from her position as the president’s assistant and as the director of Oval Office operations, after details of her conversation with journalists emerged.
While dining with reporters from The Washington Post, Bloomberg, and The Wall Street Journal who were covering Trump’s vacation at his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, Westerhout “had a couple drinks” and opened up to the journalists, Politico reported.
Westerhout joked with the reporters that Trump couldn’t pick Tiffany out of a crowd, that she had a better relationship with the president than either Ivanka or Tiffany, and said that he wouldn’t take pictures with his youngest daughter because of her weight.
Trump echoed the sentiment in his tweet to reporters yesterday at the White House, before departing for Camp David. When asked if what Westerhout said was true, Trump replied “Oh, no. No. Tiffany is great. I love Tiffany.”
“I think the press is very dishonest because it was supposed to be off-the-record. But still, you don’t say things like she said, which were just a little bit hurtful to some people,” Trump continued on to say about Westerhout.
In a reply to his own tweet forgiving his former assistant, Trump noted that he was currently using similar confidentiality agreements to sue other people, including his former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman.
“…Yes, I am currently suing various people for violating their confidentiality agreements. Disgusting and foul mouthed Omarosa is one. I gave her every break, despite the fact that she was despised by everyone, and she went for some cheap money from a book. Numerous others also!” Trump wrote in his tweet.
After resigning from her position in the Trump administration in December 2017, Newman, a former reality TV show collaborator of the president went on to call him racist, release tapes she recorded secretly from inside the Situation Room, and release a book titled “Unhinged” about her tenure at the White House, which paints Trump and the rest of his administration as incompetent.
Trump also tweeted the same tweet praising Sean Hannity and Fox News twice on Saturday morning, tweeted his support for North Carolina congressional candidate Dan Bishop, and tweeted a quote from Fox News reporters about former FBI director James Comey violating the Espionage Act.
