Omarosa Manigault Newman awarded $1.3M in legal fees from Trump campaign

By Tierney Sneed

Omarosa Manigault Newman — a former staffer on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign who then worked for Trump’s White House — was awarded more than $1.3 million in attorney’s fees and costs this week after previously prevailing in a dispute over whether she had violated a Trump campaign non-disclosure agreement.

The award was handed down Tuesday and determined by Andrew Brown, of the American Arbitration Association, who had served as the arbiter in the dispute.

The Trump campaign filed the lawsuit in arbitration in August 2018, on the same day of the release of Manigault Newman’s book “Unhinged: An Insiders Account of the Trump White House,” her behind-the-scenes look at working for Trump.

In his September decision in Manigault Newman’s favor, the arbiter rejected the Trump campaign’s claims that she had violated the agreement.

The campaign’s NDA was “overbroad, indefinite, and unreasonable,” the arbiter said then, adding that its terms went “far beyond what would be reasonably expected to protect” the Trump campaign’s interests.

According to Tuesday’s filing announcing the award, Manigault Newman had initially sought more than $3.4 million in attorney’s fees and costs. The arbiter rejected several general objections the Trump campaign had raised about her request, including a Trump campaign claim that she and her attorney had engaged in bad faith in their behavior during the proceedings.

However, the arbiter said that he could not rubber stamp the “staggering fee request” upon the “flimsy support” she had offered. Citing procedural defects with her filings, he came up with his own calculations for number of hours her attorneys worked and their hourly rates.

Manigault Newman was awarded $1,293,568.75 for attorney’s fees and $17,304.73 for costs, for a total award of $1,310,873.48.

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