Kellyanne Conway Denies Being The White House Leaker, Says She’d Rather ‘Knife People From The Front’

Kellyanne Conway prefers to “knife people from the front.” That’s according to a statement she gave to Vanity Fair in which she denied leaking critical information from the Trump White House.

“The real leakers, past and present, get much more positive press than I do,” she said. “While it’s rare, I prefer to knife people from the front, so they see it coming.”

Cliff Sims, a former Trump aide, has written a tell-all book in which he accused Conway of being a notorious leaker. He also called her a “cartoon villain come to life.”

In an exclusive excerpt from the book published by Vanity Fair, Sims described Conway as a woman who was “content” to go on TV and passionately defend the president. But behind closed doors, she was all about her own survival, he said.

“Her agenda — which was her survival over all others, including the president — became more and more transparent,” he wrote. “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.”

Sims went on to say that he was once privy to messages that she exchanged with members of the press in which she criticized fellow members of the Trump administration like Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, and Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. According to Sims, she was in conversation with reporters from not-so-Trump-friendly outlets like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN. Sims also wrote that, despite her ardent defense of her boss and his policies on TV, in private conversations, she described the president as a child that needed discipline.

Ex-Trump aide says Kellyanne Conway bad-mouthed colleagues to reporters, calls her "cartoon villain" https://t.co/eZ6slIZjKx pic.twitter.com/RhssK7MfkQ

— The Hill (@thehill) January 24, 2019

The woman, who is well known for using the term “alternative facts,” has continued to stump for Trump as the government shutdown over his border wall continues. As Vox reports, she recently disputed that the commander-in-chief wants to build a wall, opting to describe it as “steel barriers.” Conway asked CNN’s Abby Phillip why reporters and opinion pollsters were referring to it as a wall when “the president said you can call it whatever you want.” This mere hours after the president issued a tweet including the word wall in reference to his plans for the Mexico-U.S. border on January 23. The border wall was one of then-candidate Trump’s main campaign promises during the run-up to the 2016 election.

BUILD A WALL & CRIME WILL FALL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 23, 2019

Chris Sims’ book, Team of Vipers: My 500 Extraordinary Days in the Trump White House, hits bookstores next week.