All posts tagged "Susie Wiles"

Katie Zacharia's brutal exit as President Donald Trump's press secretary didn't happen by accident, insiders say, pointing to a powerful figure pulling the strings.

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles orchestrated the ouster of Zacharia, who lasted just five days on the job, The Daily Mail reported Friday. Wiles had reportedly been bypassed when the president plucked Zacharia, a 41-year-old former communications adviser at his media company, from relative obscurity last week.

One senior Trump administration official told The Daily Mail that "Susie gave Fox News the kill order," while adding that Zacharia "was an obviously bad choice."...

Rival camps in President Donald Trump’s circle are jockeying to pick the next chief of staff as the president considers a West Wing shake-up after the midterms, seven insiders told the Daily Mail.

“Oppo is flooding to POTUS every hour destroying Susie Wiles and her team, especially LaCivita and Blair,” one source in Trump’s orbit said.

The competing groups are loyalists of current chief of staff Susie Wiles, allies of Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and the longtime MAGA faithful. Wiles’ side prefers Mike Needham, a former Heritage Action chief now deputy national security adviser. Kushner’s allies back envoy Steve Witkoff and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins. The MAGA veterans lean toward deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and housing official Bill Pulte. A wildcard is John McEntee, Trump’s former personnel chief, who sources say Wiles has kept out of the White House this term....

President Donald Trump's longtime chronicler says the president has already started a ritual that spells doom for one of his most powerful aides.

In a Thursday episode of "Inside Trump's Head" co-hosted by Joanna Coles, Trump biographer Michael Wolff said the president is "asking around" about White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, a habit Wolff called "the kiss of death" in Trump's orbit.

Coles pointed to a Politico report Thursday morning that Trump has been calling people to sound them out on Wiles. Wolff predicted earlier this year that she would not survive past the midterms....

New reporting sheds light on why the daughter of President Donald Trump's chief of staff turned up in a pro-Russian Balkan enclave.

Katie Wiles, daughter of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, traveled to Republika Srpska in August alongside John V. Calce, a Texas energy executive who was exploring a gas pipeline partnership with the territory's government, The New York Times reported Thursday. Donald Trump Jr. owns a minority stake in another company Calce runs, America First Refining, according to The Times.

Wiles' trip first drew scrutiny last week after CBS News verified a photo of her holding a rifle at a shooting range next to Zeljko Budimir, the region's interior minister and a member of strongman Milorad Dodik's pro-Russian party. She captioned the image "mostly work + some serious fun!"...

The White House has been selectively releasing files from the investigation into President Donald Trump’s handling of classified documents. According to a new report from The New York Times, it strips out key context to turn old news and routine investigative steps into a “weaponization” scandal ahead of the midterms.

The Times’ Charlie Savage reported that the centerpiece of the latest release was phone logs from White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, which became fodder for false claims that her phone had been “tapped.”

At an Oct. 2 briefing, the White House previewed files from special counsel Jack Smith’s inquiry. They showed that in 2023, investigators logged Wiles’ calls with a pen register, which records who called whom and when but not what was said. Wiles ran Trump’s political action committee and later his 2024 campaign....

President Donald Trump's own chief of staff is steering White House leaks that break sharply with the president, author Michael Wolff alleged.

During a Saturday episode of "Inside Trump's Head," Michael Wolff pointed to two same-day stories, one in the New York Times and one in The Washington Post, that both built on unnamed advisers contradicting Trump. The first had aides pushing back on Trump's dismissal of AI fears as a "hoax." The second had them warning he should be far more worried about the midterms.

Trump "usually reacts very badly to leaks, but the nature of this leak, and the nature of the way it's expressed, both of them, the AI story, and the midterm story, is 'advisers,' not 'a adviser,'" Wolff said. "So they're speaking to, in both instances, more than one person, and where there's more than one person... that means it's likely to come from the top."...