Susie Wiles Seeks Damage Control After Spilling Tea About Trump Administration in Vanity Fair Interview

Irate White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles is attempting to walk back comments after spilling all the tea about some of the most prominent figures in the Trump Administration in a lengthy interview published on Tuesday by Vanity Fair, saying her comments were used to paint a “chaotic narrative” about the Trump Administration.“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” Ms. Wiles said in a post on X. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”Among the revelations in a wide-ranging interview that was conducted during numerous times throughout the year and published in two parts on Tuesday morning, were stunning details in which she admitted that Mr. Trump has been seeking retribution in his prosecution of public figures like New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI director James Comey, but that she and the president had a “loose agreement” to move away from settling his personal scores.“Yes I do,” she said in March when reporter Chris Whipple asked if she had ever mentioned to Mr. Trump that his second stint in the White House should not be a “retribution tour.”“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”When asked again during another meeting with Mr. Whipple in August, Ms. Wiles insisted that the president kept to his word despite prosecutions continuing past the first three months of his current term.“A governing principle for him is, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’ And so, people that have done bad things need to get out of the government,” she said. “In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”Other bombshell revelations include the files on Jeffrey Epstein. Ms. Wiles told Mr. Whipple that she has read the documents and that the President’s name is in them.“We know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful,” she said, downplaying Mr. Trump’s relationship with the convicted sex offender.“[Trump] was on [Epstein’s] plane…he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.”She also contradicted Mr. Trump’s claims about President Clinton saying there was “no evidence” that he had ever visited Epstein’s private island.Ms. Wiles also called Attorney General Pam Bondi to task, saying that she “completely whiffed” the handling of the Epstein files.“First, she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk,” the chief of staff said. “There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”The chief of staff didn’t stop there, making comments on multiple high-profile officials affiliated with the current administration, calling former DOGE head, Elon Musk, “an odd, odd duck,” and described him as “an avowed ketamine user.”Ms. Wiles also claimed in a subsequent interview with the New York Times that she did not make the comments about Mr. Musk’s alleged drug use that was attributed to her.“That’s ridiculous,” she said. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.”Mr. Whipple, however, quickly poured cold water on her claims, producing a tape of their conversation to the newspaper in which she is heard making the comments he had included in his piece.She also set her sights on Vice President Vance, not only saying that he has “been a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” but that his turnaround of support for Mr. Trump has been self-serving.“His conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.”Mr. Vance quickly came to her defense in public statements, claiming at least one of her characterizations was correct.“Sometimes, I am a conspiracy theorist but I only believe in the conspiracy theories that are true” he quipped to a gaggle of reporters at a public event in Pennsylvania before vehemently praising Ms. Wiles for her work.“I’ve never seen Susie Wiles say something to the President and then go and counteract him or subvert his will behind the scenes. And that’s what you want in a staffer,” he said. Ms. Wiles also said that despite being a teetotaler, President Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality” and that she believed that her ability to work with him so well was due to growing up with her father, famed sportscaster Pat Summerall, who had battled alcoholism for most of his life.“He operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing,” she said of Mr. Trump.Amidst the fallout from the release of the interview, others in the administration have come out in defense of Ms. Wiles, including White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.“President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie,” she said in a post on X. “The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”

Susie Wiles Seeks Damage Control After Spilling Tea About Trump Administration in Vanity Fair Interview

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