By DARLENE SUPERVILLE and BILL BARROW
WASHINGTON (AP) — Susie Wiles, President Donald Trump’s understated but influential chief of staff, criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and offered an unvarnished take on her boss and those in his orbit in a series of observations that were published Tuesday in Vanity Fair and immediately sent shock waves through Washington while sending the West Wing into damage control.
The first woman to ever hold her current post, Wiles pushed back on what she described as a “hit piece” that lacked context. But neither she, nor other West Wing officials who came to her defense, disputed any details in the two-part profile — a wide-ranging narrative that included Wiles’ assessments of the teetotaling Trump as having “an alcoholic’s personality,” Vice President JD Vance as a calculating “conspiracy theorist” and Health Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. as “quirky Bobby.”
On Epstein, Wiles told the magazine that she underestimated the scandal involving the disgraced financier, but she sharply criticized how Bondi managed the case and the public’s expectations. She said at one point that Trump’s tariffs had been more painful than expected. She conceded some mistakes in Trump’s mass deportation program and suggested that the president’s retribution campaign against his perceived political enemies has gone beyond what she initially wanted.
But Wiles, who managed Trump’s 2024 comeback campaign, broadly defended the president’s aggressive second term agenda, including affirming that Trump wants to keep bombing alleged drug boats in the waters off the coast of Venezuela until that country’s leader, Nicolas Maduro, “cries uncle.”
Wiles pushed back but without any denials
After the comments were published, Wiles disparaged it as a “disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.”
“Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story,” she wrote in a social media post. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
Wiles did not deny the comments that were attributed to her.
Press secretary Karoline Leavitt also rose to Wiles’ defense, writing on the X platform that, “President Trump has no greater or more loyal advisor than Susie. The entire Administration is grateful for her steady leadership and united fully behind her.”
White House budget chief Russell Vought added his praise as well, posting on social media that Trump’s West Wing through two presidencies has “never worked this well or been more oriented towards accomplishing what he wants to.”
In her interviews, Wiles praised Vought while describing him as “right-wing absolute zealot.”
The chief of staff criticizes the attorney general
Trump tapped Wiles after she managed his 2024 campaign. She is known for shunning the spotlight, so it is rare for her to speak as extensively and openly as she did about the president to the magazine, which published its lengthy interview with her — and other members of the White House staff and the Cabinet. Wiles has been speaking to Vanity Fair since just before Trump took office last January.
Asked about Epstein, Wiles said she hadn’t tracked the public focus on “whether all these rich, important men went to that nasty island and did unforgivable things to young girls.”
Related Articles
Hegseth says he won’t publicly release video of boat that killed survivors in the Caribbean
Under Kennedy, America’s health department is in the business of promoting Kennedy
Congressional panel accuses DC police chief of pressuring commanders to manipulate crime data
Wisconsin judge rules Trump aides must face trial in 2020 fake elector scheme
Trump administration says White House ballroom construction is a matter of national security
She said she has read the Epstein file and that Trump is “not in the file doing anything awful.” He and Epstein were friends before they had a falling out.
The Justice Department is facing a Friday deadline to release everything it has on Epstein after Trump, who had objected to the release, signed legislation requiring that the papers be made public.
Wiles criticized Bondi’s handling of the case, going back to earlier in the year when she distributed binders to a group of social media influencers that included no new information about Epstein. That led to even more calls from Trump’s base for the files to be released.
“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi. “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk. There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
An insider’s look at the president with ‘an alcoholic’s personality’
Wiles, over the series of interviews, described the president behind the scenes very much as he presents himself in public: an intense figure who thinks in broad strokes yet is often not concerned with the details of process and policy. She added, though, that he has not been as angry or temperamental as is often suggested, even as she affirmed his ruthlessness and determination to achieve retribution against those he considers his political enemies.
Trump, she said, has “an alcoholic’s personality,” even though the president does not drink. But the personality trait is something she recognizes from her father, the famous sports broadcaster Pat Summerall.
“High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities,” she said, adding that Trump has “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
On Venezuela, Wiles said Trump wants to keep the pressure on Maduro.
“He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.” Her comment, though, seemed to contradict the administration’s position that the strikes are about stopping drugs and saving American lives, not regime change.
She said the administration is “very sure we know who we’re blowing up.”
The continued strikes and mounting death toll have drawn scrutiny from Congress, which has pushed back and opened investigations.
Trump’s vengeance comes with a purpose, Wiles says
Wiles described much of her job as channeling Trump’s energy, whims and desired policy outcomes — including managing his desire for vengeance against his political opponents, anyone he blames for his 2020 electoral defeat and those who pursued criminal cases against him after his first term.
“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” Wiles said early in his administration, telling Vanity Fair that she does try to tamp down Trump’s penchant for retribution.
Later in 2025, she pushed back. “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said, arguing he was operating on a different principle: ”‘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. 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.”
Asked about the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, Wiles allowed: “Well, that might be the one retribution.”
Barrow reported from Atlanta.
Leave a Reply