Trump’s chief of staff acknowledges ‘score settling’ behind prosecutions of political rivals: ‘He will go for it’ – live
‘When there’s an opportunity, he will go for it’: Trump’s chief of staff acknowledges ‘score settling’ behind prosecutions
Wiles also said she had told Donald Trump that his second term was not supposed to be a retribution tour.
“We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over,” she said in an interview in March.
When that failed to materialize, she said in August: “I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour.” But, she said, he was aiming at people who did “bad things” in coming after him. “In some cases, it may look like retribution,” she said. “And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.”
Asked about New York attorney general Letitia James, Wiles replied: “Well, that might be the one retribution.” James won a massive civil court verdict against Trump for business fraud with a $450m penalty.
Asked whether she told Trump to back down, Wiles doubled down: “Not on her. She had a half a billion dollars of his money.” A reminder that an appeals court later threw out the monetary penalty, deeming it excessive, but upheld the core finding that Trump was liable for fraud.
On former FBI director James Comey, Wiles said:
I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.
I don’t think he [Trump] wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.
Last month a federal judge threw out both the Comey and James criminal cases brought by the Trump administration, concluding that the prosecutor had been appointed unlawfully.
Key events
Trump administration says White House ballroom construction is matter of national security
Earlier this morning, Donald Trump’s administration argued in a court filing that the president’s White House ballroom construction project must continue for reasons of national security.
The filing came in response to a lawsuit filed three days earlier by the National Trust for Historic Preservation asking a federal judge to halt the ballroom project until it goes through multiple independent reviews and wins approval from Congress.
In its filing, the administration included a declaration from the deputy director of the US Secret Service saying more work on the site of the former White House East Wing is still needed to meet the agency’s “safety and security requirements”. The administration has offered to share classified details with the judge in an in-person setting without the plaintiffs present.
The government’s response to the lawsuit offers the most comprehensive look yet at the ballroom construction project, including a window into how it was so swiftly approved by the Trump administration bureaucracy and its expanding scope.
The filings assert that final plans for the ballroom have yet to be completed despite the continuing demolition and other work to prepare the site for construction. Below-ground work on the site continues, wrote John Stanwich, the National Park Service’s liaison to the White House – and work on the foundations is set to begin in January. Above-ground construction “is not anticipated to begin until April 2026, at the earliest”, he wrote.
Democrats condemn Republicans calling for Muslim ban on the heels of Australia shooting
Rachel Leingang
Democrats are condemning two Republican members of Congress who said, in the wake of the mass shooting in Australia, that the US should ban Muslims from the country and kick out those who already live here.
Congressman Randy Fine, a Florida Republican, said he not only wants deportations of legal immigrants who are Muslim, but “citizenship revocations wherever possible” of Muslims.
“This has to stop. Diversity is not our strength. Diversity has become suicidal,” Fine wrote on X on Monday. “It is time for a Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible. Mainstream Muslims have declared war on us. The least we can do is kick them the hell out of America.”
Senator Tommy Tuberville, a Republican from Alabama, said Islam is a “cult”, Muslims are “here to conquer” and that people needed to “stop worrying about offending the pearl clutchers”.
“We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America,” he wrote on X on Sunday.
For the full story, click here:
No plans to release unedited boat strike video to public, Hegseth says
Pete Hegseth has said the defense department will not publicly release unedited video of a Caribbean boat strike that killed two survivors from an earlier attack on a boat allegedly carrying cocaine in the Carribean.
According to the defense secretary, members of the House and Senate armed services committees would be allowed to review the footage; however, he made no commitment to sharing it with the full Congress, despite a defense policy bill calling for its release.
“Of course we’re not going to release a top secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public,” Hegseth said, in comments reported by the Associated Press.
Hegseth made the remarks after closed-door briefings on Capitol Hill where he and other top national security officials defended the administration’s expanded use of military force in international waters near Venezuela.
After Susie Wiles’s denouncement of the Vanity Fair pieces published today, other figures from the Trump administration have taken to social media to rally around her.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said:
Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has helped President Trump achieve the most successful first 11 months in office of any President in American history. 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.
Russell Vought, architect of the notorious Project 2025 and head of the Office of Management and Budget – who Wiles called “a right-wing absolute zealot” – wrote:
Susie Wiles is an exceptional chief of staff. I have had the privilege of working in President Trump’s White House for every single minute of his two terms. Let me be very clear: It has never worked this well or been more oriented towards accomplishing what he wants to accomplish. In my portfolio, she is always an ally in helping me deliver for the president. And this hit piece will not slow us down.
Asked about JD Vance and Marco Rubio’s dramatic transformations from Trump critics to heirs apparent, Wiles said Rubio’s journey to Trump acolyte was ideological and principled:
Marco was not the sort of person that would violate his principles. He just won’t. And so he had to get there.
Vance, on the other hand, had other motivations.
His conversion came when he was running for the Senate. And I think his conversion was a little bit more, sort of political.
For his part, Rubio told Vanity Fair: “If JD Vance runs for president, he’s going to be our nominee, and I’ll be one of the first people to support him.”
According to the New York Times, Vance, meanwhile, joked with the photographer:
I’ll give you $100 for every person you make look really shitty compared to me. And $1,000 if it’s Marco.
After Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act in mid-March and deported 238 migrant men – most of whom had not committed serious crimes – to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador (including Kilmar Ábrego García, who was deported by mistake), Wiles said:
I will concede that we’ve got to look harder at our process for deportation.
She said that while criminals should be deported, “if there is a question, I think our process has to lean toward a double-check.”
On the case where two mothers in Louisiana were arrested after voluntarily attending routine immigration meetings and deported to Honduras with their US citizen children (including one four-year-old being treated for stage four cancer), Wiles couldn’t explain it:
It could be an overzealous Border Patrol agent, I don’t know … I can’t understand how you make that mistake, but somebody did.
Wiles suggests real goal of Trump’s boat strikes is to topple Venezuela’s Maduro
Wiles also said of Trump’s Venezuela strategy:
He wants to keep on blowing boats up until [president Nicolás] Maduro cries uncle. And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.
The author notes that “Wiles’s statement appears to contradict the administration’s official stance that blowing up boats is about drug interdiction, not regime change”.
“So not a war on the cartels. It’s regime change,” Democratic senator Chris Murphy wrote on X in response to the article. “Either way, totally illegal and nonsensical.”
Wiles also conceded that attacking targets on Venezuela’s mainland would force Trump to get congressional approval.
If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress.
Wiles says she was ‘initially aghast’ at Elon Musk’s demolition of USAID
Back to the interviews, Wiles called Elon Musk “an avowed Ketamine” user and “an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are”. “You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person,” she said.
Furthermore, she said Musk’s demolition of USAID initially left her “aghast”. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work,” Wiles said.
She said that Musk’s approach, which was “to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out”, was “not the way I would do it”. She recalled telling him, “You can’t just lock people out of their offices.”
Musk was a disrupter, she said, “but no rational person could think the USAID process was a good one. Nobody.”
Susie Wiles slams her Vanity Fair interview as ‘a disingenuously framed hit piece’
I’ll briefly interrupt to note that Susie Wiles is not happy with the Vanity Fair interviews published today, calling it “a disingenuously framed hit piece”.
She wrote on X:
The article published early this morning is 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. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.
The truth is the Trump White House has already accomplished more in eleven months than any other President has accomplished in eight years and that is due to the unmatched leadership and vision of President Trump, for whom I have been honored to work for the better part of a decade.
None of this will stop our relentless pursuit of Making America Great Again!
Wiles also revealed that it was deputy attorney general Todd Blanche’s idea to go interview Epstein’s associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison and that Trump didn’t know that she would be transferred to a less restrictive facility following Blanche’s visit.
“The president was ticked,” she said. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.”
Wiles says Trump was ‘wrong’ to accuse Bill Clinton of visiting Epstein’s island
Also on Epstein, Wiles told Vanity Fair she had read the documents. She acknowledged that Donald Trump is in them, adding: “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.”
Trump has accused former president Bill Clinton (without evidence) of visiting Epstein’s infamous private island. Asked about that, Wiles said, “There is no evidence” that those visits happened. And asked whether there was anything incriminating in the files about Clinton as Trump suggested, Wiles said: “The president was wrong about that.”
Bondi ‘completely whiffed’ early handling of Epstein files and Vance is a ‘conspiracy theorist’, says Wiles
On the Epstein files, Wiles said attorney general Pam Bondi “completely whiffed” the early handling of the affair, when she gave binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a group of conservative social media influencers who were visiting the White House in February.
“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said. “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.”
Vice-president JD Vance, by contrast, understood the sensitivity because he himself “has been a conspiracy theorist for a decade”, Wiles added. She said that Vance, along with FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino, were the only ones in the administration that “really appreciated what a big deal this is” because “they lived in that world”.
