The family at the center of compromising President Trump’s first term has managed to further cement their influence in the administration of the 47th president.
As Donald Trump approaches the end of his first year in his second term, the administration is facing significant challenges and growing scrutiny. The atmosphere surrounding the White House is becoming increasingly fraught, with controversies emerging on multiple fronts.
One of the most polarizing issues involves the ongoing battle over the release of the so-called Epstein Files. Initially, efforts were made to keep these documents under wraps, but Trump later dismissed them as a “hoax.” This has led to a public relations scramble, particularly with allies like Dan Bongino and Kash Patel, who previously advocated for transparency and now appear embroiled in a cover-up concerning an alleged Israeli influence operation linked to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
Adding to the tumult, there have been conflicting reports about an alleged assassination attempt on Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, further fueling the atmosphere of chaos. Political tensions have also flared with figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie, who are actively working to make the Epstein Files public. Trump has clashed with these lawmakers, highlighting the growing fractures within his own party.
The administration’s policies have also come under fire, particularly regarding employment practices. Critics accuse the government of prioritizing foreign workers, brought in under H1B visas, over American citizens. This has been compounded by accusations of a technological shift that favors artificial intelligence at the expense of American jobs.
Internationally, the administration faces criticism over its handling of foreign relations, with controversial decisions including hosting individuals with ties to terrorism at the White House and recognizing figures with questionable backgrounds as legitimate statesmen.
The fallout from these issues has been significant. Public dissatisfaction is mounting, with many Americans feeling disillusioned by what they perceive as a betrayal of the “America First” agenda. In response, Trump has softened his stance on the Epstein Files, agreeing to their release. This decision has been met with mixed reactions from the media, with outlets like CNN and the New York Times reporting on the shift but not exonerating Trump’s critics, such as Massie and Greene.
The question left in the minds of most thinking Americans becomes, “Why can’t this administration seem to get anything right?”
The answer lies with Donald Trump’s White House Chief-of-Staff, Susie Wiles.
The Wiles family, and now the LaCivita family are deeply connected. National File and Patrick Howley first reported on Susie’s ties to Pfizer back in 2022.
Wiles, who previously worked at Ballard Partners (now on the outs with Trump after Susie moved on to Mercury), seems to have an easy time obtaining puff pieces on her at Trump-hating rags like the New York Times, POLITICO, and CNN (this one back in 2022), got her start in the politics more than forty years ago with Jack Kemp and later the Bush family as a result of her father Pat Summerall’s connections in media at CBS.
Wiles, and her ex-husband Lanny, each managed to lever their experience into statewide and later national level political positions, and lucrative lobbying gigs.
Wiles’s former firm Mercury Public Affairs recently signed up to lobby for China.
But Wiles’s ties to China are much longer than Mercury’s recent acquisition of the communist nation as a client.
Wiles’s was co-chair of a firm which took millions of dollars from Chinese companies such as Yealink, Hikvision and Alibaba.
“Susie could put Trump away for years in just one minute of testimony to Jack Smith,” a GOP operative told The New York Post. “She’s got Trump by the balls, which means she can name her price for her loyalty and Trump can’t say no.”
Alibaba was one of Mercury’s most lucrative clients, and still pays Mercury. The Chinese government holds a minority stake in Alibaba. Mercury collected $400,000 from its work with Alibaba in a short two year span.
Mercury did business with the Chinese firm Yealink up through May of 2023.
Mercury, Wiles’s lobbying firm, also signed up a US subsidiary of Chinese firm Hikvision as one of its biggest clients, raking in more than $1.7 million, according to the money-in-politics tracker OpenSecrets.
Hikvision manufactures video surveillance equipment for the Chinese government. That technology has been used to identify, locate, and detain political opponents within China, in Xinjiang, Axios reported in April.
The Commerce Department had previously barred American companies like AT&T from engaging with Chinese firms, as in this case, in which the selling of goods or services to Hikvision was barred. Subsidiaries of Hikvision were not proscribed from doing business with American companies, however.
Chinese companies like Hikvision which were deemed national security threats had their requests for new-device authorizations rejected by the Federal Communications Commission.
It is unclear whether Mercury and Wiles continued working on behalf of Hikvision into 2023.
The nation of India has also hired Mercury, Wiles’s former lobby shop, as well as a J.D. Vance staffer, to fight its corner in D.C.
The Wiles family record of undermining Trump goes back to the first term. National File’s cousin website Big League Politics first reported on the Wiles family’s efforts to undermine the Trump administration.
In that case, Susie’s daughter Caroline Wiles, who was reportedly engaged in an affair with another Trump staffer, was working to spike the tenures of hard-line MAGA nominees at EPA and Interior.
You can read that exclusive report here below:
EXCLUSIVE: White House Leaker Identified As Trump’s Former Scheduler Caroline Wiles
by Patrick Howley
This article was originally published at Big League Politics in May of 2018.
WASHINGTON — Caroline Wiles, President Donald Trump’s original White House scheduler, has been identified as a leaker involved in the scheme to knock out Cabinet members Scott Pruitt and Ryan Zinke.
Big League Politics has learned that Wiles worked with anti-Scott Pruitt EPA leaker Kevin Chmielewski, who was fired from the Trump administration for driving around a fake police car in traffic.
Wiles and Chmielewski worked together in Florida governor Rick Scott’s office. Chmielewski was the advance man for Paul Manafort on sketchy Ukraine trips. His plot was exposed when one of his comrades, Alex Hinson in the Department of the Interior, lost his government cell phone, after which his personal cell phone became subject to federal government review.
Wiles was dismissed by the White House in February shortly after taking office, according to the Fox affiliate in Jacksonville, because she failed an FBI background check. Caroline Wiles is the daughter of Trump campaign strategist (and now Chief of Staff) Susie Wiles.
Sources further confirmed to Big League Politics that the impression within the White House that Caroline Wiles was having an affair with Rick Gates, the Trump campaign adviser who was forced to plead guilty in the Robert Mueller case. Gates agreed to “cooperate.”
Wiles is identified as an engineer of a misleading Atlantic piece by Elaina Plott claiming that Michael Abboud, an EPA official close to Pruitt, was responsible for negative leaks against Zinke. It was a head fake to distract attention from the real conspirators, according to sources close to the EPA.
The real conspirators: Kevin Chmielewski, Caroline Wiles of the White House personnel office, and Alex Hinson at the Department of the Interior (who is now said to be living with his parents as Ryan Zinke tries to figure out what to do about the young man’s leaking).
The so-called “whistleblower” in the now-fading Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) flap is actually a disgruntled employee who was fired for cause — being AWOL from his EPA post without clearance from his agency supervisors, according to multiple sources in and near the Trump administration.
The EPA media circus over the last weeks have stemmed from allegations made by former Deputy of Chief of Staff for operations, Kevin Chmielewski, a man whose behavior and background portended a short career as a presidential appointee.
The reasons for the media maelstrom seem much clearer given recent revelations about Chmielewski.
Upon being fired, Kevin Chmielewski threatened to go public with allegations against EPA chief Scott Pruitt, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation.
