Conflict exists everywhere in politics. Even inside the Trump administration.
And this White House official went nuclear on one of Donald Trump’s cabinet members.
In the heart of President Trump’s second term, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles didn’t hold back when slamming Attorney General Pam Bondi over her bungled handling of the Jeffrey Epstein saga.
Wiles, in a no-holds-barred interview posted by Vanity Fair, exposed what she saw as a total failure to grasp the stakes for the conservative base hungry for real answers.
It all kicked off back in February when the Trump team handed out flashy binders dubbed “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to a select crew of right-leaning influencers at the White House. These folks waved them around for the cameras, building hype among the press corps watching every move.
But the excitement fizzled fast. Those binders? Nothing but scraps from Epstein’s old phone book – a bland list of contacts stripped of any juicy details, with addresses redacted like some amateur cover-up.
Wiles pulled no punches in her chat with author Chris Whipple, laying into Bondi for dropping the ball.
“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 h*ll wasn’t on her desk.”
That desk comment from Bondi came during a February 21 spot on Fox News, where she teased big revelations. When pressed on whether Epstein’s so-called client list would hit the public eye, she claimed: “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”
According to Wiles, the real heroes who got the gravity of the Epstein mess were FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino. She highlighted how they, along with Vice President JD Vance, truly understood the fire this issue lit under the American people.
“They lived in that world,” Wiles explained, “and the vice president [JD Vance], who’s been a conspiracy theorist for a decade … For years, Kash has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.”
Fast forward to July 6, and the FBI teamed up with the DOJ to drop a bombshell memo. Their conclusion? Epstein never kept some master list of elite predators preying on underage girls – debunking years of rumors that had folks demanding justice.
Just days after that, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche jetted down to Florida for a face-to-face with Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted sidekick rotting away on a 20-year sentence for s*x-trafficking and more.
Wiles dished that the Maxwell meeting was all Blanche’s brainchild, and neither she nor Trump got a heads-up about what followed: Maxwell’s shuffle to a cushier medium-security spot in Texas.
“The president was ticked,” Wiles revealed. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.”
This insider scoop came from one of 11 sit-downs Wiles had with Whipple over Trump’s first year back in the Oval Office, giving a raw look at the administration’s inner workings.
Whipple, the guy behind the pen, knows his way around power players. He’s famous for his 2017 deep dive The Gatekeepers, chronicling White House chiefs of staff through the ages.
He didn’t stop there – Whipple also penned The Fight of His Life, a biography on Joe Biden.
And just this year, he rolled out Uncharted, zeroing in on the wild ride of the 2024 presidential campaign.
