Trump Chief of Staff Caught in Obvious Lie About Her Trash Talking

White House chief of staff Susie Wiles seems to have been caught lying about her statements regarding Elon Musk’s ketamine use, leading us to question everything else she denies from her series of interviews with Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple.

“The challenge with Elon is keeping up with him,” Wiles told Whipple, in part one of the article. “He’s an avowed ketamine [user]. And he sleeps in a sleeping bag in the [Executive Office Building] in the daytime. And he’s an odd, odd duck, as I think geniuses are. You know, it’s not helpful, but he is his own person.”

While Musk’s drug use has been previously reported on, Musk had only admitted to casual and infrequent use of ketamine specifically. Wiles’s comments blow that notion up entirely.

Wiles, of course, profusely denied that she said this.

“That’s ridiculous,” she told The New York Times. “I wouldn’t have said it and I wouldn’t know.”

But Whipple’s reporting comes from a series of sit-downs that Wiles did with him, and The New York Times confirmed that Whipple played them a recording in which the White House chief of staff is heard making the ketamine comment.

This interview was a disaster for Wiles. She inexplicably gave Vanity Fair—and the general public—even more fodder against an already tumultuous administration. She said that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” that Attorney General Pam Bondi “whiffed” on her handling of the Epstein files, and that Vice President JD Vance was a conspiracy theorist, among other things. And it seems that Whipple has solid ground to stand on, given his recordings of her, no matter how much she and her administration deny it.

The Trump administration is trying to claim that the FBI believed it didn’t have probable cause to search Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2022, citing a Fox News article claiming to have declassified emails. 

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted the article on X Tuesday, calling it a “story that matters.” The article claims that the FBI was hesitant to search the estate of the then-former president for missing classified documents, but was pushed by the Department of Justice at the time. 

One email reportedly states that at one point, the FBI’s Washington Field Office did “not believe (and has articulated to [DOJ]), that we have established probable cause for the search warrant for classified records at Mar a Lago.” Another email states that the bureau thought a raid would be “counterproductive,” suggesting “alternative, less intrusive and likelier quicker options for resolution” to recover the documents at the heart of the case.

It’s not surprising that the White House would want to highlight this article, because it makes the Biden administration look like it was pushing for a raid over the objections of federal law enforcement. But the search of Mar-a-Lago, which a federal judge signed a warrant for, ultimately undermines that argument. 

Classified documents were found all over the estate, including in the ballroom, bathroom and shower, an office, Trump’s bedroom, and a storage room, according to special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment. Agents allegedly found documents from seven government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency, Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and State Department. 

The August 2022 search recovered 102 documents, including 17 classified as “Top Secret,” 54 as “Secret,” and 31 as “Confidential.” The indictment at the time quotes one of Trump’s attorneys saying that Trump allegedly said, “I don’t want anybody looking, I don’t want anybody looking through my boxes, I really don’t,” and, “What happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?” 

One of Trump’s own lawyers specifically brought on to handle the classified documents case, Evan Corcoran, quit his job while the case was still ongoing in April last year. Trump and his aides allegedly misled Corcoran and encouraged him to lie to the DOJ. 

All of this may have been damning for Trump had the case actually gone to trial instead of being repeatedly undermined by Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon, who ultimately dismissed the case in July 2024 on the spurious grounds that Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Following Trump’s election victory, Smith moved to have the case dismissed without prejudice, meaning it can be reopened once Trump leaves office in 2029. 

That might be why the Trump administration is trying to undermine what at one point seemed like the clearest case of Trump breaking the law. Trump not only wants to escape justice, but also wants anyone who prosecuted him punished and his record completely clean. Unfortunately for Trump, the evidence against him is well-documented, no matter how much he wants to whine about it.  

It’s official: House Speaker Mike Johnson is letting the Affordable Care Act subsidies expire—and Republicans are pissed. 

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Johnson said that Republican leadership just couldn’t get on the same page about extending Obamacare tax credits. “In the end, there was not an agreement,” he said.

This is an apparent reversal after one Republican aide indicated last week that GOP leadership “would allow” for a floor vote on extending subsidies, at the behest of moderate Republicans who wanted the opportunity to voice their support for an extension. 

Representative Mike Lawler, one of those moderate Republicans, was furious over Johnson’s decision.  

“I think it’s idiotic not to have an up-or-down vote on this issue,” Lawler fumed after Tuesday morning’s House Republican Conference, arguing that Johnson was committing “political malpractice.”

“I am pissed for the American people. This is absolute bullshit,” he said. 

After this week, Congress is out of session until 2026, and the enhanced tax credits expire on December 31. Starting in January, insurance premiums are set to skyrocket, and premiums for some individuals will increase by as much as double. 

House Majority Leader Steve Scalise told reporters that Republicans had chosen another path. “I think after everybody talked, they decided they didn’t want to go forward, you know, with the options that were out there,” he said. “So, you know, in the end we have a bill that lowers premiums for 100 percent of Americans. Democrats are only focused on bailing out insurance companies for less than 10 percent of Americans.”

Last week, Republican leadership unveiled their own disastrous plan to lower health care costs, which did not include extending subsidies. 

Instead, they proposed that Americans be given cash directly into health savings accounts paired with high-deductible health plans, meaning higher insurance premiums would theoretically be replaced by higher out-of-pocket costs. 

Donald Trump was apparently tricked into giving Ghislane Maxwell better prison conditions, according to his chief of staff.

Susie Wiles told author Chris Whipple in a Vanity Fair interview that neither she nor the president were consulted about Maxwell’s transfer to a cushier prison earlier this year following her meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“The president was ticked,” Wiles said. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.” Wiles added to Whipple, “If that’s an important point, I can find out.”

Wiles never got back to Whipple on that point, even as the author reached out to her just before Vanity Fair published their interview.

Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell was itself unusual, and Whipple asked Wiles why it was conducted.

“It’s not typical, is it, to send the number two guy in the DOJ and the president’s former defense lawyer to interview a convicted sex trafficker?” Whipple asked. Wiles replied that the interview was Blanche’s suggestion.

If Wiles’s comments are to be believed, it’s easy to trick the president of the United States. In another reading, Wiles’s comments are a revelation by omission. Maxwell was moved to a federal facility that gave her all kinds of special treatment, such as the ability to have visitation rights for long periods of time in the prison’s chapel. She also receives unlimited toilet paper, meal service in her cell, and immediate responses to requests to have other inmates moved away from her.

Maxwell supposedly exonerated Trump from any wrongdoing in her interview with Blanche’s interview, claiming he had never even been to Epstein’s house, but emails released this fall from Epstein’s estate by the House Oversight Committee contradict her testimony. Trump is mentioned as a frequent visitor to Epstein’s home, who “knew about the girls,” which creates the impression that Maxwell was simply telling Blanche and the Trump administration what they wanted to hear.

Do Trump and Wiles really have no idea why Maxwell has an easy prison life right now? It certainly doesn’t seem that way, but based on Wiles’s negative reaction to her published remarks, she’s not going to go out of her way to clear things up.

Maybe the United States should try to be more like Australia.

The day after a mass shooting at a Jewish gathering killed 15 people at Bondi Beach Sunday, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese wasted no time in moving to tighten gun laws.

“The consideration that will take place includes limiting the number of guns an individual can own, the type of guns that are legal, whether gun ownership should require Australian citizenship, and accelerating work on the national firearms register,” he said during a press conference Monday.

“The government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary.”

The United States, on the other hand, seems to have its own way of dealing with mass shootings—and it’s worse than doing nothing.

Here in the land of the free and home of the brave, our lawmakers don’t draft gun control legislation. They draft posts on X spreading baseless conspiracy theories.

Representative Michael Rulli, a MAGA acolyte from Ohio, posted about the weekend shooting at Brown University, claiming that Ella Cook, one of the victims and the vice president of the Brown chapter of College Republicans of America, had been targeted for her conservative beliefs.

“They tried to kill Trump. They killed Charlie Kirk. Now they’ve killed Ella Cook. The left wants all of us dead, and there’s no denying it anymore,” he wrote.

And Rulli wasn’t alone: Multiple right-wing figures pushed the narrative that Cook had been targeted.

Of course, none of them could be bothered to mention Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek neuroscience student who was also killed Saturday, or the eight others who were injured in the shooting. Meanwhile, the gunman has not yet been taken into custody or identified.

At the same time, Yahoo News circulated an unsourced story, cooked up by right-wing media, that the shooter at Brown University had declared “Allahu Akbar” before open firing on a group of students studying for their economics final.

But at least we have our freedom, right?