Another Member of Trump’s Inner Circle Works for Russian-Linked Group

Yet another person with close ties to Donald Trump’s White House has been linked to a pro-Russia Balkan regime.

Katie Wiles, daughter of Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, works for a political lobbying firm that has a $35,000-per-month contract to represent a small self-governing territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Republika Srpska. She traveled there as recently as August.

A photograph circulated by Evi Kokalari, a conservative Albanian American activist, showed the younger Wiles wielding a rifle and standing next to a man that CBS News identified as Željko Budimir, the interior minister of Republika Srpska. The image appeared to have been initially posted to Wiles’s Instagram story with the caption “mostly work + some serious fun!”

Continental Strategy, Wiles’s employer, confirmed to CBS that she traveled to Republika Srpska in August, but said she has not lobbied the U.S. government on its behalf. Yeah, she probably wouldn’t have to do much—her mom would do it for her. As of Thursday afternoon, Wiles’s page on her company’s website was inaccessible.

This news comes as MAGA world has turned its ire on two of the president’s closest advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, who took time out of their presumably busy pre-midterm elections schedules to travel to the Balkans to assist in that territory’s elections. The two men were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each to provide counsel on voting issues to the government, which is led by far-right nationalists. Republika Srpska is closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has made a considerable effort to make inroads with Trump and his allies.

Both LaCivita and Blair are connected to Susie Wiles—but even the famed “ice maiden” reportedly couldn’t protect them from the White House’s ire. Trump tried to distance himself from his beloved strategists, claiming that Blair and LaCivita were “outside consultants,” but his chief of staff’s child may be harder to disown.

On Thursday afternoon, President Trump awarded national medals for advancements in technology and science to six CEOs and founders: Google’s Sergey Brin, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang, Advanced Micro Devices’ Lisa Su, Dell Technologies’ Michael Dell, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, and SpaceX and Tesla’s Elon Musk. These six awardees collectively donated at least $6 billion to Trump’s campaign, his inauguration fund, his White House ballroom, pro-Trump super PACs, and other Republican initiatives aligned with Trump’s agenda, a New Republic analysis found.

Congratulations to all six individuals for realizing that the president can be very easily bought. 

Sergey Brin, Google co-founder, current Gemini AI head

Google’s parent company, Alphabet (which Brin co-founded), donated $22 billion to the Trust for the National Mall, a fund that will help construct Trump’s White House ballroom plan. The donation was made as part of a settlement in Trump’s January 6–related lawsuit against YouTube. Google separately  donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. Brin himself donated half a million dollars to the Republican National Committee last year, and spent more than $100 million in an effort to kill California’s proposed wealth tax. 

These donations don’t include other clear links between Google and Trump, like the tech company’s decision to hire Trump ally Carlos Trujillo’s lobbying firm, Continental Strategy, to lobby the White House.

Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO

Huang donated an unspecified amount to the construction of President Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom last year, and attended a $1 million-per-plate dinner at Mar-a-Lago. His company, NVIDIA, also announced it would be pledging $1 billion to Trump’s Genesis Mission AI project on Thursday morning, shortly before Huang received his award. 

Lisa Su, president and CEO, Advanced Micro Devices

Su’s AMD company donated $1 million to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC, and pledged to give 15 percent of its processor sales revenue from China to the Trump administration.

Elon Musk, Tesla CEO, xAI CEO, X Corp. CTO

Musk, who also served as a quasi-member of the Trump Cabinet as head of DOGE, has extensive financial connections to the Trump administration. In 2024, he wasn’t just Trump’s largest donor, he was the biggest political spender in the entire country, shelling out $277 million directly to Trump and other Republican campaigns. Musk helped form Trump’s America PAC and ran a $1 million election “lottery” scheme to pay Republican voters. 

Michael Dell, Dell Technologies founder, chair, and CEO 

Dell and his wife gifted the Trump administration $6.25 billion to the president’s “Trump accounts” program for children. 

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Nadella’s company, Microsoft, contributed $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and an undisclosed amount to his White House ballroom. 

Trump has disclosed millions in stock trades in the companies run by all six individuals.

North Carolinians were blissfully unaware that they survived one of the “great water hurricanes” of all time—until Donald Trump said so at the White House summit for scientific achievement Thursday.

All hurricanes lash rain as a fundamental part of the storm system, but the president suggested Thursday that there was a difference between a cyclone and what he described as a “water hurricane.”

“I will tell you personally, because I was involved, we had a hurricane—one of the great water hurricanes of all time—delivered more water than at any time that we can remember on record,” Trump said in the midst of a speech intended to celebrate Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink technologies.

Yet somehow it’s not the first time that Trump has leaned on the bizarre phrase. The president previously pitched the idea during a presidential campaign stop in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in October 2024. He lamented the role that water had played during Hurricane Helene—a Category 4 storm that ravaged the state and simultaneously sparked Trump’s interest in dismantling the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

“I must’ve been the first [to visit the area], I followed that storm right in,” Trump said two years ago. “But I saw the devastation, I came back the following week because I didn’t want to get in, it was a travesty, it was a vicious, it was water, the water was the worst we’d ever seen, it was a water hurricane, that’s what it was.”

Pretty much everything Trump said about hurricanes at the White House’s Science: A New Golden Age summit Thursday was blatantly dishonest and, ironically, logically unsound. Despite the damage it wreaked, Hurricane Helene was not the most severe rainfall event in U.S. history. That distinction would go to Hurricane Harvey, which battered portions of Texas and Louisiana across eight days of rainfall in 2017.

He was also not involved. Trump visited the Tar Heel State once to formally acknowledge the wreckage, making three stops across North Carolina on October 21, 2024—nearly a month after the storm had passed.

“The power of nature. Nothing you can do about it, but you got to get a little bit better crew in to do a better job than has been done by the White House. It’s been not good. Not good,” Trump said at the time.

The storm inspired an unfounded MAGA conspiracy that the Biden administration was utilizing FEMA funds to assist undocumented immigrants. But even after North Carolinians voted Trump back into office, the Trump administration made it remarkably difficult for the state to access the emergency relief.

Instead, the Trump campaign initiated a GoFundMe where Americans could privately donate cash (on top of their taxes) to help rebuild the damaged regions of North Carolina. They managed to raise $7.7 million, but that money effectively disappeared within a year.

Trump’s team distributed the money to a handful of Christian charities with close ties to the president, including Mtn2Sea Ministries, Water Mission, Samaritan’s Purse, the Clinch Foundation, and Sweetwater Mission. As religious entities, none were legally required to publicly disclose their expenditures, making it next to impossible for the press, the communities in need, or those who donated to actually track down the dollars.

Hurricane Helene killed at least 250 people across seven states, making it the second-deadliest storm to hit the mainland in U.S. history. More than 100 of those fatalities happened in North Carolina.

The state is still dealing with the fallout of the storm: state officials are still working to provide internet and housing assistance for thousands of people that lost their homes to the hurricane, according to a factsheet released by Governor Josh Stein’s office in September.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth wants convicted Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s execution by firing squad to be open to the public.

Speaking to Jack Posobiec for Real America’s Voice on the USS Abraham Lincoln Wednesday, Hegseth was asked about the decision to execute Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist who shot and killed 12 soldiers and one civilian in 2009 on the base before being shot, wounded, and arrested. President Trump approved Hasan’s death by firing squad to take place December 3, the first such execution in over 60 years.

“Of course we’re going to do it at Fort Hood. We’re going to do it on a Thursday, we’re going to do it at one o’clock, which is when he did it, and it’s going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad,” Hegseth said. “We know what it is, it was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks, and so he’s going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be, and we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it’s public, because people need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things.”

What Hegseth means by “public” is unclear. Will it be broadcast live? Will spectators from outside of the military be allowed onto the Texas base to see it? We’ll probably learn more in the coming days, but current Army regulations allow for at least two media outlets to be present for the execution. No legal execution has ever been broadcast live in the U.S., and the country’s last public execution was in 1936.

Since he was convicted of a military crime, Hasan’s execution required approval from Hegseth and then Trump, which was granted. Trump’s Department of Justice doesn’t want this to be the last firing squad execution. In April, the DOJ announced it was bringing back federal firing squads for death penalty sentences. President Biden had paused all executions and commuted the death sentences of 37 prisoners to life without parole as he was leaving the White House.

This story has been updated.

The Trump administration wants to prosecute Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide who was one of the star witnesses for the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Punchbowl News reports that the Department of Justice wants to criminally indict Hutchinson, accusing her of lying to the January 6 committee about what she saw that day in 2021. The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division presented evidence to a federal grand jury on Tuesday and is expected to present additional evidence and witnesses in the coming weeks, unnamed sources told Punchbowl. NBC News confirmed the report. Hutchinson, who worked for former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, has not yet received a subpoena from the grand jury.

Republicans have been calling for Hutchinson’s prosecution for years, with Representative Barry Loudermilk referring her to the DOJ in March and House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan signing off on it. In 2022, Hutchinson testified that President Trump wanted to join his supporters and march on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, but his aides and Secret Service detail said it wasn’t safe.

Hutchinson said that Trump then tried to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine, and when a Secret Service agent grabbed his arm, he grabbed the agent’s neck. Hutchinson also testified that Trump wanted his armed supporters to march that day, and said Meadows overheard the president say Vice President Mike Pence “deserves it” in response to the MAGA faithful chanting “Hang Mike Pence” at the Capitol.

The DOJ’s Civil Rights Division usually handles discrimination cases, and it’s not normal for the office to oversee a case of lying to Congress. The division has resorted to hiring questionable candidates to fill vacancies, including lawyers convicted of crimes themselves. These substandard lawyers will hopefully have a tough time convincing a federal grand jury to pursue revenge against one of Trump’s perceived enemies, who simply testified on what she witnessed on January 6.