Susie Wiles, U.S. President Donald Trump’s understated but influential chief of staff, criticized Attorney General Pam Bondi’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and broadly defended the president’s aggressive second administration in a series of interviews published Tuesday in Vanity Fair.
Wiles told the magazine in a wide-ranging, revealing series of conversations that she underestimated the scandal involving Epstein, the disgraced financier, but sharply criticized how Bondi managed the case and the public’s expectations.
The Justice Department is facing a Friday deadline to release everything it has on Epstein after Trump, who had initially objected to the release, signed legislation requiring that the papers be made public.
Wiles criticized Bondi’s handling of the case, going back to earlier in the year when she distributed binders to a group of social media influencers that included no new information about Epstein. That led to even more calls from Trump’s base for the files to be released.
“I think she completely whiffed on appreciating that that was the very targeted group that cared about this,” Wiles said of Bondi. “First she gave them binders full of nothingness. And then she said that the witness list, or the client list, was on her desk.
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“There is no client list, and it sure as hell wasn’t on her desk.”
Wiles said she has read the Epstein file and that Trump is “not in the file doing anything awful.”
‘Significant context’ missing, Wiles says
After the story was published, Wiles disparaged it as 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,” she wrote in a social media post. “I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
Wiles did not deny the comments that were attributed to her.
Wiles also levelled criticisms at Vice-President JD Vance and two of the men who were tasked to significantly reduce the size of the federal government — billionaire Elon Musk, an early White House adviser, and Office of Management and Budget Director Russ Vought.
In her rebuttal, Wiles argued that Trump had accomplished more in 11 months than any president had in eight years because of his “unmatched leadership and vision.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also rose to Wiles’s defence, writing on X that, “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.”
Trump tapped Wiles after she managed his winning 2024 campaign. She is the first woman to ever serve as White House chief of staff and is known for shunning the spotlight. It is rare for her to speak as extensively and openly as she did to the magazine.
Wiles has been speaking to Vanity Fair since just before Trump took office last January.
The interviews were conducted by former 60 Minutes producer Chris Whipple, who has written books about the role of the White House chief of staff, as well as an inside look at Joe Biden’s administration. His most recent book, Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History, was published in April.
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Spoke about Trump’s desire for retribution
Wiles, over the series of interviews, described the president behind the scenes very much as he presents himself in public — an intense figure who thinks in broad strokes yet is often not concerned with the details of process and policy.
Trump, she said, has “an alcoholic’s personality,” even though the president does not drink. But the personality trait is something she recognizes from her father, the famous sports broadcaster Pat Summerall, who was open about his struggles with alcohol.
“High-functioning alcoholics or alcoholics in general, their personalities are exaggerated when they drink. And so I’m a little bit of an expert in big personalities,” she said, adding that Trump has “a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Wiles described much of her job as channelling Trump’s whims and desired policy outcomes — including managing his desire for vengeance against his political opponents, anyone he blames for his 2020 electoral defeat and those who pursued criminal cases against him after his first term.
Wiles said early in this administration that she had a “loose agreement” with Trump that score settling would end after the his first 90 days in office, but later in 2025, she pushed back.
A U.S. judge has dismissed criminal cases against former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, two prominent critics of President Donald Trump. But despite hitting a wall, Trump’s efforts to prosecute adversaries is likely far from over.
“In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me,” she said.
Asked about the prosecution of New York Attorney General Letitia James for mortgage fraud, Wiles allowed: “Well, that might be the one retribution.”
There have been three attempts to indict James, all of which have failed. The Justice Department asked a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., to return an indictment last week a different grand jury in Norfolk, also in Virginia.
A judge in November threw out successful indictments against James, as well as against former FBI director James Comey. It was ruled that the prosecutor who presented to the grand jury, Lindsey Halligan, was illegally appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
Susie Wiles, the chief of staff to U.S. President Donald Trump, was interviewed a total of 11 times for her profile in Vanity Fair in which she shared her views on Trump’s second term and some of the people on his core team, including J.D. Vance, Karoline Leavitt and Marco Rubio. Wiles is now taking issue with the published piece, however, saying it lacks context. The CBC’s Willy Lowry explains.