Trump's incoming White House chief of staff's lobbying interest come under scrutiny
In his first term, President-elect Donald Trump burned through four White House chiefs of staff who tried in vain to police who had access to the president.
Now, incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles, the "ice maiden," will be tasked with guarding the president from special interests who seek to abuse the White House for their own personal gain. But progressives are calling out Wiles for her own history as a former corporate lobbyist and are raising concerns that her hire signals Trump does not intend to keep his promise to "drain the Swamp."
"By putting a corporate lobbyist in charge of his administration with his first act as president-elect, Trump is hanging a ‘For Sale’ sign on the front door of the White House," said Jon Golinger, the democracy advocate for Public Citizen, a non-profit, progressive consumer advocacy group. Public Citizen released a report authored by Golinger on Friday that details WIles' lobbying disclosures and highlights her work on behalf of various special interests.
The report found that Wiles was a registered lobbyist for 42 different clients between November 2017 and April 2024. Some of her more controversial clients, according to Public Citizen, include Republic Services, a waste management company that has yet to clean radioactive nuclear waste from its dump; The Pebble Partnership, a Canadian copper and gold mining company that wants to build a mine opponents say would harm the environment in the Bristol Bay region of Alaska; and Swisher International, a tobacco company that opposed federal regulations of candy-flavored cigars.
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"A lobbyist with this record of controversial representation and a minefield of potential conflicts of interest should not go near the Oval Office, much less be White House Chief of Staff," Golinger said.
In a statement to the Associated Press, Trump transition spokesman Brian Hughes defended Wiles from claims that her past work as a lobbyist would impact how Trump runs the White House.
"Susie Wiles has an undeniable reputation of the highest integrity and steadfast commitment to service both inside and outside government," Hughes said. "She will bring this same integrity and commitment as she serves President Trump in the White House, and that is exactly why she was selected."
Wiles, a longtime GOP operative and advisor to Trump, will be the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff in American history. She is the daughter of the late legendary NFL broadcaster Pat Summerall.
The 67-year-old veteran political strategist co-led the president-elect's 2024 campaign and is widely credited with running a far more disciplined operation than his two previous efforts. Trump has praised her as "tough, smart, innovative and universally admired and respected."
A longtime Florida-based Republican strategist who ran Trump's campaign in the state in 2016 and 2020, Wiles’ decades-long political career stretches back to working as former President Reagan’s campaign scheduler for his 1980 presidential bid.
Wiles also ran Rick Scott's 2010 campaign for Florida governor and briefly served as the manager of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman's 2012 presidential campaign.
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After Trump's 2016 victory, Wiles became a partner at Ballard Partners, a Florida-based lobbying firm founded by Brian Ballard. The firm opened an office in Washington, D.C. and quickly became successful, earning more than $70 million in lobbying fees during Trump's first term in office by representing various corporate clients, federal disclosures show.
Some of Wiles' anodyne clients included General Motors, a trade group for children’s hospitals, home builders, and the City of Jacksonville, Florida.
However, she also represented foreign clients, including Globovisión, a Venezuelan TV network owned by Raúl Gorrín, a businessman charged in Miami with money laundering.
Gorrín bought the broadcast company in 2013 and immediately softened its anti-government coverage. He hired Ballard to advise on "general government policies and regulations," lobbying disclosures show. But according to the Associated Press, Gorrín sought to influence the White House to ease ties between the U.S. and the socialist government of Venezuela.
While Gorrín was Wiles' client, he sought to curry Trump's favor towards Nicolás Maduro’s government. "He was a fraud and as soon as we learned he was a fraud, we fired him," Ballard told the Associated Press in an interview. "He would ask us to set up a lot of things, in LA and D.C., and then nothing would happen. It was all a fantasy. He just wanted to use our firm."
A few days after Ballard dropped Gorrín in 2018, federal prosecutors unsealed charges against the businessman for allegedly using the U.S. finance system to supply Venezuelan officials with private jets, a yacht and champion show-jumping horses as part of a fake loan scheme perpetrated by insiders to pilfer the state’s coffers. Last month, he was charged a second time, also based in Miami, in another scheme to siphon $1 billion from the state oil company, PDVSA.
Ballard told the AP that Wiles did not manage the firm's relationship with Gorrín and called her a highly organized "straight shooter" who is "tough as nails."
"She’s the type of person who you want in a foxhole," he said. "She will serve the president well."
Any effort by Venezuela to win over the Trump administration proved unsuccessful. In 2019, Trump ordered crushing oil sanctions against the OPEC Nation, closed the U.S. embassy in Caracas and recognized the head of the opposition-controlled National Assembly as the country's legitimate head of government. Maduro was then indicted in 2020 by the U.S. Justice Department on federal drug trafficking charges out of New York.
Wiles lobbied for other foreign clients.
In 2019, she registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent working for one of Nigeria's main political parties for two months. She also lobbied for an auto dealership owned by international businessman Shafik Gabr, who the AP reported was involved in a financial dispute over selling cars in Egypt with a subsidiary of the German automaker Volkswagen.
Disclosures show Wiles also registered as a lobbyist for a multinational gaming company and for Waterton Global Resource Management Inc., a Canadian private equity firm that sought approval to construct a gold mine on public and private land near Las Vegas, Nevada.
Her lobbying work continued during Trump's 2024 campaign. Federal disclosures filed in April show she worked to influence Congress on "FDA regulations" on behalf of Swisher International, a tobacco company.
Wiles most recently worked as the co-chair for the Florida and Washington, D.C., offices of Mercury Public Affairs, a lobbying firm whose clients include AirBnB, AT&T, eBay, Pfizer, Tesla, and the Embassy of Qatar, although she is not a registered lobbyist for any of those clients.
Fox News Digital's Bradford Betz, Louis Casiano, Paul Steinhauser and the Associated Press contributed to this report.