An email from Susie Wiles ordering White House staff to stop leaking to the press was … leaked … on Friday, when Politico’s West Wing Playbook published the March memo.
In it, Wiles sternly states that “no staff member within the Executive Office of the President is permitted to speak with members of the news media without the explicit approval of the White House Communications Office. Unauthorized leaks will not be tolerated and are subject to sanction up to and including termination.”
Donald Trump’s handpicked top aide also appealed to staffers’ sense of the greater good.
“Violation of this policy can result in significant disruption to ongoing operations and can potentially endanger missions and activities of national significance,” she concluded.
Wiles has been working to tighten operational discipline across the administration. White House spokesperson Liz Huston defended the email to Politico, and said staff are subject to “a zero-tolerance policy against speaking to the media without explicit authorization.”
The push comes as Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has crossed swords with the press, pushing many outlets to leave legacy seats at the Pentagon, and Donald Trump continues to bash individual reporters and networks on a regular basis.
As the Trump administration continues to slam Vanity Fair’s framing and context of its interviews with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, “The View” hosts are looking at the feature a bit differently. To the ABC hosts’ eyes, Wiles was actually incredibly intentional with what she said.
Wiles wrote the memo just a few months after her own interviews with Vanity Fair, in which she said the president has the personality of an alcoholic, called JD Vance’s pivot to Trump acolyte politically motivated, called Elon Musk an “avowed” ketamine user.
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