President Donald Trump's chief of staff, Susie Wiles, did a series of 11 bombshell interviews with Vanity Fair for an extensive cover story blasting many Cabinet officials and revealing inside secrets about the administrations goals.
CNN host Dana Bash read off some of the more shocking details from the report. One of those included Wiles saying that Trump was, indeed, on a retribution tour and encouraged him to switch back to kitchen-table issues.
Speaking about the piece on Tuesday, Brian Stelter, CNN's media correspondent and analyst, said that Wiles' problem is she was simply being honest.
"The scandal is always just saying the truth out loud, just admitting what everyone else knows is going on. What Republicans say in private," said Stelter. "And she just happens to have been saying it in front of a tape recorder. And she was saying this over the course of a year, right? So different interviews, different times. That creates some context for this."
He noted that on X, Wiles claimed that the writer did a kind of hit piece and she was "taken out of contxt."
"Maybe [reporter Chris] Whipple will now come out with the tapes, but it does seem like, to me, a situation where she was in a very candid situation. Maybe she was talking — not that she thought she was not on the record, because she knows the whole time. Chris Whipple is an author who writes for Vanity Fair, so there's no excuse."
"But maybe it's one of those situations where you're talking for hours, you're talking in a really casual way," he continued, speculating. "Maybe you forget the tape recorder is rolling. I'm wondering if that's the best way to explain some of this material, because it is so honest and all on the record."
New York Times national political correspondent Lisa Lerer cut in to say what was so unusual is that Wiles "is a deeply savvy operator."
"This is someone who has been around politics for a really long time, and you would think that she's someone that knows," said Lerer.
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