A former adviser to first lady Melania Trump who served on the president’s White House transition team disputed the White House’s account of why her business with the Trump administration ended.
The New York Times reported Tuesday that Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a New York socialite and friend of the first lady’s who served as a leading organizer for events hosted by President Trump’s inaugural committee in 2017, said she was “thrown under the bus” by the Trump administration after the inaugural committee’s spending came under scrutiny last year.
{mosads}Winston Wolkoff was publicly dismissed in February of 2018 after serving as an unpaid adviser to the first lady for more than a year following President Trump’s inauguration, but Winston Wolkoff told the Times that her contract with the administration ended after the White House counsel decided to end all business arrangements with contractors like her.
Privately, the Times reported, Winston Wolkoff was assured that she had done nothing wrong. “You didn’t do anything wrong, and there’s nothing wrong with this kind of contract, and I don’t want you to think that this has anything to do with [inauguration spending],” she said a White House deputy counsel, Stefan Passantino, told her in 2018.
“So this is not personal,” Passantino added, according to Winston Wolkoff.
Publicly, she added, “a decision was made to state publicly that I had been ‘severed.’ That was not fair or accurate.”
The decision was made, she argued, because the White House was seeking to cut down on negative news stories related to the inaugural committee, which is under investigation by the Southern District of New York for its spending and record levels of fundraising.
Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s spokeswoman, “informed [Winston Wolkoff] that she had consulted with others within the White House and it was decided that ‘this messaging is the best way to go in order to minimize the negative press stories of today and protect [the White House],’ ” she claimed.
“Was I fired? No,” Winston Wolkoff told the Times. “Did I personally receive $26 million or $1.6 million? No. Was I thrown under the bus? Yes.”
Grisham disputed the former aide’s characterization of events in a statement to the newspaper.
“The White House ended Mrs. Wolkoff’s contract, period,” the first lady’s spokeswoman told the Times, adding: “I’m not going to waste my time arguing the semantics of what the word ‘severed’ means simply because someone decided to run to the media with hurt feelings and a bruised ego. As stated more than a year ago, I wish Mrs. Wolkoff well.”
It was reported in February that the inaugural committee had at least once moved forward with plans to use event space at the Trump International Hotel that charged $175,000 per day to use despite Winston Wolkoff’s warnings that such a cost would be subject to negative public attention.
“Please take into consideration that when this is audited it will become public knowledge,” she wrote in a memo, according to a ProPublica investigation.