Trump Has Bizarre Retort to Chief of Staff’s Phone Hack
The president brushed off reports that his top aide’s devices had been hacked.
President Donald Trump has offered an outlandish rebuttal to reports that one of his top officials at the White House was hacked.
A reporter asked the president about a report from the Wall Street Journal that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles had not only had her devices hacked, but that the hackers used her phone to send messages and place calls under her name.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles was targeted by an impersonator plot, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
“Nobody can impersonate Susie,” Trump shot back. “There’s only one Susie. There’s only one.”
He added in the exchange Friday evening that he considers his chief of staff “an amazing woman” and that he has every confidence “she can handle it.”
The Trump administration has been plagued by concerns about information security following the Signalgate controversy in March, in which top security officials discussed plans to bomb Yemen in a chat with a journalist.
KENT NISHIMURA/Kent Nishimura/Reuters
The White House has responded to the Journal report by insisting that the Trump administration “takes the security of all staff very seriously, and this matter continues to be investigated.”
The incident nevertheless comes hot on the heels of the Signalgate scandal earlier in March, in which The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a group chat used by top members of the Trump administration to discuss sensitive details of imminent missile strikes against Yemen.
Those officials included Vice President JD Vance, Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and National Intelligence Chief Tulsi Gabbard, among others.
The incident sent shockwaves across Washington, DC, prompting alarm over the apparent severity of informational vulnerabilities at the White House.
Those concerns have been further exacerbated in the weeks since following repeated reports into Hegseth’s prolific use of the messaging platform, with the Defence Secretary reportedly even bypassing Pentagon security protocols in order to install the app on his computer.
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