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Katie Wiles, daughter of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, is a partner at Continental Strategy, a lobbying firm that has registered to lobby on behalf of Republika Srpska, a pro-Russian entity in Bosnia. She traveled there in August for business related to a U.S. company conducting a feasibility study, but has not directly lobbied the U.S. government regarding the region.
Background on Katie Wiles
Katie Wiles is the daughter of Susie Wiles, who serves as White House Chief of Staff. Katie is a partner at Continental Strategy, a political lobbying firm based in Washington, D.C.
Lobbying Activities
Connection to Republika Srpska
- Firm Registration: Continental Strategy has registered to lobby on behalf of Republika Srpska, a semi-autonomous region in Bosnia known for its pro-Russian leadership.
- Trip to Bosnia: In August 2026, Katie Wiles traveled to Republika Srpska for two days. This trip was related to a U.S.-based company conducting a feasibility study in the region.
Clarifications on Lobbying
- No Direct Lobbying: Wiles has not directly lobbied the U.S. government regarding Republika Srpska. A spokesperson for her firm confirmed that she has not spoken with any U.S. government officials about the region.
- Work Context: The trip was described as business-related, and Wiles has provided strategic communications support to the U.S. company involved for over two years.
Implications and Controversies
The connections between Katie Wiles and the pro-Russian entity have raised questions about potential links between the Trump administration and foreign lobbying efforts. However, the White House has stated that Susie Wiles does not discuss work matters with her daughters, aiming to distance her from Katie's professional activities.
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beast
Updated Oct 09, 2026 10:46AM EDT—Published Oct 09, 2026
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ daughter has been pictured at a Bosnian gun range beside an ally of Vladimir Putin.
Katie Wiles traveled to the semi-autonomous region of Republika Srpska, where she met with interior minister Željko Budimir, according to an image shared by conservative Albanian-American activist Evi Kokalari and verified by CBS News.
The image, in which Wiles holds a rifle, appears to be a screenshot of one of Wiles’ Instagram Stories. Wiles captioned it “mostly work + some serious fun!” and added the Republika Srpska handle. Kokalari claimed the picture was taken in August.
Katie Wiles holds a rifle next to Željko Budimir, the interior minister of the semi-autonomous Republika Srpska administration.
@evikokalari/X
Budimir (left) and Dodik (second from left) attend a meeting with Putin at the Kremlin in April 2025.
In December 2025, Putin awarded Budimir the Pushkin Medal for strengthening ties between Serbs and Russians. The two had previously met at the Kremlin that April.
Republika Srpska is led by 67-year-old Milorad Dodik, the region’s former president. Though removed from office last year for failing to adhere to Bosnia’s 1995 peace accords, Dodik retains considerable influence. He has formed a close connection to Russian dictator Putin, and, according to foreign agent registration (FARA) filings seen by CBS, paid U.S.-based lobbying firms to rub elbows with Trump associates.
Two top outside advisers to Trump, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, visited Bosnia and Herzegovina last week to help Dodik’s party campaign, the New York Times reported
Trump Humiliates MAGA Aides Busted Helping Pro-Putin Regime
Katie Wiles is a partner at D.C.-based political lobbying firm Continental Strategy, which earlier this year registered to lobby for the region she visited. A spokesperson told CBS that Wiles spent two days in Republika Srpska in mid-August “with a U.S.-based company who was invited to do a feasibility study in the region.”
“Wiles provides strategic communications support to this U.S. company and has done so for over two years,” the spokesperson added. “Wiles has not spoken with any United States Government official regarding Srpska.”
Putin meets with Dodik at the Kremlin in April, 2025.
The company’s name is unclear. Continental Strategies did not immediately respond to CBS or the Daily Beast when asked
Katie Wiles’ bio on the firm’s site appears to have been taken down.
A White House official told the Daily Beast that Susie Wiles, 69, “does not discuss work matters with her daughters.” Wiles’ other daughter, Caroline, is also a consultant. Caroline worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign and transition team, and was aiming to land a role in the White House until she reportedly failed an FBI background check, forcing her to find another job in the Trump administration.The White House says Susie Wiles does not discuss work matters with her two daughters, who are in the consulting business.
Despite the White House’s claim that Susie and Katie Wiles don’t disclose their work to each other, they have interacted with similar types of people from the Balkans.
Last month, according to CBS, Susie Wiles met with Dodik ally Željka Cvijanović, a former president of Republika Srpska and a current member of the three-person presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Katie Wiles did not set it up, a White House official told the network. Instead, it was Alejandro Garcia, who is also a partner at Continental Strategies.
The firm’s spokesperson told CBS that Garcia, a former deputy political director for Trump’s 2024 campaign, attended election day in Bosnia—Oct. 4—“but no other member of the team was present.”
“Garcia is the sole person who has interacted with the United States government regarding Srpska, and his contacts have all been meticulously tracked to be reported in accordance with FARA requirements,” the spokesperson said.
Trump Humiliates MAGA Aides Busted Helping Pro-Putin Regime
Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s decision to lift sanctions against Dodik has drawn scrutiny. House Democrats say the administration did so to help AAFS Infrastructure & Energy, a U.S.-incorporated company run by Joseph Flynn, the brother of Trump ally Michael Flynn, and Jesse Binnall, a former personal attorney to Trump. After the sanctions were removed, Dodik’s party, which had opposed the company’s proposed gas pipeline in the region, changed course and passed legislation clearing the way for the over $1.5 billion project.
A White House official told CBS that the administration lifted sanctions to prevent regional instability.
“This is yet another example of President Trump’s pragmatic, farseeing foreign policy that has prevented disasters on perennial issues that his predecessors so often stumbled into,” they said.
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Yet another person with close ties to Donald Trump’s White House has been linked to a pro-Russia Balkan regime.
Katie Wiles, daughter of Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, works for a political lobbying firm that has a $35,000-per-month contract to represent a small self-governing territory in Bosnia and Herzegovina known as Republika Srpska. She traveled there as recently as August.
A photograph circulated by Evi Kokalari, a conservative Albanian American activist, showed the younger Wiles wielding a rifle and standing next to a man that CBS News identified as Željko Budimir, the interior minister of Republika Srpska. The image appeared to have been initially posted to Wiles’s Instagram story with the caption “mostly work + some serious fun!”
Continental Strategy, Wiles’s employer, confirmed to CBS that she traveled to Republika Srpska in August, but said she has not lobbied the U.S. government on its behalf. Yeah, she probably wouldn’t have to do much—her mom would do it for her. As of Thursday afternoon, Wiles’s page on her company’s website was inaccessible.
This news comes as MAGA world has turned its ire on two of the president’s closest advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, who took time out of their presumably busy pre-midterm elections schedules to travel to the Balkans to assist in that territory’s elections. The two men were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each to provide counsel on voting issues to the government, which is led by far-right nationalists. Republika Srpska is closely aligned with Russian President Vladimir Putin and has made a considerable effort to make inroads with Trump and his allies.
Both LaCivita and Blair are connected to Susie Wiles—but even the famed “ice maiden” reportedly couldn’t protect them from the White House’s ire. Trump tried to distance himself from his beloved strategists, claiming that Blair and LaCivita were “outside consultants,” but his chief of staff’s child may be harder to disown.
Read more about Trump’s allies:
“Livid”: Trump Team Loses It Over Advisers Helping Russia-Linked Group
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October 8, 2026
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free press
Drain the Swamp? MAGA Lobbyists Say They’re ‘Drinking from a Fire Hose.’
(Illustration by The Free Press)
Once upon a time, Donald Trump promised to clean up Washington. But for the swampiest industry of all, business is booming.
05.05.25 —U.S. Politics
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Since 2016, Donald Trump has promised his supporters that he will 
”—the president’s catchall pledge to end corruption in Washington. But as his second administration gets busy remaking the federal government, business is good for one of D.C.’s most lucrative—and “swampiest”—lines of work: lobbying. And for those lobbyists enmeshed in MAGA World, business has never been better.
One of the biggest winners is Jeff Miller, a veteran Republican lobbyist who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in donations for Trump and the GOP. His phone has been ringing off the hook ever since election night, which he spent in the grand ballroom of Mar-a-Lago, a few tables away from the incoming president, along with J.D. Vance and Elon Musk.
“We went all-in to make sure President Trump had the resources to win, and we’ve been drinking from a fire hose ever since,” he told The Free Press.
Miller’s firm, Miller Strategies, posted at least $8.5 million in lobbying revenue in the first quarter of 2025—a 190 percent increase from its $2.9 million haul at the same time last year.
His is just one of the lobbying firms with close ties to Trump that cashed in on their influence between January and March, the period captured in the latest lobbying disclosures. They illustrate how, in Trump’s Washington, the “swamp” is far from drained.
Along with other close allies of Trump, Miller is a founding member of a new, invite-only MAGA moguls club in Georgetown called Executive Branch. The club costs $500,000 to join and already has a waitlist. Its co-founders include Donald Trump Jr.; Alex Witkoff and Zach Witkoff, the sons of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East; and Omeed Malik, a megadonor who was a seed investor in Tucker Carlson’s new media venture.
Miller Strategies, based in Washington, D.C., is lobbying on behalf of powerhouse companies like Zoom, NASDAQ, Apple, Sam Altman’s OpenAI, and Comcast. In March, it signed Cornell University, which, along with other elite colleges, has been roped into Trump’s investigations into alleged racial discrimination and antisemitism on their campuses.
Another new Miller client is Palantir, a data software company that was awarded a $30 million contract from the Trump administration to assist in the government’s deportation efforts.
“Despite all the rhetoric about ‘draining the swamp,’ there remains a thriving industry of lobbying firms who will help those willing to pay for access in Washington, D.C.,” said Michael Beckel, the senior research director for Issue One, a nonpartisan money-in-politics watchdog group.
It’s an echo of the good times that had been enjoyed by Democratic lobbyists with close ties to the Biden White House. For instance, Jeff Ricchetti, the brother of then–White House counselor Steve Ricchetti, saw his lobbying business boom during the Biden years: His lobbying revenues increased fivefold in the first three months of Biden’s presidency. Thus it has always been: When a Republican is in office, firms tied to the GOP thrive; when Democrats are in, the Democratic lobbying firms do well.
Except that Trump has long promised to clean up Washington. On the campaign trail in 2016 he committed to “a complete ban on foreign lobbyists raising money for American elections.” But that pledge has long been forgotten. In the 2024 election, lobbyists registered as agents of foreign governments helped raise more than $10 million for Trump, according to research by Issue One.
Miller was listed in that report because of his work for the Japanese government, his firm’s only foreign client. Miller refuses to sign Chinese clients—“even the ones who say things like, ‘Oh, we just moved into Singapore,’ or wherever,” Miller told The Free Press.
Other firms aren’t so picky.
Ballard Partners, the firm of Republican superlobbyist and Trump fundraiser Brian Ballard, has signed more than 130 clients since Trump’s victory last November. It’s a staggering number given that the firm had signed a total of 178 between 2021 and 2024. White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Attorney General Pam Bondi both previously worked at the firm.
With 10 offices around the world, including in Istanbul, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh, Ballard posted at least $14 million in lobbying revenue in the first quarter of 2025. That’s triple its $4.2 million haul during the first quarter of 2024.
One new client of Ballard’s is Pirelli, an Italian tire manufacturer that the firm signed one month before Trump’s inauguration. Pirelli’s largest shareholder, with a 37 percent stake, is a Chinese state-owned company called Sinochem. In 2021, Sinochem merged with ChemChina, a company identified by the U.S. Department of Defense as an arm of the Chinese military. Pirelli has paid Ballard at least $120,000 since that December lobbying registration, filings show.
Among Ballard’s controversial clients, perhaps the most high-profile is TikTok. Trump delivered a major win for Ballard and TikTok on his first day in office, when he signed an executive order that extended a congressionally mandated deadline for a sale of the popular social media platform by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance.
Foreign ties are nothing new for Ballard. Before Bondi was attorney general, she worked as a lobbyist at Ballard for the gas-rich country of Qatar, which has long harbored the leaders of Hamas. Bondi also lobbied for iGas USA—a Florida-based company that received a large investment from a Chinese state-owned enterprise. Until July of last year, Brian Ballard and his partner, John O’Hanlon, lobbied for iGas USA. Ballard Partners declined to comment.
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Another firm flexing its influence early on in Trump’s Washington is Florida-based Continental Strategy. It was founded in 2021 by former Trump adviser Carlos Trujillo and employs both Katie Wiles, the daughter of the White House chief of staff, and Alberto Martinez, who served as a chief of staff in the Senate to now–Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Lobbying disclosures show that Continental netted $3.6 million in the first quarter of 2025, compared to revenue of $127,500 for the same period last year. The firm has added at least 50 clients since Trump’s victory.
It’s hardly a surprise that the firm is in Trump’s good graces. One insider told The Free Press that Trujillo and his colleagues helped raise $15 million for Trump’s inauguration. Trujillo did not dispute the figure.
“We didn’t just show up in Trump World two months ago,” Trujillo told The Free Press—saying that his relationships “make it easy to navigate” Washington.
As business booms for Continental, it is already delivering wins for some clients—with Trump’s blessing. The firm helped broker a deal for a consortium led by BlackRock—that included Continental’s client, the Swiss-based Mediterranean Shipping Company—to pay $23 billion for ports in Panama and across the world. According to a person familiar with the lobbying push, Trujillo’s firm privately secured support from Trump and previewed the deal to federal officials. The president hailed the deal in his March speech to Congress, calling it a step toward “reclaiming” the Panama Canal, a top priority of his administration.
Continental has established an in-house policy of working only with foreign clients that it sees as aligned with American interests, according to two people familiar with the firm.
Then there’s Mercury Public Affairs, where now–White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles worked as a lobbyist until 2024. Former Trump campaign adviser Bryan Lanza is a partner at the firm, where revenue climbed to $5.2 million in the first quarter of 2025—doubling since the last quarter of 2024. It registered on behalf of around 70 clients in 2024 and 2025, according to lobbying filings.
“The calls started coming in last summer, before Biden dropped out,” said one person familiar with Mercury’s booming operation.
After the election, Lanza registered to lobby for the Chinese electronics giant Xiaomi, which was placed on a Pentagon blacklist during Trump’s first term over alleged Chinese military ties. (The designation was later removed under Biden.)
Mercury clients have included Qatar, the Turkish government, a Chinese surveillance firm linked to China’s persecution of the Uyghurs, and a Chinese solar panel manufacturer called JinkoSolar that saw its Florida factory raided in 2023 after reports the company was linked to forced labor in China.
Mercury has hauled in hundreds of thousands of dollars since 2020 to lobby for China’s Alibaba Group and millions of dollars from Gotion—an electric vehicle battery manufacturer and subsidiary of a Chinese company that pledged in 2022 group documents to “carry out” activities for the Chinese Communist Party. Multiple reports in 2020 linked Alibaba Group to China’s surveillance of Uyghur Muslims. An early client for Lanza upon his joining in 2017 was ZTE, a Chinese telecommunications giant for which Mercury said its work “may inure to the benefit of the People’s Republic of China,” Justice Department filings show.
“As long as evil political regimes like the Chinese Communist Party and the companies they control have willing representatives in Washington, the ‘swamp’ is never going to be fully drained,” said Michael Sobolik, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute who specializes in U.S.-China relations.
There are, however, limits to how much foreign baggage lawmakers are willing to tolerate.
:{“The problem with Mercury is that so many of their clients are total shitbags,” said one senior Republican congressional staffer, “so they have trouble getting meetings.”
Drain the Swamp? MAGA Lobbyists Say They’re ‘Drinking from a Fire Hose.’}:
endit?
... “so they have trouble getting meetings.”}:
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os 2023
| Issue | Number of Reports | Number of Lobbyists | Number of Clients |
|---|---|---|---|
| Foreign Relations | 8 | 1 | 2 |
| Banking | 4 | 1 | 1 |
| Tobacco | 1 | 0 | 1 |
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an 12 24
One of the campaign promises President-elect Donald Trump made ahead of his victory over Vice President Kamala Harris last month was to carry out the "the largest domestic deportation operation in American history."
According to a Sunday, December 22 Wall Street Journal report, the private prison industry is preparing to benefit greatly from the move — if Trump is able to accomplish it.
"Private prisons and other companies that provide detention services are getting ready to cash in on" the initiative, which "includes scouring for as many detention beds as possible in their networks of facilities, and scouting sites for new buildings to house migrants," the WSJ reports.
READ MORE:**Top Trump donors who funded anti-migrant 'invasion' ad allegedly hiring undocumented migrants**
Per the report, George Zoley, who serves as executive chairman of the private prison company, GEO group, told investors soon after the election, "This is, to us, an unprecedented opportunity."
The company, the WSJ notes, "which currently houses about 40% of ICE detainees, is looking at a potential doubling of all its services, Zoley said on the call."
GEO Chief Executive Officer Wayne Calabrese told the newspaper, "We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands, or even several millions, of individuals."
WSJ reports:
*CoreCivic, the other major player in ICE detention centers, had a similar message for investors after the election. The company believes it could quickly bring its detention capacity to 25,000 beds by bringing unused ones online, including at a facility previously used to hold families in Dilley, Texas, CEO Damon Hininger said in an interview. The Biden administration chose to close the site earlier this year, but CoreCivic kept it in 'warm status,' Hininger said.
READ MORE:['Acknowledging reality': Fed chair says Trump agenda creating 'uncertainty around inflation'
Hininger, according to WSJ, said "in addition to identifying already-existing beds it could open, CoreCivic is also exploring adding new buildings or temporary facilities on land it already owns."
WSJ also notes, "To bolster its ties to the incoming administration, GEO Group recently hired a Trump-connected lobbying firm called Continental Strategy LLC, according to federal lobbying disclosures. The Florida firm is run by Carlos Trujillo, who advised Trump on Latino voters and immigration issues during the campaign. It also employs Katie Wiles, daughter of Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles."
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