As we already reported on October 7, this story is now continuing. Once again, a trail from close to the White House leads to a Moscow-aligned regime in the Balkans. Katie Wiles, the daughter of Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, works for a lobbying firm that represents Republika Srpska for $35,000 a month, a self-governing entity in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She was last there in August.
A photo circulated by conservative activist Evi Kokalari shows the younger Wiles holding a rifle, next to a man identified as Željko Budimir, the interior minister of Republika Srpska. In her own online story, the photo carried the line “mostly work + some serious fun!”. A young woman poses with a gun next to a minister and captions it like a vacation snapshot. Nobody here draws a line between work and pleasure anymore, and that is the message. What once would have been a scandal now drifts through the internet as a casual photo.
Continental Strategy, her employer, confirmed the August trip but said she had not influenced the U.S. government on behalf of the entity. She would not have to. Her mother runs the president’s office. By Thursday afternoon, Wiles’ page on the firm’s website was no longer available. The quiet deletion speaks louder than the explanation.
The weight of this story lies in her mother’s office. A chief of staff decides who gets through to the president and who does not. When someone from the same household is taking money from a government seeking exactly that kind of access, the firewall between private income and public office runs straight through a family. Firewalls that run through families rarely hold. What the firm books as a contract is, for the regime, an investment in the right address.
The story hits the administration in an awkward week. Chris LaCivita and James Blair, close Trump advisers, had traveled to the Balkans in the middle of the campaign to advise a nationalist-led government there. Both are said to have received several hundred thousand dollars each for it. Both men are connected to Susie Wiles, and even the chief of staff known in Washington as “the Ice-Cold One” reportedly could not protect them from the White House’s anger. Trump distanced himself and called Blair and LaCivita “outside advisers.” The chief of staff’s own child is harder to explain away as an outsider. You can fire an adviser. You cannot fire a daughter.
Every time, the White House response sounds the same: we have nothing to do with these people, they act from the outside and on their own account. The only problem is that the outsiders keep coming, with suspicious regularity, from the innermost circle. And the timing speaks for itself, because while the midterms are getting closer back home, the president’s people are taking time to help a Moscow-aligned government with its election. Foreign powers rent their influence now, and they rent the right people.
A regime rarely looks for a path to power through the front door. It goes through families and old loyalties, this time through a daughter who just happens to work for its cause and just happens to have the right mother. 3 names in a matter of weeks, and they all end at the same door. When those who run a president’s office are making money off Moscow’s viceroy, the question is no longer whether the Kremlin has reached Washington. It is how comfortable it already is there.
While Trump Fights for Congress, His Advisers Are Making Hundreds of Thousands Working for Putin’s Friends in the Balkans
Former Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik, head of the SNSD and still the most powerful politician in Republika Srpska, wearing a Trump MAGA cap in Banja Luka
Donald Trump is traveling across the United States trying to save Republican control of Congress in the midterm elections. Meanwhile, two men from his closest political team were in the Balkans. James Blair and Chris LaCivita, who are running a multimillion-dollar congressional advertising campaign for Trump’s political operation, advised the government of Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina ahead of Sunday’s election. Both are said to have been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each, through a Washington law firm. Officially, they worked for the government, not Milorad Dodik’s nationalist party. In practice, that distinction is hard to draw there: Dodik’s party has controlled the government for years and has brought Republika Srpska closely into Moscow’s orbit.
After his party’s decisive election victory on Sunday, Dodik thanked Vladimir Putin for his support and said at the same time that Trump’s 2024 victory had created a more favorable political environment for him. His people have long campaigned on Christian conservative politics, oppose joining the European Union and maintain ties to Trump’s circle. Before the election, they also warned about new voting machines, similar to the devices that Trump and his allies continue to falsely blame for his 2020 defeat. There were delays and technical problems on Sunday, but Dodik’s party still won decisively. Blair and LaCivita returned to the United States on Monday. MAGA Inc. said they had continued working on Trump’s midterm campaign during the trip. Blair runs the political action committee, which had more than $415 million on hand at the end of August, and LaCivita is a senior adviser there.
Question: Did you talk to James Blair and Chris LaCivita about their potential conflicts of interest?
TRUMP: They don’t have a conflict because they are independent people. I assume they have a lot of clients. I don’t know who their clients are.
The two are part of a much bigger business. Since the beginning of 2025, the government of Republika Srpska has paid more than $4 million to lobbyists and political advisers with ties to Trump and the Republican Party. Late last year, the Trump administration lifted sanctions on Dodik, his family and his aides. Those sanctions had originally been imposed because Dodik undermined the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war in Bosnia in 1995. A Bosnian court later convicted him of defying the international authority overseeing that agreement, he lost the presidency and is barred from holding public office. Politically, however, he remained the dominant man in his party.
Trump’s family and others in his circle had already been there as well. Donald Trump Jr. visited Republika Srpska in April as a guest of Dodik’s son. Željka Cvijanović, a member of Dodik’s party, met Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles at the White House in September. Lobbyist Alex Garcia, once part of Trump’s campaign team, receives $35,000 a month to represent Republika Srpska. Former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, whose firm has received $1.325 million from Banja Luka since March, describes the political value of that relationship pretty openly: People in Serbia and Republika Srpska love Trump. Anyone who shows up there as a Trump friend has a huge advantage. And Trump’s people figured out long ago that there is good money to be made from it too.
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