Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former adviser and aide to First Lady Melania Trump and a top Trump inauguration organizer, is reacting to statements from the White House that she was fired from her position as an unpaid adviser to Mrs. Trump.
The New York Times reported that Winston Wolkoff is particularly angry about the suggestion that she was forced out of her position with Melania Trump because of reports that she “profited excessively” from her position as an organizer for Trump inaugural events.
A year after she left her post at the White House, she is commenting on her departure and the things that are being said about her.
“Was I fired? No. Did I personally receive $26 million or $1.6 million? No. Was I thrown under the bus? Yes.”
Lawyers for Winston Wolkoff recently told Trump officials that she had been cooperating with federal prosecutors in New York for the last year who are investigating potential fraud in the inauguration committee’s spending and fundraising.
In her parting of the ways with the White House, she has started publicly talking about feeling “mistreated by Mr. Trump, his family and his advisers” and she has the receipts to back up her assertions.
Stephanie Winston Wolkoff was previously best known as a socialite and organizer of the Met Gala. She was brought on board the inaugural committee after Donald Trump’s surprise victory. Winston Wolkoff and her company WIS worked with a variety of contractors to put together a variety of events, often using subcontractors when needed.
After she left the White House, she started reading articles where senior officials were quoted as saying “she had been ousted from her job,” because Donald and Melania Trump were angry because of excessive spending and complaints that she was hard to work with.
Yet in her private communications with deputy White House counsel, Stefan Passantino, Winston Wolkoff has it in writing that she did nothing wrong, and the White House was just “terminating all types of gratuitous service agreements.”
Passantino told her in writing that it had nothing to do with her and her performance.
“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 the inaugural spending. So this is not personal.”
Passantino, who has now left the White House himself declined to comment on the matter, only to say that the White House ended Ms. Winston Wolkoff’s contract, and he wishes her well.
