White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and her daughter have separately met with senior figures from Bosnia’s pro-Russian Serb nationalist leadership in recent weeks, according to photos circulating online this week.
Photos documenting the Wiles’ meetings with members of the Republika Srpska, the autonomous entity that makes half of Bosnia and Herzegovina, surfaced after President Donald Trump distanced himself from two longtime political advisers over their travels to the region to advise its government on election-related issues.
Wiles met Željka Cvijanović, a close ally of longtime Bosnian Serb leader Milorad Dodik, at the White House on Sept. 21. Cvijanović posted a photo of the meeting on Instagram at the time, saying the two discussed “the situation in BiH and the region” and looked forward to continued cooperation.
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Cvijanović won another term Sunday as the Serb member of Bosnia’s three-member presidency, and is a senior member of the SNSD, the Serb nationalist party that dominates Republika Srpska and maintains close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Katie Wiles traveled to Republika Srpska in August and was photographed holding a rifle alongside the region’s interior minister, Željko Budimir, CBS News reported Thursday after verifying the image and its location.
Katie Wiles is a partner at Continental Strategy, a Washington lobbying firm that registered earlier this year to represent the Republika Srpska government. The firm told CBS that her two-day trip was for a separate U.S. client conducting a feasibility study and that she has not spoken with U.S. government officials about Republika Srpska.
A White House official sought to distance Susie Wiles from her daughter’s lobbying work, telling CBS News that “Susie does not discuss work matters with her daughters.”
The White House meeting between Susie Wiles and Cvijanović was arranged by Alex Garcia, another Continental Strategy partner who is registered to work for Republika Srpska.
Cvijanović said she and Wiles had agreed to continue talks within about a month to six weeks after their September meeting, and that she expected the discussions to lead to “concrete activities,” according to Republika Srpska’s government-linked news agency SRNA.
Trump distanced himself Wednesday from political advisers Chris LaCivita and James Blair and said he would “terminate them” if their outside work posed a conflict, after The New York Times reported that the two had traveled to Republika Srpska to advise its government on voting-related issues ahead of Oct. 4 election.
Republika Srpska has spent heavily on Washington lobbyists as its leaders have sought closer ties with the Trump administration. The administration last year lifted sanctions on Dodik and several of his allies that had been imposed over his efforts to undermine Bosnia’s U.S.-brokered postwar political order.
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