Nihad Zunić of Klix.ba broke the Katie Wiles tapes. On Narativ Live Monday, Zev Shalev asked him the questions the tapes raise, starting with whether Milorad Dodik is a Russian puppet.
Zunić: "I think if you Google Russian puppet, I think he would come up first, his picture." Dodik met Putin after the full invasion of Ukraine, still calls it a "special military operation," and blocks full Bosnian sanctions on Russia. Wiles' firm, Continental Strategy, takes $35,000 a month from his Republika Srpska.
Protect her from what? On the tape, from an early October meeting of Continental Strategy partners and staff, Wiles tells the room: "I'm trusting you guys to protect me. When I get this draft over to you, it goes nowhere without you guys scrubbing the metadata on this, because somebody will look for who made the edit." Zunić's sources say the draft was the victory speech Dodik read after his party, SNSD, won Bosnia's elections. Nobody doing legal work, Zunić said, needs a room to protect her.
How would she know? Wiles says the president will come back from the summit "happier" or "madder than a damn horse fly," and the client should have "that tweet sort of ready." Zunić's sources identify the tweet as the post by Željka Cvijanović, the Serb member of Bosnia's presidency, that screenshotted Trump's Truth Social announcement of the diesel deal with Russia. It went up minutes after the announcement, on talks few knew of. Susie Wiles has denied sharing anything with her daughter. If the information came from her, the denial covers a leak from the chief of staff's office.
The last question was why Washington would help undo Dayton, which Zunić called one of America's biggest foreign policy successes, the agreement that has kept the peace since 1995. Republika Srpska's taxpayers paid an estimated $9 million for lobbying in Washington, and Dodik won sanctions relief for himself, his family and his associates. Christian Schmidt, the international High Representative whose law Dodik was convicted of defying, resigned in May under American pressure. One lobbying contract sought U.S. approval for the entity's secession. Bosnia cannot answer him in Washington: Dodik's veto blocks state money for lobbying.
Zunić held to what he can prove. He does not know whether the tweet was Katie Wiles' idea. If his sources are right, he said, she did work that requires registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, and used her mother's post to get better information for a client.
The network around Dodik runs through Trump's world: Susie Wiles, her deputy James Blair, Chris LaCivita, Rod Blagojevich, Michael Flynn, Rudy Giuliani and Paolo Zampoli. Zampoli was fired weeks ago. Susie Wiles left this morning. The file goes to Rep. Robert Garcia, the incoming Oversight chairman.
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