BUSTED: Emails reveal Melania friend who planned inauguration ripped officials over sketchy money pr
Source: rawstory.com
BUSTED: Emails reveal Melania friend who planned inauguration ripped officials over sketchy money practices
A friend of Melania Trump's who planned the president's inauguration flagged multiple financial and conflict of interest issues when working on the events -- and was ignored.
Vanity Fair's Emily Jane Fox reported Thursday that Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former Vogue staffer and New York City event planner, was brought on to plan Donald Trump's inauguration just days after he was elected president. She had no idea what was in store for her.
According to people familiar with recordings made by former Trump "fixer" Michael Cohen, Wolkoff can be heard telling the president's longtime attorney during conversations last summer that she had many concerns with the process that unfolded.
Those recordings, Cohen told the event planner, were later seized by the FBI -- and led in part to the SDNY's investigation into the inauguration that Wolkoff is now involved in.
Read more: https://www.rawstory.com/2019/02/busted-emails-reveal-melania-friend-planned-inauguration-ripped-officials-sketchy-money-practices
Here's an excerpt from the Vanity Fair article this summarizes: "I Am Disgusted": Behind the Scenes of Trump's Increasingly Scrutinized $107 Million Inauguration
The two women had met years earlier, when Wolkoff helped produce the Metropolitan Museum's Costume Institute Benefit. (Anna Wintour, who hosts the gala, is editor-in-chief of Vogue and the artistic director of Cond Nast, Vanity Fair's parent company.) Over the years, Wolkoff would become a member of Melania's small inner circle. After Trump's surprise electoral-college victory, she went on to help the First Lady in Washington, serving as a senior adviser to her official governmental office on matters large and small. Wolkoff helped facilitate Melania's transition to the White House, and advised her on policy platforms, East Wing dcor, and her overall messaging.
The two were close enough that Wolkoff could openly express divergent views. According to sources familiar with the conversations, Wolkoff told Melania and East Wing staffers that the name for her anti-bullying initiative, "Be Best," sounded illiterate. (The First Lady, according to these sources, feared that an alternative, "Children First," was too similar to her husband's "America First" branding.) They also disagreed about the infamous "I Really Don't Care, Do U?" jacket that the First Lady wore to the U.S.-Mexico border. (Melania, according to these sources, thought the trip would not get attention without such a brazen fashion gesture. In an interview with ABC News in October, she said that she wore the jacket for the media and people who were criticizing her, and wondered aloud whether the trip would have received similar attention without it.) But the two women remained close, nevertheless. On trips to D.C., Wolkoff would sometimes spend the night in the White House residence; other times, she would book a room in the Trump International Hotel down Pennsylvania Avenue. According to e-mail exchanges from the time, she was given the friends and family rate of $345 a night, and told to submit receipts to Reince Priebus.
Cohen and Wolkoff also had something else in common: they both endured very public splits from the Trumps. Cohen, of course, went from being one of the president's closest confidants to one of his most bitter and dangerous adversaries. Wolkoff's separation was less public, but is increasingly newsworthy. Through her company, WIS Media Partners, Wolkoff oversaw Trump's sprawling week-long inaugural festivities--she sourced and managed third-party vendors, entertainers, and broadcasters, and oversaw the themes and production of all the concerts, dinners, balls, and programming. She worked in close proximity to the Trump family and inaugural chair Tom Barrack, a billionaire private-equity real-estate investor who had been a close friend of the president for years. And yet a year after the swearing-in ceremony, Wolkoff left the White House amid an uncomfortable public-relations crisis regarding the president's inaugural committee.
= new reply since forum marked as read
& recommend!!
of what this family is capable of and every day I realize we’re not even close to how far they have and will go. On a lighter note...Be Best does, in fact, sound illiterate. If the shoe fits...
Lock her up! 
Melania has a friend?!? 
