White House denies Trump chief Susie Wiles’ phone was hacked again after UK Prime Minister falls victim to hoax
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-susie-wiles-phone-hack-b3034303.html
White House denies Trump chief Susie Wiles’ phone was hacked again after UK Prime Minister falls victim to hoax
Denial comes after Prime Minister Andy Burnham was taken in by a hoaxer who claimed to be Wiles in a text exchange
The White House was forced to deny on Monday that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ phone was hacked a second time after it emerged that British Prime Minister Andy Burnham received texts from a person he thought was President Donald Trump’s top aide.
Politico first reported that Burnham had briefly “engaged” with text messages purporting to be from Wiles, a veteran Florida political operative who is the first woman to serve as White House chief of staff, before becoming concerned that the messages in question were not actually from Wiles.
The prime minister’s office said the “few messages” exchanged were “of no significance” and described the incident as a “national security matter” on which there would be no further comment.
But the incident was concerning enough that the British government contacted the White House about it through their embassy in Washington over fears that Wiles’ phone had been breached as it was a year ago, when business people and political figures began receiving texts from her that she had not actually sent.
Still, a White House official told The Independent the incident with Burnham is not related to that prior security breach.
“This incident had nothing to do with the Chief of Staff’s devices being hacked,” the official said.
The transatlantic contretemps over the inauthentic messages comes more than a year after the FBI and White House launched a probe into how a slew of political and business bigwigs began receiving texts and calls from someone purporting to be Wiles — after which she reportedly told people her phone had been breached.
According to The Wall Street Journal, FBI officials told the White House they did not believe a foreign adversary was to blame for the incidents.
Burnham is not the first British or American official to fall victim to a high-profile hoax in recent years.
In 2024, Lord David Cameron — then the British Foreign Minister — was duped by a hoaxer who had tricked him into texting and getting on the phone with someone pretending to be ex-Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko.
And last year, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was impersonated by an individual who used AI to ape his voice and written communications in a series of voice and text messages to what The Washington Post described as “three foreign ministers, a U.S. governor, and a U.S. member of Congress.”
Unlike the incident with Burnham and Wiles, the Post said a State Department cable attributed the Rubio hoaxes to an actor who had the “goal of gaining access to information or accounts.”
Trump administration officials frequently flout record-keeping laws and long-established security practices by using their personal devices to conduct government business, often using the Signal encrypted messaging app.
Michael Waltz, the ex-Florida congressman who currently serves as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, was sacked from his prior position as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser after he inadvertently included The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg in a signal chat in which he, Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top administration officials discussed plans for airstrikes on Houthi rebels in Yemen last year.
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