A photo of Katie Wiles, the daughter of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, recently surfaced online showing her in an unexpected place: northern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Dressed in blue jeans, a white T-shirt and sunglasses, Katie Wiles wore earmuffs and held a large black rifle. She appeared to have been target shooting.
“Mostly work + some serious fun!” she wrote in a post that appeared to be from her private Instagram account.
Roughly a 100 miles away from where Wiles stood lies a cemetery in the town of Srebrenica that holds the bodies of 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys killed by Serb nationalist forces during the Bosnian War in the 1990s. An international war crimes tribunal deemed the killings genocide.
The tribunal also convicted Serb soldiers of detaining dozens of Bosnian Muslim women and girls, some as young as 12 and 13, in the town of Foča for months in private houses “where they were raped, frequently beaten and abused.”
“Some were traded among Bosnian Serb soldiers and some murdered,” the tribunal said.
Wiles’ trip is the latest in a series of business deals and visits by family members of President Donald Trump and others in his orbit involving Republika Srpska, a semiautonomous region of Bosnia controlled by a far-right, pro-Putin Serb nationalist party. Some of the connections include paid work either for Republika Sprska or for companies hoping to do business there.
They come after years of U.S. and European leaders largely shunning Republika Srpska and the nationalist party that dominates it.
The party’s leader, Milorad Dodik, has called the killings in Srebrenica “the greatest deception of the 20th century.” In 2020, when Dodik visited a spa in the town of Visegrad that was used as a rape and murder camp during the war, he promised to invest $1.5 million in the facility to increase its appeal for tourists.
Even in an administration that has faced criticism for allowing allies to profit off their connections, the work of Trump allies to aid Dodik stands out due to his repeated threats to secede from Bosnia, which could spark a new war.
For decades, Republican and Democratic presidents alike, as well as the first Trump administration, treated Dodik as a pariah. Last year, Dodik was banned from holding public office and forced to resign because his secessionist policies violated the 1995 U.S.-brokered peace agreement.
In October 2025, Trump removed U.S. sanctions against Dodik that Congress enacted during the Obama administration, kept in place during the first Trump administration and enhanced under the Biden administration..
In April 2026, Donald Trump Jr. visited Republika Srpska as part of his “Trump Business Visions 2026” tour. His arrival was seen as a boost for Dodik. In September, Susie Wiles met with Dodik’s successor, Željka Cvijanović, in the White House; Cvijanović posted a photo of the meeting. Earlier this month, the nationalist party gained support in elections in Bosnia.
Last week, the Financial Times reported that Katie Wiles’ Washington lobbying firm, Continental Strategy, signed a $35,000-a-month contract last February to represent Republika Srpska.
Another partner at Continental lobbies on Republika Srpska’s behalf. A spokesperson for Wiles’ firm told MS NOW her visit to northern Bosnia in mid-August was related to work not for Republika Srpska but on behalf of another Continental client, a U.S.-based company the spokesperson did not name that was invited to do a feasibility study in the region.
“She is not a lobbyist. She does not represent Srpska and has not spoken with any United States government official regarding Srpska,” the Continental spokesperson said.
A White House spokesperson told MS NOW that Susie Wiles had no knowledge of her daughter’s work
“Susie does not discuss work matters with her daughters,” they said.
The New York Times reported last week that former Trump campaign advisers Chris LaCivita and James Blair were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by a Washington-based law firm for their work in Republika Srpska. A source with knowledge of their trip told MS NOW that they were hired “to provide guidance on how to spot and prevent any potential organized election fraud with goal of ensuring a free and fair election.”
LaCivita and Blair both work at MAGA, Inc., the Trump-backed super PAC playing a central role in the midterm elections. A spokesman for MAGA Inc. declined to comment to the Times about their trip to the Balkans but said Blair and LaCivita remained fully engaged in the PAC’s midterm effort.
After the Times disclosed LaCivita and Blair’s work in Bosnia,Trump distanced himself from it in a social media post.
“I do not have any idea who else they work for but will, on reflection, ask them,” he wrote. “And, if there’s a conflict, I will terminate them, immediately!”
Shortly afterward, he told reporters in the Oval Office he wasn’t worried about any conflict of interest, calling LaCivita and Blair “consultants” rather than White House employees.
“I’m sure they have many clients,” the president said, “but that would be true with everybody in Washington.”
Democrats vowed to investigate Trump administration corruption around the world if they win control of Congress. They said profiteering by Trump associates was being prioritized over longtime U.S. foreign policy.
“It should cause a political firestorm in the United States,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told CNN during a visit to Bosnia last week. “This is all about getting money for people who are working for the White House.”
Bosnians who lived through the war expressed alarm at Trump’s new backing of Dodik.
Bosnia’s ethnic Serbs, Muslims and Croats now generally “live door-to-door freely without any tensions whatsoever,” a Bosnian, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to fears of retaliation from Serb nationalists, told MS NOW. He called the backing of Dodik by the United States, which ended the country’s war, bewildering.
“It feels terribly wrong,” he said.
Nedzad Avdic, a Bosnian Muslim who survived a mass execution near Srebrenica during the war by hiding under bodies for hours, said Trump’s revival of Dodik’s political fortunes had emboldened Serb extremists.
Avdic, who still lives in Srebrenica, said that new graffiti recently appeared outside the town after the death of Gen. Ratko Mladić, the Serb wartime leader convicted of genocide for the mass killing there. The graffiti said, “all Serbs are Ratko’s soldiers.”
“Just when Dodik appeared politically dead and largely isolated internationally, a lifeline arrived from America as a gift from heaven,” Avdic said, adding that it jeopardizes stability in the region. “It may be a flawed peace but it is peace nonetheless.”
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