Chris Whipple

Just read @ccwhip’s The Gatekeepers ✅ Great history of White House Chiefs of Staff with fascinating West Wing insights.

Kathryn Ruemmler, the former Obama White House counsel, resigns as Goldman Sachs general counsel in the wake of the Justice Department’s release of emails and other material that revealed her extensive relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. @realrobcopeland nytimes.com/2026/02/12/bus…

Much of the mourning for the late great @washingtonpost has rightly focused on how democracy dies in darkness at the national level, which is hugely important. But the evisceration of Metro coverage is every bit as devastating because there is no comparable news outlet keeping local governments and institutions honest. Eight of my 20 years at the Post were spent on Metro, which was the heart and soul of the Post under the legendary @dongrahamdc1. The undertakers now running the paper have all but wiped out the metro staff, leaving just 12 reporters, according to reports, to cover a region of 6.5 million people. We had twice that many journalists in Fairfax alone back in the day. And it mattered. Reporters are the eyes and ears of the community, keeping tabs on people in power. We were there for every supervisors meeting, every school board meeting. We pored through planning commission documents and campaign filings. When county officials wasted taxpayer money, raised taxes on overstretched homeowners, gave sweetheart zoning deals to developers who filled their election coffers, we were there. When teachers who sexually abused students were quietly transferred to other schools to do it all over again, we were there. We were there for the more uplifting stories too, the cops who broke a cold case, the educators who turned around a struggling school, the residents who rallied to help neighbors in trouble, the student athletes who won the big game, the entrepreneurs who started something new. Our friend @SariHorwitz who has won more Pulitzers than I can count, wrote so movingly online about the Post (facebook.com/share/p/1AZLTT…). To recognize how indispensable local coverage is, you need only look at her holy-shit investigations of a broken child welfare system, rampant police shootings and the corporate-fed opioid crisis, stories that opened eyes and led to change. Democracy is not just what happens at the White House and the Capitol but in our own backyards. The Post has just turned the lights down at home too.

From today's @ReliableSources: Chris Whipple's bombshell account about WH chief of staff Susie Wiles is officially @VanityFair's top subscriber-driving story ever. The piece appears in print in VF's winter issue, on newsstands next Tuesday...

Reminder COS Susie Wiles to @VanityFair @ccwhip "But Wiles conceded that attacking targets on Venezuela’s mainland would force Trump to get congressional approval. 'If he were to authorize some activity on land, then it’s war, then [we’d need] Congress.'"

@ccwhip @RonaldKlain @BeschlossDC @johnpodesta I follow a seemingly knowledgeable man on Instagram who's diagnosing Trump's physical & mental health issues. I'm wondering if you got a hint in your hours of interviewing Susie Wiles that she and others are coveringup the ailments that epistemiccrisis is posting.

SAT | Author and filmmaker Chris Whipple (@ccwhip) discusses his Vanity Fair profile of White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and his book "Uncharted: How Trump Beat Biden, Harris, and the Odds in the Wildest Campaign in History." Watch live at 8:05 am ET!

Susie Wiles tells @ccwhip that she had a "loose agreement" with Trump to end the "score settling" after 90 days, but acknowledges that prosecutions of his enemies has been driven in part by the president's desire for retribution. nytimes.com/2025/12/16/us/…

Some more of the #uptowngirl 's fabulous moments from last Saturday night at the East Hampton authors' benefit for the local library, including moments with bestselling @HarperCollins authors @ccwhip who wrote #uncharted and Regina Calcaterra who penned Etched in Sand. Great night under the full 🌕