A former Melania Trump friend and adviser said she is working with multiple prosecutors on investigations into potential financial crimes committed in connection with the president’s 2017 inauguration.
“I’m working with three different prosecutors, and it’s taken over my life,” Stephanie Winston Wolkoff told ABC News in an interview Monday, referring to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York and local attorneys general in New Jersey and Washington, D.C.
Winston Wolkoff said she considered Trump a close friend for more than a decade. She served as a leading organizer for the inauguration and later as an adviser to the first lady.
Winston Wolkoff’s ABC News interview aired one day before her book “Melania and Me” is set to be released.
Winston Wolkoff reportedly declined to provide ABC News with materials to support any of the claims outlined in her book or interview.
President Trump’s inaugural committee said in a statement to ABC News that it “disagrees” with Winston Wolkoff’s “description of this historic event,” but did not respond to her specific allegations. The committee added that it “will decline to engage in her efforts to sell books.”
Asked about the allegations, White House spokesperson Judd Deere told The Hill: “This is just one more book among a long list that have sought to profit off of lies and mischaracterizations meant to harm the First Family. The President and this entire White House are focused on making our country stronger, safer, and more prosperous not some book that belongs in the fiction section.”
Asked if she had audio tapes to back up the claims in her book, Winston Wolkoff told ABC News, “I can back up everything that’s in the book 100 percent.” She did not say whether she was in possession of tapes to verify her allegations.
Winston Wolkoff has previously said she was “thrown under the bus” by the Trump administration after the inaugural committee’s spending came under scrutiny in 2018.
In her forthcoming book, she says was made into “the cover girl for the inauguration shenanigans,” according to ABC News.
The inaugural committee raised a record $107 million, approximately twice as much as former Presidents Obama and George W. Bush.
Attorneys with the Southern District of New York subpoenaed Trump’s inaugural committee over an investigation into potential illegal contributions from foreigners. The D.C. attorney general also launched a lawsuit against the committee, and the New Jersey attorney general issued a subpoena last year.
Updated at 2:15 p.m.