‘It’s Taken Over My Life’: Ex-Melania Friend Working With Prosecutors On Inauguration Probe

Former Vogue special event planner Stephanie Winston Wolkoff stops in front of the media at Trump Tower in New York on December 5, 2016. (KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)
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Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, a former close friend to first lady Melania Trump, claimed on Monday that she is working with three prosecutors in their investigations into the Trump inaugural committee.

“I’m working with three different prosecutors, and it’s taken over my life,” she told ABC News in a pre-taped interview.

Those would be the U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York, along with the attorneys general in New Jersey and Washington, D.C.

Winston Wolkoff was an adviser to the inaugural committee, which spent a jaw-dropping $104 million on the event after raising more than $107 million. Her ABC News interview is part of her media tour to promote her tell-all book, “Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady.”

The New York Times reported in February 2018 that Winston Wolkoff’s event planning firm had received more than $26 million. Winston Wolkoff claimed to ABC News that she did not personally received that full sum after paying her employees and transferring the funds to an outside company that would produce the events.

Stephanie Grisham, Melania Trump’s spokesperson, told the New York Times in its exposé that Trump had “no involvement” with the inaugural committee, a statement Winston Wolkoff described as “complete and utter horseshit” in her book.

Winston Wolkoff told ABC News that Trump had “turned her back on me” when she “begged” the first lady to publicly admit she knew how the committee’s finances were being run.

Winston Wolkoff claimed she had a recorded conversation with Michael Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney, in which she discussed the committee’s expenditures. The FBI later seized the recording during its raid in the investigation into Cohen.

Grisham told ABC News that Winston Wolkoff’s allegations were “clearly based on some imagined need for revenge.”

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