Stephanie Winston Wolkoff attends Strut: The Fashionable Mom Show during Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week in 2014. According to e-mail exchanges from the time, she was given the friends and family rate of $345 a night, and told to submit receipts to Reince Priebus. On trips to D.C., Wolkoff would sometimes spend the night in the White House residence other times, she would book a room in the Trump International Hotel down Pennsylvania Avenue. In an interview with ABC News in October, she said that she wore the jacket for the media and people who were criticizing her, and wondered aloud whether the trip would have received similar attention without it.) But the two women remained close, nevertheless. (Melania, according to these sources, thought the trip would not get attention without such a brazen fashion gesture. (The First Lady, according to these sources, feared that an alternative, “Children First,” was too similar to her husband’s “America First” branding.) They also disagreed about the infamous “I Really Don’t Care, Do U?” jacket that the First Lady wore to the U.S.-Mexico border. According to sources familiar with the conversations, Wolkoff told Melania and East Wing staffers that the name for her anti-bullying initiative, “Be Best,” sounded illiterate. The two were close enough that Wolkoff could openly express divergent views. Wolkoff helped facilitate Melania’s transition to the White House, and advised her on policy platforms, East Wing décor, and her overall messaging. After Trump’s surprise electoral-college victory, she went on to help the First Lady in Washington, serving as a senior adviser to her official governmental office on matters large and small. ( Anna Wintour, who hosts the gala, is editor-in-chief of Vogue and the artistic director of Condé Nast, Vanity Fair’s parent company.) Over the years, Wolkoff would become a member of Melania’s small inner circle. The two women had met years earlier, when Wolkoff helped produce the Metropolitan Museum’s Costume Institute Benefit. Wolkoff, for a time, was a lesser-known, but equally diligent enforcer for Melania Trump. Cohen had been an indefatigable booster of Donald Trump, helping to arrange his real-estate deals, paying off alleged mistresses, and quashing would-be damaging stories regarding his boss. More notably, both were crucial supporting players in the Trump orbit. Both lived on the same block on the Upper East Side. For years, Cohen and Wolkoff had operated in a shared milieu. Last summer, months after federal agents executed search warrants on his home, office, and hotel room-seizing more than a dozen devices and hundreds of records- Michael Cohen made a phone call to Stephanie Winston Wolkoff.
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