Melania Trump worried that Rudy Giuliani would walk in on her wearing only a robe, a transcript of the testimony by her former chief of staff this year has revealed.
Stephanie Grisham told the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 riot earlier this year that the former first lady was worried that the then-president, Donald Trump was getting “bad advice” in his final months in the White House and was concerned about unannounced visitors like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.
According to the transcripts released on Thursday, Ms Trump grew “very upset” when unannounced visitors entered the White House’s residential areas without warning.
“She hated when people would come to the residence,” Ms Grisham said in her testimony from May.
“That was her home, she wanted privacy. So I do recall, towards the end, her telling me that there were constant meetings happening in the Yellow Oval, which is the room up in the residence, with various people,” Ms Grisham told the January 6 panel in May.
“And she was very upset because nobody would give her a heads-up and she was walking around in a robe, that type of thing. But she never gave me specific names other than Sidney Powell, Giuliani and campaign people. Those were her words.”
Ms Grisham added that “Mrs Trump always wanted to be warned before people were coming into her house”.
The testimony, however, did not make it clear whether the unannounced guests, Guilinai or Powell, actually walked in on the former first lady wearing only a robe.
Ms Grisham said that the first lady “felt [Mark Meadows] was letting a lot of people who were maybe being harmful to the president, giving him bad advice”.
She added: “He was clearing them into the residence or getting them into the Oval. And Mrs Trump never liked it when people would tell Trump what he wanted to hear rather than the truth or the reality of the situation, and she felt that Meadows was always just playing into his hand.”
Ms Grisham added that the first lady was “very wary of Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, a lot of the people who were coming up to the residence and talking to the president” and that she even “got on the phone with [Republican National Committee Chairwoman] Ronna [McDaniel] a few times to kind of ask, like, ‘Where really are we with polling?’ because I don’t think she fully trusted the campaign necessarily”.
“I don’t know that she was sitting in on meetings often. But from … some of the things that the president would then say to her, which I do not have specifics on, she would say, ‘I think they’re giving him bad advice, I don’t think this is smart,’” Ms Grisham told the January 6 panel.
“She was just always frustrated that those certain people were let up into the residence, because during the day, while a lot of people were let around him during the day, it was at night where I think — he was a night owl, people would come up, there was no vetting.
“Sometimes a chief of staff wouldn’t know. And almost anyone could be up there and tell him something. And if it was things he liked to hear, he would then start to react the next day based on that, and she never liked that.”
