Did Susie Wiles Really Block MAHA?

Investigative Health Policy, MAHA Accountability

Drs. Robert Malone and Jill Glasspool Malone

Washington, DC: November 9, 2026

On Thursday, November 6, 2026, three days after Republicans lost control of the House, Susie Wiles resigned as White House Chief of Staff. Richard Walters, her deputy, resigned on Friday. President Trump elevated Stephen Miller to Chief of Staff. Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. posted on X: “Stephen Miller is the strongest MAHA supporter in the administration. It’s time to unleash the Kraken.”

Calley Means had resigned his own White House and HHS roles on October 22, 2026, twelve days before the midterms. The specific trigger, as he told it on Rogan, was Chief of Staff Wiles pulling the ultra-processed-food definition after lobbyist calls, including from Coca-Cola and Mondelez. His resignation statement named “a corrupt DC bureaucracy that is doing everything possible to protect the status quo.” On the day Means left, stock prices for General Mills, Kraft Heinz, and other packaged-food companies rose roughly 8 percent. Means framed the exit as his own choice. Wiles sent him a text afterward praising him and asking that he not speak negatively of her. He has not honored that request.

Means went on the podcast circuit in the two weeks that followed. He appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience on November 6 for a little over two hours. He appeared on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan on Sunday, November 8.

Both interviews are now in the public record. Together they give the fullest account yet of how the first two years of the Kennedy HHS tenure ran. They also give the fullest account yet of how Calley Means wants that history remembered. The two accounts diverge in ways the public record can test.

What Did Calley Means Allege on Rogan and Face the Nation?

Means directs his allegations at four groups.

Against Chief of Staff Wiles and her deputies. Wiles kept the president in the dark about the midterm headwinds. She pulled the ultra-processed-food definition after lobbyist calls to her office. She told Means directly that she needed sugar-industry money for the midterms. Her daughter Katie Wiles joined Continental Strategy, a lobbying firm whose revenue rose from $1.8 million in 2024 to $27.3 million in 2025, per filings under the Lobbying Disclosure Act. Wiles’s former firm, Ballard Partners, generated $82 million in 2025 lobbying revenue, the highest single-year total in LegiStorm’s data.

Against pollster Tony Fabrizio. Fabrizio took Pepsi and pharmaceutical-industry money while serving as the political check on cabinet policy decisions. Means recited Fabrizio’s Corporate Public Affairs client list on Rogan, reading from the firm’s own website. The list visible during the broadcast included Pfizer, PhRMA, RJ Reynolds, Philip Morris, Dow Chemical, Pepsi, Procter and Gamble, Penn National Gaming, and the Vaping Heritage Foundation. Fabrizio has denied the allegations.

Against White House staff members Walker Barrett, James Blair, Chris LaCivita, and Richard Walters. Policy decisions on glyphosate, kratom, fruit-flavored vapes, and the sugar-industry threat to the ultra-processed-food definition were driven through the interagency process by these staff members. The driving party, in each case, was a named industry interest. Blair and LaCivita allegedly traveled to Republika Srpska and collected money from parties there while running the midterm strategy. Blair denies telling Wiles about the trip.

Against FDA-commissioner nominee Heidi Overton. Overton blocked psychedelic policy. She blocked MAHA food policy. She drove the reversal of the FDA decision on Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine after former Commissioner Marty Makary was pushed out. She wrote the rule relaxing the 7-OH kratom concentration tolerance by twenty times. She worked with the Solicitor General’s office through attorney Sarah Harris on the brief urging Supreme Court certiorari in the glyphosate liability case. Harris came from Bayer’s main law firm, Means says.

What Can the Public Record Confirm?

Several of these specific claims are confirmed outside the interview transcripts. Continental Strategy’s revenue growth is in the public filings. Ballard Partners’ 2025 revenue total is in LegiStorm’s data. Reynolds American contributed $5 million to MAGA, Inc. on April 30, 2026, according to the Federal Election Commission. The contribution preceded the administration’s rollback of Makary’s kratom and vape posture. Fabrizio’s client roster is published on his firm’s own website.

Marty Makary’s on-record statement to CBS News reads: “Big tobacco exploited their connections to administration and HHS officials to put repeated pressure on me to approve fruit-flavored vapes that appeal to children. I wouldn’t do it.” Makary names tobacco rather than a single named staff member. The pressure channel he describes runs through the same staff offices Means names.

Means’s account of the glyphosate executive order is also partly supported by the document itself. The signed order carries the title “Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides.” That is a national-security framing for a chemical that has no national-security application outside munitions precursors. The phosphorus argument and the glyphosate argument are stitched together in the order text.

Is Calley Means a Neutral Witness?

Means is not a neutral witness. He co-founded TrueMed, which enables pre-tax health-savings dollars to flow to wellness-industry products through letter-of-medical-necessity certifications. Representative Jake Auchincloss and other congressional Democrats have raised the question of whether Means’s holdings in TrueMed, valued between $25 million and $50 million through November 2025, constituted a conflict of interest during his tenure as a Special Government Employee. Means states that he divested when he moved to full-time government status. Mary Talley Bowden, an ear, nose and throat physician in Houston, published an essay in April 2025 titled “The Truth About TrueMed” that raised the same question. Bowden has pressed the TrueMed critique for two years.

Means also helped build the apparatus he now criticizes. He is the person who introduced Secretary Kennedy to the Trump 2024 campaign. He led MAHA implementation inside the White House through the first twenty-one months of the administration. The lobbying-firm dynamic he describes on Rogan was already running on inauguration day. He worked within it for twenty-one months before leaving.

The allegations still deserve to be weighed on their merits. The interview tour also serves three functions beyond informing the public. Means is defending his own role from the conflict-of-interest critique Bowden pressed first. He is repositioning himself as a MAHA-base voice against the apparatus. And he is building a narrative frame that keeps blame away from two specific people: President Trump and Secretary Kennedy.

Why Does Toby Rogers Call the Rogan Interview a Psyop?

Toby Rogers, a political-economy scholar who publishes the Substack newsletter uTobian, watched the full 138-minute Rogan interview and published his own reading on X on November 8, 2026. The post drew more than 622,000 views at this writing. Rogers has published on autism causation, regulatory capture, and the political economy of the pharmaceutical industry for over a decade. He sits to the skeptical side of the MAHA base.

Rogers reduces the Means argument to a five-step logic. President Trump and Secretary Kennedy are heroes. Staffers who know the system bamboozle them. Both men remain unaware despite daily news coverage and activist outreach. When they find out after the fact, they are furious and do nothing. The underlying problem is structural and can only be fixed by a constitutional amendment whose text Means never supplies. Rogers notes that Joe Rogan never asks why the alleged betrayals are not met with firings.

The logical pressure point in Rogers’s reading is Heidi Overton. Means alleges on Rogan that Overton plotted with the Department of Justice to secure Supreme Court certiorari in the glyphosate liability case. He alleges that she wrote the executive order protecting Bayer. He alleges that she drove the reversal of the FDA decision on Moderna’s mRNA flu vaccine after Makary was pushed out. If any of that is true, her nomination to lead the FDA cannot be the behavior of a Secretary and a President kept in the dark. “That’s how you know the interview is a psyop,” Rogers writes.

Rogers makes the stronger version of the skeptical case directly. He writes that “Trump or RFK Jr. could have stopped the approval of the Moderna mRNA flu shot or flavored vapes but refused to use their legal authority to do so. Both men know EXACTLY what is happening but they do nothing because THEY are captured by industry.” He cites a June 30, 2026 letter from the Informed Consent Action Network to Secretary Kennedy listing twenty vaccine-program reforms the Secretary could implement by signature alone. None of those reforms have happened. The authority question has been on the public record longer than Rogers’s post. Our September 14, 2026 MALONE.NEWS essay, “Kennedy Can End Big Pharma’s COVID Immunity With a Signature,” notes that 42 U.S.C. § 247d-6d(b) authorizes the Secretary to amend the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration through Federal Register publication, without Congress. The declaration remains in force through December 31, 2029. The Secretary has not amended it.

Rogers also offers a specific theory on former FDA Commissioner Marty Makary. Rogers writes that Makary “knew he was finished at the FDA and he was thinking about his next career move. He quit over flavored vapes so that he could go out like Scott Gottlieb.” If Makary had instead resigned a week later over the Moderna mRNA flu vaccine approval, which Rogers calls “the worst example of regulatory capture in history,” he would have been labeled an anti-vaxxer. His post-government career would have narrowed.

Our own reading does not go as far as Rogers’s. The public record shows a cabinet officer who endorsed the glyphosate order, thanked his Chief of Staff on her departure, and nominated Overton to lead the FDA. Whether that endorsement sequence reflects industry capture, political calculation, or sincere agreement is a question we cannot answer from the public record alone. What we can say is that Rogers’s five-step summary tracks the logical structure of the Means interviews accurately. His Overton test is the right place to apply pressure. The Overton nomination is the harder episode for the overridden-Secretary thesis to carry. Rogers’s five-step summary of the Means logic is the more direct challenge we have seen in public from inside the medical-freedom readership.

Was RFK Jr. Really Blocked by His Own Staff?

Means tells Rogan directly: “Bobby Kennedy is a hero.” He says he left with more respect for the Secretary than ever. He says he has never seen Secretary Kennedy do anything that wasn’t in the best interest of the American people. On Face the Nation he tells Brennan: “America is very, very lucky he is sitting at HHS.” The accompanying claim is that the Secretary has been surrounded, blocked, and overridden by a captured apparatus running policy around him. That is the subtext the public record does not support, across three specific episodes.

The glyphosate executive order was signed on February 18, 2026. Means describes being handed the signed order by Walker Barrett and being told to inform Kennedy that it was not up for discussion. Within four days, Secretary Kennedy publicly defended the order. He told CNBC on February 19: “Donald Trump’s Executive Order puts America first where it matters most, our defense readiness and our food supply. We must safeguard America’s national security first, because all of our priorities depend on it.”

On February 22, he posted at length on social media. He wrote that “our agricultural system depends heavily on these chemicals.” He warned that without them “crop yields would fall, food prices would surge, and America would experience a massive loss of farms.” He added that “reform at this scale will test entrenched interests, and it will not move in a straight line.” He told The Epoch Times: “When hostile actors control critical inputs, they weaken our security. By expanding domestic production, we close that gap and protect American families.”

A Secretary blindsided and overridden four days earlier does not publish three separate defenses of the order in the ensuing week. Those statements describe a cabinet officer embracing the policy under his signature. If the order was driven by Ballard Partners and Bayer through Wiles and Barrett, as Means now describes, Secretary Kennedy’s February 2026 statements provided the political cover that let the order stand.

On Wiles, Secretary Kennedy’s public statement at the moment of her departure, as reported by CBS News on November 8, credits her with brokering his partnership with President Trump. He thanked her for helping bring disruptive leaders into HHS. Brennan put that statement to Means on air. He did not challenge the quote. He said he was comfortable with his own account and declined to speak for the Secretary.

On Heidi Overton, Secretary Kennedy’s X post nominating her reads: “A pantheon of superstar candidates made choosing our next FDA Commissioner one of the toughest decisions of my tenure at HHS. I’m confident President Trump and I chose the best person for the job: Dr. Heidi Overton. Heidi brings exceptional judgment, professionalism, discipline, and strategic leadership to every policy she touches.” Means on Face the Nation now says Overton “does not have the character or integrity to be FDA commissioner.” Both statements cannot be true. Kennedy’s nomination letter went to the Senate under his signature in August. Means’s character attack on Overton came on November 8, seventy-two hours after the White House staff shake-up.

Who Benefits from the Means Interview Tour?

The tour does three kinds of work at once. It externalizes blame for the first two years. Policy failures on the ultra-processed-food definition, glyphosate liability, kratom tolerance, fruit-flavored vapes, and the Moderna mRNA flu vaccine are assigned to named staff members. The cabinet officer who defended them, the president who signed them, and the senior adviser who worked inside the process throughout are left outside the blame frame.

The tour also positions Secretary Kennedy and President Trump for a reset. Suppose the past two years were captured by the named staff members. Removing them, which Means frames as both necessary and under way, restores the possibility that the administration’s remaining two years can deliver what the 2024 campaign promised. For Trump and Kennedy, the Means account keeps the door open to a second-half recovery.

The tour positions Means himself along the way. He becomes the MAHA-base-aligned reformer, not the former apparatus insider defending a TrueMed-adjacent record. The Auchincloss conflict-of-interest critique is answered, in Means’s framing, by the fact that he was the person fighting for the base against the captured apparatus.

The first function is the most durable of the three. The named staff members are out of the White House or on the way out. The pattern Means describes, in which lobbying firms generate historic revenue by trading access, is consistent with what the public filings show about Ballard Partners and Continental Strategy. The second function, the protective framing around Secretary Kennedy and President Trump, is false. Kennedy defended the glyphosate order in February, thanked Wiles on her departure, and nominated Overton to lead the FDA. His name is on each.

What Can Congress Do With What Calley Means Just Said?

The November 3 midterms shifted House control to the Democrats. The House Oversight Committee, soon to be under Democratic chairmanship, holds jurisdiction over federal personnel practices, lobbying conduct, and the revolving-door patterns Means described. The Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hold parallel jurisdiction over HHS personnel practices, FDA decision-making, and campaign-finance timing. All three committees will likely open parallel inquiries within sixty days of the new Congress convening.

Congressional investigation does work that private litigation and prosecutorial discretion cannot do. Subpoenas can compel the Office of Management and Budget interagency review records for the glyphosate executive order and the kratom tolerance rule. The Wiles and Blair offices can be subpoenaed for internal communications with Continental Strategy and Ballard Partners, along with the firms’ client lists and meeting calendars. Fabrizio Lee and Associates would face compulsory production of contracts and payment records covering the period when Fabrizio advised the White House on MAHA policy direction. The Federal Election Commission records on the Reynolds American contribution to MAGA, Inc. and on related corporate contributions in the same window are already public and can be entered into the hearing record. Testimony under oath, with the option of immunity grants to compel named deputies to speak, can establish what Means has asserted in interviews. The resulting documentary trail outlasts any single administration.

Several of the specific allegations, if the documents support them, would implicate federal criminal statutes. The Foreign Agents Registration Act and 18 U.S.C. § 219 apply to any federal employee or agent of a foreign principal who collected funds during the Blair and LaCivita Srpska travel. 18 U.S.C. § 208 applies to recusal failures at the Department of Justice and at the Food and Drug Administration where named attorneys and officials held prohibited financial interests. 18 U.S.C. §§ 201 and 1343-1346 apply to pay-for-access patterns where quid pro quo can be proven. The Supreme Court’s McDonnell v. United States decision tightened the quid-pro-quo standard. Proof beyond reasonable doubt is the practical barrier to prosecution. The Department has shown limited appetite for referral under the incumbent administration. Congress’s work here is different from the Department’s. A hearing record can establish what happened even where an indictment does not follow.

What Three Reforms Would End the Lobbying Capture?

Means identifies the correct underlying problem. The policy process is captured by firms whose revenue depends on access to the people deciding policy. Removing a chief of staff does not fix that capture. Rogers adds a counter-point that cuts the other way. The Secretary already has unilateral authority over many of the captured policies and has not used it. Structural reform and the use of existing authority are both required.

First, require real-time, machine-readable disclosure of private-sector clients for every cabinet-adjacent White House adviser, polling contractor, and lobbying firm engaging on health policy. The Lobbying Disclosure Act already requires registered lobbyists to report. Extend the requirement to the political consultants who shape cabinet policy without lobbying registration. Fabrizio’s public client list is on his firm’s website today. Requiring that it also be filed under oath with the Office of Government Ethics would close the ambiguity.

Second, strengthen revolving-door restrictions. Senior political-appointee staff should face a five-year rather than one-year lobbying prohibition on the agencies they led. The case of Courtney Knupp, the National Security Council staff member who drove the glyphosate executive order and then became CEO of the United Soybean Board, is the paradigm the reform needs to close.

Third, publish the Office of Management and Budget interagency review record for every major health-related executive order and FDA rulemaking within thirty days of final action. The glyphosate executive order and the kratom tolerance rule are both policies whose deliberative records, if published, would let the public test the Means account against the administrative record directly.

Conclusion: Will RFK Jr. Just Talk the Talk, or Will He Walk the Walk?

None of these reforms requires a constitutional amendment. All three can be implemented through statute in the current Congress. In the meantime, Rogers’s point stands: the Secretary and the President hold existing authority to pull approvals, reverse rules, and replace political appointees. The question in front of the base over the next ninety days is whether they use it.

Both transcripts will be cited for years. The confirmed facts, Continental Strategy’s revenue curve, Reynolds American’s $5 million contribution, Ballard Partners’ record 2025 revenue, Fabrizio’s visible client list, and Makary’s own tobacco-pressure statement, place the Means allegations within a documented pattern of White House-adjacent lobbying revenue. The counter-record, Kennedy’s February defense of the glyphosate order, his November thanks to Wiles, and his August nomination of Overton, places the Secretary inside the pattern rather than above it.

This essay opened with Secretary Kennedy’s November 6 X post: “Stephen Miller is the strongest MAHA supporter in the administration. It’s time to unleash the Kraken.” The phrase is a commitment, publicly made. Amend the COVID-19 PREP Act declaration under 42 U.S.C. § 247d-6d(b). Withdraw the Moderna mRNA flu-shot license that Makary sent back for further study. Withdraw the Overton nomination from the Senate. Reopen the ultra-processed-food definition process that Wiles’s office pulled. Issue the ICAN-listed vaccine-program reforms. None of these actions requires Congress. None requires the staff Means now names as captured.

The signatures Kennedy adds to the Federal Register over the next ninety days are the answer.

References

Brennan, Margaret. “Transcript: Calley Means on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan, Nov. 8, 2026.” CBS News. cbsnews.com/news/calley-means-health-and-human-services-face-the-nation-transcript-11-08-2026.

CNBC. “Kennedy defends Trump glyphosate order; MAHA erupts as midterms approach.” February 19, 2026.

Executive Order, “Promoting the National Defense by Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Elemental Phosphorus and Glyphosate-Based Herbicides.” The White House, February 18, 2026.

Federal Election Commission. Contribution record, RAI Services Company to MAGA, Inc., April 30, 2026.

Informed Consent Action Network. Letter to Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on Immediate Vaccine Reforms, June 30, 2026. icandecide.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/2026-06-30_Letter_Kennedy_Immediate_Vaccine_Reforms.pdf.

Kennedy, Robert F. Jr. (@SecKennedy). X post nominating Dr. Heidi Overton for FDA Commissioner. x.com/SecKennedy/status/2090116085978632385.

LegiStorm. Ballard Partners lobbying revenue data, 2025.

Lobbying Disclosure Act filings. Continental Strategy revenue, 2024 and 2025.

Makary, Marty. Statement to CBS News, November 8, 2026.

Malone, Robert W. and Jill Glasspool Malone. “Kennedy Can End Big Pharma’s COVID Immunity With a Signature.” MALONE.NEWS, September 14, 2026. malone.news/p/kennedy-can-end-big-pharmas-covid.

Rogan, Joe. “The Joe Rogan Experience #2578 with Calley Means,” November 6, 2026.

Rogers, Toby (@uTobian). X post reading the Rogan interview as a psyop and citing the ICAN letter, November 8, 2026. x.com/uTobian/status/2119361157781942420.

Rogers, Toby (@uTobian). X post on Marty Makary’s resignation timing and the Scott Gottlieb exit model, November 8, 2026. x.com/uTobian/status/2119513667389767838.

The Epoch Times. Statement by Secretary Kennedy on the glyphosate executive order, February 2026.

Truthout. “RFK Jr. Supports Trump Push to Ramp Up Glyphosate Output, Angering MAHA Backers.” February 2026.