Trump distances himself from top advisers over paid work for pro-Russian Bosnian government

President Trump moved on Wednesday to distance himself from two of his most senior midterm campaign advisers, Chris LaCivita and James Blair, after the New York Times reported that the pair had been paid hundreds of thousands of dollars each to advise the pro-Russian government of Republika Srpska, a self-governing Bosnian Serb territory inside Bosnia and Herzegovina, ahead of elections there on Sunday. Trump said in a Truth Social post that LaCivita and Blair are "outside consultants" who "do not work for me" and that he would "terminate them, immediately" if their foreign work created a conflict with his political operation.

The disclosure landed three and a half weeks before Election Day, as Republicans try to hold a 53-47 Senate majority and defend House seats in a midterm cycle both parties expect to be close. LaCivita and Blair are not peripheral figures in that effort: Blair stepped down this spring as White House deputy chief of staff for legislative, political and public affairs to run the midterm operation at MAGA Inc., Trump's outside political fund, and LaCivita, who co-managed Trump's 2024 campaign, serves as a senior adviser to the same super PAC. The Times reported that each was paid through a Washington-based firm retained by Republika Srpska's government to advise on "voting issues," and that the territory's ruling party, which has aligned itself with Russian President Vladimir Putin, has paid more than $4 million to Trump-linked lobbyists and consultants since the start of last year. Records filed with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act show Republika Srpska has retained multiple Washington firms in recent years to lobby Congress and federal agencies on its behalf, though the firm named in the Times report was not identified in the filings reviewed.

A trip timed to a Balkan election

LaCivita and Blair traveled to Republika Srpska ahead of Sunday's general elections, in which voters chose a new entity president along with Bosnia's state-level parliament and presidency. Two people familiar with the arrangement told the Times that the two Americans were engaged by the government rather than by the ruling Alliance of Independent Social Democrats, or SNSD, though the paper noted the party and the government it controls are closely intertwined. The SNSD is led by Milorad Dodik, the longtime Bosnian Serb strongman who was removed as Republika Srpska's president last year after Bosnia's Constitutional Court convicted him of defying the international official who oversees the Dayton Peace Accords, the 1995 agreement that ended the Bosnian war. Dodik was barred from holding office for six years but remains the party's dominant figure, and preliminary results from Sunday's vote showed the SNSD's candidate, Republika Srpska Prime Minister Savo Minić, leading the race to succeed him.

The episode is not LaCivita's first paid foreign political work. He has also advised the opposition Democratic Party in neighboring Albania, led by former Prime Minister Sali Berisha, in an arrangement reported last year. The pattern recalls the career of Paul Manafort, the Trump 2016 campaign chairman who was convicted in 2018 of secretly lobbying in the United States for Ukraine's former pro-Russian president, Viktor Yanukovych, without registering as a foreign agent.

Washington's shifting line on Dodik

The story also lands amid an unresolved fight in Washington over how the United States should treat Dodik. The first Trump administration sanctioned him in 2017 for obstructing the Dayton accords, and the Biden administration expanded those sanctions in 2022 and 2023 over what the Treasury Department described as corruption and destabilizing activity. In March 2025, a bipartisan group of senators led by Jeanne Shaheen, Chuck Grassley and Jim Risch wrote to Secretary of State Marco Rubio warning that Dodik's "secessionist activity" amounted to "a direct attack on the constitutional order of Bosnia and Herzegovina" and urging expanded sanctions and a new U.S. envoy for the region.

Seven months later, the Trump administration reversed course. On October 29, 2025, the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control removed Dodik, his family and dozens of associates from its sanctions list without public explanation. House Democrats Bill Keating and Gregory Meeks, the ranking members on the Foreign Affairs Committee's Europe subcommittee and the full committee, wrote to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Rubio objecting that the delisting "provides destabilizing actors in Republika Srpska, including Mr. Dodik, a free hand" and demanded an explanation for the decision. It is against that backdrop that two of Trump's own political lieutenants were reportedly being paid, within the past year, by the government the sanctions relief benefited.

A split response inside Trump's orbit

Reaction broke along unusual lines. Sen. Thom Tillis, the retiring North Carolina Republican and co-chair of the Senate's NATO Observer Group, said in an interview with CNN's Kasie Hunt that Republika Srpska was "a destabilizing force" and that LaCivita and Blair should end the arrangement.

"These guys are not hurting for money. They don't need to be doing that," Tillis said, adding that if the reports are accurate, "they should get out of that relationship very, very quickly." He called the optics "a horrible look."

Steve Bannon, Trump's former White House chief strategist, went further, calling LaCivita and Blair "grifters" who were betraying the "drain the swamp" message of Trump's 2016 campaign and telling Politico that "we need a forensic audit of where the money went so the president has the information to hold people accountable." An unnamed Trump ally pushed back on the scrutiny, telling reporters that Blair "was working quite literally around the clock on races" and that, absent the Times story, "no one involved in the midterms would have even known" about the trip, part of a divided reaction inside Trump's own coalition. Some conservative commentators framed the episode as overblown, comparing the coverage to earlier Russia-related controversies from Trump's first term.

Trump himself offered a narrower defense than some of his allies, saying he had "no idea" who else LaCivita and Blair work for but would ask them, and that he saw no immediate conflict. Neither LaCivita nor Blair has publicly addressed the report in detail, and Republika Srpska's government did not respond to the Times' questions about the engagement or how much it paid.

What happens next

No one involved has said LaCivita or Blair will be let go, and Trump's threat to fire them was conditioned on finding an actual conflict of interest, a determination he said he would make himself. Bosnia's Central Election Commission has not yet certified Sunday's results, and the outcome in Republika Srpska's presidential race remains preliminary. In Washington, the episode is likely to keep feeding a broader argument, three weeks before Americans go to the polls, over how closely Trump's political operation and administration have aligned themselves with a Balkan leader whom successive U.S. governments, including Trump's own first term, treated as a destabilizing, Moscow-aligned force.