By George News | georgenews.org | November 11, 2026
Meghan Bauer and her husband Zach are Pence people. That is not a theory. It is a record.
When they had to choose, in 2023, between Mike Pence and Donald Trump, they chose Pence — with their own donations, and with a consulting paycheck from the campaign that was trying to beat the President. They got back on the Trump train only after their candidate had already lost, and only because Susie Wiles picked up the phone.
The money trail is the tell. This is what people who are in it for themselves look like.
Wiles recruited Meghan on New Year’s Day 2025. She came back as Director of Scheduling on Inauguration Day and, since November 21, 2025, has been Assistant to the President and Cabinet Secretary — the official who sits between President Trump and his Cabinet. A senior White House source tells me she is being fired. The building is already trying to soften that into a “new role.” That is not good enough. She needs to be gone now.
I laid out her disclosure, the Cabinet travel contest, and her mother’s appointments in my earlier investigation. This piece is about loyalty. It is about what Zach Bauer wrote when President Trump was fighting for the election, what this household did when Pence ran against him, and why that household should not be running Cabinet affairs.
“He did... sadly”
Zach Bauer was Mike Pence’s body man, the Vice President’s personal aide. On December 21, 2020 — weeks before January 6 — President Trump met at the White House with House Freedom Caucus members. That evening, Mark Meadows tweeted that they were “preparing to fight back against mounting evidence of voter fraud.”
Chris Hodgson, Pence’s legislative director, texted Zach to ask whether the Vice President had sat in. Those texts were later read into the January 6 Committee’s deposition of Hodgson on March 30, 2022. Zach never testified himself.
On page 94, committee counsel holds up the thread and asks, “Who’s Zach?”
Hodgson answers: “Zach Bauer, the Vice President’s personal aide.”
Counsel: “In a role colloquially known as the body man perhaps?”
Hodgson: “Yes.”
Then come Zach’s own words, read into the record on page 95.
Zach wrote: “He did... sadly. Marc was in there too.”
Marc is Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff.
Hodgson told the committee he understood “sadly” this way: given where they were in December, and given that legal challenges “were not decided in favor of the President and his legal team,” Zach “was alluding to the fact that he thought the Vice President’s time could be better spent elsewhere.”
Hodgson sent back an image of a person holding their forehead.
Zach wrote again: “It was... interesting, like living in an alternative universe.”
Hodgson’s testimony on what that meant is unambiguous. “I think Zach was referring to the fact that those Members would have been pushing an idea that the outcome of the election could be altered at this point and Zach not agreeing with that being the case.”
Hodgson replied, “Yes, that was definitely the twilight zone.”
On the next pages, counsel comes back to it. The purpose of the meeting, counsel said, was “a pushing an idea about changing the outcome of the Presidential election that was inconsistent with Zach’s understanding of — of the facts, of reality at the time.” Was that also consistent with Hodgson’s own understanding? “Yes.”
So the man now married to the President’s Cabinet Secretary privately described the President’s fight, in real time, as an “alternative universe,” and said “sadly” when he learned that Pence had walked into the room. That is not the vocabulary of a Trump loyalist. It is the vocabulary of Pence’s body man, talking to Pence’s legislative director, about Pence’s time.
On January 6, he was with Pence’s team
The December 21 texts are weeks before January 6. What Zach actually did on January 6 is in the same transcript, and it is just as clear.
On pages 192 and 193, counsel turns to a new thread from that morning. At 10:51 a.m., Zach texted Hodgson to ask if he was at VPR — the Vice President’s residence. Hodgson said yes, he was in the library. Zach then texted: “He down?” Hodgson replied, “Not yet.” Hodgson told the committee that Zach was asking whether Pence was downstairs and ready to leave.
Was Zach already at the residence? “At this point he was on his way. He hadn’t arrived yet.” But “he did ultimately arrive after this text message.” Did he travel with them to the Capitol that day? “He did.”
He was still with them at the end. After the joint session finally dissolved, in the small hours of January 7, Hodgson “joined the motorcade back to the residence and then got a ride home from Zach whose car was at VPR.” They got back around 4:30 a.m. Hodgson was home around 5.
Zach also turns up as a recipient, not a speaker. Exhibit 47, discussed on page 155, is a January 6 email from Paul Teller, sent to Marc Short and “Mr. Bauer,” subject line “CAP write-up.” It summarized a Conservative Action Project call — Cleta Mitchell’s work in Georgia, and Senator Cruz’s chief predicting that each objection to the electors would take hours. Zach is on the To line. He is not on record as having answered it, and he is not on record as having testified about any of this.
That is a full day on Pence’s team: at the residence, in the motorcade to the Capitol, on the email chain about the objections, and driving Pence’s legislative director home after it was over. Combined with the December 21 texts, it is a portrait of loyalty. The loyalty is to Mike Pence.
Then they got paid to help Pence beat him
Pence’s 2024 campaign was not a think-tank exercise. It was a Republican primary against Donald Trump. Zach Bauer was its national political director. The Federal Election Commission recorded what that campaign, and this household, did with money.
Mike Pence for President (C00842039) reported four disbursements to “BAUER, ZACHARY” of Vienna, Virginia 22182, all inside the window between Pence’s launch in early June 2023 and his suspension on October 28, 2023:
July 28, 2023 — $3,000, “GENERAL CAMPAIGN CONSULTING” (FEC image)
August 15, 2023 — $304, “TRAVEL” (FEC image)
August 31, 2023 — $3,000, “GENERAL CAMPAIGN CONSULTING” (FEC image)
October 2, 2023 — $42.20, travel (FEC image)
That is $6,346.20, including $6,000 in general campaign consulting, paid by the campaign that ran against President Trump to the husband of the woman who now sits between the President and his Cabinet.
The money did not flow only one way. On June 23, 2023, eighteen days after Pence’s committee first filed with the FEC, husband and wife each gave that campaign $250 from the same Vienna address, ZIP+4 22182-6037, on the same FEC filing image:
Bauer, Meghan P. — $250 to Mike Pence for President. The filing listed her employer as the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Her later financial disclosure says she was Chief of Staff at Greystone through June 2023; FEC employer fields are often stale. The donor line is not. It is her name, her middle initial, and her household address.
Bauer, Zach C. — $250 to Mike Pence for President, listing his employer as Bauer Consulting LLC.
On July 12, 2023, Zach gave another $1 through WinRed.
The current Cabinet Secretary personally donated to Mike Pence’s campaign against Donald Trump. So did her husband, who was about to collect consulting fees from that same campaign.
Their mother-in-law did too. On August 9, 2023, Pamela Patenaude gave $155 to Mike Pence for President. After Pence quit, she did not come over to Trump. She gave $810 to Nikki Haley for President: $310 on November 15, 2023, $250 on December 18, 2023, and $250 on January 15, 2024.
I found no itemized contribution from Meghan or Zach Bauer to other 2024 presidential candidates in the records I reviewed.
Before the presidential campaign, Pence’s leadership PAC, Great America Committee (C00640664), had already been paying this household. It reimbursed Zach Bauer himself $5,468.88 in travel, mileage, and per diem from November 2021 through September 2022. It separately paid Bauer Consulting LLC of Vienna, Virginia 22182 — the same city and ZIP as Zach — $21,652.44 between November 2022 and June 2023 for political strategy, management, and fundraising consulting, plus travel. Zach’s own FEC entries in June and July 2023 identify him as a consultant at that LLC. Meghan later disclosed a firm of the same name in Vienna starting in January 2024. The filings do not, by themselves, prove which spouse performed the 2022–23 LLC work, and they show no payment from these Pence committees to Meghan Bauer by name. They do prove the PAC paid Zach $5,468.88 personally, paid the Vienna LLC $21,652.44, and that the presidential campaign then paid Zach another $6,346.20 — $11,815.08 to him personally, or $33,467.52 if the LLC bills are included.
That is not a casual donation. It is a professional relationship with the last Republican who tried to stop Donald Trump, running right up to the week Pence quit.
They served in the first term. They got off. They got back on when Pence lost.
None of this requires pretending the Bauers were never around President Trump. Meghan has said she joined the 2016 campaign on the fifth floor of Trump Tower. In the first administration she worked in scheduling and at the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Zach spent those years as Pence’s aide. 1100 Pennsylvania reported that they met while working for Pence; Meghan later told IW Features she met her husband on the campaign. Pence joined the ticket in July 2016. Their wedding reception was at the Trump International Hotel. Their world, from the start, was Pence’s world inside a Trump administration.
The tell is what they did when they had a clean choice. In 2020, Meghan has said, she thought she was leaving politics for real estate finance. By 2023 they were not on the sidelines, and they were not on Trump’s team. They were on Pence’s: donations from both spouses, consulting fees to Zach, national political director on the campaign against the President, and, after Pence suspended, Zach went to work for Advancing American Freedom, the group Pence founded. Meghan’s financial disclosure lists a spouse salary from that organization.
AAF did not become a friend of the second term. Ahead of the April 2, 2025, “Liberation Day” tariffs, Fox News reported that AAF called them “essentially a tax on American consumers and businesses.” The group launched a six-figure campaign against them and told Congress that “Your constituents are hurting because of President Trump’s tariffs.” That is the shop that was paying the Cabinet Secretary’s husband.
Then Pence had lost, Trump had won, and a door opened. On New Year’s Day 2025, Wiles called Meghan and asked her to return to the White House. The same month, Zach became CEO of Passages, the well-funded Christian Israel-trip organization he now leads. Meghan has said she had a three-year-old and a six-month-old at the time, and that her husband was starting a new job that same month. She took the call. She came back as Director of Scheduling, and then as Cabinet Secretary, meeting with Wiles every morning and running the midterm Cabinet travel contest I documented in that earlier piece.
They did not come back because they had been Trump loyalists all along. They came back because their choice for president had already lost, Wiles offered a West Wing job, and a CEO title opened for Zach in the same window. That is the money trail. That is what people who are in it for themselves look like.
She needs to be gone now
This is not an attack on President Trump. It is a defense of him. The President of the United States should not have to share his West Wing with a Cabinet Secretary whose husband called the President’s election fight an “alternative universe,” whose household funded and staffed the last Republican campaign against him, and who returned to his service only after that campaign had failed.
A senior White House source has already told me Bauer is being fired. Not moved. Fired. The official line is softer. Spokeswoman Allison Schuster said on November 10 that Bauer “will continue to work in the White House in a new role.” A White House official told Semafor she will “shift to a different role.” A memo from Stephen Miller’s office, viewed by Fox News Digital, says the Cabinet Secretary post “will be changed to the role of Director of Cabinet Relations” — a new title and a support job, not a firing. Multiple other sources told Semafor she is expected to depart in the coming weeks.
Do not rename the office and leave her in it. Do not wait until the end of the year. Wiles recruited her, met with her every morning, and put a Pence household in charge of Cabinet affairs. That was the personnel system. It should end with her removal, now, for the good of the nation.
Sources
Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack, deposition of Chris Hodgson, March 30, 2022. Zach Bauer is identified and quoted on pp. 94–98 and 100; the January 6 email is on p. 155; the January 6 residence and Capitol travel are on pp. 192–193; the ride home is on p. 247. The transcript is a U.S. government work and is in the public domain. The screenshots in this article are from that document, with relevant passages highlighted.
FEC, Mike Pence for President (C00842039); disbursements to Bauer; receipts from Bauer; receipts from Patenaude.
FEC, Great America Committee (C00640664); disbursements to Bauer.
IW Features, “Inside the ‘Most Pro-Family’ White House with Meghan Bauer,” October 21, 2026.
Meghan Bauer, OGE Form 278e, signed May 20, 2025.
“Two Trump politicals, one Trump Hotel,” 1100 Pennsylvania, November 18, 2019.
Passages, About / leadership; Haley Cohen, “New CEO of Passages hopes to reinvigorate support for Israel with young evangelicals,” eJewishPhilanthropy, January 31, 2025.
Fox News, AAF on Trump tariffs; AAF, April 8, 2025 campaign; Washington Examiner, April 29, 2025.
Fox News Digital, Stephen Miller memo, November 11, 2026; Semafor, November 11; MS NOW, November 10.
George News, “Wiles Recruited Her. She Ran the Midterm Points Contest. Meghan Bauer Needs to Go Now.”, November 11, 2026; November 10 thread; May 28, 2024 thread.