New UK PM Andy Burnham Texted With Fake Susie Wiles Before Catching On

Andy Burnham has been UK prime minister for less than a month, and he's already been targeted by someone pretending to be Susie Wiles, Trump's White House chief of staff.

Politico reported Monday, citing four anonymous officials, that Burnham exchanged messages with the impersonator both while he was on track to take over Downing Street and briefly after he was sworn in on July 20. One person briefed on the matter told Politico only a "few messages" went back and forth and they were "of no significance." Burnham reportedly grew suspicious the contact wasn't real and cut it off.

BBC News confirmed the exchange to CBS News, reporting it was strictly text-based, no phone call, no voice contact. What was actually said, and exactly when, hasn't been made public by any outlet.

Downing Street isn't saying much. Asked for comment, a UK government spokesperson gave the same line to multiple outlets, including the BBC and Anadolu Agency: "We do not comment on national security matters." It's the standard non-answer governments give when they don't want to tip off exactly what they know.

The British embassy in Washington apparently didn't treat this as nothing. Politico's sources said the embassy raised the incident directly with the White House because officials in London worried Wiles' phone might have been compromised again. That's a notable move. Embassies don't usually escalate "a few insignificant texts" to the host government unless somebody's nervous.

Wiles was targeted before. The Wall Street Journal reported in May 2025 that someone accessed her personal cellphone contacts and used them to message and call senators, governors, and business executives while posing as her. The FBI and the White House opened an investigation. A White House spokesperson said at the time the administration "takes the cybersecurity of all staff very seriously."

Trump, for his part, brushed off the whole thing when it first broke. "Nobody can impersonate Susie," he told reporters. "There's only one Susie. There's only one." He called her "an amazing woman" and said he trusted her to handle it.

A White House official told the Daily Beast this new incident "had nothing to do with the chief of staff's devices being hacked." A source close to Wiles went further, telling the Beast that Wiles didn't even have Burnham's cell number in the first place. If that's accurate, this wasn't a repeat of last year's contact-list hack. It could just as easily be a random scammer or prankster who cold-contacted the new PM with zero connection to Wiles' actual phone.

If Wiles never had Burnham's number, the scenario where her device was breached again gets a lot less likely, and the "second hacking" framing that several outlets ran with looks overstated. The Daily Beast's own headline still led with "for a second time," which stretches past what its own White House source said on the record.

No formal investigation into this specific Burnham exchange has been announced by the FBI, the White House, or UK authorities as of Monday, August 17. The only confirmed federal investigation on record is the one opened in May 2025 into the original Wiles contact-list breach, and CBS News reported that probe "continues to be investigated."

Nobody has identified who was behind the Burnham messages. Nobody has released the content of the texts. Nobody has confirmed whether this traces back to the same actor from last year's breach or is an unrelated stunt. The News International's report flatly stated "the mystery surrounding the true identity of the scammer remains unresolved."

This lands against a backdrop that isn't exactly confidence-inspiring. The original Wiles hack followed the Signalgate mess from March 2025, when top national security officials discussed strike plans on Yemen in a Signal chat that accidentally included a journalist. Add a foreign head of government texting with a fake chief of staff, and it's fair to ask whether the West Wing has actually tightened up who gets access to senior officials' identities, or whether this keeps happening because nobody fixed the underlying problem.

The next real test is whether the FBI's ongoing investigation into the 2025 Wiles breach produces an actual suspect, or whether this second episode just gets filed away as another unresolved anomaly, like the first one has been for the last 15 months.