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Katie Miller is married to Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller.
5 min read
President Donald Trump confirmed Friday that Vice President Pence’s press secretary Katie Miller is the White House staffer who tested positive for the coronavirus earlier in the day.
Miller is married to another top White House aide, Trump’s senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller.
“She’s a wonderful young woman, Katie,” Trump told ABC News Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl when he asked if the president had any information on the sick staffer, whose identity until then had been kept anonymous. “It’s — I believe the press person. Right? It’s a press person. So, she tested positive, out of the blue,” he said.
Multiple sources confirmed to ABC News that Miller is in fact the staffer who tested positive.
Trump said she “hasn’t come into contact with me” and that she “spends some time with the vice president.”
Pence’s aide testing positive for the coronavirus, comes one day after it was revealed that a personal valet for President Trump also had tested positive.
The aide testing positive Friday morning delayed Pence’s plane from taking off for a trip to Iowa.
“Out of abundance of caution we went back and looked into all the person’s contacts most recently,” a senior administration official told pool reporters traveling with Pence. “And so out of an abundance of caution, that’s why we asked some of our staff to deplane. Nobody else was exhibiting any symptoms or having any feeling of sickness, but we asked them to go get tested and go home out of abundance of caution,” the official said, according to a pool report.
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The senior official wouldn’t go into the level of contact the staffer had with vice president but did say the president has not had direct contact with this person recently, according to the pool.
The official said the staffer had tested negative Thursday and did not have symptoms at that time but had tested positive Friday morning, according to the pool.
Trump said Thursday that he and Pence would now get daily testing.
All six of the staffers who deplaned from Air Force Two Friday morning and were subsequently tested for the novel coronavirus received negative test results, according to an administration official.
Two of the six staffers were members of the vice president’s press team, according to reporters traveling with the vice president.
ABC News’ Katherine Faulders, John Santucci and Ben Gittleson contributed to this report.
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