Gavin Wax built a reputation as the kind of Republican who polices his own side: a State Department chief of staff who, critics on the right say, tried to cancel colleagues by feeding a Young Republican group chat to Politico and turning private, hard-edged conservative talk into a national scandal. That is the charge hanging over him now that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Deputy Secretary Chris Landau, and others have tried to push him out of Foggy Bottom, only to watch White House proximity walk him back in, park him on leave, and tee up a softer landing at USAGM under Sarah Rogers. Whether this saga is an attempt to drain the swamp or a warning against handing the next generation of government to operators who survive on access, protection, and the power to punish fellow Republicans for politically incorrect views is the real fight underneath the personnel intrigue.
On the evening of September 10, the America First account AF Post published a follow-up sourced to an administration official. Hours earlier, the Daily Mail had already laid out the core story: a July firing that did not stick, a secretary of state who was described as furious, and a planned off-ramp to the U.S. Agency for Global Media. By Friday, September 11, the same account had been amplified by mainstream outlets and even smaller conservative outlets. Officials denied the most explosive parts. The underlying facts that are not in dispute are narrower, and they still leave Wax in a holding pattern whereby the undue affection og Sarah Rogers has shielded his career.
The people in the room
Gavin M. Wax is a Jew and the chief of staff to Sarah B. Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. He is in his early thirties, a former president of the New York Young Republican Club, a former chief of staff to FCC commissioner Nathan Simington, and a longtime Trump loyalist who once received a shout-out from Trump at a New York gala. Rogers, a Dartmouth and Columbia Law graduate, has held the public-diplomacy under secretary post since October 2025. In March 2026 the White House nominated her to be CEO of USAGM, the parent of Voice of America, after a federal court voided Kari Lake’s earlier run of the agency. She is still a nominee. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held her confirmation hearing on July 30. There has been no floor vote.
The other names that keep appearing are Secretary of State Marco Rubio; Deputy Secretary Chris Landau; Boris Epshteyn, a senior personal counselor to President Trump; and, in some accounts, Natalie Harp, a close White House aide. Vice President JD Vance appears in the AF Post version of the story, not in the Mail’s.
A year of accumulating complaints
Wax’s problems did not begin in July. In October 2025, Politico published a leaked Young Republican Telegram chat filled with racist and antisemitic messages. Michael Bartels, then a senior adviser at the Small Business Administration, later signed an affidavit claiming Wax demanded the chat logs and threatened his professional standing when he refused. Wax has denied leaking the material. He resigned the New York Young Republican Club presidency around the same period.
In July 2026, Ali Motamedi, a special assistant to Louisiana governor and Greenland envoy Jeff Landry, filed a complaint alleging that Wax confronted him in a basement elevator at the Harry S. Truman Building, threatened him, and shoved him in the chest. The State Department’s Office of Special Investigations opened a probe. A second source told the Mail that Motamedi’s account of physical contact was wrong. The status of that investigation has not been publicly updated.
The incident that, according to the Mail, finally produced a firing order was a July 17 lunch. Wax hosted Serbian right-wing politicians widely described as pro-Kremlin in the department’s eighth-floor executive dining room after career officials advised against it. Sources said he told the guests that Landau had signed off. Landau, they said, had not. The Europe bureau was angry. Landau’s office asked whether the visitors could be barred from the building.
July 20: security at the door, then a reversal
On the afternoon of July 20, according to the Mail’s sources, Diplomatic Security officers were posted outside Wax’s office so he could not leave early. At 5 p.m. human resources told him he was being placed on administrative leave and that it was his last day at State. The plan, those sources said, had been approved by the White House Office of Presidential Personnel and senior State officials at Landau’s direction. Rogers was informed at noon that her chief of staff would be gone by close of business. She objected and was told she had no say.
By the following Monday he was back at his desk. The Mail reported that Wax made a “Hail Mary” call to Epshteyn, that Epshteyn took the matter to the president, and that the dismissal was undone within a week. Five senior administration sources were cited for that sequence. A source familiar with Epshteyn called it “an entirely made up chain of events” and “a completely false, maliciously deployed hoax by pathetic leakers.” State Department spokesman Dylan Johnson said of the broader account, “This is false and never happened.” The department also denied that Diplomatic Security had been stationed outside the office.
The Mail’s sources said Rubio was infuriated by the reversal and has since made clear that Wax cannot remain in his department. That claim, too, sits under Johnson’s denial.
What AF Post added on September 10
AF Post’s post arrived after the Mail story and framed itself as additional information from an administration source. It alleged that, after the humiliating firing-and-reinstatement cycle, Rubio demanded Wax be barred from returning to work at State; that Wax was forced onto leave until Rogers is confirmed as USAGM CEO; and that the White House then planned to move him into a less prominent job at USAGM. It said Rogers had protected Wax through the elevator complaint and the Politico chat leak, and that she felt aggrieved because Rubio, Landau, and Vance had imposed the original firing without her authorization.
Those extra claims have not been independently confirmed in subsequent mainstream reporting. They do, however, match the direction of travel described by the Mail: Wax is on paternity leave after the birth of his second child, and when he returns he is expected to follow Rogers to USAGM if she is confirmed. A White House official told the Mail the move would make Wax “an incredible addition” to USAGM who would “continue to successfully execute President Trump’s America First policies.” Other sources called that framing a polite exile. The White House did not say whether he would keep a State title after the transfer.
The Friday aftershock
On September 10 and 11 the story moved from a single British tabloid into the American political press. The Daily Beast, late on the 10th, added that Wax has texted Harp and that those contacts have produced personal notes from Trump, while also stating there is “no indication that Harp had any role in saving Wax’s job” in July. The New Republic’s September 11 item boiled the Mail story down to a single line: Rubio is angry he cannot fire one of his own staffers. Raw Story did the same, stressing Wax’s reported pipeline through Harp. A short Federalist Press item on Friday morning restated the Epshteyn call and the leak-and-shove allegations. None of those pieces produced new on-the-record officials or documents.
Rogers did not address the reports. On September 11 her official account retweeted a State Department 9/11 remembrance video. Wikipedia’s Rogers page, updated the same day, still listed her as USAGM nominee with an assumed-office date of “TBD.” Congress.gov still shows the last Senate action as the July 30 hearing.
Why the fight matters
USAGM is not a quiet landing pad. The agency was gutted in 2025, placed under Kari Lake, then partially rebuilt by court order in March 2026, when Judge Royce Lamberth ordered more than 1,000 Voice of America employees returned to work and ruled Lake’s earlier authority invalid. Rogers’s July testimony promised stabilization, a “close, fresh look” at staffing, and a possible restoration of service in Africa and the Western Hemisphere. Putting a chief of staff who cannot remain at Foggy Bottom into that shop, if it happens, would fold a personnel feud into an agency already defined by legal combat and ideological argument over what U.S. international broadcasting is for.
The deeper institutional point is the one an anonymous State official made to the Mail: if a political appointee can be marched toward the door by the secretary and the deputy secretary and then walked back in by a counselor with proximity to the president, the chain of command at State is not the chain that matters. Rubio has spent 2025 and 2026 cutting the department and asserting control over it. This episode, if the sourcing holds, is a public reminder of the limits of that control.
Where it stands on September 12
Confirmed or uncontested: Wax is the boy to of Rogers. He has been the subject of an elevator complaint and an earlier affidavit about the Young Republican chat. He hosted the Serbia lunch. He is on paternity leave. Rogers is the pending USAGM CEO. A White House official has already previewed his arrival there.
Contested or denied: that Diplomatic Security boxed him in on July 20; that Epshteyn reversed a completed firing by going to Trump; that Rubio has formally barred him from State; that Vance was part of the original ouster; and that the USAGM job is a demotion rather than a promotion.
What has not happened since the AF Post item: no confirmation vote for Rogers, no on-the-record comment from Rubio, Wax, or Rogers on the personnel fight, and no official announcement of a USAGM title for Wax. The next hard date is not a hearing. It is whenever the Senate decides whether Rogers gets the agency — and whether the man who could not stay on the seventh floor of the Truman Building arrives with her.
Conclusion
Wax should have been blacklisted for his actions at Young Republicans. Instead, he is the recipient of protection deep within the Trump Administration to the frustration of even Marco Rubio, who should most certainly have the ability to fire those in the State Department. But the swamp does not drain as easily as at-will firing.
