© 2026 ABC News

-- ABC News' Elizabeth Thomas and Ben Gittleson

\"PHOTO:
Charlie Neibergall/AP
PHOTO: Vice President Mike Pence waves as he stops off Air Force Two after arriving at the Des Moines International Airport, May 8, 2020, in Des Moines, Iowa.
>

Pence press secretary tests positive for coronavirus

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 confirm to ABC News that Miller is in fact the staffer who tested positive.

\"PHOTO:
Alastair Pike/AFP via Getty Images, File
PHOTO: White House Senior Advisor Stephen Miller and Katie Waldman arrive in the Booksellers area of the White House to attend an Official Visit with a State Dinner honoring Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, in Washington, Sept. 20, 2019.
>

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 press 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.

\"PHOTO:
James Gathany/CDC
PHOTO: The Centers for Disease Control's Tom Harkin Global Communications Center in Atlanta is shown in a 2006 photo released by the CDC.
>

White House, Birx say detailed CDC reopening guidelines 'in the editing process'

The White House on Friday echoed Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator, who said she's still working with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on detailed reopening guidelines for states during the pandemic even though a White House task force official had said the guidelines wouldn't be issued because those decisions are up to local officials.

\"We're working with the CDC on a whole series of products, from how to improve community mitigation, what to do about contact tracing, how to improve surveillance, and certainly these more detailed guidelines about child care and camps. Those are still being worked on. No one has stopped those guidelines. We're still in editing,\" she told CNN Thursday night.

Asked about the apparent disconnect at her briefing Friday, press secretary Kayleigh McEnany blamed the leak of the draft guidelines on a \"rogue employee\" and denied they had been blocked, saying they were \"still in the editing process.\"

What to know about Coronavirus:

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