James Richard Wilkinson (born 1970) is an American political advisor who served as the chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson during the George W. Bush administration.

He had previously served in the White House as deputy communications director and as an aide to then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

He served The Brunswick Group as a Managing Partner from January 2009 to April 2012, when he joined PepsiCo as Executive Vice President of Communications.

[9][10] In 1999, during George W. Bush's campaign for president, Wilkinson helped sell the idea that Al Gore claimed to have "invented the Internet".

[7][13] Wilkinson joined the Bush administration and worked as "White House deputy director of communications and spokesman for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's transition team".

[13] As Karl Rove's choice,[14] Wilkinson left the Bush administration to work as the communications director for the 2004 Republican National Convention before returning to the White House under Rice.

[19] The goal of the group was to "get the country on the page that the White House wanted everybody to believe: that Iraq, with its weapons of mass destruction, was an imminent threat to the United States".

[25] When interviewed by the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Wilkinson said that he did not know the identity of the "U.S. officials" cited in the 3 April story.

[7] Tommy Franks, in his book American Soldier, writes that Wilkinson was too eager to pass along the night-vision video of Lynch to the media.

[29] In an op-ed titled "Smear Without Fear", Paul Krugman of The New York Times attributed to Wilkinson a smear on Richard Clarke broadcast on CNN, writing that, "Wilkinson seems to have questioned Mr. Clarke's sanity, saying: 'He sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden, and bin Laden has a mystical mind control over U.S. officials.

It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush.'

[31] A Wilkinson September 2008 email regarding the government's approach to Lehman Brothers appeared in a 2010 Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission document.