Andy Kaczynski@KFILE
Media Matter finds Michele Morrow, the Republican nominee to lead North Carolina K-12 schools touted her work for a group that said school shooting are false flags, 9/11 was an inside job, and that Obama had a "Hitler bloodline."
The news that NBC News reconsidered its invitation to former Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to become a paid contributor has buried the recent news about some of the other participants in Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Yesterday a judge in Minnesota ruled in favor of a warehouse owner who sought to evict MyPillow after it failed to pay more than $200,000 in rent. MyPillow chief executive officer Mike Lindell has complained that his company has been “decimated” by his support for Trump. His insistence—without evidence—that the 2020 presidential election was stolen has entangled him in expensive defamation lawsuits filed by voting machine companies Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic.
Lindell cannot pay his lawyers and claims to have “lost hundreds of millions of dollars,” but insists he is being persecuted “because you want me to shut up about [the] security of our elections.”
Also yesterday, Trump loyalist Kari Lake, who has pushed the idea that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, ran for Arizona governor in 2022, and is now running for the U.S. Senate, admitted she defamed Maricopa County recorder Stephen Richer and that she acted with actual malice when she claimed he “sabotaged” the 2022 election. The request to admit to defamation came on the day that discovery, the process of sharing information about a case with each side, was to begin, suggesting that she preferred to admit wrongdoing rather than let anyone see what might be in her emails, texts, and recordings.
Arizona journalist Howard Fischer reported in the Arizona Daily Star that in a video statement, Lake said her admission did not mean she agreed she did anything wrong, although that is expressly stipulated in the court papers. She said she conceded because Richer’s lawsuit was keeping her off the campaign trail. “It’s called lawfare: weaponizing the legal system to punish, impoverish and destroy political opponents,’’ Lake said. “We’ve all seen how they’re doing it to President Trump. And here in Arizona, they’re doing the exact same thing to me.’’
One of Lake’s senior advisors said: “Kari Lake maintains she has always been truthful.”
Also yesterday, a three-member panel of the D.C. Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility began a disciplinary hearing for former Department of Justice environmental lawyer Jeffrey Clark, who was so key to Trump’s plan to get state legislatures to overturn the results of the 2020 election that Trump tried to make him attorney general.
Clark joins Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who led the media blitz to argue—falsely—that the election had been stolen. Giuliani’s New York and Washington, D.C., law licenses were suspended in June 2021 after a court found that he made “demonstrably false and misleading statements to courts, lawmakers, and the public at large.” He is now facing disbarment.
Earlier this month, he said on his podcast that he expected to be disbarred because “[t]he Bar Association is going to crucify me no matter what. I will be disbarred in New York. I will be disbarred in Washington. It will have nothing to do with anything I did wrong.”
Today, after a long trial, attorney discipline judge Yvette Roland recommended that John Eastman, the lawyer who came up with the justification for using fake electors to overturn the 2020 presidential election, be disbarred. Eastman will immediately lose his license to practice law. The California Supreme Court will decide whether to disbar Eastman.
Eastman’s lawyer said it was unfair to take Eastman’s law license because he needs to make money to fight the criminal charges against him in Georgia, where he has been indicted for his part in the effort to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election there. For his part, Eastman maintains he did nothing wrong.
In her recommendation, Judge Roland compared Eastman’s case to that of Donald Segretti, the lawyer whose efforts to guarantee President Richard Nixon’s 1972 reelection included, as Roland’s recommendation noted, distributing letters that made false accusations against Nixon’s rivals (including a forged letter attributing a slur against French-Canadians to Maine senator and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination Edmund Muskie). At the time, the court noted that Segretti was only 30, thought he was acting for Nixon, and did not act in his capacity as a lawyer. The court also emphasized that Segretti “recognized the wrongfulness of his acts, expressed regret, and cooperated with the investigating agencies.”
In contrast, Roland wrote, “[t]he scale and egregiousness of Eastman’s unethical actions far surpasses” Segretti’s misconduct. Segretti acted outside his role as an attorney, while “Eastman’s wrongdoing was committed directly in the course and scope of his representation of President Trump and the Trump campaign.” Roland also noted that while Segretti expressed remorse and recognized his wrongdoing, Eastman has shown “an apparent inability to accept responsibility. This lack of remorse and accountability presents a significant risk that Eastman may engage in further unethical conduct, compounding the threat to the public.”
One by one, those who worked with Trump to overturn the election are being held to account by our legal system. But still, they refuse to admit any wrongdoing.
In that, they are following Trump.
Despite Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order, Trump continued today to attack both Merchan and his daughter. On his social media site, Trump posted that Merchan was trying to deprive him of his “First Amendment right to speak out against the Weaponization of Law Enforcement, including the fact that Crooked Joe Biden, Merrick Garland, and their Hacks and Thugs are tracking and following me all across the Country, obsessively trying to persecute me, while everyone knows I have done nothing wrong!” Trump posted in great detail about the judge’s daughter, accusing her of making money by “working to ‘Get Trump,’” based on images shared by an old social media account of hers that had been hacked.
It was President Nixon who perfected the refusal to admit wrongdoing in the face of overwhelming evidence. Even after tapes recorded in the Oval Office revealed that he had plotted with an aide to block investigations of the break-in at the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate Hotel by invoking national security and Republican Party leaders told him he needed to resign, he refused to admit wrongdoing. Instead, he told the American people he was stepping down because he no longer had enough support in Congress to advance the national interest. He blamed his fall on the press, saying its “leaks and accusations and innuendo” were designed to destroy him.
Gerald R. Ford, the president who replaced Nixon, inadvertently put a rubber stamp on Nixon’s refusal to accept responsibility. Believing it was better for the country to move past the divisions of the Watergate era, Ford issued a preemptive pardon for any crimes the former president might have committed against the United States while in office. Ford maintained that the acceptance of a pardon was an admission of guilt.
But Ford’s pardon meant Nixon never faced legal accountability for his actions. That escape allowed him to argue that a president is above the law. In a 1977 interview with British journalist David Frost, Nixon told Frost that “when the president does it…that means that it is not illegal,” by definition.
As Nixon did, Trump has watched those who participated in his schemes pay dearly for their support, but he appears angry and confused at the idea that he himself could be held legally accountable for his behavior.
But without accountability, as Judge Roland noted, there is no incentive to stop dangerous behavior. Josh Dawsey reported last night in the Washington Post that since Trump has taken over the Republican National Committee and purged it of former employees, those interviewing for jobs are being asked if they believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Other questions, Dawsey reported, include “what applicants believe should be done on ‘election integrity’ in 2024.”
My formative journalistic years were spent reporting on the final freeze of the cold war – days of hard times and soft currencies. When I return to those countries now, I test myself on how well I guessed what would follow in the three decades since. On Poland in particular, I would have been hard pressed to predict the giddy zigzag of power still featuring a generation who marched to topple communism, but whose protagonists feud bitterly about how to govern the country in the 21st century.
We talk a lot about places that have recently bought a one-way ticket towards authoritarian politics – Russia and Turkey for the full-fat versions, and Hungary’s democratic backsliding and stifling of independent institutions.
I had pondered about what happens when a country that embraced populist nationalism does a 180-degree turn and seeks to restore legal and democratic norms at top speed. What happens to laws passed under the previous masters of the house: the courts, state media, and business and other institutions stuffed by supporters of one side?
Poland, in the wake of an election last year that ended eight years of rule by the rightwing Law and Justice party in favour of a coalition headed by Donald Tusk’s Civil Platform, is in the eye of all these legal, ethical and practical storms. A documentary for BBC Radio 4 gave me the chance to chart this volte-face as the Tusk government takes an “iron broom” to sweep away a legacy of ultra-conservative rule.
But there’s also the story that is more nuanced and paradoxical here: the new government won an election, and forged an alliance in power that represents a lot of the country – but by no means all of it. As it sweeps away obstacles to its will, it will need to restore pluralism to avoid repeating aspects of the absolutism it replaces.
For a government led by Tusk, a bullish pro-European veteran of centrist politics who is not of the charm school persuasion (Brexiters were on the receiving end of his mordant style when he wished the Johnsonian variety a “special place in hell”), and with little common ground yet visible, that might well be the difference between a durable return to the centre of politics and yet another hairpin change of direction.
But as my producer and I travelled from the buzzy streets of Warsaw, via the Law and Justice stronghold of Wadowice – where a lady coming out of the basilica responded tartly to the question about Tusk’s government by saying it was “time he came back to God” – to Kraków, to speak to one woman caught up in the implementation of draconian abortion laws, it felt like veering giddily from one world to another. People claimed that they understood the destiny of their country while turning a deaf ear to others’ views.
It is not hard for western European liberals to identify with a figure like the deputy justice minister, Dariusz Mazur, who describes himself as “very tired” after years of tussle over control of courts, regulators and legal certification bodies. For him, it’s about cleaning out a judicial system stacked by Law and Justice – while avoiding the obvious pitfall of this government being seen as replacing one lot of favourites with another.
There’s also a fraught dealing here with the idea of Europe. The Tusk government is EU friendly: he is a veteran of Brussels and adept at working it to appeal to Poland’s desire to be taken more seriously. A return to the European “family” and access to EU-derived funds was part of the appeal. The “iron broom”, however, might have met a hard stop as the European Central Bank raises objections to the Tusk government’s threat of a tribunal aimed to oust Poland’s central bank boss, on the grounds that it infringes the bank’s independence.
These attempts to eradicate eight years of a rightward “state capture”, with personal cronyism as well as ideology, guarantee a lengthy period of institutional muddle – it’s not even clear whether the president, Andrzej Duda (loyal to the old team), will allow the prime minister to swap out ambassadors he wants recalled.
Tusk has been (by his uncompromising standards) conciliatory in insisting that this is a recalibration “not a retaliation”, though it’s hard to see that landing well with a large chunk of voters whose rightwing party won the largest share of the vote at the election. And the new government is held together by a coalition that itself contains many shades of opinion, infuriating the many young activists and voters who helped drive change by turning out en masse to oust Law and Justice – and now hanker for faster results on abortion and other social reforms.
Economically, a thriving Poland defies my expectations as the country I remember from the doldrums of the late 1980s, when a stint in the Dickensian conditions of Warsaw’s Rosa Luxemburg lightbulb factory would have been enough to put anyone off thinking that communism was an illuminating idea.
Now, it’s approached the EU average on household wealth, ahead of Spain and nudging Ireland, and the main cities feel like cosmopolitan havens, with a new sprinkling of Ukrainians who have fled west to start new lives – my friend’s dog-clipper is from Kharkiv, my manicurist fled from Odesa.
The new Poland still bears the echoes of grim events. But it might well turn out to be a test case for other states or movements in Europe and beyond that one day want to turn back from the “ultra” model. The moral of this story is that it’s necessary – but not easy.
Ron Filipkowski@RonFilipkowski
5h
Trump Bible business partner Lee Greenwood on Trump’s new commercial: “I’m so proud of the president for stepping forward and saying that he believes in God, that he’s a christian.”
Yesterday the National Economic Council called a meeting of the Supply Chain Disruptions Task Force, which the Biden-Harris administration launched in 2021, to discuss the impact of the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge and the partial closure of the Port of Baltimore on regional and national supply chains. The task force draws members from the White House and the departments of Transportation, Commerce, Agriculture, Defense, Labor, Health and Human Services, Energy, and Homeland Security. It is focused on coordinating efforts to divert ships to other ports and to minimize impacts to employers and workers, making sure, for example, that dock workers stay on payrolls.
Today, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg convened a meeting of port, labor, and industry partners—ocean carriers, truckers, local business owners, unions, railroads, and so on—to mitigate disruption from the bridge collapse. Representatives came from 40 organizations including American Roll-on Roll-off Carrier; the Georgia Ports Authority; the International Longshoremen’s Association, the International Organization of Masters, Mates and Pilots; John Deere; Maersk; Mercedes-Benz North America Operations; Seabulk Tankers; Under Armour; and the World Shipping Council.
Today the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration announced it would make $60 million available immediately to be used as a down payment toward initial costs. Already, though, some Republicans are balking at the idea of using new federal money to rebuild the bridge, saying that lawmakers should simply take the money that has been appropriated for things like electric vehicles, or wait until insurance money comes in from the shipping companies.
In 2007, when a bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis suddenly collapsed, Congress passed funding to rebuild it in days and then-president George W. Bush signed the measure into law within a week of the accident.
In the past days, we have learned that the six maintenance workers killed when the bridge collapsed were all immigrants, natives of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. Around 39% of the workforce in the construction industry around Baltimore and Washington, D.C., about 130,000 people, are immigrants, Scott Dance and María Luisa Paúl reported in the Washington Post yesterday.
Some of the men were undocumented, and all of them were family men who sent money back to their home countries, as well. From Honduras, the nephew of one of the men killed told the Associated Press, “The kind of work he did is what people born in the U.S. won’t do. People like him travel there with a dream. They don’t want to break anything or take anything.”
In the Philadelphia Inquirer today, journalist Will Bunch castigated the right-wing lawmakers and pundits who have whipped up native-born Americans over immigration, calling immigrants sex traffickers and fentanyl dealers, and even “animals.” Bunch illustrated that the reality of what was happening on the Francis Scott Key Bridge when it collapsed creates an opportunity to reframe the immigration debate in the United States.
Last month, Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post noted that immigration is a key reason that the United States experienced greater economic growth than any other nation In the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. The surge of immigration that began in 2022 brought to the U.S. working-age people who, Director Phill Swagel of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office wrote, are expected to make the U.S. gross domestic product about $7 trillion larger over the ten years from 2023 to 2034 than it would have been otherwise. Those workers will account for about $1 trillion dollars in revenues.
Curiously, while Republican leaders today are working to outdo each other in their harsh opposition to immigration, it was actually the leaders of the original Republican Party who recognized the power of immigrants to build the country and articulated an economic justification for increased immigration during the nation’s first major anti-immigrant period.
The United States had always been a nation of immigrants, but in the 1840s the failure of the potato crop in Ireland sent at least half a million Irish immigrants to the United States. As they moved into urban ports on the East Coast, especially in Massachusetts and New York, native-born Americans turned against them as competitors for jobs.
The 1850s saw a similar anti-immigrant fury in the new state of California. After the discovery of gold there in 1848, native-born Americans—the so-called Forty Niners—moved to the West Coast. They had no intention of sharing the riches they expected to find. The Indigenous people who lived there had no right to the land under which gold lay, native-born men thought; nor did the Mexicans whose government had sold the land to the U.S. in 1848; nor did the Chileans, who came with mining skills that made them powerful competitors. Above all, native-born Americans resented the Chinese miners who came to work in order to send money home to a land devastated by the first Opium War.
Democrats and the new anti-immigrant American Party (more popularly known as the “Know Nothings” because members claimed to know nothing about the party) turned against the new immigrants, seeing them as competition that would drive down wages. In the 1850s, Know Nothing officials in Massachusetts persecuted Catholics and deported Irish immigrants they believed were paupers. In California the state legislature placed a monthly tax on Mexican and Chinese miners, made unemployment a crime, took from Chinese men the right to testify in court, and finally tried to stop Chinese immigration altogether by taxing shipmasters $50 for each Chinese immigrant they brought.
When the Republicans organized in the 1850s, they saw society differently than the Democrats and the Know Nothings. They argued that society was not made up of a struggle over a limited economic pie, but rather that hardworking individuals would create more than they could consume, thus producing capital that would make the economy grow. The more people a nation had, the stronger it would be.
In 1860 the new party took a stand against the new laws that discriminated against immigrants. Immigrants’ rights should not be “abridged or impaired,” the delegates to its convention declared, adding that they were “in favor of giving a full and efficient protection to the rights of all classes of citizens, whether native or naturalized, both at home and abroad.”
Republicans’ support for immigration only increased during the Civil War. In contrast to the southern enslavers, they wanted to fill the land with people who supported freedom. As one poorly educated man wrote to his senator, “Protect Emegration and that will protect the Territories to Freedom.”
Republicans also wanted to bring as many workers to the country as possible to increase economic development. The war created a huge demand for agricultural products to feed the troops. At the same time, a terrible drought in Europe meant there was money to be made exporting grain. But the war was draining men to the battlefields of Stone’s River and Gettysburg and to the growing U.S. Navy, leaving farmers with fewer and fewer hands to work the land.
By 1864, Republicans were so strongly in favor of immigration that Congress passed “an Act to Encourage Immigration.” The law permitted immigrants to borrow against future homesteads to fund their voyage to the U.S., appropriated money to provide for impoverished immigrants upon their arrival, and, to undercut Democrats’ accusations that they were simply trying to find men to throw into the grinding war, guaranteed that no immigrant could be drafted until he announced his intention of becoming a citizen.
Support for immigration has waxed and waned repeatedly since then, but as recently as 1989, Republican president Ronald Reagan said: “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation…. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
The workers who died in the bridge collapse on Tuesday “were not ‘poisoning the blood of our country,’” Will Bunch wrote, quoting Trump; “they were replenishing it…. They may have been born all over the continent, but when these men plunged into our waters on Tuesday, they died as Americans.”
After an anti-corruption crusader unexpectedly won last year’s presidential election in Guatemala, democracy teetered on the edge in the Central American country. Amid law enforcement raids on election offices and threats of violence, the Biden administration worked feverishly to lay the groundwork for a peaceful transfer of power.
But not Richard Grenell, a former diplomat and intelligence official in Donald Trump’s administration, who arrived in Guatemala in January, days before the new president was to be sworn in — and threw his support behind a right-wing campaign to undermine the election.
Grenell met with a hard-line group that sued to block the inauguration. The group thanked him for his “visit and trust.” He defended Guatemalan officials who had seized ballot boxes in an effort to overturn a vote declared “free and fair” by the United States and international observers, and he attacked the U.S. State Department’s sanctions against hundreds of anti-democratic actors.
“They are trying to intimidate conservatives in Guatemala,” Grenell said in a television interview. “This is all wrapped into this kind of phony concern about democracy.”
Grenell’s intervention highlights the extraordinary role he has carved out in the three years since Trump left the White House. From Central America to Eastern Europe and beyond, Grenell has been acting as a kind of shadow secretary of state, meeting with far-right leaders and movements, pledging Trump’s support and, at times, working against the current administration’s policies.
It’s unusual for a former diplomatic official to continue meeting with foreign leaders and promoting the agenda of a presidential candidate on the world stage. Grenell’s globe-trotting has sparked deep concern among career national security officials and diplomats, who warn that he emboldens bad actors and jeopardizes U.S. interests in service of Trump’s personal agenda. In the process, Grenell is openly charting a foreign policy road map for a Republican presidential nominee who has found common cause with authoritarian leaders and threatened to blow up partnerships with democratic allies.
“I think Trump and Grenell would upend American leadership of the free world, from Truman on the left to Reagan on the right, and replace it with something much darker,” said Daniel Fried, who spent four decades in top State Department posts, including as an assistant secretary of state and a director of the National Security Council. “It’s transactional. Democratic values are irrelevant, and it’s isolationist.”
Grenell declined to talk on the record about his overseas work.
His profile is rising in Trump’s MAGA movement, which hails him as a champion of the “America First” platform. Trump and his supporters view a second term as an opportunity to elevate his most loyal backers, who potentially would test traditional guardrails against abuse of executive power.
The former president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., in an online chat with Grenell last month, touted his record as ambassador to Germany and called him a “top contender for secretary of state.”
“Your name comes up a lot in some very high levels. You’re in there with the base,” Trump Jr. said, adding that Grenell was “probably the only ambassador who spoke truth to power.”
Grenell calls himself a diplomat but acts as a rapid-response, war-room director, perpetually exalting Trump and trolling his political foes on social media and in interviews.
“Grenell fulfills the top priority that Trump is looking for in his second term, which is absolute loyalty,” said Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, who has called Trump “unfit” to be president and warned about a potential administration of enablers. “What a president’s advisers owe him is their opinions on what’s right, their sound judgment.”
Grenell is in regular contact with the former president and his family, though it’s unclear when or if he’s acting on Trump’s directions. Earlier this year, Grenell attended a small, private funeral for Trump’s mother-in-law, according to other guests. Social media posts show several visits to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Fla., and his golf club in Bedminster, N.J. In an unusual statement by an ex-president, Trump gave one of Grenell’s recent foreign trips his blessing, calling him “My Envoy.”
In Guatemala, Grenell claimed on social media that he met with more than 45 political and business leaders during a days-long trip. In the Balkans, where he worked as an envoy under Trump, he has continued to talk to heads of state who are separately engaging with the Biden administration. Last year, as Turkey threatened Sweden’s pathway to joining NATO, Grenell tried to broker a meeting between Trump and the Turkish president, according to two people close to the former president who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung declined to comment on whether the former president endorses Grenell’s foreign activities.
“There has been no discussion of who will serve in a second Trump administration.” Cheung said. “President Trump will choose the best people for his Cabinet to undo all the damage Crooked Joe Biden has done to our country.”
Asked whether he is seeking a Cabinet-level position, Grenell has told reporters that he is busy campaigning for Trump’s reelection.
Federal law requires many people paid to advocate on behalf of foreign interests to register with the Justice Department and disclose their activities. When Grenell joined the Trump administration, amid revelations that his former public relations firm was paid by a nonprofit funded by the Hungarian government, his lawyer at the time said he did not need to register as a lobbyist. Bloomberg and the New York Times recently reported that Grenell and Trump’s son-in-law and former adviser Jared Kushner are proposing major real estate developments in the Balkans that could pose conflicts of interest if either of them serves in another Trump administration.
“This is private sector investment. This is not political,” Grenell said in a recent interview with an Albanian television station. “Jared and I are both not in government, and we are on the outside.”
Kushner did not respond to The Post’s requests for comment.
A divisive diplomat
The arc of Grenell’s political career tracks Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party.
A native of Grand Rapids, Mich., who obtained a master’s degree in public administration from the Harvard Kennedy School, he served as a spokesman for various Republican politicians and then for the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations for several years. During a brief stint as a spokesman for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, Grenell deleted numerous snarky and sexist social media posts and apologized. (He resigned after some religious conservatives rejected him for being openly gay.)
He would not issue a public apology like that again. The following year, he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “He always says that after cancer, he’s fearless and lives life without regrets,” said former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is close with Grenell.
Grenell’s aptitude for tormenting liberals and journalists, viewed as a liability by the Romney campaign, became an asset after Trump’s election. The president who relished weaponizing social media against his political foes named Grenell, a Fox News contributor, as ambassador to Germany.
Grenell immediately offended his new host. Shortly after Trump pulled the United States out of a nuclear deal with Iran in May 2018, Grenell demanded that German businesses cut ties with Iran even though the country remained part of the agreement. One month later, some German politicians called for Grenell’s ouster after he said he wanted to “empower other conservatives throughout Europe” and praised an Austrian political leader allied with the far right. He also pushed a major drawdown of U.S. troops in Germany, which had failed to meet NATO targets for defense spending.
“He really animated the America-first ideology through diplomacy, and that was equal parts confidence, savvy, creativity and online snark,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.), a Trump ally and friend of Grenell’s. “It was effective. He got Germany to be less of an economic welfare case for the United States.”
Seasoned diplomats criticized Grenell for upending relations with a foreign partner, and later, for boosting Russian interests in the Balkans. While Grenell was still posted to Berlin in 2019, Trump tapped him to mediate between Kosovo and Serbia. Kosovo was recognized as a sovereign state by the United States but not by Serbia, long aligned with Russia. Grenell helped broker an agreement normalizing economic cooperation in the region. Kosovo’s prime minister accused Grenell of helping sink his left-wing administration and favoring Serbia’s president, but both countries subsequently honored Grenell for his work.
In early 2020, Trump appointed Grenell as acting director of national intelligence, a sensitive post typically held by nonpartisan national security experts who have led intelligence agencies or served in the military. During three disruptive months as a Cabinet member, Grenell purged career intelligence professionals serving in what he characterized as a bloated counterterrorism bureaucracy, and he declassified documents sought by Republicans to argue against the investigation into Russian interference.
As Grenell stepped down in May 2020, Trump called him “the all-time great acting ever, at any position.”
He campaigned for the president’s reelection, and days after the vote, he and other Trump surrogates alleged at a news conference that “illegal votes” had tainted the results in Nevada. The state was soon called for Biden, but Grenell has continued to promote the false claim that voting fraud fueled Biden’s 2020 victory.
Grenell’s allegiance to Trump has proved fruitful during the Biden years.
In late 2021, he became a high-ranking executive at Newsmax, which has grown more popular with a right-wing audience that views Fox News as insufficiently pro-Trump. The Republican National Committee paid Grenell $135,000 for consulting that year, records show. Grenell received nearly $400,000 from two pro-Trump, tax-exempt organizations in 2022, the latest year tax filings were available.
Last year, Grenell was elected to the board overseeing the Conservative Political Action Conference, a standard-bearer for the conservative movement that has become an unofficial arm of the Trump campaign.
“You probably all have heard the buzz that Ric Grenell is probably likely to have an extremely important role in a Trump administration,” K.T. McFarland, a CPAC board member who served briefly as Trump’s deputy national security adviser, said at its February conference. Another speaker drew applause when he started a question to Grenell this way: “Let’s say that you’re the next secretary of state …”
Return to the Balkans
After Trump’s defeat, Grenell was no longer a diplomat — but a private citizen who continued traveling and meeting with world leaders.
Grenell returned to the Balkans in November 2021 — days after dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago — amid renewed tensions between Serbia and Kosovo. Trump released a statement calling Grenell “My Envoy” and touting their 2020 economic deal in the region as “historic.”
Grenell criticized U.S. policy during his trip, and Kosovo’s president met with senior Biden administration officials in Washington that same month.
On his repeated trips to Kosovo and Serbia, he has used his stature in the region to boost Trump’s allies, to denigrate Biden’s efforts at negotiating a new peace deal, and to push for private developments.
In Serbia, Grenell is often greeted as a quasi-official, reflecting a perception that he speaks for Trump and could play an important role in a future administration. “He is undoubtedly Serbia’s friend,” Serbia’s ambassador to Washington, Marko Duric, said in an interview last year. “He was while he had the official post, and has remained so today. Everyone in Serbia appreciates that very much.”
At times, that affinity has brought him close to officials tied to the Kremlin. Grenell partied at a cabaret club in Belgrade in 2021 with Serbia’s finance minister, a close ally of President Aleksandar Vucic, who has faced scrutiny in the United States for his authoritarian leanings and connections to Russia.
Grenell’s deep Balkan ties helped pave the way for the estimated $1 billion in real estate projects he is now pursuing with Kushner’s investment firm, Affinity Partners, including a luxury hotel and offices in downtown Belgrade and a resort on an island off the Albanian coast. “I was ecstatic to be able to get Jared and Affinity to look at the project and invest in it,” Grenell said in the recent Albanian television interview, adding that he expected the deal to attract “a flood of investment.”
A Turkish offer
In the fall of 2023, Sweden’s drive to enter NATO was being held up by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose erosion of civil liberties and ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin had badly strained his ties to the United States. In Congress, some key lawmakers were demanding a commitment from Turkey before ratifying the sale of $20 billion in U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets.
Amid those tense negotiations, Grenell, a fierce critic of NATO and the Biden administration’s foreign policies, made a startling offer: a meeting between Trump and Erdogan, who was coming to New York City for the United Nations General Assembly, according to the two people close to the former president.
Grenell proposed a Sept. 12 meeting, according to one of the people familiar with the request. Grenell had long opposed Sweden joining NATO, skeptical that it would meet the alliance’s benchmark of spending at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense.
It’s not clear how Grenell proposed to broker the meeting, or whom he was representing.
But the idea alarmed the Trump confidants, who were concerned about the location and security risks of Erdogan meeting with the former president. Ultimately, Trump decided against it, according to the two people.
Halil Mutlu, Erdogan’s cousin and the head of his political party’s operations in the United States, said he was not aware of the proposed meeting and that Grenell was not working for his organization.
A review of Grenell’s public statements shows that he has pulled back on his criticism of Erdogan. In 2016, Grenell complained that Erdogan was “too close to Islamists,” and as recently as June 2022 he said the Turkish president “views dissenting voices as terrorists.” But in a May 2023 podcast, Grenell argued that Western media unfairly demonized Erdogan in a complicated political climate. “He’s standing up for Turkey,” he said.
In January, the Turkish parliament voted in favor of Sweden joining NATO. Earlier this month, when Biden invited the Swedish prime minister to the State of the Union address to celebrate NATO’s expansion, Grenell mocked the foreign leader for applauding the American president.
‘Slow-motion coup’
In August, following a tumultuous presidential campaign in Guatemala, Bernardo Arévalo, a left-leaning academic, defeated Sandra Torres, a former first lady backed by the right-wing ruling class. U.S. officials then watched in alarm at what Arévalo described as a “slow-motion coup,” driven by business and political elites opposed to his anti-graft platform. Guatemalan authorities seized ballot boxes on flimsy claims of voter fraud, tried to dissolve Arévelo’s party and opened a criminal investigation of him.
Both Democrats and Republicans in Congress recognized Arévelo’s victory, as the European Union warned of “a grave threat to democracy” in a country with a long history of corruption. The Biden administration responded aggressively, dispatching members of Congress and top diplomats. In December, the State Department restricted the visas of nearly 300 individuals in Guatemala, including 100 lawmakers, who it said were trying to undermine the rule of law.
That same day, Grenell blasted the moves as politically motivated and circulated unproven claims of election fraud made by the nation’s attorney general, who was previously restricted from visiting the United States after the State Department cited her for corruption and obstructing investigations.
Grenell was in Guatemala City by Jan. 11, four days before Arévalo’s inauguration. He met that evening with leaders of a right-wing group, Liga Pro Patria, which had recently tried to block Arévalo’s inauguration in court. Among the activists in a photo of the meeting posted online was Steve Hecht, a political website editor in the group, who said in an interview that Liga Pro Patria invited Grenell to Guatemala to seek the backing of a powerful messenger allied with a former U.S. president.
“People couldn’t believe it,” Hecht said. “Here’s a former, high-level U.S. official who, for whatever reason, came here, and we really appreciated him speaking out.”
Fernando Linares Beltranena, a former lawmaker who also attended the meeting, said he agreed with the group that the State Department had meddled in the Guatemala election. “He told us that when he gets to the State Department, if Donald Trump arrives, then heads will roll,” Linares Beltranena said.
The next day, Grenell ate lunch with outgoing president Alejandro Giammattei, whom he called “a great U.S. ally” on Instagram four days before the State Department barred the former head of state from entering the United States due to “involvement in significant corruption.” (Giammattei has denied any wrongdoing.) The president’s press agency released a photo of his handshake with “my friend, diplomat Richard Grenell.”
“They are running around labeling everyone who disagrees with them as “undermining Democracy,” Grenell said on X, in several posts bashing the State Department’s efforts to safeguard Arévalo’s presidency.
To Guatemalans on the far right questioning the legitimacy of Arévalo’s election, Grenell’s visit was a sign that help was on the way. To former and current U.S. officials concerned about the peaceful transfer of power, it was a red flag.
“People in Guatemala were asking me, ‘Who is this guy?’” said Francisco Villagrán de León, a career diplomat and adviser to Arévalo. “Why is he meeting with these known election deniers?”
Grenell briefed the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala about his concerns. But he continued publicly attacking the Biden administration’s support for Arévalo, even as political chaos threatened the inauguration.
The swearing-in was delayed by nine hours amid shouting matches in the Guatemalan Congress over new leadership, street protests and a temporary suspension of Arévalo’s party. Arévalo was finally sworn in after midnight.
“It took me back to Jan. 6,” said Rep. Norma J. Torres (D-Calif.), a member of the U.S. delegation to the inauguration who was holed up for hours during the unrest. “It was very, very tense.”
Vice President Harris hosted Arévalo at the White House on Monday.
Meanwhile, Grenell is providing cover to Arévalo’s political opponents. Mario Duarte, a former Guatemalan intelligence official who has circulated many of Grenell’s social media posts, met with him in Guatemala and again at CPAC last month.
“In Guatemala, he is seen as an important part of team Trump,” Duarte said. “I hope someone like Ric Grenell is in a position of influence of power when Trump wins — God willing.”
On Wednesday the nonprofit, nonpartisan Institute for the Study of War published a long essay explaining that Russia’s only strategy for success in Ukraine is to win the disinformation war in which it is engaged. While the piece by Nataliya Bugayova and Frederick W. Kagan, with Katryna Stepanenko, focused on Russia’s war against Ukraine, the point it makes about Russia’s information operation against Western countries applies more widely.
The authors note that the countries allied behind Ukraine dwarf Russia, with relative gross domestic products of $63 trillion and $1.9 trillion, respectively, while those countries allied with Russia are not mobilizing to help Russian president Vladimir Putin. Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West, they write, if the West mobilizes its resources.
This means that the strategy that matters most for the Kremlin is not the military strategy, but rather the spread of disinformation that causes the West to back away and allow Russia to win. That disinformation operation echoes the Russian practice of getting a population to believe in a false reality so that voters will cast their ballots for the party of oligarchs. In this case, in addition to seeding the idea that Ukraine cannot win and that the Russian invasion was justified, the Kremlin is exploiting divisions already roiling U.S. politics.
It is, for example, playing on the American opposition to sending our troops to fight “forever” wars, a dislike ingrained in the population since the Vietnam War. But the U.S. is not fighting in Ukraine. Ukrainians are asking only for money and matériel, and their war is not a proxy war—they are fighting for their own reasons—although their victory could well prevent U.S. engagement elsewhere in the future. The Kremlin is also playing on the idea that aid to Ukraine is too expensive as the U.S. faces large budget deficits, but the U.S. contribution to Ukraine’s war effort in 2023 was less than 0.5% of the defense budget.
Russian propaganda is also changing key Western concepts of war, suggesting, for example, that Ukrainian surrender will bring peace when, in fact, the end of fighting will simply take away Ukrainians’ ability to protect themselves against Russian violence. The authors note that Russia is using Americans’ regard for peace, life, American interests, freedom of debate, and responsible foreign relations against the U.S.
The authors’ argument parallels that of political observers in the U.S. and elsewhere: Russian actors have amplified the power of a relatively small, aggressive country by leveraging disinformation.
The European Union will hold parliamentary elections in June, and on Wednesday the Czech government sanctioned a news site called Voice of Europe, saying it was part of a pro-Russian propaganda operation. It also sanctioned the man running the site, Artyom Marchevsky, as well as Putin ally Viktor Medvedchuk, a Ukrainian oligarch, saying Medvedchuk was running a “Russian influence operation” through Voice of Europe.
The far right has been rising in Europe, and Nicholas Vinocur, Pieter Haeck, and Eddy Wax of Politico noted that “Voice of Europe’s YouTube page throws up a parade of EU lawmakers, many of them belonging to far-right, Euroskeptic parties, who line up to bash the Green Deal, predict the Union’s imminent collapse, or attack Ukraine.”
Belgian security services were in on the investigation, and on Thursday, Belgian prime minister Alexander De Croo added that Russian operatives had paid European Union lawmakers to parrot Russian propaganda. Intelligence sources told Czech media that Voice of Europe paid politicians from Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Poland to influence the upcoming E.U. elections. Germany’s Der Spiegel newspaper said the money was paid in cash or cryptocurrency.
Czech prime minister Petr Fiala wrote on social media: “We have uncovered a pro-Russian network that was developing an operation to spread Russian influence and undermine security across Europe.” "This shows how great the risk of foreign influence is," Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte told journalists. "It's a threat to our democracy, to our free elections, to our freedom of speech, to everything."
There are reasons to think the same disinformation process is underway in the United States. Not only do MAGA Republicans, including House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), parrot Russian talking points about Ukraine, but Russian disinformation has also been a key part of the House Republicans’ attempt to impeach President Joe Biden.
Republicans spent months touting Alexander Smirnov’s allegation that Biden had accepted foreign bribes, with Representative James Comer (R-KY) and Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) calling his evidence “verifiable” and “valuable.” In February the Department of Justice indicted Smirnov for creating a false record, days before revealing that he was in close contact with “Russian intelligence agencies” and was “actively peddling new lies that could impact U.S. elections.”
On March 19, former Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas testified about the investigation into Biden’s alleged corruption before the House Oversight Committee at the request of the Democrats. Parnas was part of the attempt to create dirt on Biden before the 2020 election, and he explained how the process worked.
“The only information ever pushed about the Bidens and Ukraine has come from Russia and Russian agents,” Parnas said, and was part of “a much larger plan for Russia to crush Ukraine by infiltrating the United States.” Politicians and right-wing media figures, including then-representative Devin Nunes (R-CA), Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI), The Hill reporter John Solomon, Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity, and other FNC hosts, knew the narrative was false, Parnas said, even as they echoed it. He suggested that they were permitting “Russia to use our government for malicious purposes, and to reward selfish people with ill-gotten gains.”
The attempt to create a false reality—whether by foreign operatives or homegrown ones—seems increasingly obvious in perceptions of the 2024 election. There has been much chatter, for example, about polls showing Trump ahead of Biden. But the 2022 polls were badly skewed rightward by partisan actors, and Democrat Marilyn Lands’s overwhelming victory over her Republican opponent in an Alabama House election this week suggests those errors have not yet been fully addressed.
Real measures of political enthusiasm appear to favor Biden and the Democrats. On Wednesday, Molly Cook Escobar, Albert Sun, and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times reported that since leaving office, Trump has spent more than $100 million on legal fees alone. He is badly in need of money, and his reordering of the funding priorities of the Republican National Committee to put himself first means that the party is badly in need of money, too.
Donors’ awareness that their cash will go to Trump before funding other Republican candidates might well slow fundraising. Certainly, small-donor contributions to Trump have dropped off significantly: Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported last week that “in 2023, Trump’s reelection campaign raised 62.5% less money from small-dollar donors than it did in 2019, the year before the last presidential election.”
Billionaires Liz and Dick Uihlein have recently said they will back Trump, and Alexandra Ulmer of Reuters reported on Tuesday that other billionaires had pooled the money to back Trump’s then–$454 million appeal bond before an appeals court reduced it. But Ulmer also noted that there might be a limit to such gifts, as they “could draw scrutiny from election regulators or federal prosecutors if the benefactors were to give Trump amounts exceeding campaign contribution limits. While the payment would not be a direct donation to Trump's campaign, federal laws broadly define political contributions as ‘anything of value’ provided to a campaign.”
Meanwhile, the fundraising of Biden and the Democrats is breaking records. Last night, in New York City, former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama joined Biden onstage with television personality Stephen Colbert, along with event host Mindy Kaling and musical guests Queen Latifah, Lizzo, and Ben Platt. The 5,000-person event raised an eye-popping amount—more than $25 million—and the campaign noted that, unlike donations to Trump, every dollar raised would go to the campaign.
In his remarks, Biden said that the grassroots nature of the Democrats’ support showed in the number of people who have contributed so far to his campaign: 1.5 million in all, including 550,000 “brand-new contributors in the last couple of weeks.” Ninety-seven percent of the donations have been less than $200.
Tonight, Adrienne Watson, the spokesperson for the National Security Council, the president’s primary forum for national security and foreign policy, pointed to Russia’s devastating recent attacks on Ukraine’s energy grid and called again for Speaker Johnson to bring up the bipartisan national security supplemental bill providing aid to Ukraine that the Senate passed in February. She warned: “Ukraine’s need is urgent, and we cannot afford any further delays.”
