Kimberly Guilfoyle's Grift Is at Least as Offensive as Hunter Biden's
The ex-girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr. asked a Republican fundraiser to pay off her her credit card debt.
Kimberly Guilfoyle is the current U.S. ambassador to Greece and longtime cheerleader for President Donald Trump. She is also a former Fox News personality, long-ago ex-wife of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D–Calif.), and (more recently) ex-girlfriend of Donald Trump Jr.
And she's for sale.
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The Wall Street Journal has the receipts: Guilfoyle promised Eric Deters, a quixotic political operative and fundraiser for Republicans, special access to a number of administration officials who might help him with his pet causes, which included a dispute over his taxes with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). In exchange, she wanted $100,000 to help pay off her credit card debt.
"You could just send it here," she wrote, texting Deters a link to the American Express website. "It won't show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express that's all that will show."
Guilfoyle was keenly aware of the impropriety and repeatedly texted Deters to stop providing written evidence of their dealings and instead just call her up if need be—and to pay the money.
"What a nightmare," she wrote at one point. "You'll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing."
Deters did not pay off Guilfoyle's credit card debt, though she did contact IRS Commissioner Billy Long about his case. She also bragged about her access to a host of other top Trump officials: FBI Director Kash Patel, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, and others.
"Every secretary of you know defense, transportation, treasury commerce IRS commissioner everyone gets right back to me," she told Deters in 2024.
So first, this is nakedly corrupt, and Guilfoyle should resign as ambassador or be impeached and removed. She cannot be trusted to represent U.S. interests abroad when she has proven that she is willing to peddle influence with the Trump administration in exchange for personal enrichment.
Second, it's fair to ask some questions about Trump Jr., whose relationship with Guilfoyle ended before she was nominated to be ambassador to Greece; nevertheless, in her message to the IRS commissioner, she mentions that "Don Jr. and I are very close with Eric Deters." Trump Jr. subsequently married a model, Bettina Anderson. Their wedding was secretly paid for by Umar Kremlev, a Russian oligarch. (Kremlev has since claimed that Trump Jr. paid him back.) While the oligarch maintains he had simply struck up a friendship with the couple and wanted to buy them a nice wedding gift, you would have to be very, very gullible not to suspect that his real aim was to influence the administration's policy toward Russia! (It's possible Trump anticipated this and skipped the wedding for this very reason.)
My point is this: Evidence is accumulating that suggests Guilfoyle and Trump Jr. are the kinds of people who will take money in exchange for doing favors. (Perhaps unwittingly in Trump Jr.'s case, but obviously quite willfully in Guilfoyle's.) And while they aren't together anymore, they were a power couple at the center of Trump's orbit throughout his first term.
This irks me, as someone who cares about hypocrisy, because….Remember Hunter Biden? The man who was at the center of countless congressional inquiries over allegations that he was paid by foreign interests in order to lobby his dad, President Joe Biden? Republicans turned this into a huge issue and doggedly pursued it—to be clear, with plenty of justification. I criticized Biden pardoning his son as a clear example of the president abusing his power to thwart a legitimate investigation into his doings.
But look, there's no way around this: Trump Jr. letting a Russian oligarch pay for his wedding is at least as suspicious as anything Hunter Biden did. And now his ex-girlfriend is caught red-handed engaging in precisely the kind of kickback scheme that birthed the "Biden crime family" moniker? By any reasonable standard, this is just as bad or significantly worse.
Unfortunately, I suspect many Republicans and conservative commentators will greet these revelations with the exact same stony silence that Democrats opted for when Hunter Biden was under the microscope. I hope I'm wrong though.
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Worth Watching
One more serious thing: I participated in a debate with the journalist Sohrab Ahmari, hosted by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. The topic was "Do Oligarchs Run America?" ISI is a great organization, and Ahmari is an erudite articulator of his views, so I thought this was a particularly worthy exchange. Watch and share!
