She has no diplomatic experience and doesn’t speak Greek – but Kimberly Guilfoyle is a former Fox News presenter and ex-fiancée of Donald Trump Jr, and in MAGA World that was enough to qualify her for the plum role of US ambassador to Greece.
Her own personal Odyssey may be about to come to an end, though – after text messages awkwardly emerged showing her apparently asking a Trump-allied donor to send a wire transfer for $100,000 to pay off her American Express account at the same time she should have been preparing for a Senate confirmation hearing for her Athens posting.
The Wall Street Journal has published messages between Guilfoyle and Eric Deters, a Kentucky attorney and former congressional candidate who had apparently sought the ex-wife of Gavin Newsom for help resolving tax and legal issues with the Internal Revenue Service.
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Apparently asking Deters for the money, messages sent via the encrypted Signal app appear to show Guilfoyle saying: “Honey please I need you to get this done for me today” on July 3 last year, adding a praying emoji and a PDF containing payment instructions from Amex. “You could just send it here. It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express that’s all that will show. Please.”
Deters apparently replied: “Your needing $100,000 urgent unfortunately is not going to work. I can’t do this without getting a divorce”, to which Guilfoyle is shown as responding: “I’ve been calling you for over a week straight. You could be here meeting with Billy Long.” Long was at that point commissioner for the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS) but was fired by President Trump the following month in an unrelated row over sending confidential taxpayer data to the immigration authorities.
Guilfoyle also appears to have been concerned about Deters leaving a paper trail, apparently writing: “Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things. It’s really dangerous and not helpful to you or me while you could simply just call me on signal.” In another message she is shown to say: “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”
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Prescient? Jesse Binnall, a lawyer for Guilfoyle, has disputed the authenticity of the messages, without outright claiming them to be fakes. Meanwhile, secretary of state Marco Rubio, coincidentally in Greece this week to lecture the cradle of Western civilisation about Western values, simultaneously said he knew nothing about the claims but they must be untrue.
“You guys walk around thinking that because some source told you something and you reported it, it’s the gospel,” he told reporters. “It’s not the gospel. It’s not the gospel for me. That’s not the way we do things.”
Still, at least it’s not the worst thing Guilfoyle has stored on her phone. When she left Fox News in 2018 the channel agreed to an out-of-court settlement, reported to be worth $4 million, with an assistant of hers who, among other things, “was shown photographs of the genitalia of men with whom Guilfoyle had had sexual relations”. A bit of old-fashioned graft seems almost quaint in comparison!
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