The US Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle resigned on Tuesday. US President Donald Trump's office confirmed it had asked her to resign. Guilfoyle is a former prosecutor and Fox News personality, and she had once been engaged to Donald Trump Jr.
Over the last couple of weeks, clear evidence emerged that Guilfoyle was corrupt and abusing her office for personal gain. So far, there is concerning evidence that Guilfoyle was overly entangled with a lobbyist for a Greek construction company and regularly promoting his company in official meetings. The lobbyist supposedly attended so many of Guilfoyle's meetings that people thought he was her chief of staff.
For instance, Guilfoyle had been dealing with Bulgaria on behalf of the US in the spring in order to persuade the Eastern European nation to buy American natural gas.
The Bulgarian government, she told people should deal with a Greek construction firm called Aktor Group, a newcomer to the gas business that had teamed up with a Greek state-backed energy company to bring in liquefied natural gas from the U.S. "There is no doubt that this is kind of an official position of the U.S. government," said a person familiar with the talks.
Sitting beside the 57-year-old ambassador in an audience with the Bulgarian president was a 39-year-old named Christos Marafastos. He has attended so many of her meetings that some foreign officials mistook him for her chief of staff. In fact, he is a top lobbyist for Aktor, whose CEO had flown Guilfoyle to the country on a private jet.
Nothing suspicious about that. I am sure the Greek company did not provide any personal benefits to her in exchange for all the favor and promotion.
And then there is the unbelievably blatant request she made that a Trump donor pay off her credit card debt in exchange for political access and favors so she could appear less financially desperate and susceptible to bribery (Ha!) ahead of her consideration for the ambassadorship.
Kimberly Guilfoyle was preparing for her congressional hearing to become U.S. ambassador to Greece when she reached out to a Trump donor with an urgent request: She needed $100,000 that she said she owed American Express—in a way that wouldn’t leave a paper trail.
“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express,” she wrote on Signal, according to messages reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Please.”
For months, Guilfoyle had been chatting with Eric Deters, a former congressional candidate in Kentucky who was seeking her help in getting the attention of the new Trump administration on some personal tax and legal issues-and had promised payments of as much as $1 million if she was successful. As Donald Trump Jr.'s former fiancée, Guilfoyle offered to use her sway, according to Deters and messages reviewed by the Journal. She forwarded Deters the messages she's sent to the new Internal Revenue Service Chief and updated him on her efforts to lobby the Justice Department on his Behalf.
This is corruption in its purest form. Asking someone to pay money to you so you can use your government connections and authority to have the government take favorable action for the person.
To make matters worse, it was just insultingly transparent.
“Every secretary of you know defense, transportation, treasury commerce IRS commissioner everyone gets right back to me,” she wrote in a message to Deters, adding, “Oh yeah, l’m forgetting cash Patel,” in an apparent misspelling of FBI Director Kash Patel’s name.
[...]
In another exchange, Deters suggested he was not altogether impressed with the return on his investment.
“I have paid you $300,000 over the years,” he wrote to Guilfoyle. “As of this memo, I have not received one favor. I am not naive or a sucker. I need results.”
And she clearly knew what she was doing was wrong.
In one especially memorable exchange, Guilfoyle warned him not to reference money or payments by way of texts: ”Eric, I really wish you would stop papering all these things.”
In context, “papering” apparently meant “putting controversial comments in writing.”
Deters has publicly stated that this was indeed a quid pro quo.
And now Trump and Co. have asked her resign to try spare him and Republicans anymore of this especially transparent and embarrassing corruption mess just before the election. Despite resigning, Guilfoyle has denied doing anything wrong and asserts that she will "vigorously defend" herself. Sure thing.
It seems likely that this will be the official end of the matter as far as Trump is concerned. This woman caused him a political problem. She is no longer in her government position. End of story.
But that should not be the end of the matter. There is very, very credible evidence that Guilfoyle engaged in corruption and benefitted personally from her government position. This conduct is likely criminal and should be investigated and (almost certainly) prosecuted as such.
While Trump is president, however, there is essentially zero chance that Guilfoyle will be seriously investigated and prosecuted by the federal government. In fact, I would not be surprised if she lands a cushy job elsewhere in government or the private sector to keep her quiet. Perhaps Trump will even pardon her to make sure that she can face no repercussions if and when a more moral and competent president takes office and oversees the Department of Justice.
To let her off the hook now that she resigned will serve simply to show other officials and prospective officials that the only downside to even the most embarrassing and blatant corruption is temporary unemployment. As a result, we will end up with more corruption.
After all, as I have noted time and time again, corruption is the name of the game for Trump and his family and top cronies. With every new, embarrassing example of corruption, the reputation of the federal government worsens. The rule of law is undermined. The people continue to lose faith in our institutions and our system of government.
While many of us have always expected that there will be some degree of corruption in a large government, we used to expect that most government officials would try to stay on the straight and narrow and do their best to work toward what they thought was best for Americans. But with every instance of corruption, more people are becoming disillusioned and adopting the belief that the government is irredeemably corrupt, malignant, and self-serving, as well as incompetent.
Long-term, our system can only work if most people mostly believe in and support it. The more people start to believe it is irredeemably rotten, the more likely it is that we will see the continued degradation of our constitutional system and undermining of the rule of law. And eventually, that will lead to radical change, such as a popular revolution, a civil war, and/or takeover by a more powerful and oppressive dictator.
If we do not start to turn the ship around and clean up our nation's act, regardless of what ends up resulting, it will likely result in serious instability and worse lives for the majority of us.