BOMBSHELL: Leaked Kimberly Guilfoyle Texts Reveal Brazen Corruption

Sam Stein (0:00)

All right, hey everybody, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bulwark, and I'm joined by the reporter and the spy, Marc Polymeropoulos, Michael Weiss. We're doing an emergency pod here, because there's a story out from the journal that is genuinely the most comical, but also most brazen and spectacular form of corruption, I think I've ever seen out of a state department official, at least recently. I'm sure there's honors, and probably you guys know the history more than I do. We're talking about Kimberly Guilfoyle, who is our ambassador to Greece, who has been exposed for basically trying to shake down a friend slash donor, for tons and tons of financial support, promising a variety of favors and ways to get in good with both conservative media luminaries and Trump officials.

Then all of the signal chats and all the texts that she sent to this dude, he just handed over apparently to the journal, and it reads like a soap opera, Michael.

Michael Weiss (1:06)

I mean, we were just discussing this offline, the last graphs of this thing, if you put it in a screenplay about just cheap chintz MAGA corruption and just read it with no edits, no notes, 10 out of 10, I would be riveted. I mean, should we just read some of the last bits here, or do we need to get into them?

Sam Stein (1:27)

I'm going to read the first bit, and then I'm going to go to the last bit, because the lead is this. The lead is just, it blows you away. I'm going to try to do it not laughing. Kimberly Guilfoyle was preparing for her congressional hearing to become US 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. Quote, it won't show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express, she wrote on Signal, people should know Signal is the secretive way to communicate, according to messages reviewed by the Journal. Please.

For months, Guilfoyle had been chatting with Eric Deaters, or is it Deaters? I don't actually know. Former congressional candidate in Kentucky, who was seeking her help in getting attention of the new Trump administration on some personal tags and legal issues, and had promised payments of as much as $1 million if she were successful. That is the setup. We'll get to the latter part with all the end goes, because we're actually going to rank all these stuff. But Marc, we're all laughing at how grotesque it is, but you made very valid points that this is actually quite serious.

Marc Polymeropoulos (2:38)

So an ambassador who is the president's representative, who every morning gets a rebook. In the rebook is all of the clandestine reporting from the CIA, is the intercepts from the National Security Agency. The ambassador will have a top secret clearance, cleared to very high levels.

And so this is a very serious position. If someone is in debt of $100,000, it is disqualifying. Let's just be very clear. So how she even got there, passed a background check, a background investigation, is pretty alarming. And so I think there's got to be some look at what in the world Congress did, but also-

Sam Stein (3:17)

It's worth explaining why it's disqualifying.

Marc Polymeropoulos (3:20)

Because at the end of the day, any foreign intelligence service is going to look for individuals to recruit. What better juicy target than an ambassador? And when you go over what are the motivations in which people spy, anyone, from any country? We have used this acronym MICE, and it's Money, Ideology, Coercion, or Ego. Well, money, which is kind of the old classic of everything, if you're $100,000 in debt, you are vulnerable, period.

And so in reading this story, it appears that she actually did not get the $100,000 from him, but did she get it from someone else? So any background investigator from the Department of State, from FBI, CIA, any from DOD, this would be a disqualification. If someone's $100,000 in debt, you're not going out. And so it is dangerous to the national security of the United States. I laughed at this too. Of course, this is also a story that Michael and I have been following. We did back in the 28th of September, we did a pod on this. We are very well sourced into the kind of the US Greek ecosystem of hell right now on this issue, whose now our phones are exploding on this.

But I'm not particularly surprised that this broke. The details of it though, in terms of her being in debt, to be honest, I did not know about, and that's why that is very concerning.