Tag Archives: Albania

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Richard Grenell:Guilty As Charged

Richard Grenell (L) and his patron, President Trump, Feb. 2025

A New York Times investigation has found that Richard Grenell, one of hundreds of Trump acolytes rooting around in the moral rot of his regime, played a role in securing the release of Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan, who had been detained in Romania, accused of rape, human trafficking and organized crime.  The Trump Administration and Grenell have previously denied involvement in the sordid affair. 

Asked if the United States had pressed Romania to release the Tate brothers, Trump previously said “I know nothing about that “and that the White House would “check it out”. The brothers got their passports back and on February 27, 2025  flew in a private jet to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. 

The New York Times disclosed today its investigation into the Tate affair had found that in a Jan. 14 text message, Andrew Tate indicated that help was on the way. “I had word from The Trump admin that theyre on top of things,” Mr. Tate wrote to someone close to him, in a message reviewed by The New York Times. “Ive been told I’ll be free soon but Trump needs to see me in Miami,” he added.

The Times found that “the brothers’ release from Romania was the culmination of a yearslong effort by Andrew to forge alliances with Mr. Trump’s advisers and family members,” including Grenell.

“After Mr. Trump’s re-election, some of the Tates’ supporters ascended into the new administration,” the Times reported on Dec. 10. ” One of them, the diplomatic envoy Richard Grenell, twice discussed their case with Romanian officials, The Times found. “

Grenell is well-known now mostly because of his appointment by Trump to be Executive Director of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. According to The New Yorker , KennedyCenter staff and others often refer to Grenell as Grendel, a “powerful demon, a prowler through the dark” in Beowulf.

Despite Grenell calling Trump “unserious”, “reckless”, and “dangerous” in 2016, he switched to openly praising Trump after he became the Republican Party’s nominee and Trump appointed him Ambassador to Germany in his first term. The Germans were less than pleased. “By challenging accepted convention and diplomatic protocol — that is, by acting very Trump-like — Grenell has sent Germany’s hidebound political class into a fit of apoplexy,” Politico reported. 

Grenell returned to the US in 2020 when Trump selected him to temporarily replace the acting director of national intelligence (DNI). Occupying the post for just about three months, he used this tour to work with Kash Patel (now Trump’s appointee as FBI Director) to purge top officials and gain a reputation as a deeply political animal. Grenell, who feuded publicly with Congress, was “criticized by Democrats and career intelligence officials as the least-experienced and most overtly political official to serve as the DNI,” CNN reported. 

On Election Day in 2020, Trump told Grenell to fly to Nevada, where he situated himself in a suite at the Venetian Resort and established a war room to question the results of the election in the state, according to the New York Times.  Trump’s team filed a lawsuit and aired false accusations of voting fraud. Trump supplemented the accusations with a tweetthat the state was a “cesspool of Fake Votes,”

The Times reported Grenell told the Venetian team the whole effort was a sham, that the Nevada vote was not stolen and that “… the goal was simply to ‘throw spaghetti at the wall’ to distract the media from calling Nevada while the election to distract the media from calling Nevada while the election battle in neighboring Arizona played out.”

After Trump left office, Grenell worked on behalf of himself and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, who was looking to develop multiple hotel and tourism projects. According to the New York Times, he worked with Kushner on plans for a luxury hotel, apartment complex and museum in Serbia and development of  luxury tourist sites on an Albanian peninsula and on a Mediterranean island off the Albanian coast.

The New Republic reported in June 2024 that Kushner’s contract with the Serbian government to bulldoze the bombed-out ruins of the Yugoslav Ministry of Defense complex and convert it into a luxury hotel included a fine-print commitment by Kushner’s firm, Affinity Partners, to build a “memorial dedicated to all the victims of NATO aggression” — an allusion to the U.S.-backed bombing campaign in 1999 that brought the Serbian government of Slobodan Milosevic to its knees in response to its campaign of repression and massacres of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo.

Retired General Wesley Clark, who served as NATO Supreme Allied Commander during the 1999 bombing campaign, told SpyTalk, a Substack site that covers national security issues, the commitment was “a betrayal of the United States, its policies and the brave diplomats and airmen who did what they could to stop Serb ethnic cleansing.”

Grenell also further ingratiated himself with Donald Trump by securing Melania two lucrative speeches in California over two consecutive days in 2022. The California Globe, a right-leaning news website, ran a story about her speeches. The story highlighted her “focus on the welfare of the Nation’s children” and gave her a chance to say readers “…should visit the two marketplaces I built, USAmemorabilia.com and MelaniaTrump.com”. 

The Globe article neglected to mention that Melania was paid $500,000 in fees for the speeches.

The New York Times reported that the payments were $250,000 from Log Cabin Republicans, a Republican organization dedicated to representing LGBT conservatives and allies (Grenell is gay) and a $250,000 payment from Fix California, a conservative 501(c)(4)non-profit founded by Grenell in 2021 to support “free and fair elections”. 

Fix California’s IRS Form 990 filing with the IRS for 2022 shows Melania Trump’s speaking fee, paid through Designers Management Agency Inc. of New York, consumed about 17% of the group’s total revenue in 2022. The Log Cabin Republicans Form 990 shows Melania’s fee consumed about 20% of that group’s revenue in 2022.

When Trump was elected to his second term, Grenell lobbied hard to be named Secretary of State. Politico reported that an associate of Grenell’s even offered payments to some MAGA influencers to promote Grenell’s campaign for the position (Grenell told Politico that “none of this is true.”), but he lost out to Marco Rubio. 

Instead, Trump gave Grenell a more amorphous position, naming him his “envoy for special missions”, a catch-all for a jack-of-all-trades. That did not require Senate confirmation.

Since then, Grenell has popped up all over the place like a fungus. 

On January 31, he surfaced in Venezuela to negotiate with its president Nicolás Maduro for the return of Venezuelan migrants in the US illegally and to secure the release of Americans detained in the country. He returned with six Americans who had been detained in Venezuela in recent months.

On Feb. 8, Grenell surfaced again with a tweet calling for an end to government funding of Radio Free Europe and Voice of America.  “It is state-owned media,” he posted. “These outlets are filled with far left activists. I’ve worked with these reporters for decades. It’s a relic of the past. We don’t need government paid media outlets.”  Elon Musk agreed, posting, “It’s just radical left crazy people talking to themselves while torching $1B/year of US taxpayer money.”

On Feb. 10, Trump purged the board of the prominent John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., replaced them with Trump loyalists, who voted to install Trump as Chairman and then announced that Grenell would be the new interim executive director.

Then on December 18, Grenell voted with other members of the Kennedy Center’s board to rename it the Trump-Kennedy Center. The New York Times reported, ” Even though Mr. Trump had already been calling it that for months in trollish posts online, he acted shocked that his handpicked board had thought to do this for him. “I was honored by it,” he told reporters at the White House. “The board is a very distinguished board, most distinguished people in the country, and I was surprised by it. I was honored by it.”

The New York Times investigation has now reminded Grenell that he can’t hide forever.

Hang on for the ride.

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The Manafort mess: I’m shocked, shocked!

casablanca-17

“I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!,” said Captain Renault in Casablanca, as a croupier handed him a pile of money.

I feel the same way about comments from political figures in the U.S., including Hillary Clinton, who have expressed astonishment and dismay over allegations that Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, provided campaign assistance to Ukraine’s former president, Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych was forced to flee from Ukraine to Russia in 2014 after violent several months of political crisis and violent protests.

I’m equally unsurprised by attempts to tar Manafort as a villain because he has lobbied in the U.S. for Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines

Hillary Clinton’s campaign leapt at the chance to draw blood. “Donald Trump has a responsibility to disclose campaign chair Paul Manafort’s and all other campaign employees’ and advisers’ ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities, including whether any of Trump’s employees or advisers are currently representing and or being paid by them,” said Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook.

Good grief. Everybody’s in such high dudgeon.

But wait a minute.

We’re not all rubes, as so many politicians and media outlets assume. We know that Washington, D.C. is packed with public relations professionals and lobbyists who work for foreign governments and special interests, many of them with reputations for corruption and human rights abuses.

Take John Podesta, the Chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

In 1988, he and his brother, Tony, founded Podesta Associates, Inc., a Washington, D.C., government relations and public affairs lobbying firm. The firm later changed its name to the Podesta Group, Inc.

According to the Sunlight Foundation, which works to make our government and politics more accountable and transparent, the Podesta Group has been a registered agent, or lobbyist, for a number of foreign governments, including the Government of the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan, the National Security Council of Georgia, the Republic of Kosova, the Government of Albania and the Kingdom of Thailand.

In 2013, for example, the Podesta Group reported being paid $840,196.21 by the Embassy of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

The previous year, the corruption watchdog Transparency International awarded the crown of “Corrupt Person of the Year” to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. “Despite its massive oil resources, … Azerbaijan is plagued by endemic corruption that prevents ordinary Azerbaijanis from sharing in their country’s natural wealth and is a significant barrier to Azerbaijan’s development,” the organization said.

That same year, public protests against human rights abuses led to brutal crackdowns, arrests, and undemocratic trials.

2013 was another awkward time for the Government of Azerbaijan when election authorities released vote results re-electing Aliyev – a full day before voting had even started. The announcement followed intimidation of activists and journalists and free speech restrictions.

Freedom House, a promoter of global human rights, lambasted the country’s government. “Azerbaijan is ruled by an authoritarian regime characterized by intolerance for dissent and disregard for civil liberties and political rights,” the organization said in 2013.

The federal  Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal, as well as activities, receipts and disbursements in support of those activities. There are about  2,000 foreign agents registered under the Act representing more than 100 countries.

Late last year, the Center for Public Integrity released a study, “The hired guns who advocate for the world’s worst human rights abusers” – a research report that highlighted the PR firms that make the most money representing clients that violate human rights.

The study said FARA records revealed that “that the 50 countries with the worst human rights violation records have spent $168 million on American lobbyists and public relations specialists since 2010.”

The study said the leader of the pack was Omnicom-owned Ketchum PR, which made $37 million representing human-rights violators, followed by Qorvis Communications/MSL Group at $20.6 Million dollars.

In 2013, Ketchum was behind a Vladimir Putin-led PR push tied to Syria. When the New York Times ran a highly visible op-ed about Syria submitted by Russian President Putin in Sept. 2013, Ketchum arranged it (and likely wrote it).

“From the outset, Russia has advocated peaceful dialogue enabling Syrians to develop a compromise plan for their own future,” Putin said. “We are not protecting the Syrian government, but international law.” The op-ed went on to say, “Millions around the world increasingly see America not as a model of democracy but as relying solely on brute force…”

According to ProPublica and Ketchum reports, Russia paid $1.3 million for Ketchum’s professional services for the period ended in May 2013.

In 2014, the New York Times reported how Angus Roxburgh, a former Ketchum consultant and journalist for the BBC and The Economist, recounted his experiences working with Ketchum. “The Russian officials…were initially convinced they could pay for better coverage, or intimidate journalists into it,” Roxburgh told the Times. “They were eventually persuaded to take reporters to dinner instead.”

According to the Times, Roxburgh told The Daily Beast that Ketchum’s aim “means helping them (Russia) disguise all the issues that make it unattractive: human rights, invasions of neighboring countries, etc.”

Last year, Saudi Arabia, under fire for human rights abuses, hired a cornucopia of U.S. PR/lobbying firms to tell its story in a favorable way and influence legislation.

In March, the Saudi Royal Embassy retained DLA Piper and Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman. That same month, it also hired Targeted Victory, which uses expansive data to put together digital campaigns for political clients, and Zignal Labs, which uses big data analytics, media monitoring and business intelligence to provide insights that drive public outreach efforts. In September 2015, the Saudi government expanded its efforts further by signing contracts with PR leviathan Edelman and the Podesta Group.

Just a few things to remember when attack dogs and establishment politicians, including Hillary Clinton, feign surprise and horror at amoral U.S. PR and lobbying firms doing business with foreign governments and foreign leaders with bad reputations.

Don’t be shocked.

 

Addendum

On 8/25/16, PoliticoPlaybook reported that the FBI and DOJ are looking into the Podesta Group’s work in Ukraine:

K STREET WATCH — The FBI and DOJ’s probes into the Podesta Group’s work for a non-profit tied to the former Ukrainian government are sending shockwaves downtown, where the investigation into the firm’s work for the European Centre for a Modern Ukraine has led to widespread nervousness. Reps from multiple firms who lobby for foreign entities think this might be a tipping point, and the feds might take a much broader look at other firms and clients. “It’s right in the purview of the DOJ – they don’t need a referral,” said one lobbyist.