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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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Contempt of Congress: Donald Trump’s Cabal of Co-Conspirators

Nancy Rommelmann, an American writer, recently attributed Hunter Biden’s failures to “entitlement and soul rot” and said his situation was a classic case of a boy who has never reached adulthood. “I can think of few things worse than never growing up,” Rommelmann wrote. 

Donald Trump, who holds everlasting grudges, enjoys humiliating people and acts like a schoolyard bully, has never grown up either. He’s a man-child. His childish, and mean-spirited attitudes are reflected in many of his selections of key people to exercise influence in his administration. 

How else to explain his apparent determination to ensure loyalty among his key advisors by creating a kakistocracy, a state governed by its least suitable or competent citizens.

if Trump gets all his key nominees for leadership positions, including what journalist Tina Brown calls his “cast of crazies” who need to be confirmed by the Senate, our democracy will be severely diminished. 

Kash Patel, Trump’s choice for FBI Director, wants to go after the media.  “Yes, we’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections — we’re going to come after you,” Patel said last year. “Whether it’s criminally or civilly, we’ll figure that out.” Writing in Bulwark of Trump’s choice off Patel to lead the FBI, Jonathan Last said   “… the actual incoming president of the United States has signaled that he’s going to fire the director of the FBI for [reasons] and replace him with a psychopath.” And Patel was hardly admired in Tump’s first term. During Trump’s first term, Attorney General William Barr and CIA Director Gina Haspel thought so little of him that they threatened to resign if Patel was imposed on them as deputy FBI or CIA Director, respectively.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., nominated to be Health and Human Services Secretary, is a much-ridiculed conspiracy theorist, vaccine skeptic and dumper of a bear carcass in New York’s Central Park. “There’s no telling how far an anti-vaxxer & fringe conspiracy theorist like RFK Jr. could set America back in terms of public health, reproductive rights, research, & more,” said Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA).

 “Kennedy has few good things to say about almost any technological invention,” Derek Thompson wrote in The Atlantic. “”He has voiced histrionic fears about nuclear reactors, said that Wi-Fi can cause “leaky brain,” suggested that chemicals in the water supply might make kids transgender, wondered aloud if Prozac might contribute to school shootings, and posted support for the so-called chemtrails conspiracy, which holds that the government uses the contrails, or condensation trails, of jetliners to spread toxic chemicals.”

Secretary of Education nominee Linda McMahon, is another problematic case. “McMahon’s only mission is to eliminate the Department of Education and take away taxpayer dollars from public schools, where 90% of students – and 95% of students with disabilities – learn, and give them to unaccountable and discriminatory private schools,” says National Education Association (NEA) President Becky Pringle.

At one point, professional wrestling mogul McMahon said she didn’t know her claim she had earned a degree in education from East Carolina University was false. When Connecticut’s Hartford Courant newspaper reported that her degree was actually in French. McMahon said she thought her degree was in education because she did a semester of student-teaching and had a certificate to teach. 

Director of National Intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard, who has never worked in the intelligence community, has been criticized for making laudatory comments about Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said Gabbard was “parroting fake Russian propaganda.” She has also spoken favorably of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who has carried out a brutal war against his country’s people. In 2015, Gabbard was widely criticized by members of her own party when she urged the Obama administration to halt its support for  Syria’s opposition movement against Assad and in 2017 she made an unannounced trip to Syria in 2017 to meet Assad, despite the fact the U.S. had severed diplomatic relations with Syria.

Russ Vought, Trump’s nominee for Office of Management and Budget Director, was a co-author of Project 2025, the controversial Heritage Foundation blueprint for Trump’s hoped-for second term. Which Trump vigorously disavowed during his campaign.  Vought supports a a broad expansion of presidential power, including giving Trump the ability to fire thousands of federal workers.

Mehmet Oz, a snake oil salesman with a history of and outright quackery and championing pseudo-scientific treatments, has been proposed as leader of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which provide health care to America’s most vulnerable.

Pete Hegseth, a co-host of Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends Weekend”, whom Trump has nominated to serve as Secretary of Defense, has questioned the role of women in combat and advocated pardoning service members charged with war crimes. And The New Yorker ‘s Jane Mayer just reported, “A whistle-blower report and other documents suggest that Trump’s nominee to run the Pentagon was forced out of previous leadership positions for financial mismanagement, sexist behavior, and being repeatedly intoxicated on the job.”

In Hegseth’s case, there’s speculation that Trump continues to support him in the face of opposition because it takes some of the heat and media attention off other unqualified candidates, particularly Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert Kennedy Jr.

Nominee for U.S. ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has a lot of baggage, too. In a Truth Social post, Trump praised Charles Kushner as a “tremendous business leader, philanthropist, & dealmaker, who will be a strong advocate representing our Country & its interests.” Trump pardoned Charles Kushner during his first term for a 2005 federal conviction on 18 counts of assisting in the filing of false tax returns, retaliating against a cooperating witness (his own sister) and making false statements to the Federal -Election Commission (FEC).

The retaliation charge was related to a beyond -the-pale admission by Charles Kushner that he had paid a private investigator $25,000 to have a prostitute seduce his sister’s husband, covertly film them having sex and have the videotape mailed to the cooperating witness.

Even with all these severely challenged nominees, it’s no sure thing that Trump’s -proposed appointees, what television host and comedian Jimmy Kimmel has described as a “clown car”, will be held in check by the Senate’s reluctance to challenge him or by an aghast public. 

All of it is enough to drive a concerned citizen to existential despair. 

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The Baltimore brouhaha: Trump is an attention whore and the media are complicit

President Trump threw out the lure last Saturday and the media leaped at it like steelhead going after spinners. For almost a week now, the the media has been salivating over the Cummings/Baltimore story, playing right into Trump’s hands.

Spinning-fishing-for-steelhead

I’m sure that Trump, a manipulative narcissist if there ever was one, has been absolutely loving it.

“Rep, Elijah Cummings (D-MD) has been a brutal bully, shouting and screaming at the great men & women of Border Patrol about conditions at the Southern Border, when actually his Baltimore district is FAR WORSE and more dangerous. His district is considered the Worst in the USA…..,,” Trump Tweeted to start it all..

“….As proven last week during a Congressional tour, the Border is clean, efficient & well run, just very crowded,” Trump continued. “Cumming District is a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess. If he spent more time in Baltimore, maybe he could help clean up this very dangerous & filthy place.”

According to Politico’s Daniel Lippman, despite Trump’s public anti-media screeds, he religiously reads four daily newspapers — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, as well was a daily print-out of the Drudge Report, all of which have covered the Cummings/Baltimore contretemps like a thick blanket.

Thankfully, at least one outlet, the babylonbee.com, a satirical news site, has approached he whole tempest as a joke with stories such as, Futuristic, Utopian Paradise Of Baltimore Completely Baffled By Trump’s Attacks:

“BALTIMORE, MD—President Trump launched into a deranged attack against the city of Baltimore, calling it “a disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess” and a place “no human being would want to live.” This caused extreme confusion within the city — as, having been run exclusively by Democrats for decades and decades, it is a nearly perfect, progressive utopia and a beacon of hope to all.”

But most news outlets have pursued the Cummings/Baltimore stories with the kind of moral outrage and hand-wringing usually reserved for stories of great import.

The New York Times, for example, has been all over the story, with headlines like, “The Rot You Smell is a Racist Potus,” “Trump Accuses Black Congressman and Allies of Being Racist,” and “Some very Specific Things the President Could do to Help Baltimore.”

The Times went so far as to run a story featuring Trevor Noah of The Daily Show defending Baltimore and Fox News asked Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Tavon Austin, who grew up in Baltimore, what he thought about Trump’s comments. Even though Austin said he hadn’t even read Trump’s comments about Baltimore, Fox gave him an opportunity to opine on the city’s tough times.

On the Sunday, July 28 talk shows, commentators couldn’t stay away from the topic, relishing the chance to fulminate ad nauseam about Trump, racism, inequality, inner-city troubles, etc.

Tuesday evening’s network news shows continued with one quoting Trump saying that living in Baltimore is like “living in hell” and interviewing residents for their reactions.

Online news outlets have latched onto the story too. On Tuesday, The Bulwark, an American conservative news and opinion website, ran a 1048-word story, Republicans Can Defend Elijah Cummings Any Time Now. Huffpost has gone wild with Cummings/Baltimore stories, too, posting eight different stories just on Tuesday.

And the whole thing has presented an opportunity for all sorts of detestable people to raise their profile, aided and abetted by the media. For example, Al Sharpton, who shows up repeatedly at hot spots like Nadia Vulvokov in the Netflix series Russian Doll, has jumped on the Cummings/Baltimore flap.

At a Monday news conference in Baltimore with former Maryland lieutenant governor Michael Steele (R), Sharpton said Trump “has a particular venom for blacks and people of color.”

The story continued to draw in the media on Wednesday (July 31). A CBSN reporter, for example, asked a Republican National Committee official whether the controversy would alienate voters of color from the Republican Party.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), also apparently unable to move on, continued the barrage on Thursday, saying Trump should ask “slumlord” Jared Kushner about Baltimore. Here comments generated multiple news stories, including a lengthy story on The Hill and television news stories across the country.

The hand-wringing continued on Friday, Aug. 2, as academics and politicians worked to find an angle they could exploit. William A. Donohue, a Distinguished Professor of Communication at Michigan State University, wrote a piece for The Conversation, an online publication, likening Trump referring to Baltimore as a “disgusting rat and rodent infested mess” to the “pattern of dehumanizing language in the lead-up to the genocide committed by the Turks against Armenians, where Armenians were “dangerous microbes.” Donohue went so far as to equate Trump’s remarks to Germans describing Jews as “Untermenschen,” or subhumans, during the Holocaust.

All of the country’s major news outlets, and many secondary ones, have been rabidly pursuing the Cummings/Baltimore story, elevating it to major coverage, as though it matters.

If the media had simply ignored Trump’s blathering, it would have died a natural, and appropriate, death.  OK, maybe the Baltimore Sun had a reason to go with news coverage and a scathing editorial, but that’s it.

TrumpTweeting

Instead, major media have seen in Trump’s tweetstorm an opportunity to promote rancorous public disputes and contrived mud fights, just as the Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist, observed that the “clear intent of the (CNN) moderation was to spark fights” in Tuesday night’s Democratic debate.

Atlantic magazine writer Adam Serwer got it right. “The mainstream press has internalized Trump’s own reality-show standards for what counts as a significant political development,” Server wrote. “All the world is trashy television, and the president and his opposition are merely producers.”

Trump’s Cummings/Baltimore tweet storms were designed to be a distraction, and they’ve worked particularly well with an American media with a hive mentality, a kind of “On est tous dans le même bain, ” and a consistent race to the bottom. It’s likepornography has gotten more and more crude and explicit in order to compete for attention.

Trump’s outrageous tweets divert the world’s attention, and reporters, from real issues that matter. He manipulates the media by transforming out-of-the-blue poisonous rants into free, must-cover press opportunities. “I remain astonished by the ability of this former reality TV star to be our assignment editor,” bemoaned Kyle Pope, editor of the Columbia Journalism Review.

Frankly, Trump has led the media by the nose, as they’ve pursued audiences with ferocity, their eyes more than ever on the bottom line in this difficult time for journalism.

As a Wall Street Journal opinion column by Holman W. Jenkins Jr. put it, “He delights in making us dance to tunes he wantonly types out in the wee hours.” Jenkins went on to mourn “…the apparent ease with which he elicits ritualized behavior from our media.”

When are the media going to wise up?