Leaked records show outreach, denials and unanswered approaches
The leaked records show the AfD federal board adopted a request on 16 January 2017 asking Donald Trump to support removal of the enemy-state clause from the UN Charter. The federal office’s record of the decision, together with surrounding emails, documents both the policy request and internal disagreement over the proposed letter. The trove spans more than a decade of outreach to Trump, MAGA figures and officials, but its evidentiary reach is uneven: several approaches produced no reply or meeting, and the records do not show that every proposed contact succeeded.
Distributed Denial of Secrets provided the material to reporters. It includes more than 420,000 emails as well as documents and personnel records from the AfD’s founding in 2013 to the present, with most of the emails coming before 2019. The AfD said in a Monday statement that a hosting provider used by the party had been attacked at the end of September and that “only a few mailboxes” had been copied. The party told dpa that most of those mailboxes had not been used for years, and party sources said the published material appeared to be authentic.
A photograph accompanying The Guardian’s report showed AfD co-leader Alice Weidel at a press conference with Viktor Orban in Budapest in February 2025.
On 11 January 2017, AfD board member Dirk Driesang asked for a planned inauguration message to be placed on the next conference call’s agenda, “this time faster and better prepared.” He proposed adding: “Please support us in our efforts to remove the enemy-state clause from the UN charter.” The federal board adopted the request on 16 January, according to the federal office’s record contained in the leaked documents.
An English draft circulated on 19 January. Georg Pazderski, then the party’s Berlin leader and a federal board member, objected to the tone and the request for support: “You don’t address the president as Mr Trump, he is Mr President. Otherwise a bit wordy and flowery. I stand by it: the enemy-state clause doesn’t belong in this letter at all. You don’t do that in a letter of congratulation. It looks like a begging letter.” Driesang replied at 6.16 the next morning: “Personally I of course find the style appropriate, otherwise I wouldn’t have written it that way.”
A photograph accompanying the report showed Weidel, Georg Pazderski and Alexander Gauland at a meeting in Riesa in 2019.
The “enemy state” clauses were written into the UN Charter in 1945 and exempted action against “any state which during the second world war has been an enemy of any signatory” from the charter’s normal rules, allowing the wartime allies to move against a “renewal of aggressive policy” by Germany, Japan or their allies. The General Assembly declared the clauses obsolete in 1995 and resolved to repeal them, but the text has never been amended because changing the charter requires ratification by two-thirds of member states and all five permanent members of the Security Council.
No German party currently defends the clauses, but the Bundestag’s research service wrote in 2017 that international lawyers unanimously regarded them as having no practical relevance. The Guardian described the clauses as totemic on the German right and as a limitation on German sovereignty. The AfD’s Bundestag group demanded deletion in a 2020 motion calling the clauses a “relic of the past” that “indirectly designates Germany an ‘enemy state’”; every other party voted the motion down.
The AfD office debated whether to send the telegram directly to Trump’s campaign team or through official diplomatic channels, including the US embassy in Berlin. André Poggenburg, then the party leader in Saxony-Anhalt, answered: “all available channels.” In the afternoon of 20 January, a text signed by Frauke Petry and then co-leader Jörg Meuthen retained the request. It told Trump that the clause stood in Germany’s way “as a strange anachronism” and asked him to see the AfD “as natural allies at your side, because we are the only German party in clear opposition to the wrong policies of Chancellor Merkel”. The Guardian reported the telegram’s wording the next day. The Guardian also reported that Petry left the party in 2017 in the wake of an internal power struggle; Meuthen, Pazderski and Driesang also later left.
Trump, MAGA, Harris and Bannon contacts in the archive
The trove showed that AfD officials saw Donald Trump as a potential ally from the beginning and that senior party officials deliberated over the wording of a congratulatory telegram after his 2016 election. The Guardian said the hacked documents showed that, in the wake of Trump’s election, the party scrambled to send an ingratiating telegram to the new president. In spring 2016, then leader Petry called Trump a “refreshingly alternative proposition.” The day after Trump won the presidency, Petry said the victory was “encouraging for Germany and for Europe.” On 10 November, she emailed the federal board proposing “an official and brief congratulatory telegram to the future US president.” German politics, she wrote, was “once again outdoing itself in politically unacceptable behaviour.” She said the AfD was “already perceived as the ones who don’t join in the majority howl of the political establishment” and, “as the only German party welcoming a new beginning in the US,” should say so officially.
Eleven of the board’s 13 members replied, all in favor. Current leader Alice Weidel wrote “Yes:-)”. Beatrix von Storch, now deputy leader of the AfD’s Bundestag group, wrote: “Couldn’t be more of a yes.” Driesang added that Trump should also receive, “by post (?)”, the party’s manifesto in English. The proposed telegram included the wish that Trump’s “hopes as a person be fulfilled.”
A photograph accompanying the report showed Beatrix von Storch at an AfD campaign rally in February.
The telegram went out on 11 November under Petry’s name, “on behalf of the federal board”, and was released to the press. It told the president-elect: “We are confident that you will readjust the transatlantic relationship and end the wars in Syria and Ukraine by mutual agreement with Russia.”
That approach contrasted with reactions among mainstream German politicians. On 9 November 2016, then Chancellor Angela Merkel offered Trump “close cooperation” only “on the basis of … values”, including respect for human dignity “regardless of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views”. Then defence minister Ursula von der Leyen called the result a “huge shock”. The next day, vice-chancellor Sigmar Gabriel reportedly called Trump the “forerunner of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international” and counted the AfD among its forces.
A more formal channel opened in 2018. A 13 June press release from the AfD’s Bundestag group said foreign-affairs spokesman Armin-Paulus Hampel and defence-committee member Jens Kestner had traveled to the United States “to inform themselves about the state of German-American relations.” The release quoted Hampel: “We came to listen.” It said the two politicians held talks at the State Department, Capitol Hill and the Pentagon and set out the AfD group’s foreign-policy positions.
A photograph accompanying the report showed Armin-Paulus Hampel in 2020.
The release named Justin Stebbins, a security-policy adviser to Senator Ron Johnson, who it said showed understanding for the AfD position on NATO, and Ken Toko, head of the State Department’s “German desk”, who pressed Germany on defence spending. The Frankfurter Rundschau reported at the time that the trip was the group’s first official US visit and that the talks were at the mid-level working level.
The party’s policy documents gave the outreach a defined frame. Its founding manifesto, adopted in 2016, said NATO membership served Germany’s interests “insofar as NATO confines itself to its task as a defensive alliance” and called for the withdrawal of all allied troops stationed in Germany, “and in particular their nuclear weapons”. Its 2025 manifesto kept NATO membership only “until an independent and capable European military alliance has been built”, rejected NATO’s eastward expansion and envisioned Ukraine as a neutral state aligned neither with Russia nor the West.
The Guardian described Harris Media, a Texas digital firm, as the most direct line into Trump’s circle. The firm had worked for Republican Senator Rand Paul, Marine Le Pen and Benjamin Netanyahu and ran the AfD’s online campaign for the 2017 federal election, according to Der Spiegel. On 28 February 2018, founder Vincent Harris emailed Weidel, then the AfD’s co-leader in the Bundestag, saying he would be in Berlin in March and would “love to connect” about “the database for the party, and maximizing donations, and lead generation efforts”. Weidel replied the next day: “Sure! My office will get in touch with you. Btw. Do you have Steve Bannons cell phone number? I need to see him.”
Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, had left the post seven months earlier and had been forced out of Breitbart in January. On 3 March, Harris wrote to Weidel and Bannon, saying: “Alice, Per your email, wanted to introduce you to Steve Bannon. I believe you two will get along incredibly well, and share common vision and ideals.” He added that he was “looking forward to seeing what you will cook up together”.
A photograph accompanying the report showed Steve Bannon at CPAC in Grapevine, Texas, in March.
Bannon answered two minutes later from his BlackBerry, “Thanks vince”, and “Alice let me know when u can chat”. Weidel wrote: “Steve, any time. I am in Berlin tomorrow, in Zurich Monday and Tuesday. Let me know.” Bannon replied: “I’m in zurich tuesday, wednesday” and “Would love to meet”. Weidel proposed: “Tuesday afternoon Zurich. When and where?” Bannon answered: “Perfect.”
The emails arranged a meeting in Zurich, which dpa reported the same day by citing Weidel’s office. Her office said Bannon’s experience in political communication and alternative media had been of particular interest to her. The Guardian said the emails showed who arranged the meeting and why: Weidel had sought Bannon’s number because she needed to see him, while Harris believed they shared common vision and ideals. On 12 March, Harris wrote to Weidel: “I am glad to see the other meeting went well!”
Three days later, campaign creative director Thor Kunkel suggested to Weidel: “Why not hire Bannon? For AfD-TV”, referring to the party’s in-house media organization. He added: “Why not? The man is desperately looking for a job. I know this by chance from Dietrich Mateschitz,” naming the co-founder of Red Bull. Weidel forwarded the proposal to her Bundestag office, but the archive shows no result.
By that summer, the party was keeping its distance from Bannon in public. On 11 August 2018, Alexander Gauland, a former Christian Democrat and AfD co-founder who was then a deputy leader, told German newspapers that Weidel “had met once with Bannon” but saw no possibility of cooperating with him. When CNN wrote to the AfD’s press office on 7 August, it asked about Bannon’s Movement foundation and noted that “some other news outlets have been reporting that Ms Weidel met Mr Bannon in Switzerland in March”. Meuthen replied: “I will not give CNN an interview on that.” A week later, the Bundestag group’s press office told every AfD member of parliament that, “after consultation with the two parliamentary group leaders, we ask you politely to leave these requests unanswered”.
On 26 March 2019, Bannon told a press conference in Rome, where he called Italy the “centre of the universe” because of Matteo Salvini, that he had met representatives of several parties there, including the AfD. When a Stuttgarter Zeitung correspondent asked who had met Bannon, the federal office told the board it knew nothing about the meeting. Pazderski complained of a “wild growth” in the party’s foreign relations and said the board had to “put a stop to these will-o’-the-wisp self-promoters, because their completely uncoordinated ‘private diplomacy’ reflects negatively on the entire party”.
Frohnmaier allegations, denials and responses
Markus Frohnmaier entered the Bundestag in 2017 and is now a deputy leader of the AfD’s parliamentary group and a member of its foreign affairs committee. Before that, he led the Junge Alternative. At a rally in Erfurt in October 2015, he told the crowd: “I say to these leftwing thought-terrorists, this party cartel, quite clearly: when we come, there will be a clear-out, there will be a mucking-out!” Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classified the Junge Alternative as “confirmed extremist” in 2023. The youth organization dissolved in March 2025, and Generation Deutschland was founded in November 2025.
A photograph accompanying the report showed Markus Frohnmaier in Aalen in February.
In April 2019, the BBC and several European partner outlets reported on documents emailed in 2017 by Petr Premyak, a Duma staffer and former naval counterintelligence officer, to a senior official in Vladimir Putin’s administration. The documents proposed support for Frohnmaier’s candidacy in the 2017 German election and included the assessment: “We will have our own absolutely controlled MP in the Bundestag.” Frohnmaier’s lawyers said he “was never under the control of any third party”, and he told the BBC the documents were fake.
Five weeks after those reports, on 13 May 2019, Frohnmaier’s parliamentary assistant wrote to a Gmail address in the name of Daniel Pipes, the founder of the Middle East Forum (MEF). The Southern Poverty Law Center, a US civil rights organization, said Pipes had “spent the better part of three decades actively promoting anti-Muslim rhetoric” and had argued that Western leaders should consider “working with” far-right parties such as Austria’s Freedom Party, “not marginalizing it”. Pipes had met Frohnmaier in Berlin two months earlier during a tour of what he called Europe’s “civilizationist” parties; the site PI-NEWS published a photograph of the two.
The email thanked “Dr Pipes” for sending his interview with the rightwing weekly Junge Freiheit and asked him to arrange a contact at the US embassy in Berlin. Frohnmaier wanted to meet Ambassador Richard Grenell or the head of the Department of Economic Cooperation and Development Policy. The Guardian reported that, within weeks of taking up the post in 2018, Grenell told Breitbart: “I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders.”
The Guardian said Grenell’s praise in the same interview for Austria’s rightwing politician Sebastian Kurz as a “rock star” prompted calls from German politicians for his expulsion. It also reported that Grenell served as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence in 2020 despite having no background in intelligence, fronted what it described as evidence-free claims of “illegal votes” in Nevada two days after the 2020 election, and ran the Kennedy Center in Trump’s second term through its renaming as the Trump Kennedy Center until he stepped down in March.
A photograph accompanying the report showed Ric Grenell addressing the Republican national convention in August 2020.
The archive holds no reply from the Pipes address and no record of a meeting. Pipes said: “I received that request. I did not pass the request to anyone at the US Embassy in Berlin. If Markus Frohnmaier had a meeting there, it took place without my involvement. I do not recall Mr Frohnmaier among the many politicians I met on that trip. I show no subsequent contact with him after 13 May 2019.”
Pipes disputed the Southern Poverty Law Center’s account, saying: “The Southern Poverty Law Center distorts my views, which can be summed up by my well-known adage: ‘Radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution.’ I oppose Islamism and Islamists, not Islam and Muslims … Representing my views and work otherwise is a calumny.” He said that in Berlin in 2019 he repeatedly urged AfD members and leaders to adopt an anti-Islamist rather than anti-Islamic outlook, without success. He added: “Indeed, I made that point in the Junge Freiheit interview you referenced.”
Two months earlier, the same office had approached Breitbart. On 12 March 2019, the assistant asked the Bundestag group’s press spokesman whether he had “a contact at Breitbart”, then wrote to the Breitbart reporter Chris Tomlinson, describing his boss as a “young star” of the party and an expert on the UN’s “2030 Agenda” and Global Compact for Migration: “Are you maybe interested in doing an interview with Mr Frohnmaier for Breitbart about these topics and the situation in Germany?” No reply is in the archive. The Guardian said there was no evidence the pitch succeeded and that the archive contained no other mentions of Frohnmaier on Breitbart outside quotations in a story from the previous year about anti-immigrant riots in Chemnitz.
Frohnmaier said in an email: “Regarding the correspondence you refer to, it must first be noted that we have so far had no opportunity to independently verify its authenticity and completeness. This applies all the more given that, according to the information available to us, the documents were obtained unlawfully.” He described the contacts as part of the ordinary cultivation of international political relationships and said exchanges with international interlocutors were part of everyday political work. “As a matter of principle, we do not comment further publicly on internal matters,” he wrote.
Second-administration contacts and electoral context
The leaked mail thins after 2019, but the AfD’s ongoing contacts with the second Trump administration appear through public records and its politicians’ newsletters. Media outlets, including The Guardian, had reported apparently friendly contacts between the party and the US State Department during the administration.
On the eve of the January 2025 inauguration, Beatrix von Storch and her husband Sven attended Trump’s “Make America Great Again Victory Rally” in Washington. In a newsletter the next day, von Storch said she was “together with many celebrities and Trump supporters” and had “met Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Jr there, among others”. On 14 February, Vice-President JD Vance met Weidel on the sidelines of the Munich security conference. On 23 February, the AfD doubled its vote and became the largest opposition party in the Bundestag.
A Guardian photograph accompanying the published investigation showed what its caption described as far-right supporters carrying a Trump flag at a Berlin demonstration in 2025.
In September 2025, The New York Times reported that von Storch and AfD politician Joachim Paul had met State Department official Samuel Samson in Washington in April. Paul said, “They took a lot of notes.”
A photograph accompanying the report showed an AfD supporter wearing a Trump T-shirt at an event in Halle the previous year.
On 1 October, Darren Beattie, then the acting under-secretary of state for public diplomacy, said he had met Frohnmaier and a second AfD member of parliament, Jan Wenzel Schmidt, to discuss US-Germany relations and shared priorities on cultural exchange and migration. Beattie had been fired as a White House speechwriter in 2018 after it emerged that he had spoken on a panel with Peter Brimelow, whom The Guardian described as a white nationalist. On 13 December, Beattie’s successor, Sarah B Rogers, met Frohnmaier, who posted on X that the exchange had “made clear that Washington is looking for a strong German partner that is ready to take on responsibility”.
The Guardian reported in February that Rogers, asked about the 2019 Russian documents that argued for supporting Frohnmaier’s candidacy in the 2017 German election, said she had “sought guidance within the state department and determined” that the allegation was “unsubstantiated – and in any event, not a bar to a meeting”. In an emailed response, Rogers wrote: “Mr Frohnmaier is the foreign policy spokesman for the most popular political party in Germany. He delivers AfD’s foreign policy positions in the Bundestag, and is the person German media call when they want a policy statement from AfD. For this reason, we talk to him in his official capacity to understand AfD’s positions.” She added: “During the ‘cancel culture’ era, there was a manic focus on reputational contagion that probably hurt American civic life, and is a poor fit for American diplomacy.”
The Guardian reported that the AfD became a home for anti-immigration voters after 1.2 million refugees arrived in Germany in 2015 and 2016. It entered the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, in 2017 with 12.6% of the vote, came second in the February 2025 federal election with 20.8%, and led national polls at about 30%. In September, it won 43.8% of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt and was trying to form what the newspaper called Germany’s first far-right state government since the second world war. Trump marked the win in a Truth Social post, concluding his message with a German version of his MAGA acronym, “MGGA!!!”
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency monitors the party as a suspected rightwing extremist organisation, and state agencies classify five of its regional branches as confirmed extremist. The Guardian reported that Björn Höcke, the AfD leader in the central Thuringia region, was convicted in 2024 of knowingly using a slogan of the SA, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing. The Guardian also reported that AfD politicians attended a meeting with extremists at which a mass-deportation “masterplan” was discussed. The party’s 2025 election programme calls for lifting sanctions on Russia and repairing the Nord Stream gas pipelines programme, while nearly all other German parties have maintained a firewall against governing with it.
Taken together, the records show the AfD seeking a relationship with Trump and MAGA figures while requesting concrete assistance on policy questions. They also preserve the limits of the evidence: the archive contains no reply or meeting involving Pipes, no evidence that the Breitbart approach succeeded and no result from the proposal to hire Bannon. The AfD’s electoral rise gives the relationship current significance, but the material documents attempts and contacts without establishing that every proposed contact succeeded.