Kimberly Guilfoyle took a gas company’s jet and sold its deals as ambassador.
That is what the record shows, and you do not need a Senate committee to follow it. A registered lobbyist named Christos Marafatsos has a Greek client called Aktor Group. Aktor, through a joint venture with a Greek state-backed energy company called DEPA, signed a twenty-year deal last fall to buy liquefied natural gas from an American exporter called Venture Global. Since then the U.S. ambassador to Greece has been selling that deal across southeastern Europe, and she has been bringing Marafatsos into meetings with foreign officials while she does it. She has also been riding on private aircraft, one of them paid for by Aktor’s chief executive, once on her way to present her credentials in Athens and again in January between Athens and Paris. Former embassy staff say ambassadors do not do that. State Department rules say she needed explicit approval in writing. Nobody has produced any.
Now, I’m just a simple man, but a twenty-year supply contract is not complicated. Somebody signs it, somebody buys from it, and whoever buys from it pays whatever the signers locked in, for twenty years. That is how it works on the shop floor and it works the same way in Athens. DEPA sells energy in Greece. It is now committed for two decades to a purchase that was pushed into place with the U.S. ambassador hustling for the seller. When the heating season comes, that contract is in the price, and it will be in the price in Bucharest too, where Aktor’s joint venture is selling the same gas. A customer brought in a Tacoma last week with a cracked timing cover and asked me, half joking, what his heating bill is going to look like. He was not joking about the heating bill. He lives in Georgia and he has never met Kimberly Guilfoyle. But the man in Athens and the small-business owner in Bucharest are in the same position he is in. They pay the bill, and they are never in the room where the deal gets signed.
The embassy’s answer is that Guilfoyle “continues to follow all State Department ethical guidelines” and that any insinuation otherwise is “categorically false.” Her lawyer says she worked with several energy companies and was not focused on just one. A lawyer for Aktor says she has been “consistently promoting U.S. interests.” Maybe so. But the rules on the books say an ambassador gets explicit approval before climbing aboard somebody else’s aircraft, and two documented flights have produced no approval yet. Either the paper exists and the State Department can show it this week, or the embassy’s sentence is wrong. Those are the only two options, and the department has to pick one in writing.
Then there is the dinner in Athens in March, with more than a dozen people at the table, U.S. officials and Greek officials and embassy staff among them. Guilfoyle, referring to the collapse of the Romanian government, said: “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here.” Her lawyer disputes the characterization. The Greek government’s spokesman says there was “never any question of a threat.” He did not address the part about Romania. What she said, at the same time she was selling Aktor’s gas deal and dining in Bucharest later that month with the very politicians of the Social Democratic Party whose party helped bring down that government in May, is not the kind of thing that gets fixed by a press statement. A Romanian lawmaker has already filed a treason complaint against the politicians who met with her, accusing them of colluding with a foreign power with the “aim of subjugating and economically undermining Romania.” The PSD’s leader says his party did not collude with the United States. Fine. The accusation is on the table either way, and it is on the table because an ambassador told a roomful of people her government can make governments fall while she was hustling a gas contract.
I am not writing this because Shaheen and Meeks are Democrats. I am writing it because Shaheen voted to confirm Guilfoyle last year, and she is asking these questions anyway. That is the job the people elected her to do. When a senator does that job, on either side of the aisle, she earns the standing to put the department on the spot, and this week she did: she wants to know whether Marafatsos was ever authorized to sit in meetings with foreign officials, what Guilfoyle’s financial interests are, and what a twenty-year gas deal brokered with an ambassador’s help has to do with the United States of America. Those are not complicated questions. They are the questions any man at a parts counter would ask if a salesman walked in driving his boss’s truck.
What happens next belongs to Secretary Rubio, not to the press shop in Athens. The Greek opposition has noted that the foreign ministry has not summoned Guilfoyle for an explanation, and that if she were from another country it would have. The Romans are louder still. So far the department has offered a sentence and a shrug.
Guilfoyle’s client’s chief executive put her on his jet. The lobbyist that same client hired got a seat in the room with foreign officials. Aktor got a twenty-year contract to sell American gas across southeastern Europe. And the families in Athens and Bucharest who will pay whatever that gas costs for the next twenty years were never in the room at all. Guilfoyle took the boss’s plane. The boss got the deal. Somebody else got the bill.