Allegations by former congressional candidate Eric Deters are the latest controversy to swirl around the U.S. ambassador to Greece.
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Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Thursday declined to condemn U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle over allegations that she asked a Trump donor to pay her $100,000 credit card bill as she was preparing for her confirmation hearing before the Senate.
Vance, during a news conference in Washington on Thursday, said he would “like to get the full story before offering a real opinion” on the matter. “I don’t love that, but I don’t know exactly who you’re talking about,” he said.
And at an airport outside Athens on Thursday, Rubio brushed aside questions about the U.S. ambassador. “We don’t conduct these things in a news conference on a tarmac in a foreign country,” he added.
The allegations about the credit card bill are the latest controversy to swirl around Guilfoyle, a former media personality and prosecutor who was nominated and confirmed as U.S. ambassador to Greece last year.
Guilfoyle, who was engaged to President Donald Trump’s oldest son, Donald Jr., before they broke up in late 2024, has become a high-profile figure in Athens, feted by Greece’s right-wing government for her close ties to the White House. But the U.S. ambassador has been dogged by accounts of a hard-partying lifestyle and outbursts of anger at staff.
The donor making the latest claims about Guilfoyle, Eric Deters, is a former congressional candidate from Kentucky who says he supported Trump since his initial 2016 run.
Deters shared a tranche of documents, emails and text messages with The Post, writing that he was seeking the administration’s help on several issues and asked Guilfoyle to use her connections before her confirmation as ambassador. The Wall Street Journal first reported on Deters’s allegations.
“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express that’s all it will show … Please,” Guilfoyle allegedly wrote in a text message sent to Deters requesting the credit card payment. The message appears to include a PDF file with instructions on how to pay the bill to American Express. Deters ultimately did not pay off the bill, writing that he couldn’t do it “without getting a divorce.”
The alleged messages also suggest that Guilfoyle sought to trade her access to high-level officials within the Trump administration. Deters says he paid Guilfoyle $300,000 over the past several years in speaking fees as he sought the administration’s influence in tax matters and in pursuing the extradition of an Ohio doctor who fled to Pakistan after being charged with insurance fraud.
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Guilfoyle at several points appeared to express awareness that the situation could skirt ethical lines, according to the alleged messages, frequently telling Deters not to put anything in writing and warning he could cost her the ambassador position.
“What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me [my] ambassadorship stop writing,” she wrote in one alleged message.
Deters, who said he began working with Guilfoyle in 2020 when she appeared at an event in Kentucky called Freedom Fest, has now firmly turned on her, making multiple media appearances on Thursday and describing her as a “grifter” and saying their relationship was “quid-pro-quo.”
The State Department, the White House and Guilfoyle’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.
The allegations about Guilfoyle partially overshadowed Rubio’s trip to Athens, where he was enthusiastically greeted by the U.S. ambassador at the airport. The top U.S. diplomat on Wednesday gave a high-profile speech in front of the Acropolis, where he attempted to set Trump’s “America First” ethos in the history of Western civilization.
“We are at an inflection point — an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization,” he said.
Democratic lawmakers on the House and Senate foreign relations committees wrote to Rubio last week calling on the State Department to investigate the allegations against Guilfoyle and provide an update to Congress.
If the allegations are proved accurate, Guilfoyle should be removed from her position, wrote Rep. Gregory Meeks (New York), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
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Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.
