Bah, civil rights. That's so passe. Republicans know the wave of the future is law and order, or something.
'Ex-Trump Spy Chief Cozies Up to Serbia's Pro-Moscow Strongman'
While all eyes were on Tucker Carlson’s televised swoon for Hungary’s anti-democratic, pro-Russian strongman Viktor Orban earlier this month, another prominent Donald Trump acolyte was elsewhere in Eastern Europe celebrating yet another would-be dictator who’s fallen into Moscow’s orbit, Serbia’s Aleksandar Vučić.
Richard Grenell, Trump’s erstwhile ambassador to Germany, and, for a brief time, acting director of National Intelligence, has long taken the Serbian president’s side in his resistance to a peace plan that would have him recognize Kosovo’s sovereignty. Grenell’s partisanship was so blatant that, in 2020, when he was Trump’s special envoy to the Balkans, Kosovo’s acting prime minister, Albin Kurti, accused him of “direct involvement” in the downfall of his government. Grenell, he said, “put pressure” on the junior partner in his government to quit his coalition after he balked at signing a peace agreement that favored Serbia in a land-swaps deal.
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Grenell is also connected to Hungary’s budding dictator Orban, it turns out. Last year the libertarian-leaning Responsible Statecraft think tank revealed that in 2016, Grenell’s Washington, D.C., public relations firm, Capitol Media Partners, had taken over $100,000 from a foundation funded and directed by the Hungarian government. Grenell did not register as a foreign agent as required by U.S. law, and the connection remained secret while he was the acting director of National Intelligence. In addition, the Propublica investigative news organization reported last year that Grenell had also had done undisclosed consulting work on behalf of Vladimir Plahotniuc, a Moldovan oligarch “who is now a fugitive and was recently barred from entering the U.S. under anti-corruption sanctions imposed last month by the State Department.” In 2016, Grenell wrote several articles in right-leaning newspapers defending Plahotniuc. A lawyer for Grenell told Propublica he hadn’t had to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act “because he was not working at the direction of a foreign power.”
[A review of Vučić's authoritarianism and shady connections.]
All of which makes Aleksandar Vučić a strange bedfellow for a former American diplomat, not to mention one who recently occupied the top job in U.S. intelligence—unless, of course, that person is the confidant of a former American president who demonstrated a marked preference for the world’s autocrats over the leaders of its democracies. And given the hero-worship Tucker Carlson and Grenell have showered on two who seem bent on a fascist revival, it’s fair to wonder whether Team Trump is cultivating an alliance melding the power and money of U.S. and European far right autocrats and nationalists, pro-Russia Ukrainians and Gulf state monarchies into a new kind of axis of evil, this one anchored in the White House.
“I truly hope that the Biden Administration is keeping an eye on Grenell’s Balkan adventures,” says Sipher, the former CIA station chief in Serbia. He wishes someone in the Biden administration would review all of Grenell’s dealings while he was director of National Intelligence. But in the meantime, he says, “I’m just happy he is no longer in a position of authority.”
For now.
