President Donald Trump told reporters he knew very little about the explosive allegations surrounding his ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, dismissing the issue as “too bad” when pressed outside the White House on Friday.
Speaking on the South Lawn before heading to a campaign rally in Syracuse, New York, Trump cut short a question about the growing scrutiny of his envoy. “I just heard about it. It’s too bad. I mean, I don’t know. She’s, she’s an ambassador. Uh, I just heard a little bit about it. I don’t know too much, but she was always very nice,” he said.
The controversy erupted after The Wall Street Journal published an investigative report claiming Guilfoyle asked wealthy Kentucky lawyer and former Trump donor Eric Deters for financial help to clear a six‑figure American Express credit‑card balance before her Senate confirmation, allegedly offering political influence in return.
According to the Journal, a July 3, 2025 Signal message from Guilfoyle to Deters read: “Honey, please, I need you to get this done for me today.” The text featured a prayer‑hands emoji and an attached PDF with payment instructions for American Express. Deters declined, later saying that paying the debt would have endangered his marriage.
Guilfoyle, who dated Donald Trump Jr. for six years before their 2024 split, was confirmed as U.S. ambassador to Greece shortly after the alleged exchange. Her attorneys have challenged the authenticity of the messages and note that she cleared the standard Senate vetting process.
The controversy intensified after Deters appeared on television and leveled direct accusations against the ambassador. “Kimberly Guilfoyle, I have no doubt, has done this to more than me. She’s doing it right now in Greece,” Deters told an interviewer, calling her a “grifter” and suggesting other political figures engaged in similar conduct.
During that segment, anchor Peter Alexander questioned Deters’s credibility, pointing out, “You do have a track record of making false statements in court proceedings that led to the suspension of your law license.”
Trump’s brief remarks in Washington followed a sharp, defensive reaction overseas from U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who declined to address the report during an airport‑tarmac briefing in Athens before departing for Portugal.
Rubio dismissed the premise of the questions, accusing the press of relying on leaks and demanding instant reactions before officials can review the facts. “I know the game, okay? The game is someone gives information to a newspaper or a media outlet, the media outlet reports it, you immediately turn to me and say, ‘I need you to respond to our reporting,’” Rubio told reporters on the runway. “That’s not the way this process works. Our job is not to respond every time someone decides to give the media something without any advance warning, without having any chance to look at it and see what’s in there.”
“I’m not going to comment on a story that literally posted a few hours ago,” Rubio added. “Within hours, some member of Congress will write you a letter demanding you answer questions to something we’ve never seen before. I don’t even know if it’s true or not true, so it’s just not going to work that way. And it most certainly is not going to work that way when I’m sitting in another country.”
When a reporter asked how inquiries should be handled, Rubio reiterated that an airport tarmac abroad was not the appropriate setting for addressing leaked news stories. “We don’t conduct these things on a press conference on a tarmac in a foreign country because you wrote a story or somebody else wrote a story because some source gave it to you,” he said. “You guys somehow walk around thinking that because some source told you something and you reported it, it’s the gospel. It’s not the gospel. It’s not the gospel for me.”
Before turning to the Guilfoyle issue, Rubio used his briefing to discuss broader regional policy, urging European allies to stay economically and militarily robust within NATO and stressing that Iranian threats do not limit U.S. operations across Europe as he boarded his flight to Portugal.
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