An American friend sent me a short video from a dinner in Bucharest on March 31. Kimberly Guilfoyle, President Donald Trump’s ambassador to Greece, sat with Sorin Grindeanu, leader of Romania’s Social Democrats, and Bogdan Ivan, then Romania’s energy minister.
Five weeks later, Grindeanu’s party joined nationalists to bring down Prime Minister Ilie Bolojan’s government.
Last month, the Wall Street Journal reported that at a dinner in Athens in March, Guilfoyle spoke of the coming fall of Romania’s government and said America could do that “to any country we want.”
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The account rests on one diner’s word. Guilfoyle’s lawyer disputes it. Grindeanu says Bolojan fell to “neither the Americans, nor the Loch Ness monster, nor Bigfoot.”
In my old trade, a single-source story from a dinner party is a lead, nothing more. But assume it is true.
Now try it in Georgia.
Whom would she call?
Not the government. The man who owns it, Bidzina Ivanishvili, has been under U.S. sanctions since December 2024, and his Georgian Dream party is asking its own constitutional court to ban every opposition party that won seats in 2024. Vice President JD Vance toured the South Caucasus in February and skipped Tbilisi.
So she would call the opposition. Many of its leaders were jailed last year. The ones now free are back on television, speaking with the authority that prison and beatings confer. Their viewers rarely question them.
I watch Georgian opposition television every day. Nightly, Trump is “Krasnov,” Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agent, an insane moron who sold out Ukraine, and worse. Opposition leaders mostly keep Trump out of their own public statements. Their channels say it for them.
Givi Targamadze, a former chairman of parliament’s defense committee, served seven months in one of Ivanishvili’s prisons, an injustice that does not make him right. In late September, on the opposition YouTube program Accents, he called Trump Tower Tbilisi “directly a Kremlin money-laundering machine”: Trump’s son sells the brand, and Kremlin cash is washed through the apartments. The broker, he said, is Umar Kremlev, the Russian boxing boss who reportedly paid for Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding party. He offered no documents for the laundering claim. The host, Eka Kvesitadze, did not ask for one.
Part of his story checks out. Kremlev did fly into Tbilisi last October, through the airport’s government-delegation hall, and, as Targamadze said, met the mayor, Kakha Kaladze, Georgian Dream’s secretary general, who called it “just a friendly visit.” Georgia’s boxing federation knew nothing of the visit. A counterintelligence officer would ask who authorized the government-hall entrance, who arranged the meeting, and what kind of boxing visit bypasses the boxing federation. Targamadze skipped the questions and went straight to a verdict.
He then predicted “a scandal worse than the wedding” and urged Georgian emigrants to make it “one of the leading topics” about Georgia. Kvesitadze offered to enlist friends in the international press and asked “dear emigrants” to share the program. Many of us live in America and listen to Tbilisi. On Election Day 2024, Nika Gvaramia, now a leader of the main opposition bloc, dismissed Georgian émigrés who voted for Trump as “Darwinian natural selection.” Now his camp wants our help.
The program aired five weeks before the midterm elections. Trump has warned that if Republicans lose the House, Democrats will “find a reason to impeach me.” In private conversations with me and in social-media comments, opposition figures and supporters have said they are counting on exactly that.
Targamadze need not look far. We served in parliament for the same party. I am an emigrant who has written four articles for American publications on Trump Tower Tbilisi and Kremlev’s role in that wedding party. When a mutual acquaintance, Ia Parulava, sent Kvesitadze my pieces after the program, the reply, in full, was: “I’ll pass it on.”
I have been hard on that tower in these pages, and on that wedding party, which I called a counterintelligence failure. But I said what I could prove and what I could not. That is the difference between criticism and conspiracy.
The conspiracy line comes from the top. In January 2021, former President Mikheil Saakashvili, founder of Targamadze’s party, told Gvaramia’s channel, Mtavari, that “everyone knows” Ivanishvili had financed Trump’s campaign through lobbying groups and Jared Kushner. Gvaramia concluded that America had been ruled by “a Russian project.” I am still waiting for a document.
This summer, Eka Mishveladze, a longtime TV Pirveli anchor now in politics, mocked a Trump promise on Facebook and signed off with one Georgian word: bati. Goose, our slang for a fool. I forwarded it to a journalist I know there. Keep calling the American president a goose, I wrote, and see if that frees Georgia from Russia. I have worked with that channel’s journalists; in private, they curse him every time.
Criticizing Trump is not cursing America. But it is the first rung of a ladder I described in these pages in July: the man, his administration, his party, then America itself. Labour Party leader Shalva Natelashvili mocked Trump’s pick for Homeland Security, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, as a Cherokee plumber who never found time to finish school.
Back in Bucharest, Grindeanu never apologized for dining with a Trump envoy. He called Bolojan’s Cabinet “the most anti-American government” since 1989. In Romania, “anti-American” is an accusation. On Georgia’s opposition channels, it is primetime programming.
Picture a Georgian opposition leader photographed laughing over wine with a Trump ambassador. By morning, his own channels would call him Krasnov’s errand boy, and his own supporters would curse him in the comments. No American can help a politician whose voters would punish him for accepting the help.
Opposition leaders will say Washington turned away first. But several told Ia Parulava, privately, that if America removes Ivanishvili, it “will have no choice but us.” Meanwhile, Ivanishvili’s channels are setting the table. On Sept. 12, after the opposition channel Formula dismissed a Trump pledge as “vote buying,” the pro-government Imedi and Rustavi 2 published the same text about it, word for word, 47 minutes apart: “Anti-American propaganda.” Ivanishvili’s propagandists do not need to invent the opposition’s hostility to Trump. They only need to rerun it.
At Trump’s Sept. 22 reception in New York, Ivanishvili’s prime minister, Irakli Kobakhidze, says he had a brief word with the president. His office released the photograph. The opposition calls the president Krasnov. Kobakhidze has the picture. A picture is not a partnership. But the opposition has left him alone in the frame.
One Georgian has done what the opposition will not. Ia Parulava is not in politics and never was. When opposition rallies were cursing America, she bought American flags with her own money and carried them in. A year later, a fellow protester wrote to her: “At last, there were many American flags at the rally today. They played the American anthem. What you were saying a year ago, they have finally heard.” For handing out brochures about the Megobari Act, Rep. Joe Wilson’s (R-SC) bill named for the Georgian word for “friend,” the police fined her 5,000 lari.
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Whether or not Guilfoyle said it, her sentence carries a hidden condition. You can do it to any country you want, as long as someone in that country will sit at your table.
So try it in Georgia. Dial Tbilisi. The only politicians who would pick up are the ones the opposition wants gone.
Emzari Gelashvili is a former senior official of Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, specializing in counterintelligence against Russian operations; a former regional chief of Georgia’s military police; and a former member of Parliament representing the Kareli district. He received political asylum in the United States in 2013.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
