Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Leaked Text Messages Are Not Doing the Trumps Any Favors

It’s been an eventful few days for right-wing royalty Kimberly Guilfoyle and Donald Trump Jr. On Friday, the couple seemingly revealed that they were engaged, and it was reported that, actually, Jr. had gotten down on one knee a year ago but for some reason they decided to keep it a secret.

On Monday, we learned that Don Jr. (along with his sister Ivanka) had been subpoenaed by the New York attorney general, and were reportedly refusing to comply with the order. And on Wednesday, ProPublica reported that text messages sent by Guilfoyle concerning the January 6 rally that preceded the deadly attack on the Capitol suggest Team Trump was even more intimately involved with the planning of the “Stop the Steal” rally than previously thought.

Best wishes to the happy couple?

Here’s ProPublica:

Kimberly Guilfoyle, a top fundraiser for former president Donald Trump and the girlfriend of his son Donald Trump Jr., boasted to a GOP operative that she had raised $3 million for the rally that helped fuel the January 6 Capitol riot. In a series of text messages sent on January 4 to Katrina Pierson, the White House liaison to the event, Guilfoyle detailed her fundraising efforts and supported a push to get far-right speakers on the stage alongside Trump for the rally, which sought to overturn the election of President Joe Biden.

Guilfoyle’s texts, reviewed by ProPublica, represent the strongest indication yet that members of the Trump family circle were directly involved in the financing and organization of the rally. The attack on the Capitol that followed it left five dead and scores injured. A House select committee investigating the events of January 6 has subpoenaed more than 30 Trump allies for testimony and documents, including Pierson and Caroline Wren, a former deputy to Guilfoyle. But Guilfoyle herself has so far not received any official scrutiny from Congress.

Guilfoyle’s boasts of the millions she brought in reportedly came amid complaints that she wasn’t going to be allowed to speak on stage at the rally. According to ProPublica, Pierson says that the president personally set the speaker lineup and that there was nothing she could do about it. Guilfoyle reportedly responded that she just wanted to introduce Don Jr., noting that she had “raised so much money for this.… Literally one of my donors Julie at 3 million.” Guilfoyle was apparently referring to Julie Jenkins Fancelli, a Publix supermarket heir who Guilfoyle had cultivated a professional relationship with during the campaign, according to ProPublica.

Untangling the relationship between Guilfoyle, Wren, and Fancelli is key to understanding the financing of the events of January 6. In January 2020, Guilfoyle was appointed national chair of the Trump Victory finance committee, a leading fundraising vehicle for Trump’s reelection campaign. She brought Wren on as her deputy.… The pair focused primarily on ramping up the campaign’s “bundling” program, a method of fundraising that relies on volunteers collecting money from their personal networks. Fancelli, a reclusive member of one of the country’s richest families, was one of those volunteers, according to interviews and internal Trump Victory records. Splitting her time between Florida and Italy, Fancelli raised at least $72,000 from her friends and family.

After the election, Wren became the main fundraising consultant for a newly formed super PAC run by two of Trump Jr.’s closest aides. The super PAC, called “Save the US Senate PAC,” placed ads starring Trump Jr. in which he encouraged Georgians to vote Republican in the bitterly contested runoff elections that would result in Democratic control of the Senate. That PAC was primarily funded by LJ Management Services Inc., a company closely linked to Fancelli’s family foundation. It gave $800,000 to the PAC in several installments, records show. In late December, Wren became involved in the rally preparations for January 6. Wren told multiple organizers interviewed by ProPublica that she was carrying out the wishes of the Trump family.

According to ProPublica, Wren told another rally organizer that she had “parked” funds with dark money groups supporting the event, and she routed approximately $150,000 from Fancelli to the Republican Attorneys General Association’s Rule of Law Defense Fund, which later purchased a robocall telling Trump supporters to come to D.C. and march on the Capitol after the president’s speech.

On January 6, prior to the rally, Guilfoyle and Don Jr. gathered with Trump in the Oval Office, when she “indulged the fantasy that [Mike] Pence would help overturn the election results,” according to The Washington Post. Of the throngs of people assembling at the Ellipse, Guilfoyle reportedly told the president, “They’re just reflecting the will of the people. This is the will of the people.” Later, in a speech introducing Don Jr., she told the crowd: “We will not allow the liberals and the Democrats to steal our dream or steal our elections.” Don Jr. followed that by telling lawmakers set to certify the Biden’s Electoral College win, “You have an opportunity today. You can be a hero, or you can be a zero. And the choice is yours. But we are all watching. The whole world is watching, folks. Choose wisely.”

Guilfoyle’s attorney, Joe Tacopina, denied to ProPublica that his client had anything to do with fundraising or approving rally speakers, claiming the text from Guilfoyle “did not relate to the Save America rally” and that the “content of the message itself” was “inaccurate” and “taken out of context.” (He did not respond to follow-up questions from the outlet about the accuracy and context of the message.) Pierson declined to comment and Fancelli did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement released to ProPublica by her attorney, Wren said she helped to produce the rally but did not share further details about her fundraising role.

In related news, over the weekend January 6 committee chairman Representative Bennie Thompson said the panel has “some concerns” about possible financial fraud by Trump and his allies around the insurrection. “It’s highly concerning on our part that people raise money for one activity and we can’t find the money being spent for that particular activity,” he said. “So we’ll continue to look at it and the financing is one of those things we will continue to look at very closely.”

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Original Article: Kimberly Guilfoyle’s Leaked Text Messages Are Not Doing the Trumps Any Favors | Vanity Fair