Trump as you know has turned the DOJ into his personal law firm. It both defends him and goes after his enemies. However unlike a regular law firm that can only sue, Trump’s DOJ can prosecute. He’s sent them after multiple Democrats, but now he’s sending them after a former pal. Ric Grenell would be well advised to make like Forrest Gump, and RUN Rick RUN! It looks like he grifted Trump out of millions of dollars that were on the face of it supposed to be for the Kennedy Center.
What the hell happened? Why would Grenell do something so bath!t insane? He had after all been a Trump guy. In Trump’s first term he served a controversial stint as Ambassador to Germany. Then he became Acting DNI in 2020 before John Ratcliff was confirmed. Grenell and Trump were on good enough terms when Trump slimed his way back into the WH Grenell Trump made him Presidential Envoy for Special Missions(?). When Trump decided the Kennedy Center belonged to HIM and set about replacing everyone who ran it Grenell became Acting Executive Director. That position was short lived, but as Alternet tells us he made the most (literally) of his time there, and created what’s now being called a MAGA ‘Blood Feud.’
A multi-million donation from Alina Habba’s (you of course remember her) husband is ‘missing’ as in it was never deposited. Well, at least not in any Kennedy Center. Maybe in the Cayman’s or some other place with secretive banking laws, but where it apparently is NOT is in any Kennedy Center account. Nor, apparently was it ‘redirected’ to a Trump PAC. Habba we know famously worked for a bit in the first Trump administration but what I didn’t know was that her uber rich husband had too. However what matters is that Grenell convinced him to fork over upwards of six million bucks in a single donation and no one (except of course Grenell) knows what happened to it so Trump decided to sic the DOJ on him:
“Former Trump attorney Alina Habba told the president that another one of his top advisers — former Kennedy Center leader Ric Grenell — failed to deposit a multimillion-dollar donation that her billionaire husband made to the center a year ago, according to four senior administration officials and three insiders briefed on the controversy,” writes Caputo. “In the spring of 2025, Grenell persuaded [Habba’s husband Turhan] Mildon to include a multimillion-dollar Kennedy Center donation in a lump-sum $17.6 million payment for a business deal.” According to sources, the donation itself was nearly $6 million, but Habba says it was never deposited with the Center. While a senior administration official cautions that so far “these are only allegations,” Habba’s attorneys plan to give the White House documentation — reviewed by Axios — to support her claims.
That’s a big and expensive suitcase packed with you-know-what to unpack so let’s do so. Keep in mind that on Trump’s short list of things that infuriate him is people profiting off his name – or at least doing so without giving him a hefty cut of the action. Outright stealing from him? No amount of torture before before dying would be enough to satisfy him. Also, if Trump is sending the DOJ after Grenell it’s a safe bet that Grenell actually thought he could get away with swiping all that money with Trump never finding out it had been donated.
Given we’re talking about Trump and the kinds of people he surrounds himself with it’s easy enough to imagine Grenell telling Trump he’d secured a huge single donation from someone with money to burn, and that he’d find a way to funnel it from the Kennedy Center’s funds to a fund/account controlled by Trump. But Trump is said to have told the DOJ to ‘look into it’ (IOW nail him to the wall) which suggests Trump either never knew about the donation when it happened, or assumed it had gone into some Kennedy Center account. The part in the blocked quote about it only being allegations so far is face saving bullshit.
It would be fun to have been a fly on the wall at Habba’s home. I sense she didn’t know just how big the lump sum her hubby had handed over was. And the fact her husband only just found out sounds fishy. Maybe SHE only just found out but clearly she’s one unhappy wife. What the linked article tells us is that Grenell and the Habba couple had a falling out. It’s hard for me to imagine Mildon didn’t do some checking to make sure that SIX MILLION DOLLARS made it to the Kennedy Center. Even people as rich as Bezos, Zuckerberg and Musk would check on six million donated bucks going where it was supposed to go! It’s far more likely Mildon went to considerable time and effort to track down the money and failed. Only then did he tell Habba who it seems wasted little time telling Trump.
Again referring to the WH official statement saying for now it’s just ‘allegations’ I want to call your attention to the last part of the blocked out stuff above that says “Habba’s attorneys plan to give the White House documentation — reviewed by Axios — to support her claims.” Notice that Axios got a chance to review the ‘receipts?’ No wonder this has the potential to blow up into a huge sh!tstorm and at a time when Trump has all manner of such storms to deal with. His and his family’s and administrations pervasive corruption is part of the midterm campaign rhetoric. Things I believe are going to get real ugly real fast, as the last paragraph of the linked article tells us:
In the words of one Trump insider, “This is the ultimate MAGA blood feud.” Habba and Grenell were both part of Trump’s first administration, with the latter serving as Trump’s ambassador to Germany and then his acting director of national intelligence, while Habba was Trump’s private attorney and briefly was U.S. attorney in New Jersey. According to Caputo, “Those who know the president’s thinking say he is particularly disapproving of people who use his name or misuse positions he has given them. His dismissal Tuesday of Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle was the latest reminder of that. Twotop Trump world figures being engaged in such a bitter feud adds to the complexity.” As one official noted, “Nobody wants to get in the middle of Alina Habba and Ric Grenell going to war.”
This could wind up sending popcorn sales through the roof. Kimberly Guilfoyle is in legal trouble from Trump, and now so is Ric Grenell. Both know where plenty of proverbial bodies are buried and like Trump they will do anything to save their butts including punching back at Trump for not letting them slide.To paraphrase the fictional Col. Kilgore, ‘I love the smell of MAGA blood and body parts after watching them tear each other apart.’Â Stay tuned…
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