Trump’s ‘Envoy’ to Kosovo Draws White House Eye-Roll

Source: Real Clear Politics | November 12, 2021 | Philip Wegmann

It was a diplomatic mission, albeit a non-commissioned one, and the White House was less than pleased with the unofficial overture.

But this one bore an even stranger twist: Donald Trump had dispatched his former director of national intelligence to eastern Europe this week to discuss relations between Kosovo and Serbia, and while the strained relationship between those two powers is certainly significant, the fact that Richard Grenell was there at all was highly unusual.

Washington first learned of the foreign excursion not through normal diplomatic channels but from Trump’s political action committee. The announcement was delivered via email Thursday morning, and it reported that Grenell would be touring the Kosovo-Serbia border later that day to highlight the so-called Washington agreement that the two republics had struck almost a year prior in the Oval Office.

This agreement was “historic, and should not be abandoned,” the former president said in a statement, because “many lives are at stake.” And Grenell, who had hosted talks between the two parties previously, was there now to tour the area as “my Envoy Ambassador,” Trump explained. There was a final line of encouragement (“peace is possible, don’t give up — long term prosperity for those two nations is at stake”) and then directly below that a big red button soliciting political donations.

The Biden administration, meanwhile, dismissed it all as theatrics. A senior official told RealClearPolitics that “outside of his very active imagination, Donald Trump is no longer President and doesn’t have any ‘envoy ambassadors’ representing the United States.”

Despite the Trump-granted honorific, Grenell is a private citizen and therefore not authorized to conduct diplomatic negotiations of any kind on behalf of the United States. Hence, the first words out of his mouth at a press conference along the border. “I want to start by saying that I am no longer with the U.S. government. I come here as a private citizen,” said Grenell, who had also previously served as ambassador to Germany. He added, “I am here solely as a private citizen from the Trump administration.”

But that administration ended last January, and the former president is not in a position to be negotiating anything, a fact that his critics quickly seized upon. They speculated that Trump had violated the Logan Act, which prohibits private citizens from interfering with diplomatic relations between the United States and foreign governments.

Tom Nichols quipped that “envoy ambassador” was “just above Platinum Tier member.” A professor at the U.S. Naval War College, he added that the odd episode was evidence of “a former president dispatching former appointees to foreign countries to engage in foreign policy.”

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