Well, another week has flitted by as we edge closer to the midterm elections, and as things stand, the Republicans still look set to lose control of the House of Representatives and potentially the Senate too.

Life in DC is never boring, and this week the news has been filled with scandals involving the United States (US) Ambassador to Greece and a criminal investigation into a congresswoman from Minnesota. Meanwhile, as fuel prices continue to rise, with real wages falling, the Trump Administration is desperately trying to plug some diesel holes in the economy. And finally, Michigan’s Democratic candidate for the Senate has had some dubious family links to the Muslim Brotherhood exposed … and he’s not very happy about it. Let’s get to it.

Greasy in Greece

Kimberly Guilfoyle may not be a name familiar to many outside the US, but she has been knocking about the peripheries of power for many years.Guilfoyle was married to California’s oleaginous governor, Gavin Newsom, while he was that state’s attorney general. Feast your eyes on the happy couple, photographed for Harpers Bazaar, sprawled out on an expensive rug in a mansion owned by Ann Getty. The title of the piece was “The New Kennedys,” which did not seem completely inaccurate; the marriage was about as happy as any Kennedy marriage.

After her divorce from Newsom, a Democrat, Guilfoyle reinvented herself as a MAGA-style Republican and impressed Fox News’s Roger Ailes so much that she landed a job on the cable news channel. I first came across Guilfoyle when she was a co-host of a 5pm show featuring five panelists called, imaginatively enough, The Five. The show is, in a word, dumb. It’s like a TV version of an annoying X feed, with each panelist trying to outdo the others by throwing rhetorical bombs and looking around for approval.

At some point Guilfoyle disappeared from The Five and re-emerged as the fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. Sadly, that liaison crashed and burned. Perhaps to get Guilfoyle out of town so Trump Jr could focus his attentions on model Bettina Anderson, whom he later married, she was nominated to be the Ambassador to Greece.

Ambassadorships are all confirmed by the US Senate and the Senators tend to want to know if there is anything that might compromise a candidate or make them a less-than-perfect representative of the US. It turns out, as The Wall Street Journal has reported, that Guilfoyle had considerable debt. So she contacted a Trump donor, Eric Deters, and asked him, in text messages, to pay off her $100 000 American Express debt. In return, Guilfoyle promised him all sorts of favours, given her links with the Trump family.

All of this has emerged long after she was confirmed, because, it seems, the embassy staff in Athens leaked information as they were less than pleased with the conduct of the ambassador. While acting as an envoy, Guilfoyle has been traveling around with a lobbyist called Christo Marafatsos who represents the interests of a Greek natural gas company. This was, apparently, only one of many actions by Guilfoyle whose self-dealing became an embarrassment for the Trump Administration, and this week she was asked to resign. She will, it seems have to return to the States with her stylist, Fancy James, who had also been accompanying her on trips and making sure she’s perfectly coiffed and just fabulous.

Guilfoyle’s questionable dealings with MAGA donors and Greek businessmen bring disrepute to the US and so it’s good to see that the Trump Administration has some standards. But sometimes when looking at these characters one just wants to scream “POT … KETTLE.”

Since Mr Trump took up residence in the White House for the second time, his family has made an estimated $2.3 billion in various crypto schemes. Ms. Guilfoyle’s efforts to enrich herself and rid herself of credit card debt seem like child’s play compared to the grown-up sort of self-dealing the family Trump has been up to. I guess it’s good to be President … until, that is, your political opponents control Congress and then the grift may come to an abrupt halt.

The Sheriffs Come for Omar

The US is a very welcoming country. Notwithstanding its history of slavery and racial discrimination, it is now a remarkably non-racist and tolerant country, and is one that celebrates success and achievement, regardless of race. Given that, you’d think that a woman who had been brought here as a war refugee from Africa, and was given education, welfare, and work opportunities, would show an enormous amount of gratitude and would celebrate and strengthen the US. Most immigrants who move here and become naturalised citizens do just that. One, however, does the opposite: Ilhan Omar.

I have loathed Ms Omar for many years because she exhibits that most unattractive human trait, a sense of ingratitude. Omar came here as a refugee from Somalia with her father and some other family members. This country took her in, gave her a multitude of opportunities, which she took advantage of, and she ended up being elected to Congress. She represents a district in Minnesota, which has a large Somali population.

Omar uses her perch in Congress to continuously denigrate the US. Instead of expressing gratitude, she spits down on this country and tries over and again to change the institutions that have made this the strongest, wealthiest, and most generous country in history. And so, I must admit that it was with a small sense of delight that I read this week that Omar is being investigated by the authorities for some criminal wrongdoing.

This week federal agents raided her house in Washington, DC, armed with a search warrant. The fact that the feds had a search warrant means that a judge in DC had been presented with evidence to show that there was probable cause to believe that Omar had committed a crime. We don’t know yet quite what she did, but it seems her transgression relates to her immigration status. It’s possible that Omar lied about her age when she came here with her father, who was granted residency. Entering as a minor, dependent on her father, would have made her path to residency far easier, than coming here over the age of 18. It seems Omar falsely lowered her age to 17 to get in.

Regarding her father, who died not so long ago from complications related to Covid, Omar described him as a teacher. Actually, Nur Omar Mohammed was not some benevolent educator, but a senior military commander in Siad Barre’s communist Somali regime. I have no evidence that Omar père committed any atrocities himself, but the army he fought for committed sickening atrocities, including the mass murder of civilians. Does this sound like the kind of family that should have been granted asylum here?

All of this comes after some other questionable revelations about Omar. For instance, there have long been questions about one of her marriages to a man reputed to be her brother. It seems she lied to immigration officials by marrying brother to get him US residence. Either that or her family relations really are very intimate.

Then there are questions about her finances. All Congresspeople are required to disclose their financial interests, and they must declare their total assets in broad bands. Last year Omar disclosed joint assets with her new husband, Tim Mynett, to be between $6m and $30m. That was subsequently reduced to between $18k and $95k. The discrepancy was put down to an accounting error. I’m not sure about you, dear reader, but I don’t think I have ever looked at my accounts and made an accounting error that results in me overestimating assets 315-fold. Something doesn’t seem right here.

And this isn’t a good time to be a Somali from Minnesota with questionable finances, given there have been widespread allegations of fraud committed by Somali immigrants from that state. Who knows where this investigation will go, but it’s always possible that Omar will have her citizenship stripped from her and she’ll be deported. That will be an astonishing development, but not one I will be particularly sad about. Why would I write that? Take a look at this interview from 2013 where she draws a sickening equivalence between Al Qaida, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Someone with a mind so twisted shouldn’t be anywhere near the halls of Congress, or the US for that matter.

Russian oil purchases

With diesel prices rising to historic highs and with the midterms in sight, President Trump is desperate to find some way of alleviating the pain for US consumers, truckers, farmers, and everyone else given how important the fuel is the functioning of the economy. In a surprising reversal of American policy towards Russia, Trump announced on 9 October that he would allow for the purchase of Russian diesel fuel, beginning with 300 000 tonnes immediately. This move has some in the Republican Party pleased, but it is unlikely to lessen GOP losses next month and is also likely to be illegal.

US sanctions against Russia were passed by the US Congress in 2022 after Putin’s invasion. The point of the sanctions, which included prohibitions on importing Russian oil and petroleum products, was to deny Russia the funds with which to conduct the war. The US is supposed to be a nation of laws and Congress has passed a law prohibiting purchases of Russian oil. Trump, it seems to me, has no legal authority to go around Congress and buy diesel from Russia just because the price is high. Several leading Republicans, including Senators Susan Collins from Maine, Lisa Murkowski from Alaska, and Thom Tillis from North Carolina, joined with Democrats to condemn the move.

Aside from being illegal, Trump’s proposal is a betrayal of the Ukrainian people. After Ukraine agreed to halt its attacks on Russian refining plants, Russia responded with a barrage of missiles. In the past two weeks more than 200 Ukrainian civilians have been killed. When Russia deliberately attacks civilian targets, the response should not be to reward the dictatorship with oil purchases. No doubt China is watching these developments closely as it weighs the costs and benefits of invading Taiwan, calculating just how far it could increase US economic pain before it would buckle.

Although the reports are unverified, it appears that a recent Ukrainian strike on Russian server farms, which took them offline, led to dramatic drops in social media references to “genocide” and “free Palestine.” Furthermore, apparently the number of followers of Tucker Carlson’s sewer-like content fell by around 70%. If this is true, Russia is not just murdering Ukrainian civilians, it is stoking violence and hatred around the world, specifically to undermine the West.

Standing by Ukraine, which includes providing continued Starlink coverage, is not just morally correct, but also strategically sound given the other threats by bad actors that seek to undermine US and Western dominance. Meanwhile the economic pain Americans feel is not just caused by high diesel prices, but by Trump’s trade wars that have driven up prices for everyone and made it increasingly difficult for businesses to plan and invest. These economic own goals are not something the Ukrainian people should have to suffer for.

The El-Sayed Family and the Muslim Brotherhood

Abduel El-Sayed and Mike Rogers, the Democrat and Republican running for the Senate seat in Michigan held a debate this week in which neither candidate did himself any huge favours. There was one notable exchange however, when Rogers mentioned that El-Sayed’s mother worked for an organisation, the Islamic American Relief Agency, which was found to have funnelled money to Al Qaida. Rogers also claimed that El-Sayed has received support from members of the Muslim Brotherhood.

El-Sayed vehemently denied that he or his family have any ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, but he apparently didn’t factor in his sister’s public utterances on this topic. In 2012 El-Sayed’s sister, Eman Abdelhadi, wrote that their mother had been an activist for the Muslim Brotherhood and that in fact the family had been “MB.” But there’s more. Canary Mission, which counters antisemitism, just posted a video of Ms Abdelhadi talking about a novel she wrote, which is set in the future and in which Hamas terrorists succeed in a 7 October-style attack and defeat the Israel Defense Forces, and destroy Israel. El-Sayed’s family members don’t just support the Muslim Brotherhood; they also fantasise about the destruction of the state of Israel. That seems to be something voters should know about.

As it happens one wouldn’t have to delve too far into family history to get a sense of El-Sayed’s own support for the Muslim Brotherhood. After the Arab Spring revolts brought in Mohammed Morsi as a Muslim Brotherhood president of Egypt, El-Sayed himself signed an open letter to Morsi calling on him to “purge the media and police as quickly as possible.” El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood are on the same wavelength it seems. Given these attitudes, reporters in Michigan might want to watch themselves if El Sayed is elected to represent that state in the US Senate.

An NBC reporter caught El-Sayed on the street and confronted him on his family’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood, and he, clearly flustered, tried to deflect. We need much more of this kind of questioning of El-Sayed. You can be damned sure that if any Republican had even a hint of the kind of associations El-Sayed has with radical terrorists, they would face endless enquiries and aggressive questions.

As things stand, according to the RealClea Politics average of polls, El-Sayed is up by more than 2.5 points. Buckle up America, this is going to get nasty.

On that depressing note, I shall sign off and wish y’all a happy weekend.