This is the Tom Hartman program.

Over at the Guardian, Robert Tate

is writing about how Richard Grinnell, who was Donald Trump's ambassador to Germany,

who managed to offend Germany quite a bit because he was pumping their right wingers.

He's quite apparently a very right wing guy.

He's a senior executive at Newsmax, for example.

Craig Robert Tate, he's building an authoritarian axis that he's basically Donald

Trump's foreign policy guy along with Jared Kushner.

And I'll just share these observations from you.

Again, this is all based on what Robert Tate has to say in the guardian today.

In recent months, he's pitched up in Guatemala where he tried to stymie US State Department please for a peaceful

transition of power by backing right-wing efforts to block the inauguration of the liberal

president-elect Bernardo Aravelo.

That was not successful, by the way.

The president did get installed.

He's also repeatedly visited the Balkans, working on property deals in Serbia and Albania

with Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

He attempted to broker a meeting between Trump and Turkey's president, Erdogan, at last year's UN General Assembly, when the Turkish leader was blocking

Sweden's joining NATO, this sounds to me like, you know, he's running his own foreign policy, like these

are violations of the Logan Act, which says that, you know, private citizens can't do foreign

policy.

Fulton Armstrong, a senior fellow at the American University Center for Latin American Studies, says, quote,

...