"For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths." Northwoods is a ministry dedicated to refreshing Christians and challenging them to search for the truth in Christianity, politics, sociology, and science
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Father God, thank you for the love of the truth you have given me. Please bless me with the wisdom, knowledge and discernment needed to always present the truth in an attitude of grace and love. Use this blog and Northwoods Ministries for your glory. Help us all to read and to study Your Word without preconceived notions, but rather, let scripture interpret scripture in the presence of the Holy Spirit. All praise to our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.
Please note: All my writings and comments appear in bold italics in this colour
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
Corruption is Everywhere > Kimberly Guilfoyle resigns as Ambassador to Greece after corruption scandal; Corruption in America's banks is not being dealt with
WASHINGTON — Embattled US Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle announced her resignation Tuesday after President Trump asked her to step down in the wake of revelations about her pressing donors to pay off her personal bills.
The former fiancée of Donald Trump Jr. and ex-wife of Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom faced a firestorm after a bombshell Wall Street Journal report last week revealed she asked former GOP congressional candidate Eric Deters for $100,000 to pay off her American Express card ahead of her confirmation hearing.
“My gratitude and respect for President Trump and Secretary [of State Marco] Rubio remain unwavering. I am proud of what we accomplished together, and I will always be a loyal supporter of President Trump and his mission to Make America Great Again,” Guilfoyle posted on X.
Kimberly Guilfoyle, President Donald Trump’s nominee to be the U.S. ambassador to Greece, speaks alongside Trump during a Greek Independence Day celebration,
AFP via Getty Images
“While my time as Ambassador may be coming to an end, my commitment to President Trump, the America First movement, and the country I love will never end.”
“She wasn’t a member of my family. She, I guess, dated my son for a while,” President Trump told reporters later Tuesday. “She was doing a good job, but we didn’t like what we were reading.”
Trump Jr. got engaged to Guilfoyle in 2020, but the pair had officially split by late 2024, and the Trump scion tied the knot with Bettina Anderson at a May ceremony in the Bahamas.
Guilfoyle, 57, was already under fire from congressional Democrats over her links to Christos Marafatsos, a Maryland-born lobbyist for the Greek construction firm Aktor Group.
The Journal reported last month that Guilfoyle routinely promoted Aktor as a potential supplier of US-produced natural gas to southeastern Europe — with Marafatsos often sitting in on meetings to the extent that he was mistaken for the ambassador’s chief of staff.
The outlet also reported that Guilfoyle bragged about her friendship with shipping tycoon Nikolas Tsakos, who has been reported as supporting her jet-setting lifestyle, during a trip to the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland this past January.
The growing scandal around Guilfoyle reportedly miffed Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was in Greece last week to deliver a much-anticipated speech in Athens and who attended several events alongside the ambassador.
“I intend to vigorously defend my name, my reputation, and my integrity,” she added. “I have dedicated my professional life to fighting for justice, standing up for what is right, and defending the values that make America exceptional. I will not allow false accusations to define my decades of public service.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, center, flanked by US Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle, center left, arrives to board a plane at Eleftherios Venizelos International Airport near Athens, on his way to Portugal, on Oct. 8, 2026.
POOL/AFP via Getty Images
Deters came forward to the Journal with text messages revealing Guilfoyle’s pleas for money after he said she failed to come through on promises to get his business in front of administration officials.
“It won’t show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express that’s all that will show,” she wrote to him on July, 3, 2025. “I have been officially announced honey please I need you to get this done for me today.”
Deters declined to make the payment, despite her promises to be his “ride or die” in the administration.
“[A]t that moment in time, I didn’t have $100,000 to spare to give to Kimberly Guilfoyle, or I actually would have been a dumbass enough to do it,” he told CBS News last week.
“I think she’s gone. I think he has to fire her,” Deters told CNN of Guilfoyle in a separate interview Monday. “It’s grifting on the highest level, and it’s just an awful look for the administration.”
. From a back office in New Castle, Delaware, I watched billions of dollars move to drug cartels, sanctioned regimes, and terrorist organizations. The enemies of the United States. I documented it, I escalated it, and when the bank would not act, I took it to the
.
The result was a $1.92 billion settlement. At the time, it was one of the largest in American history. It was also about five weeks of the bank’s profit. Not one banker was charged. Not one went to prison.
I paid a different price. I lost my career, my savings, and my place in the industry I had trained for. I was blacklisted. Every door in American finance closed at once. I slept on a camping cot in a 300 square foot apartment because I could not afford a bed, and I waited tables at
to eat. I tell you this not for sympathy, but so you understand that I know exactly what it costs to do the right thing in American finance, and exactly how little the system does in return.
I made that sacrifice because I believed it would change something.
Yesterday, your department fined
$1.2 billion for failing to report more than $5 billion in suspicious transactions, some of it tied by your own findings to Chinese laundering networks, narcotics, and the southwest border, alongside 475 apparent sanctions violations touching Russia, Iran, and global terrorism. The bank admitted it willfully violated the Bank Secrecy Act.
Fourteen years after HSBC. A bank with “America” in its name. And once again, not one individual charged.
Secretary Bessent, I want to say plainly what I believe you already know. The fines are not working.
A fine is paid by shareholders, absorbed by the balance sheet, and forgotten by the next earnings call. Bank of America reported earnings this morning. Nobody who set the alert thresholds, nobody who decided the 2024 cease and desist could wait, nobody who chose the backlog over the law will lose a single thing they value. Their lives are untouched. That is the entire reason the behavior repeats.
This is money laundering. This is blood money. Money that reaches a cartel buys fentanyl that kills Americans. Money that reaches a terrorist organization buys the next attack. This country has fought a war on drugs and a war on terror for decades, at enormous cost in lives and treasure, and all the while we have allowed the financing to flow through institutions we charter and regulate. Cut off the money and we win. We have never seriously tried.
There is also a question of equal justice that I cannot let go.
Before I walked into the FBI building to report HSBC, I stopped in front of the Great Seal on the wall and read the words engraved beneath it: “Justice is the defense of our liberty.” I believed that. I still want to. But every day in this country, people go to prison for crimes that are nothing next to moving money for the people who want Americans dead. A suit, a title, and a corporate badge should not be a shield from the consequences that apply to everyone else. If a street dealer goes to prison for what he sells, the banker who moved the cartel’s money should be standing next to him.
I also want to raise something that is rarely said in these conversations. Why has no one inside Bank of America come forward the way I did? The answer is that everyone in American banking knows what happened to me, and to the whistleblowers who came after. The last person who spoke up is the only policy anyone believes. That is a culture problem, and it starts with leadership, in the banks and in the agencies that regulate them.
This is not a political issue. It has spanned administrations of both parties. It is a national security issue, and I am asking you to treat it as one.
Three things would change the math overnight.
Refer individuals for criminal prosecution. Not the analyst in the queue. The executives who set the thresholds and chose the risk. One banker in handcuffs would do more than every fine in Treasury’s history combined.
End “too big to jail.” An institution cannot be too big to fail and too big to jail at the same time. If it is the first, it must be held to a higher standard, not a lower one.
And if Bank of America will not act as America’s bank, review its charter. A national charter is a privilege granted on behalf of the American people. It should be conditioned on not moving money for the people trying to kill them.
Secretary Bessent, you said yesterday that these actions send a clear message that even the biggest institutions are not above the law. With respect, the institution was never the problem. The people inside it are above the law, and they know it. Until that changes, I will keep writing letters like this one, and the next bank will keep paying the next fine.
I gave up everything I had to stop this. I am asking you to use the power you have to finish it.
Respectfully,
Everett A. Stern
HSBC Whistleblower
Founder and Intelligence Director, Tactical Rabbit
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