President-elect Donald J. Trump named Richard Grenell, his former ambassador to Germany and former acting director of national intelligence, as his “envoy for special missions,” Mr. Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Saturday.
A loyalist known for unbridled social media attacks on Mr. Trump’s perceived critics and many others, Mr. Grenell led a shambolic effort to challenge the 2020 election results in Nevada after Mr. Trump’s loss, and he has lobbied assiduously for a diplomatic job in the new administration.
He got his start in government before Mr. Trump’s rise, as a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations under multiple presidents. But his online toxicity, foreign business contacts and tendency toward biting personal attacks on political opponents and the media turned off many centrist conservatives, helping propel him toward Mr. Trump, a man he denounced in 2016 as “dangerous.”
“Ric will continue to fight for Peace through Strength, and always put AMERICA FIRST,” Mr. Trump wrote in his announcement.
Mr. Grenell did not immediately reply to a texted question about his priorities for the role, which Mr. Trump outlined as: “Ric will work in some of the hottest spots around the World, including Venezuela and North Korea.”
The role is a far cry from secretary of state, the job Mr. Grenell coveted, but to which Mr. Trump plans to appoint Senator Marco Rubio, the Republican from Florida. Being named for a lower-profile White House envoy job could help Mr. Grenell avoid persistent questions about his paid work for foreign clients, including luxury hotel development projects he has pursued in the Balkans with Jared Kushner, the president-elect’s son-in-law.
During the first Trump administration, Mr. Grenell was ambassador to Germany. His abrasiveness and partisanship alarmed diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic, particularly after he told Breitbart London that he planned to “empower” German conservatives opposing “the failed policies of the left.”
In 2020, Mr. Trump named Mr. Grenell to temporarily replace the acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, whom Mr. Trump had fired.
During about three months in the post, Mr. Grenell worked with his friend Kash Patel — another loyalist who is now Mr. Trump’s pick to lead the F.B.I. — to purge top officials and oversee a wave of document declassifications aimed at discrediting the U.S. intelligence community’s assessment of Russia’s pro-Trump machinations in the 2016 presidential campaign.
Mr. Trump did not give the permanent director role to Mr. Grenell, who would have faced questions during the Senate confirmation process about his years of communications work on behalf of foreign clients, including Hungary, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya and Iran. Instead, Mr. Trump appointed John Ratcliffe, a lower-key former Republican congressman who is now Mr. Trump’s choice for C.I.A. director.
In late 2020, eager for a diplomatic coup in the final days before the presidential election, Mr. Trump enlisted Mr. Grenell to try to coax Serbia into recognizing the statehood of Kosovo, a majority-Albanian former province that declared independence in 2008.
Confident of a deal, Mr. Grenell proposed renaming an industrial reservoir bridging Kosovo and Serbia as “Trump Lake” to memorialize his achievement. But negotiations failed. Serbs and Albanians in the fractious area still call the lake by different names, neither of which is Trump.
On Election Day in 2020, Mr. Grenell was among the loyalists dispatched by Mr. Trump to sow doubt about the election results in battleground states. Mr. Grenell flew by private plane to Las Vegas, where he ensconced himself, his dog Lola and a crew of lawyers and activists in a suite at the Venetian Resort, which served as the group’s war room. In a dayslong spectacle, the Trump team filed a lawsuit and leveled false accusations of fraud, including one wrongly implicating hundreds of members of the military.
It was all a sham. Mr. Grenell told the team in the war room, two G.O.P. operatives recalled, that the Nevada vote was not, in fact, stolen. The goal was simply to “throw spaghetti at the wall” — the operatives described Mr. Grenell making a theatrical tossing gesture as he spoke — to distract members of the media from calling Nevada while the election battle in neighboring Arizona played out.
In more recent years, Mr. Grenell has worked his Balkan contacts on behalf of himself and Mr. Kushner, who is looking to develop multiple hotel and tourism projects in the region.
“I’m working on projects, private equity projects, that I get to make money on,” Mr. Grenell said in a television interview in Albania last year. “No one should ever apologize for wanting to make money.”
In 2022, Mr. Grenell helped Melania Trump make money, too, securing $500,000 for two speeches by her on two consecutive days, including one for Fix California, an election integrity and voter engagement group Mr. Grenell founded in 2021.
So far in 2024, Mr. Grenell has campaigned for Mr. Trump’s re-election and for the State Department’s top job.
In describing to a podcast interviewer how he would handle the role, he said: “If you want to avoid war, you better have a son of a bitch as the secretary of state.”
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