A longtime friend of President Donald Trump who spent months warring with a top State Department official has learned his fate.
Paolo Zampolli, the former modeling agent who introduced Trump to First Lady Melania Trump, has been dismissed from his State Department post, ABC State Department reporter Shannon Kate Kingston reported via a post on X on Thursday, citing a U.S. official.
“Paolo was notified today that his status as an envoy has been terminated and he is no longer a government employee,” the official said, per Kingston.
The ouster comes hours after Politico detailed Zampolli’s monthslong clash with Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, which played out in email chains that at times copied as many as 16 Trump administration officials.
Landau, who oversaw Zampolli directly until July, repeatedly ordered him to confine his work to cultural diplomacy. In a November 2025 email, Landau cautioned that straying beyond his legal authority could bring “disciplinary action, dismissal, and legal liability.”
Zampolli insisted he answered to the president rather than Landau, crediting his efforts with wins for Trump such as a Boeing order from Uzbekistan. He claimed Landau “has been attacking me from Day 1.”
In June, Zampolli escalated by asking the State Department’s inspector general to investigate Landau and accusing him of leaking a story to The New York Times about Zampolli’s custody fight with the mother of his son. Landau rejected the accusations as “bizarre” and “defamatory.”
A Trump administration official described the back-and-forth to Politico as “cartoonish and embarrassing.”
On X, analysts weighed in on the firing. Occupy Democrats executive editor Grant Stern celebrated that “Trump FINALLY fired ‘model recruiter’ Paolo Zampolli his longtime friend, and a major link between him and Jeffrey Epstein.”
“Escalating chaos throughout a failing regime,” noted Democratic political analyst Simon Rosenberg.
Balkans analyst Jasmin Mujanović called the firing “a sensible decision by the White House” in a post on X, arguing that Zampolli was “another conduit for the Russian and Chinese backed secessionist regime in Banja Luka,” referring to the de facto capital of the Republika Srpska in Bosnia.
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