You may remember Kimberly Guilfoyle as the high-energy speaker who terrorized the world during the Republican National Convention a couple of years ago. Guilfoyle was a Fox News media personality, reportedly pushed out due to some pretty inappropriate behavior on her part. She landed in a relationship with Donald Trump Jr., and that’s how she became a part of the MAGA inner circle.
As the picture above this story shows, Guilfoyle has had to talk with the Jan. 6 committee about her participation in the attempted coup d’etat Trump and his hangers-on conspired in. Her in-person appearance preceded a virtual interview with the committee that abruptly ended when Guilfoyle got wicked paranoid that she was getting railroaded for her part in the Trump operation. She got wicked paranoid the way a guilty person gets paranoid, and it may have been due to the fact that there is evidence of her involvement in the coup d’etat showing a financial gain. There are literal receipts.
On Tuesday, CNN’s Jake Tapper spoke with Democratic Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, a member of the Jan. 6, committee, and asked about whether or not the committee’s findings would yield criminal charges. Guess whose name came up as an example?
Rep. Lofgren, like many of the members of the committee was non-committal about the committee’s ability to push for criminal charges, but did offer up criminal actions, saying “for example, we know that Guilfoyle was paid for the introduction she gave at the speech. I mean, on January 6, she received compensation for that.” Pressed on whether or not it was a crime, Lofgren explained that while she could not “say” it was a “crime,” she could call it a “grift.”
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Why would Rep. Lofgren say getting a little compensation for introducing a grifter and insurrectionist to make his own speech is “a grift?” According to Lofgren, Guilfoyle received about “$60,000 for two and a half minutes.” That’s a lot of money to pay someone best known for shouting poorly written half-sentences at crowds. But that money came from somewhere, and it wasn’t from producing anything material or of value. “People were conned by the former president,” Lofgren said on CNN. “They were conned into believing that the election had been stolen and that they should go to the Capitol once the president asked them to. I think the average donation from those … false email requests was something like $17. These weren’t rich people. They were conned by the president. The Big Lie was also a big ripoff.”
One of the questions that the Department of Justice must answer in the coming days, weeks, and months is whether or not the promotion of a fraud, by people like Guilfoyle—who knew that the Big Lie about a stolen election was a lie—in service of profit is enough of a scam to prosecute. Guilfoyle definitely raised millions of dollars in service of the fake election fraud investigation that Trump and his conspirators used to pocket a lot of the money.
Guilfoyle’s exuberance in the Stop the Steal pageantry seems to only have been tamped down by Donald Trump’s own ego, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t participate enough to do a little time if the authorities see appropriate.
Rep. Lofgren’s comments come around the 4:15 mark.
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