The Exit
On Monday, Sept. 28, the State Department formally told the Council of Europe the United States was leaving GRECO, the Group of States against Corruption. The Council announced it the next day. A State Department spokesperson said membership, which carries an annual fee, "does not provide tangible benefits to US national security," and added: "The era of writing blank checks to international bureaucracies is over." The department said it would lean instead on "higher-impact tools" such as visa restrictions, sanctions and targeted foreign assistance. The Guardian reports the withdrawal began as an internal State proposal dated Sept. 1.
The facts that frame it are small and hard. GRECO's whole 2025 budget was about 3 million euros, spread across 48 members. The United States had been a member since 2000. Only two countries have left it before: Russia in 2023 and Belarus in 2024. In January the United States also left the Council of Europe's Venice Commission, which advises on constitutional law.
The counter-record deserves full weight. GRECO cannot fine anyone or bring a case. It works by peer review, and its own track record is mixed. The State Department's stated alternative, sanctions and visa bans aimed at foreign corruption, is a real tool and has been used. A government is entitled to decide a multilateral fee is not worth paying. The Council of Europe said the door stays open.
Here is what the Old Goat thinks the record adds. GRECO's fifth-round report on the United States, published in December 2023, credited Washington with strong laws and institutions for preventing corruption in the executive branch. It also found that the President and Vice President are exempt from most of the federal conflict-of-interest rules that bind everyone else in the executive branch, and it made ten recommendations, including an overall anti-corruption strategy. The Guardian found no published U.S. compliance report on that round. So the one international body that wrote down, in a public document, the gap that covers the officeholder is the body the officeholder's government has now left. The replacement tools the State Department named all point outward, at other countries. None of them points at this one. That observation is the Old Goat's INFERENCE. It does not say the exit was designed for that purpose, and nothing in the record shows it was.
The Ambassador
The same fortnight carried a case study in what that exemption means in practice. In September the Wall Street Journal reported that Kimberly Guilfoyle, the U.S. ambassador to Greece, repeatedly promoted Aktor, a Greek construction firm that has recently moved into natural gas, while an Aktor lobbyist, Christos Marafatsos, sat in on her meetings with foreign officials. Federal lobbying records show Aktor paid him $160,000 through June, according to the coverage of the Journal's report. In Bulgaria she reportedly arrived on a private jet provided by Aktor's chief executive. A U.S. Embassy official said she was in "full compliance with State Department guidance."
Then, this week, Eric Deters, a Kentucky lawyer and former congressional candidate, told the Journal and MS NOW that Guilfoyle asked him to wire $100,000 to pay off her American Express card before her Senate confirmation hearing, in exchange for access. He shared messages in which she allegedly promised to "be your Trump ride or die, forever and ever," and, according to the Daily Beast's account of the Journal's report, wrote: "It won't show up anywhere if you wire money to American Express." Deters called it "a quid pro quo" and Guilfoyle "a grifter." He says he never paid. Her lawyer, Jesse Binnall, disputes the authenticity of the messages and says she was "owed a balance" for travel and speaking before her nomination. Deters says he owed her nothing.
The Old Goat pulled Deters' record from the Federal Election Commission, and it matters because it changes what the ask looks like. Under his name and Independence, Kentucky address (employer: Deters Law), the database shows a $125,000 contribution on Feb. 11, 2022 to Make America Great Again, Again! Inc., the Trump-aligned committee, and two $3,500 checks to Morris for Senate dated Nov. 9, 2025 and Jan. 6, 2026. So a $100,000 request is not out of scale for a man with a six-figure Trump-committee gift on his record. That is what the filings support, and no more: a name search across the 2022 through 2026 cycles' itemized records cannot see inaugural-committee giving, state-level giving or anything filed under another name.Donors → Marafatsos' record shows no giving of note under that name. None of this bears on whether the messages are real. It bears on the shape of the claim: a donor with a documented history of large Trump-side giving says he was asked, by an official, to wire money to a credit card, and if the messages are authentic she was worried about leaving a paper trail.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, asked about it in Athens, said he would not address the allegations and reaffirmed his support. Vice President Vance said, "obviously I don't love that," but that he did not know the details. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen and Rep. Gregory Meeks have asked for a review. The standing question is who reviews an ambassador when her department head declines to comment and the international ethics monitor has just lost a member. The Old Goat has added Guilfoyle to the site's watchlist and logged the matter as an open investigation.Investigations →
The Election Referee
The third exit is the one with a date attached. The OSCE's election office says it has received no invitation to observe the Nov. 3 midterms, the first U.S. federal election since it began observing in 2002 for which it has not been invited. It has watched twelve federal elections here, six of them midterms. Until now the only members of the 57-state organization to refuse observers were Russia and Belarus, according to a former U.S. ambassador to the OSCE quoted by MS NOW. Justice Department monitors are planned instead. Observers cannot stop anything, and each state decides whether they may enter a polling place. The loss is the independent record.
Set that beside what the president said in his Time interview, published around Oct. 1. Asked whether he would rule out declaring a state of emergency before the midterms, he said, "I don't rule anything out or in. We'll see." Asked about the Insurrection Act, he said he had never used it but "could use it," and that "a lot of people think I should use it sometimes." Democracy Docket reports that the election denier Tina Peters met him at the White House and that she and Cleta Mitchell are pressing the idea that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick can seize voting machines, which election lawyers say no law allows. The Guardian notes that FBI Director Kash Patel has not ruled out federal officers at polling places. The Old Goat has not independently confirmed the Peters meeting.
Each item has an innocent reading. An administration can think OSCE is hostile, and presidents say "I don't rule anything out" about everything. Taken one at a time, nothing here is an attack on an election. Taken together, the Old Goat's INFERENCE is narrower and, he thinks, hard to answer: in about a month, a corruption monitor, an election observer and the ethics process around one ambassador have each been removed from, or declined by, the people they would watch. Referees can be wrong. A game with none is a different game. For the lens on how the noise around this is being made, see The Grievance Swap.
The Message That Fits
A widely shared essay supplied to the Old Goat argues that the single word Democrats should run on is "corruption," and that it works because it is true and portable. Its examples are real: Péter Magyar's Tisza party beat Viktor Orbán in Hungary on April 12, 2026 with a record turnout of about 78 percent, after a campaign built on a "state capture" charge. Whatever one thinks of the rest of its list, the Old Goat's point is that the exits above are the argument made flesh. A government that leaves the anti-corruption monitor, declines the election observers and shrugs at the ambassador has handed its critics their message for free.
You do not have to prove a crime to make the case. You only have to count the referees who are gone.
The Old Goat will update this dispatch if Guilfoyle's messages are authenticated or discredited, if the State Department releases a review, or if OSCE is invited after all.