Kimberly Guilfoyle was a long way from Mar-a-Lago.
A U.S. Embassy official said the ambassador traveled to Bulgaria “to advance American interests: increasing sales of U.S. LNG to European partners and decreasing European dependence on Russian gas.”
The Bulgarian government, she told people, should deal with a Greek construction firm called Aktor Group, a newcomer to the gas business that had teamed up with a Greek state-backed energy company to bring in liquefied natural gas from the U.S. “There is no doubt that this is kind of an official position of the U.S. government,” said a person familiar with the talks.
A one-time prosecutor who morphed into a MAGA icon, Guilfoyle is parlaying her ambassadorship to Greece into one of the Trump administration’s most important diplomatic roles. The former Fox News host has crisscrossed the Balkans to help Europe wean itself from Russian energy, via a “vertical gas corridor” meant to receive U.S. LNG in Greece and pipe it toward Ukraine.
U.S. Embassy staffers spent years pushing for the vertical gas corridor.
Sitting beside the 57-year-old ambassador in an audience with the Bulgarian president was a 39-year-old named Christos Marafatsos. He has attended so many of her meetings that some foreign officials mistook him for her chief of staff. In fact, he is a top lobbyist for Aktor, whose CEO had flown Guilfoyle to the country on a private jet.
Guilfoyle first met Alexandros Exarchou, Aktor’s CEO, on Nov. 1, the day she arrived in Athens, lawyers for the company said.
Lawyers for Aktor said the company began retaining Marafatsos after Exarchou attended a September 2025 lunch for top Greek energy players with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum where the vertical gas corridor was discussed. After the lunch, Exarchou contacted DEPA, the Greek state-backed company, and proposed a joint venture that would “lead the charge in supplying non-Russian LNG across Southeast Europe,” the lawyers said.
In November, Aktor announced a joint venture, Atlantic-SEE LNG, that would be split 60-40 between it and DEPA, a Greek state-backed energy company. In the months since, Aktor and its joint venture have signed memorandums of understanding and commercial agreements with gas companies in Bulgaria, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Romania. A $6 billion deal Guilfoyle helped Aktor secure in Albania would, if completed, have the country buy gas from the company through 2050.
In March, at a dinner in Athens attended by Greek and U.S. officials, Guilfoyle got into an argument with Greece’s energy minister, Stavros Papastavrou, in front of the other guests. Referring to the impending collapse of the Romanian government, Guilfoyle told the group, “We can do that to any country we want. We can do that here,” according to a person who attended the dinner and others who were told about it.
It is unclear whether all the deals will come to fruition. On Friday, Ukraine’s state-owned gas company told the Journal negotiations have halted over future purchases from Atlantic-SEE.