The State Department fired Paolo Zampolli on Thursday afternoon, hours after Politico printed a year of emails in which his boss ordered him to stop doing business in the Balkans. Zampolli, the modeling agent who brought Melania Knauss to New York and says he introduced her to Donald Trump, had been special envoy for global partnerships for a year and a half. At 5 p.m. a U.S. official told Politico his status "as an envoy has been terminated and he is no longer a government employee." He is the second Trump intimate out of a diplomatic post this week. Kimberly Guilfoyle resigned as ambassador to Greece on Monday at the White House's request.
Zampolli said he had "absolute zero surprise." His statement called serving Trump "the greatest honor of my life" and announced the next chapter, "back to business, building relationships and closing deals." He said Trump once asked him why he wanted to work in government "when you can close all these deals." Trump said it himself: the deals were the point.
Christopher Landau, Marco Rubio's deputy and Zampolli's supervisor until July, wrote to him on Nov. 14, 2025: "I am hereby ordering you–once again–to immediately stop all work on ANY issues not directly tied to cultural diplomacy." The next day, with 15 colleagues copied, Landau wrote that Zampolli intended to keep "undertaking unauthorized and possibly unlawful ventures in commercial and economic matters." In February Landau emailed Serbia's foreign minister that Zampolli "has absolutely no authority to speak for our Administration beyond the realm of cultural affairs." Zampolli answered that his boss was the president. In June he accused Landau, on a chain with a dozen officials, of leaking the New York Times story that he had asked ICE to deport Amanda Ungaro, the mother of his son. Landau called the accusation "bizarre, defamatory" and told him to stop sending "unhinged emails."
Zampolli ran the business through Putin's backyard. In February he met the government of Republika Srpska, the Serb half of Bosnia that sides with Moscow, and discussed financing solar farms and dams; Srpska's press release called him "an extremely important and influential diplomat." He posted himself with Romania's energy minister and working nuclear energy in Hungary. In September he went to Albania after Landau blocked a trip there, as the guest of the Bektashi Order, and spoke for its plan to carve a sovereign Sufi micro-state out of Tirana, a Vatican of its own. The U.S. Embassy arranged none of it.
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