Feuding Trump Officials’ Bitter, Year-Long Tit-for-Tat Email War Leaks to Politico

(Photo by Andrew Thomas/NurPhoto via AP)

Two senior Trump administration appointees have spent months waging a wild internal email war involving accusations of insubordination, potentially unlawful activity, media leaks, and “unhinged” threats while repeatedly copying in a sprawling cast of government officials.

The bitter clash between Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau and Paolo Zampolli, a longtime personal friend of President Donald Trump serving as special representative for global partnerships, is detailed in nearly a year of messages obtained by Politico on Thursday.

What began as a fight over Zampolli’s authority inside the State Department appears to have steadily metastasized into a full-blown feud.

“I am hereby ordering you–once again–to immediately stop all work on ANY issues not directly tied to cultural diplomacy,” Landau wrote in November 2025, telling Zampolli he had “no authority” to conduct wider foreign policy.

A day later, with 15 other administration officials copied, Landau accused him of pursuing “unauthorized and possibly unlawful ventures in commercial and economic matters” and said Zampolli was “committed to a path of insubordination.”

Zampolli, who once represented Melania Trump as a modeling agent and introduced her to her future husband, has publicly argued that conventional State Department hierarchies do not constrain him, arguing in a Financial Times interview that his “number-one boss is the president of America.”

After Zampolli met Serbian political and economic officials during a Balkans trip, Landau personally contacted Serbian Foreign Minister Marko Đurić to warn that the envoy had “absolutely no authority to speak for our Administration beyond the realm of cultural affairs.”

“I apologize if his visit caused any confusion,” Landau added.

By June, the dispute had turned openly personal when Zampolli asked the State Department inspector general to investigate Landau and, in an email copied to 16 officials, accused his superior of leaking information to The New York Times that caused “irrepable [sic] harm to the First Lady and to my family.”

“Unauthorized disclosures of the kind you made are expressly subject to disciplinary action,” Zampolli wrote. “These are dismissable (sic) offenses.”

Landau categorically denied the allegation, firing back: “Your threats and accusations are getting more and more bizarre, defamatory, and inappropriate for broad dissemination on email,” before ordering Zampolli to stop sending “unhinged emails until I receive further directions from the White House on how to proceed.”

Zampolli complained to Politico that Landau “has been attacking me from Day 1” and that “everything I did, he tried to destroy it,” while maintaining that only Trump could ultimately remove him.

A State Department spokesperson said Landau was focused on ensuring officials work together to advance Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s foreign policy agenda, “including oversight of special envoys.”

One administration official offered a less diplomatic assessment, describing the spectacle to Politico as “cartoonish and embarrassing.”

The episode is not the only high-level feud to erupt inside Trump’s orbit this week. Mediaite reported Wednesday on what one insider called the “ultimate MAGA blood feud” between Alina Habba and Richard Grenell over allegations surrounding millions of dollars intended for the Kennedy Center, claims Grenell has denied.

In Zampolli’s case, attempts to settle the dispute appear to have done little to end it. In July, he sent White House personnel director Dan Scavino an Axios story critical of Landau and added another accusation of his own.

“This is only a small example of how the Deputy Secretary continues to undermine the President’s and the Secretary agenda,” he wrote.

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