‘No Other Way to Read It’: Scott Jennings Admits Kimberly Guilfoyle Texts Are ‘Extremely Unseemly’

CNN’s Scott Jennings admitted Thursday that Kimberly Guilfoyle’s texts to a Trump donor asking for $100,000 to pay her credit card bill were “extremely unseemly,” and that she’d better be thinking of ways to defend her job.

The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that reporters reviewed Signal messages purportedly from Guilfoyle to Eric Deters, a Trump donor who asked her to elicit favors from the Trump administration.

Guilfoyle, who was engaged to Donald Trump Jr. and is now ambassador to Greece, texted Deters things like, “I really wish you would stop papering all these things. What a nightmare. You’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship. Stop writing. Stop papering all these things. It’s really dangerous. And just call me on signal.”

“Here’s what I think,” Jennings said on The Arena With Kasie Hunt. “It’s extremely unseemly. These text messages. There’s no other way to read it. Again, may not be illegal, has to be investigated.”

When asked about the situation from Greece while standing only a few feet away from Guilfoyle Thursday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “If someone gives information to a newspaper or a media outlet, the media outlet reports it, you immediately turn to me and say, ‘I need you respond to our reporting.’ That’s not the way this process works.”

“I assume that at the State Department, that is the next thing that will happen when he talks about a process,” Jennings said. “I assume what he meant was, there will be a process by which we look into this, gather our own information, and then we will report to you when we have some findings that aren’t just us getting a hit on a tarmac with a newspaper report. I think that’s actually perfectly fair. ”

Jennings continued, “But if I were in her shoes right now, I would be considering what I wanted to tell the president, the secretary of State, about my future. Because when you’re in an appointed position like this, and you hold a position of trust with the government, and then you become a distraction or an embarrassment to your principles, that’s a problem. And if this story continues to spiral or more bad information were to come out, only she would know that. And she needs to be transparent with her principles about that.”

A lawyer for Guilfoyle said she disputes the authenticity of the messages.

Jason Cohen contributed to this report.

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