1/ In August 2020, the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, made an extraordinary request to President Trump’s ambassador, Ronald Johnson. A previously undisclosed report tells what happened next, according to a new ProPublica investigation. 🧵 ⬇️
2/ Salvadoran officials taped a conversation between an embassy contractor and a reporter. The contractor, who worked closely with U.S. and Salvadoran law enforcement, provided information about top Bukele aides negotiating a secret pact with MS-13 gang leaders, sources said. 3/ President @nayibbukele wanted the contractor removed, says the report by the State Dept.’s inspector general. News of a deal with gang leaders posed a potential threat to the president’s crimefighting reputation and could have exposed him to possible criminal charges. 4/ Ambassador Johnson ordered an investigation that resulted in the contractor’s dismissal. “It is highly, highly abnormal for an ambassador to dismiss an embassy staffer at the request of a foreign president,” one former Capitol Hill staffer told us. 5/ The contractor’s dismissal was part of a pattern in which Johnson was accused of protecting Bukele from U.S. law enforcement, we found. Another example: U.S. officials said Johnson did little to pursue the extradition of an MS-13 leader who may have known about the gang deal. 6/ Johnson had told staff at the embassy in El Salvador that Trump’s most important priority was migration, not corruption in Bukele’s government. “The thinking was let El Salvador be El Salvador,” one official told us. 7/ Johnson and Bukele had an unusually close relationship. Johnson even posted a photo on @LinkedIn showing his family and Bukele’s family spending time at the Johnson’s Miami home around Christmas 2021.
8/ Why is this important? Johnson helped promote Bukele in MAGA Republican circles, clearing the way for Trump’s deal earlier this year to house deportees in an infamous Salvadoran megaprison.
9/ Read the full story here. propublica.org
www.propublica.org
10/ Johnson joined Republican luminaries such as @TuckerCarlson, @DonaldJTrumpJr and @kimguilfoyle at Bukele’s inauguration in June 2024.
11/ Johnson is now Trump’s ambassador to Mexico, one of the most important diplomatic posts in Latin America. And Bukele has a new friend in Trump, whose administration paid a reported $6 million to use the CECOT prison.
12/ There’s more. After Biden was elected, Jean Manes took over as the top diplomat at the embassy. State Dept. officials told her to review what was happening at the post. They felt reports from the embassy showed favoritism to Bukele. 13/ Manes concluded that the CIA station chief — a Johnson friend — was “too close” to Bukele, the report said. Former U.S. officials suspected that he was undermining a new Biden administration policy to curb the Salvadoran president’s growing authoritarianism. 14/ In a striking move, @jeanmanes had the CIA station chief removed from post. She wrote a memo that Johnson “loyalists” were preventing her from carrying out her duties. She required staff to get approval before talking to senior Bukele officials. 15/ “Manes would go see Bukele to convey U.S. concerns about some of his policies. Then the station chief would go see him and say the opposite,” a former National Security Council director told us. Neither Manes nor the station chief responded to our inquiries. 16/ Responding to our request for comment, the State Dept. said it was “false” that Johnson impeded law enforcement efforts to protect Bukele or his allies. A spokesperson said the allegations made by Manes in the inspector general report were untrue. 17/ The State Dept. gave us a written statement from Johnson about Bukele. “Our cordial relationship was based on honest and frank dialogue to advance issues of mutual benefit for both of our nations,” Johnson said. documentcloud.org
www.documentcloud.org
18/ Johnson determined the contractor had unauthorized contact with the press and had misled internal investigators about it, the IG report says. The ambassador defended the contractor’s dismissal during his Senate confirmation hearing this year. foreign.senate.gov
www.foreign.senate.gov
19/ The contractor’s removal had consequences: It resulted in a decline in U.S. cooperation with Salvadoran anti-corruption prosecutors. “Nobody really replaced him,” a former Salvadoran law enforcement official told us.“He was the most active of the Americans working with us.”