A text message allegedly sent by Trump envoy Ric Grenell offered a Turkish businessman access to Donald Trump and his administration. Less than a month later, $17.6 million from a Congolese government-affiliated account was transferred to a Houston defence contractor Grenell had previously advised. Of that sum, $5.6 million was allegedly intended for the Kennedy Center, chaired by Trump. Its financial records show just $270,000 from the businessman, leaving the alleged $5.6 million unaccounted for. Grenell denies sending the message or involvement in the transfer.

A bank account affiliated with the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo wired $17.6 million to Texas Armament & Technology (TX-AT), a private defence and security company in Houston, on 29 May 2025. A White House official told Axios that the wire record names the sender as Congo's "Ministère des Finances" in Kinshasa.

The New York Times describes the transaction as one organised by Turhan Mildon, a Turkish businessman who, his spokesman has acknowledged, advises Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi and holds a Congolese diplomatic passport. Ric Grenell consulted for TX-AT in 2024. In May 2025 he was both Trump's special presidential envoy for special missions, with Venezuela in his portfolio, and president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

On 3 May 2025, a text attributed to Grenell told Mildon that once money reached a company, the sender would arrange a donation to the Kennedy Center and Mildon would join its VIP events and "get close with the administration, even with POTUS". Axios has reviewed the message.

Mildon's lawyers allege that Grenell directed the wire and that about $5.6 million of it was meant for the Kennedy Center, which Grenell then ran and Trump chairs. Grenell denies sending the message and denies any part in the transfer. He wrote on X that he had never asked for a cent to be sent elsewhere under the pretence of a Kennedy Center gift and had never received any payment from Mildon, and the message remains unauthenticated in published reporting.

Kennedy Center finance records show a single Mildon pledge of $270,000, which he paid on 13 October 2026. Four days earlier his wife, Alina Habba Mildon, Trump's former personal lawyer, had told Trump in the Oval Office that Grenell failed to deliver the donation, and Trump handed the matter to White House counsel Will Scharf. By 20 October the purpose of the Congolese payment was still unexplained, and TX-AT and Congo's foreign ministry had left the Times' questions unanswered.

The transfer

Habba Mildon first told Trump the money had come from her husband's own bank account. The wire receipt Mildon's lawyer first sent the White House had the sender's name redacted, and officials later traced the payment to the Congolese government-affiliated account. Mildon has business in Kinshasa and access to finances there, a White House official told Axios. "We're trying to find out whose money this is," the official said.

By Mildon's account, about $12 million was for a Congo deal and $5.6 million for the Kennedy Center. A ministry-linked account can hold public revenue or money kept for a third party, and the ownership of these funds is unreported. If the money was Congolese state spending, his version places a $5.6 million gift to a US arts institution chaired by Trump inside a Congolese government transaction, one that Congo's public-finance and procurement rules require an authorised official to approve against a contract.

Doudou Fwamba Likonde had held Congo's finance portfolio for about 11 months when the wire left Kinshasa, having joined the government Prime Minister Judith Suminwa formed in June 2024. His predecessor, Nicolas Kazadi, had a close working relationship with Mildon. Forbes Turkey credited Kazadi with bringing Mildon to Congo and left the country on Mildon's private jet while facing embezzlement accusations, of which he was later acquitted; Mildon has said he lent the plane to any minister who asked. A Congolese financial oversight body accused Kazadi of failing to follow through on financing commitments for Mildon's flagship project in Kinshasa; Mildon denied any wrongdoing.

Milvest, Mildon's construction company, pre-finances Congolese government projects and is repaid by the state over time. "I pre-finance, I build and the government will pay me back little by little, with the rents," he told The Africa Report in 2024. The flagship project, the Kinshasa Financial Centre, was built by Milvest and is set to house offices of the Ministry of Finance and Budget, the ministry named on the wire.

The 3 May text mentions Congo "software", and Axios described the deal as involving TX-AT's software. In the Oval Office, Habba Mildon said most of the money was for a business transaction whose details remain unclear.

Congo's and Rwanda's foreign ministers announced a US-brokered peace deal with Trump in June 2025, a month after the wire, and Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame signed the Washington Accords on 4 December 2025, when Trump said the US was also signing critical-minerals agreements giving US companies access to both countries' resources. US lobbyists filed several Foreign Agents Registration Act registrations for the Congolese government in 2025 and 2026, none of which names anyone in this dispute.

The messages

Mildon's lawyers sent the White House counsel's office the 3 May text, an email it refers to, at least one financial document and other correspondence, some of it with financial details, according to people familiar with the inquiry. The text itself names the company and the Kennedy Center but gives no figures. "There is an e-mail that was sent to you, can you please take a look at it for me ?" it says.

A May 2025 message in the same file offers to make Mildon the "American face down in V", a reference to Venezuela. Axios, which has seen what it describes as the same text, quotes it as "We need to make you the 'American face' down in V." A June 2025 message, purportedly from Grenell, asks about a payment for a "software system" in a transaction the Times could not identify. If genuine, it puts Grenell in a payment discussion weeks after the wire, at a time he says he had no connection to TX-AT.

Grenell told the Times he never sent the Venezuela message or anything like it, and he denied the June text was genuine. Shown the wording of the 3 May text, he pointed to its British spelling of "Kennedy Centre" as proof he did not write it, according to a source briefed on his thinking.

Scharf plans to verify the 3 May text's digital footprint. The printout carries the contact photo of Grenell that appears on his phone's contact card, an image the recipient's phone attaches to a saved number. Ownership of the sending number, carrier logs and the metadata of the email the text mentions are what would identify the sender, and an extraction from Mildon's phone would show whether the messages sit in an unbroken thread.

The Oval Office

The Times sent Mildon questions about his Venezuelan contracts on 8 October 2026, the day his spokesman says his company first learned its cement contract had been terminated. Habba Mildon stormed into the Oval Office the next day. "Alina hit the roof" when her husband told her he had not donated the money directly to the Kennedy Center, sources told Axios.

Habba Mildon was "pretty animated", one administration official told Axios, and at one point said: "Ric stole the money!" She told Trump her husband had transferred $17.6 million at Grenell's direction in May 2025 and that it had taken him 17 months to discover the Kennedy Center never received its share. Her figure for that share moved from $17 million to about $6 million to $5.6 million as she spoke to her husband. According to Axios's sources, he never checked, because the centre treated him as a major donor.

"She went in there half-cocked without all the facts yelling about Grenell stealing. And the facts keep changing," the same official said. "That doesn't mean Ric is out of the woods. This looks really shady."

Trump called Scharf into the Oval Office to hear the accusations, then the two telephoned Grenell. "There's no way this is true. This is crazy," Grenell told Trump, according to a source briefed on the call, adding that he would have alerted everyone at once to a $17 million gift.

"These are only allegations. We don't know if they're true. This could be a misunderstanding," a senior administration official told Axios, as the White House review began. Another said Trump did not want to deal with the dispute: "Of course, he's concerned. But if there is missing money, this is a big, big problem." White House officials say Habba Mildon has not discussed her husband's business with Trump. "I have never, under any circumstances got involved with this White House or administration on behalf of my husband, nor would he ever ask me to," she said in a statement.

The missing millions

Late in 2025, almost a year before the Oval Office meeting, Kennedy Center staff searched for a Mildon contribution then thought to be $6 million and could not find it. Lisa Dale, who handled the centre's finances at the time, told Axios the only Mildon entry in her books was the $270,000 pledge. "There was nothing about $6 million," she said. "I would have heard about that." Mildon was in regular contact with Grenell that year about supporting the Kennedy Center, but the person who gave staff the $6 million figure has not been named.

Mildon sat in the vice-president's box, next to the president's, and was a regular at exclusive events, Kennedy Center insiders told the White House. He pledged $270,000 after a gala concert and paid only after the Times asked why he had not. "Here's where Alina might be telling the truth: Mildon did get access. So why did he get access? Was he doing business in Congo with Ric? Why so much access if the contribution was never paid?" one administration official said. "There's a lot of questions. And POTUS wants answers."

Months into his Kennedy Center tenure, Grenell proposed letting donors pay $50,000 to conduct the National Symphony Orchestra in the national anthem, an idea that was dropped after it dismayed staff and musicians. Attendance fell low enough that the centre had to "paper the house" with free tickets for federal workers, sources told CNN, and Grenell often worked from his home in California.

Trump named himself the centre's chairman, the board renamed it the Trump Kennedy Center in a December vote and Congress voted $257 million for its reconstruction. In March 2026 Trump replaced Grenell with Matt Floca, the centre's vice-president of facilities operations, ahead of a two-year renovation closure, and Grenell stayed on as an unpaid consultant to finish his fundraising work. The centre is reviewing relevant pledges and funds and will report its findings to its board, a spokesman said.

Turhan Mildon

Mildon grew up in a provincial town near the Dardanelles, where his family ran auto-repair shops and petrol stations under Miller Holding, the group his grandfather founded in 1967. His break came with his first marriage, in 2021, to a daughter of a construction magnate close to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. He told Forbes Turkey that in his grandfather's time know-how mattered, and that "now, know-who is important".

Erdoğan introduced him to Tshisekedi in 2021, during the Congolese president's visit to Turkey, Mildon told The Africa Report, and he flew to Kinshasa soon after. By 2024 he said Congo accounted for 85 per cent of his group's African business, with 7,000 Congolese and 4,000 Turkish employees, more than 2,500 pieces of heavy equipment and copper, cobalt and gold mines. He bought AS Vita Club, the country's biggest football club, in January 2024. He became an adviser to Tshisekedi in 2023 and obtained a Congolese diplomatic passport, and people who met him in Washington and Caracas say he introduced himself as a Congolese official, which his spokesman denies.

Milvest has won about $1 billion in Congolese construction contracts since 2021. The financial centre, a ministry and conference complex Tshisekedi inaugurated in December 2023, cost $290 million, pre-financed by Milvest. Mildon has given Forbes Turkey a smaller figure, $150 million including $30 million of his own money. Milvest has also built infrastructure for a military drone base, and Mildon says it signed a build-and-operate contract for a new airport at N'Djili, replacing a $1 billion deal the previous Congolese government had struck with a Chinese company. Several senior Congolese politicians attended his wedding.

Mildon arrived in Caracas in late 2023 at a Venezuelan friend's invitation and won the backing of the Turkish ambassador there. His key relationship was with Alex Saab, Nicolás Maduro's confidant, who had recently returned from a US jail and been named industry minister. Saab gave Mildon a contract to run the state cement plants in March 2025. A few months later the government awarded him a shrimp production and export business it had seized from its founder, José Enrique Rincón, after accusing him of financing the opposition; Rincón remains in jail.

Mildon's spokesman describes his dealings with Saab as professional and occasional, says Saab played no role in the shrimp award and says the cement contract followed bidding against four rivals he could not name. Numerous Venezuelan businessmen and people close to the government told the Times the two men were personally close and that ministers handed out state assets without competitive bidding.

Mildon presents himself as a billionaire; Forbes has not valued him as one. Miller Holding and its affiliates had combined turnover of about $2.6 billion in 2025, but the companies are private. The 4.5 million tonnes of cement a year he told Forbes Turkey he produced in Venezuela is about three times the country's entire output, according to data seen by the Times, and his shrimp plants, which he said employed 20,000 people, sold about 5 per cent of their former volume in the first eight months of 2026. His spokesman says he was misquoted. In Congo he has faced allegations over customs exemptions and unpaid receivables and over mining commitments to the state miner Sokimo, all of which he denies. He gives his age as 29, while US documents and British corporate records say 25 and The Africa Report put him at 27 in September 2024.

Grenell and Mildon met around late 2024 and had some business discussions, though Grenell describes the relationship as mainly social. At the Kennedy Center, where Mildon became a regular, Grenell introduced him to figures in Trump's movement. Mildon met Habba there in late 2025, his spokesman said, and they began dating in early 2026. Their wedding at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan on 26 September 2026, which the planners said came together in under 60 days, fell during the UN General Assembly and drew Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel and Scharf, with the rapper Nelly performing. Grenell, a friend of the couple until months earlier, stayed away.

The Houston contractor

From 3200 Kirby Drive in Houston, TX-AT sells firearms, ammunition, body armour, less-lethal equipment and dispatch technology to police and government buyers under a purchasing contract that runs to 5 March 2029, reselling brands including Aimpoint optics, Benelli firearms and Carbyne dispatch software. Its website claims export and import licences for controlled defence items, work in more than 40 countries, cyber services for military clients and surveillance and security systems for major airports.

In 2016 the company called itself a veteran-owned business in Conroe, Texas, and was the exclusive North American distributor of Mexico's Aguila Ammunition. A trade directory lists it as a State Department registrant for manufacturing, exporting and brokering controlled articles. Commercial data providers estimate its annual revenue at about $5.7 million with 22 employees, figures the company has not confirmed; on those estimates, the 29 May wire alone was about three times a year's sales.

TX-AT's public materials name neither owners nor managers, and it ignored repeated requests for comment from the Times. Grenell says he had no connection to TX-AT when the money arrived and never solicited payments for it. What he did for the company in 2024, how much it paid him and when the work ended are undisclosed.

TX-AT markets airport security systems and Milvest holds the contract for Kinshasa's new airport, but the contract behind the $17.6 million, for the airport or anything else, has not been published.

Venezuela

Grenell went into 2025 as Trump's envoy for special missions, a post he was given in 2024 after serving as ambassador to Germany, special envoy for Serbia and Kosovo and acting director of national intelligence. He met Maduro in Caracas in late January 2025 and secured the release of six detained Americans. He went on arguing for normalising relations with Maduro while Secretary of State Marco Rubio's pressure campaign threatened Mildon's Venezuelan contracts, and pursued a deal letting Chevron keep operating in Venezuela in exchange for detainee releases, an account he has called false.

Mildon was carrying messages between the two governments in the same period, one of a group of businessmen, including a Brazilian beef billionaire, a US asphalt tycoon and a Venezuelan oil magnate, who sought preferential treatment by ferrying messages between the two governments. He spent months trying to connect Saab with Republicans close to Trump and presented Saab to people he met in Washington as Venezuela's pre-eminent power broker and the key to a peaceful settlement. Aides to Trump and some US intelligence officials raised concerns about his work with Maduro's government, and two people told the Times the administration considered sanctioning him; his spokesman called that a "totally false and malicious rumor", and an administration official also disputed it. Mildon discussed his role in Venezuela with Grenell.

Saab awarded the cement contract in March 2025, and the "American face down in V" message is dated May, the month of the wire. In June Mildon became engaged to María Eugenia Ceballos, daughter of Adm. Remigio Ceballos, who for years ran operations for Venezuela's military and is under US sanctions for corruption and human rights abuses; the engagement later ended. By September a senior administration official was telling Semafor that Grenell was no longer involved in Venezuela policy and that his "personal comments have been out of step with the president and administration". In early October Trump ordered him to cut contact with Maduro's government.

Rubio settled on Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro's vice-president, as successor, and US forces seized Maduro on 3 January 2026; Saab was later arrested and extradited. Mildon's spokesman says he always supported Rodríguez. In February he tagged along to a meeting with her secured by Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, and in June he toured one of his cement plants in a ruling-party red shirt, promising new investment. His contractors were complaining of unpaid invoices, and the new government accused him of failing to raise output and lower prices.

Rodríguez ordered an audit of Mildon's plants and in June signed an order revoking his cement contract for missing investment targets. A source told Axios the revocation was partly the result of prodding by the US government, the only reported US move on Mildon's contracts and one that went against him; no official act by Grenell on his behalf has been reported. Rodríguez then paused the order after learning of his relationship with Habba, who had high-level access to the president keeping her in power, people familiar with her thinking told the Times. Mildon's spokesman says no audit took place and the company learned of the termination on 8 October 2026, and that the plants are still operating.

The White House review

Scharf's inquiry is an internal review by the president's counsel, set off by one Trump adviser's complaint about another, and he declined to comment to the Times. As of 20 October it had not gone to the Justice Department or the FBI, whose heads, Blanche and Patel, attended the Mildon wedding with Scharf. Whether Scharf has sought TX-AT's bank records or contacted Congolese officials is not public. "Nobody wants to get in the middle of Alina Habba and Ric Grenell going to war," one official told Axios, describing an inquiry into two top-tier presidential advisers.

On 14 October a White House official told Axios the counsel's office had asked for documents and received none. Mildon's lawyer sent Scharf text messages and a wire receipt that night, according to the Times; Axios puts the delivery at 16 October and says Scharf had grown sceptical early because the records were slow to arrive. Kennedy Center insiders have since contacted the White House about Mildon's presence at exclusive events.

People who know Trump's thinking say he is particularly disapproving of people who misuse positions he has given them, and Axios cited his dismissal of Kimberly Guilfoyle as ambassador to Greece on 13 October, the day before it broke the story.

The law

Under the federal bribery statute, 18 USC 201, a public official may not corruptly seek anything of value, for himself or anyone else, in return for being influenced in an official act; whether an envoy for special missions counts depends on the terms of Grenell's appointment. In McDonnell v. United States, the unanimous 2016 ruling that overturned the conviction of former Virginia governor Bob McDonnell over gifts and loans from a businessman, the Supreme Court held that arranging a meeting, hosting an event or calling another official is not by itself an official act. That leaves an offer of gala seats and time near the president outside the statute's core. An offer about Venezuela from the official handling Venezuela diplomacy touches a specific question of government policy.

Honest-services fraud, limited to bribes and kickbacks since the Supreme Court's 2010 ruling in the case of the former Enron chief Jeffrey Skilling, turns on the same exchange. In Snyder v. United States in 2024, the court overturned an Indiana mayor's conviction for taking $13,000 after steering a truck contract and kept gratuities distinct from bribes; federal officials remain covered by a separate gratuities provision in section 201.

Wire fraud under 18 USC 1343 requires a scheme to obtain money by false pretences, carried out by wire with intent to defraud. A case would need evidence that someone collected money by falsely promising that part of it would reach the Kennedy Center, and a Congolese government-affiliated payer complicates the question of who was deceived.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act requires registration from anyone acting in the US for a foreign principal in political or public-relations work, subject to exemptions. A Rio Times search of the register for Mildon, Milvest, TX-AT, Grenell and Habba Mildon came up empty. Advising Tshisekedi in Kinshasa does not trigger the obligation; acting in the US at the Congolese government's direction would. In 2020 ProPublica reported undisclosed consulting by Grenell tied to a Moldovan politician and a $100,000 payment to his firm from a foundation funded by Hungary's government, neither registered. His lawyer said registration was not required, and Senator Chuck Schumer asked the Justice Department to investigate.

Under 18 USC 208, the conflict-of-interest statute, an official may not act on a matter affecting a company in which he holds a financial interest, which makes the terms and end date of Grenell's TX-AT engagement relevant if any interest continued into 2025. Congo's own public-finance law governs the other end of the transaction, including whether a ministry payment could carry money for a foreign charity.

Where did the money go?

Grenell denies receiving any of the money, and no movement of funds beyond Houston has been published. TX-AT's bank records would show whether the company kept the $17.6 million, passed some of it on or set aside $5.6 million. Its contracts, invoices, export licences and shipping records would show what Congo bought, and Texas business filings would name its owners and managers.

In Kinshasa, the payment order held by the sending bank and the finance ministry should name the contract the money paid against and the official who approved it, during Fwamba's first year in office. Carrier logs, the phones involved and the email referenced in the 3 May text can settle who sent the messages, and State Department and White House files cover Grenell's Venezuela contacts.

At the Kennedy Center, the development office holds the emails behind the late-2025 search for Mildon's $6 million and the records of who seated him in the vice-president's box. The centre's review findings will go to its board.