Morgan Ortagus – the Trump administration official mulling a controversial run for Congress in Tennessee – co-founded a consultancy firm alongside her “best friend” Samantha Vinograd, a former CNN contributor who now works in Joe Biden’s White House. Vinograd has an extensive history of bashing former President Trump, even likening him to Adolf Hitler.
Ortagus – who was Mike Pompeo’s State Department spokesman during the Trump administration – received a preemptive “complete and total endorsement” from the former president, in a move that has left the America First base baffled and angered. Filmmaker and grassroots activist Robby Starbuck has been considered the frontrunner and favorite of Trump’s base thus far in Tennessee’s 5th Congressional district.
Following a report revealing Ortagus’s pledge to “faithfully serve the Biden administration,” her past policy positions, including repeated criticism of the America First agenda prior to joining his administration, continue to call into question why Trump would lend support to the potential candidate.
Ortagus’s work in the private sector – including co-founding a consultancy firm alongside a Trump-bashing Democrat with deep ties to President Joe Biden – also appears at odds with the MAGA base.
The firm in question, Global Opportunity Advisors, was founded just before Ortagus was welcomed into the Trump administration. She partnered alongside Vinograd, a current Biden and former Obama official. During the Obama years, Vinograd was tapped for a high-level role at the National Security Council, advising then-National Security Advisor Tom Donilon. Donilon’s brother Mike currently serves as a Senior Advisor to President Biden.
In addition to working as a CNN contributor, often appearing on the network to bash Trump, Vinograd also earned a spot as a Senior Advisor to the Biden Institute.
Vinograd compared Trump to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler on the network in response to the former president calling to preserve American “heritage” during a speech.
“His statements make me sick, on a personal level, preserving our heritage, reclaiming our heritage, that sounds a lot like a certain leader that killed members of my family and about six million other Jews in the 1940s,” she said.
“By the way, this whole CPAC speech, how many pieces, parts of President Putin’s to-do list was President Trump trying to accomplish today?” she said. “He denigrated our institutions, the Department of Justice and U.S. Congress, he spread misinformation and conspiracy theories, he undermined the credibility of several of our institutions, he sowed divisions, he sowed confusion, he was speaking to his base but he was also saying things that really looked like Vladimir Putin scripted his speech,” Vinograd added.
Vinograd’s work earned her a spot in the Biden regime, where she currently serves as a senior counselor for national security at the Department of Homeland Security and acting Assistant Secretary for Counterterrorism and Threat Prevention.
An “about us” page on the Global Opportunity Advisors website, which has been erased from the internet, details the firm’s area of practice:
Morgan Ortagus and Samantha Vinograd co-founded Global Opportunity (GO) Advisors after years working together in the highest levels of government, finance, and technology. Integrating experiences from the White House and Treasury Department all the way to Wall Street and Silicon Valley, Morgan and Sam saw the need for a new model to help C Suite decision makers scale their businesses globally.
Our tailored advisory services translate geopolitical risk and dynamic policy and regulatory changes into actionable strategies that drive real-time business objectives and long term growth plans.
Ortagus is pictured with Vinograd and Obama-era official Evelyn Farkas – who recently said the U.S. should prepare to go to war with Russia over Ukraine – in the image at the top of this article.
