EXCLUSIVE: Ambassador Richard Grenell responds to "unsubstantiated" accusations from Sen. Whitehouse about the Kennedy Center
The Kennedy Center exclusively responded to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's "unsubstantiated" allegations to the Washington Reporter.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) wants to investigate the Kennedy Center after President Donald Trump and Ambassador Richard Grenell took it over earlier this year. Whitehouse claims that Grenell and the Kennedy Center are providing discounts to Trump loyalists — claims the Kennedy Center rebuked as “unsubstantiated.”
The Washington Reporter exclusively obtained Grenell’s response letter to Whitehouse; the Rhode Island lawmaker notified the New York Times about his investigation before Grenell saw the complaint, a Kennedy Center insider told the Reporter.
“I am concerned about your careless attacks on me and my team,” Grenell wrote to Whitehouse. “The letter you signed did not undergo basic fact-checking. It is filled with partisan attacks and false accusations. Your staff relied on anonymous sources, inaccurate gossip, and allegations from partisan reporters who never had access to the data or facts I’m happy to provide below.”
Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, told the Reporter that Whitehouse’s interest in the Kennedy Center is ironic. Whitehouse, a Kennedy Center board member, has failed to attend some board meetings.
“The senator is an Ex Officio Member of the Board as designated by Congress but he has not attended a single board meeting, event, or program yet he claims to have obtained records of mismanagement and a new-found interest in his position?” Daravi said. “The reality is quite the opposite: the former leadership grossly mismanaged funds and he sat idly by as hundreds of millions of dollars went down the drain.”
Grenell, the President of the Kennedy Center, wrote that he “take[s] financial responsibility extremely seriously.”
“When I arrived, we were paying a bloated staff with our future debt reserves account. The
individual who had the job before me was getting paid $1,210,635 per year,” Grenell added. “There were 94 people employed in the Development Department (today, there are 16). And the deferred maintenance of the building was quite literally making the building fall apart. Today, and for the first time in decades, we have a balanced budget at the Kennedy Center. There was no reference to these facts in your letter.”
Grenell’s twelve-point response letter to Whitehouse includes several point-by-point arguments. Whitehouse accused Grenell, for example, of giving FIFA “free and exclusive use of the Kennedy Center” in advance of the United States hosting the World Cup.
In reality, Grenell said, “FIFA has given us several million dollars, in addition to paying all of the expenses for this event in lieu of a rental fee. Your focus on simple rental fees is no way to run an institution as diverse as the Kennedy Center. A simple rental fee would not have been enough to cover the magnitude of the event.”
Whitehouse also accused the Kennedy Center of hiring Lisa Dale, one of Kari Lake’s best friends, and spending lavishly at the nearby Watergate Hotel.
In response, Grenell noted that Dale, a Chilean-American “would not be welcome at your private beach club.” Whitehouse is controversially a member of an all-white beach club. Hiring Dale, Grenell said, “was an enormous improvement over the deficit spending the center was engaging in before.”
Whitehouse’s final accusation was that the Kennedy Center gave discounts to organizations aligned with Trump, specifically a “$19,820 discount for a NewsNation town hall.”
“The NewsNation event referenced was a bipartisan event featuring host Chris Cuomo, Senator John Fetterman, and Stephen A. Smith,” Grenell said. “No one would describe this as a giveaway to the President’s political allies. This group engaged in bipartisan debate with no restrictions on speech.”
Read Ambassador Richard Grenell’s full response to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse here.
