Exclusive: Leaked trove reveals extent of far-right AfD’s efforts to court Trump and Maga allies
Documents show German party’s scramble to request support after president’s 2016 election win and co-leader’s pursuit of Steve Bannon
A data leak from Germany’s far-right German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has revealed the extent of efforts by the party to court Donald Trump and other leading figures in the Maga movement, stretching back more than a decade.
The trove reveals the pains the AfD took in wooing the president, whom they saw from the beginning as a potential ally, with senior party officials agonising over the wording of an obsequious congratulatory telegram when he was elected in 2016, which included the wish that his “hopes as a person be fulfilled”.
The AfD became a home for anti-immigration voters after 1.2 million refugees arrived in Germany in 2015 and 2016. It entered the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, in 2017 with 12.6% of the vote, came second in the February 2025 federal election with 20.8%, and now leads national polls at about 30%. In September it won 43.8% of the vote in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, and it is now trying to form Germany’s first far-right state government since the second world war.
Trump hailed the win in Saxony-Anhalt in a post on his Truth Social, concluding his message with a German version of his Make America Great Again acronym, “MGGA!!!”
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency monitors the party as a suspected rightwing extremist organisation, and state agencies classify five of its regional branches as confirmed extremist.
Its leader in the central Thuringia region, Björn Höcke, was convicted in 2024 of knowingly using a slogan of the SA, the Nazi party’s paramilitary wing. AfD politicians also attended a meeting with extremists at which a mass-deportation “masterplan” was discussed. Its 2025 election programme calls for lifting sanctions on Russia and repairing the Nord Stream gas pipelines programme. Nearly all ofGermany’s other parties have kept a “firewall”, refusing to govern with it.
Media outlets including the Guardian have reported on the apparently friendly contacts between the party and the US state department during Trump’s second term.
The leaked documents show AfD officials quickly moving to requests for support from the White House on policy issues when he first won the 2016 election.
Others show a burgeoning political courtship between senior figures including the AfD’s now leader Alice Weidel and key Trump ideologue Steve Bannon.
The data, provided to reporters by the transparency organisation Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDoSecrets), covers more than 420,000 emails, along with documents and personnel records, from the party’s foundation in 2013 to the present, with most coming before 2019.
The AfD said in a statement on Monday that a hosting provider used by the party had been attacked at the end of September and that “only a few mailboxes” had been copied. It told the news agency dpa that most of those mailboxes had not been used for years, and party sources were quoted as saying the published material appeared to be authentic.
The cable
AfD figures praised Trump ahead of his first election in 2016, with then leader Frauke Petry calling him a “refreshingly alternative proposition” in the spring of 2016. On the day after Trump won the presidency, Petry said the victory was “encouraging for Germany and for Europe”.
The hacked documents reveal that in the wake of his election, the party scrambled to send an ingratiating telegram to the new president.
Mainstream German politicians greeted Trump’s election with skepticism. On 9 November 2016, then chancellor Angela Merkel offered Trump “close cooperation” only “on the basis of … values” including respect for human dignity “regardless of origin, skin colour, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views”. The then defence minister Ursula von der Leyen called the result a “huge shock”. The next day the vice-chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, reportedly called Trump the “forerunner of a new authoritarian and chauvinist international”, and he counted the AfD among its forces.
On 10 November, Petry emailed the party’s federal board proposing “an official and brief congratulatory telegram to the future US president”. German politics, she wrote, was “once again outdoing itself in politically unacceptable behaviour”; the AfD was “already perceived as the ones who don’t join in the majority howl of the political establishment” and, “as the only German party welcoming a new beginning in the US”, should say so officially.
Eleven of the board’s 13 members replied, all in favour. Current leader Weidel wrote “Yes:-)”. Beatrix von Storch, now deputy leader of the party’s Bundestag group, wrote: “Couldn’t be more of a yes.”
Board member Dirk Driesang added that Trump should also receive, “by post (?)”, the party’s manifesto in English.
The telegram went out on 11 November under Petry’s name, “on behalf of the federal board”, and was released to the press. It told the president-elect: “We are confident that you will readjust the transatlantic relationship and end the wars in Syria and Ukraine by mutual agreement with Russia.”
A second message, for the inauguration, was planned more carefully, and included a concrete request for a political favor. On 11 January 2017, Driesang asked for it to be put on the agenda of the board’s next conference call, “this time faster and better prepared”, and proposed adding a request: “Please support us in our efforts to remove the enemy-state clause from the UN charter.”
The “enemy state” clauses were written into the UN charter in 1945, and exempted action against “any state which during the second world war has been an enemy of any signatory” from the charter’s normal rules, so that the wartime allies could move against any “renewal of aggressive policy” by Germany, Japan or their allies. The general assembly declared them obsolete in 1995 and resolved to repeal them, but the text has never been amended, because changing the charter needs ratification by two-thirds of member states and all five permanent members of the security council.
No German party currently defends the clauses, but the Bundestag’s own research service wrote in 2017 that international lawyers unanimously regard the clauses as having no practical relevance. On the German right, however, the clauses are totemic, and viewed as a limitation on German sovereignty. The AfD’s Bundestag group demanded its deletion in a 2020 motion that called it a “relic of the past” which “indirectly designates Germany an ‘enemy state’”, and every other party voted it down.
AfD’s federal board adopted the enemy state request on its call of 16 January, according to the federal office’s record of the decision contained in the leaked documents.
When the office circulated an English draft on 19 January, Georg Pazderski, then the party’s Berlin leader and a member of its federal board, objected to the tone and to the request for support: “You don’t address the president as Mr Trump, he is Mr President. Otherwise a bit wordy and flowery. I stand by it: the enemy-state clause doesn’t belong in this letter at all. You don’t do that in a letter of congratulation. It looks like a begging letter.”
Driesang replied at 6.16 the next morning: “Personally I of course find the style appropriate, otherwise I wouldn’t have written it that way.”
The office also wanted to know how the telegram should reach Trump: “directly to Trump’s campaign team … or through official diplomatic channels (e.g. the US embassy in Berlin)?”
André Poggenburg, then the party’s leader in Saxony-Anhalt, answered: “all available channels.”
The text released on the afternoon of 20 January, signed by Petry and her then co-leader Jörg Meuthen, kept the request. It told Trump that the clause stood in Germany’s way “as a strange anachronism”, and asked him to see the AfD “as natural allies at your side, because we are the only German party in clear opposition to the wrong policies of Chancellor Merkel”. The Guardian reported the telegram’s wording the next day.
Frauke Petry subsequently left the party in 2017 in the wake of a bitter internal power struggle.Meuthen, Pazderski and Driesgan have also left the party.
Frohnmaier and the embassy
Markus Frohnmaier entered the Bundestag in 2017 and is now a deputy leader of the AfD’s parliamentary group and a member of the foreign affairs committee. Before that he led the party’s youth wing, the Junge Alternative. At a rally in Erfurt in October 2015 he told the crowd: “I say to these leftwing thought-terrorists, this party cartel, quite clearly: when we come, there will be a clear-out, there will be a mucking-out!”
Germany’s domestic intelligence agency classed the Junge Alternative as “confirmed extremist” in 2023. The Junge Alternative dissolved in March 2025, and a successor organisation, Generation Deutschland, was founded in November 2025.
In April 2019 the BBC and several European partner outlets reported on documents emailed in 2017 by Petr Premyak, a Duma staffer and former naval counterintelligence officer, to a senior official in Vladimir Putin’s administration in 2017 proposing support for Frohnmaier’s candidacy, with the assessment: “We will have our own absolutely controlled MP in the Bundestag.”
Frohnmaier’s lawyers said he “was never under the control of any third party”, and he told the BBC the documents were fake.
Five weeks after those reports, on 13 May 2019, his parliamentary assistant wrote to a Gmail address in the name of Daniel Pipes, the founder of the Middle East Forum (MEF).
The US civil rights organization the Southern Poverty Law Center writes of Pipes that he has “spent the better part of three decades actively promoting anti-Muslim rhetoric”, and has reported his argument that western leaders should consider “working with” far-right parties such as Austria’s Freedom party, “not marginalizing it”. Pipes had met Frohnmaier in Berlin two months earlier, on a tour of what he calls Europe’s “civilizationist” parties; the far-right site PI-NEWS published a photograph of the two.
The email thanked “Dr Pipes” for sending his interview with the rightwing weekly Junge Freiheit, then came to the point: “On behalf of Mr Frohnmaier I should also contact you with the request to arrange a contact in the US Embassy. Mr Frohnmaier would like to meet the Ambassador in person or the Head of the Department of Economic Cooperation and Development Policy.”
The ambassador was Richard Grenell, who had told the rightwing news outlet Breitbart within weeks of taking up the post in 2018: “I absolutely want to empower other conservatives throughout Europe, other leaders.” Grenell, whose praise in the same interview for Austria’s rightwing politician Sebastian Kurz as a “rock star” prompted calls from German politicians for his expulsion. Grenell went on to serve as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence in 2020 despite having no background in intelligence, to front the evidence-free claims of “illegal votes” in Nevada two days after the 2020 election, and, in Trump’s second term, to run the Kennedy Center through its renaming as the Trump Kennedy Center, until he stepped down in March.
The archive holds no reply from the Pipes address and no record of a meeting.
Responding to a request for comment, Pipes wrote in an email: “I received that request. I did not pass the request to anyone at the US Embassy in Berlin. If Markus Frohnmaier had a meeting there, it took place without my involvement. I do not recall Mr Frohnmaier among the many politicians I met on that trip. I show no subsequent contact with him after 13 May 2019.”
Pipes added: “The Southern Poverty Law Center distorts my views, which can be summed up by my well-known adage: ‘Radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution.’ I oppose Islamism and Islamists, not Islam and Muslims … Representing my views and work otherwise is a calumny.”
Pipes concluded: “In 2019 in Berlin, I constantly argued with AfD members and leaders, encouraging them to adopt an anti-Islamist rather than an anti-Islamic outlook, without success. Indeed, I made that point in the Junge Freiheit interview you referenced.”
Two months earlier the same office had approached Breitbart itself. On 12 March 2019 the assistant asked the Bundestag group’s press spokesman whether he happened to have “a contact at Breitbart”, then wrote to the Breitbart reporter Chris Tomlinson, describing his boss as a “young star” of the party and an expert on the UN’s “2030 Agenda” and Global Compact for Migration: “Are you maybe interested in doing an interview with Mr Frohnmaier for Breitbart about these topics and the situation in Germany?” No reply is in the archive.
There is no evidence that this pitch was successful, and no mentions of Frohnmaier on Breitbart outside quotes in a story the previous year about anti-immigrant riots in the German city of Chemnitz.
In an email replying to a request for comment, Frohnmaier wrote: “Regarding the correspondence you refer to, it must first be noted that we have so far had no opportunity to independently verify its authenticity and completeness. This applies all the more given that, according to the information available to us, the documents were obtained unlawfully.”
He added: “The contacts you refer to are to be seen in the context of the usual cultivation of international political contacts. Exchanges with international interlocutors are part of everyday political work and are, in themselves, nothing out of the ordinary. As a matter of principle, we do not comment further publicly on internal matters.”
‘We came to listen’
A year earlier the AfD’s Bundestag group had announced its first contacts with the Trump administration. A press release on 13 June 2018 said the group’s foreign affairs spokesman, Armin-Paulus Hampel, and Jens Kestner, a member of the defence committee, had travelled to the US “to inform themselves about the state of German-American relations”.
“We came to listen,” Hampel was quoted as saying in the release. “In talks at the state department, on Capitol Hill and at the Pentagon,” the release went on, “the two AfD politicians also set out the foreign-policy positions of the AfD Bundestag group.”
It named two of their interlocutors: Justin Stebbins, “security policy adviser to the influential senator Ron Johnson”, who it said “showed understanding” for the AfD’s position on Nato; and Ken Toko, “head of the ‘German desk’ in the state department”, who pressed Germany on defence spending. The Frankfurter Rundschau reported at the time that it was the group’s first official US trip and that the talks were at mid-level working level.
The AfD’s founding manifesto, adopted in 2016, says Nato membership serves Germany’s interests “insofar as Nato confines itself to its task as a defensive alliance” and calls for the withdrawal of all allied troops stationed in Germany, “and in particular their nuclear weapons”. Its 2025 manifesto keeps Nato membership only “until an independent and capable European military alliance has been built”, and rejects Nato’s eastward expansion. The 2025 manifesto also says that the party envisions Ukraine as a neutral state, aligned neither to Russia nor the west.
Steve Bannon
The most direct line into Trump’s circle was through Harris Media, a Texas digital firm that had worked for Republican senator Rand Paul, Marine Le Pen and Benjamin Netanyahu, and ran the AfD’s online campaign for the 2017 federal election, as Der Spiegel reported at the time.
On 28 February 2018 the firm’s founder, Vincent Harris, emailed Alice Weidel, by then the AfD’s co-leader in the Bundestag, to say he would be in Berlin in March and would “love to connect” about “the database for the party, and maximizing donations, and lead generation efforts”. Weidel replied the next day: “Sure! My office will get in touch with you. Btw. Do you have Steve Bannons cell phone number? I need to see him.”
Bannon, the former White House chief strategist, had left the post seven months earlier and had been forced out of Breitbart in January. On 3 March Harris wrote to both of them: “Alice, Per your email, wanted to introduce you to Steve Bannon. I believe you two will get along incredibly well, and share common vision and ideals.” He was, he added, “looking forward to seeing what you will cook up together”.
Bannon answered two minutes later from his BlackBerry, “Thanks vince”, and “Alice let me know when u can chat”. Weidel replied: “Steve, any time. I am in Berlin tomorrow, in Zurich Monday and Tuesday. Let me know.” Bannon: “I’m in zurich tuesday, wednesday”, and “Would love to meet”. Weidel: “Tuesday afternoon Zurich. When and where?” Bannon: “Perfect.”
The meeting was reported by the news agency dpa the same day, citing Weidel’s office, which said Bannon’s experience of political communication and alternative media had been of particular interest to her. What the emails add is who arranged it, and why. On 12 March Harris wrote to Weidel: “I am glad to see the other meeting went well!”
Three days later Thor Kunkel, the party’s campaign creative director, had a suggestion for Weidel. “Why not hire Bannon? For AfD-TV,” referring to the party’s in-house media organization. “Why not? The man is desperately looking for a job. I know this by chance from Dietrich Mateschitz,” name-checking the co-founder of Red Bull. Weidel forwarded it to her Bundestag office; the archive does not show that anything came of it.
On 26 March 2019 Bannon told a press conference in Rome, at which he called Italy “the centre of the universe” because of Matteo Salvini, that he had met representatives of several parties there, including the AfD. When a Stuttgarter Zeitung correspondent asked the party who had met with Bannon, the federal office told the board it knew nothing about it. Pazderski, the party’s Berlin leader, complained of a “wild growth” in the party in foreign relations, and said that the board had to “put a stop to these will-o’-the-wisp self-promoters, because their completely uncoordinated ‘private diplomacy’ reflects negatively on the entire party”.
The second administration
The leaked mail thins out after 2019, but the party’s ongoing contacts with the second Trump administration appear through the public record and its politicians’ own newsletters.
On the eve of the January 2025 inauguration Von Storch, the party’s deputy leader and her husband Sven were at Trump’s “Make America Great Again Victory Rally” in Washington. She told her newsletter subscribers the next day, “together with many celebrities and Trump supporters”, and “met Steve Bannon and Donald Trump Jr there, among others”.
On 14 February the vice-president, JD Vance, met Weidel on the sidelines of the Munich security conference. On 23 February the AfD doubled its vote and became the largest opposition party in the Bundestag.
In September 2025, the New York Times reported that in April, Von Storch and the AfD politician Joachim Paul had met the state department official Samuel Samson in Washington. “They took a lot of notes,” Paul said.
On 1 October Darren Beattie, then the acting under-secretary of state for public diplomacy, posted that he had met Frohnmaier and a second AfD MP, Jan Wenzel Schmidt, “to discuss U.S.-Germany relations, as well as shared priorities on cultural exchange and migration”. Beattie was fired as a White House speechwriter in 2018 after it emerged he had spoken on a panel with the white nationalist Peter Brimelow. On 13 December his successor, Sarah B Rogers, met Frohnmaier too; Frohnmaier posted on X that the exchange had “made clear that Washington is looking for a strong German partner that is ready to take on responsibility”.
The Guardian reported in February that Rogers, asked about the 2019 Russian documents, which argued for supporting his candidacy in the 2017 German election, said she had “sought guidance within the state department and determined” that the allegation was “unsubstantiated – and in any event, not a bar to a meeting”.
In an emailed response to a request for comment on the meeting, Rogers wrote “Mr Frohnmaier is the foreign policy spokesman for the most popular political party in Germany. He delivers AfD’s foreign policy positions in the Bundestag, and is the person German media call when they want a policy statement from AfD. For this reason, we talk to him in his official capacity to understand AfD’s positions.”
Rogers added: “During the ‘cancel culture’ era, there was a manic focus on reputational contagion that probably hurt American civic life, and is a poor fit for American diplomacy.”
Explore more on these topicsReuse this content
Source: www.theguardian.com
