American Embassy in Greece takes a holiday even though it's not a holiday
Lost your passport or got lost on a remote Greek island? Good luck Yankee traveler, because Uncle Sam is out to lunch
If you call the American embassy in Athens today, February 26, you’ll get a recording saying that the embassy closed due to a holiday — even though it’s not a holiday — sure, it’s Five O'Clock Somewhere, but not in the USA or Greece either, for that matter. Don’t believe us? Ok, try it: 30-210-721-2951.
There is also currently no ambassador. Biden crony George Tsunis is out by now, of course, and someone named Maria Olson who is career Foreign Service appears to be filling in as ambassador before Kimberly Guilfoyle comes to town. Ms. Olson recently made time to attend a charity gala in Athens, but apparently can’t be bothered to pick up the phone or have anyone under her well-funded “Chargé” exercise such a simple task, either.
As we’ve reported elsewhere (The Points Guy), Americans who get into tough situations abroad — and from Dublin to Dubai, it happens — are usually on their own. Under President Biden, many State Department minions were too busy pushing DEI on people who never asked for it to help Americans in need, such as the family of a California man who went missing in Amorgos.
Will things improve under President Trump? It’s difficult to say. Right now, however, if nobody is answering the phone at one of our most important embassies in Europe, it does beg the question: what exactly are we paying these people for? Why is the foreign waste spotlight shining only on USAID?
We’re not here to pontificate but to find answers and some accountability. We reached out to a spokesman for Secretary of State Marco Rubio but haven’t gotten a response. We also know that Mr. Rubio has bigger fish to fry.
It is worth noting, though, that in recent weeks a number of possibly spurious job postings on the embassy website — likely posted by lingering Biden-era staffers who themselves may have had bogus jobs — mysteriously vanished: was this an early attempt to evade DOGE’s widening radar? We asked about that too. The State Department’s Inspector General told us they would check it out, but they never got back to us — which would make sense if the IG was another Biden holdover like Ms. Olson.
Whatever, right? There are bigger problems in the world. However, for paid embassy staffers to lie about a holiday that doesn’t exist, and also apparently take the fake holiday, is actually very bad. The optics are bad. If you’re an American who gets into a pickle in Greece and needs some assistance from the embassy, which is partly what embassies are for, good luck to you and yours.
You don’t have to be a big fan of DOGE (for us doges are sorta Venetian?) or Elon Musk to recognize that we do have a problem here. At this point, would anyone be surprised at all if the Walter Gropius-designed embassy, which incidentally taxpayers have paid a fortune to expand and renovate, was simply converted into an Airbnb or some such? The area could use a nice new hotel, after all, where there could be actual jobs for real people — nice concept, right?
