US Ambassador to Georgia Robin Dunnigan has said in an interview with RFE/RL that Georgian Dream sent a private letter to President Donald Trump that was ‘threatening, insulting, [and] unserious’.
Dunnigan added that the letter was ‘received extremely poorly in Washington’.
She did not reveal the specifics of the letter.
The private letter complemented another public message sent from Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze to the Trump administration in May 2025, which complained about the lack of high-level communication between the US and the ruling Georgian Dream party.
Dunnigan, who is retiring from her post in July for personal reasons, said that she had gone to Washington shortly after Trump’s inauguration to ‘talk about our Georgia policy’ and to ‘have guidance on what they would like their first message to the Georgian government to be’.
‘I think it took a while because people were so surprised to get such a correspondence from [the] leadership of one country to my country’, Dunnigan said, explaining the delayed response from Washington.
Shortly after, she met with Georgian Foreign Minister Maka Botchorishvili in March, where Dunnigan said she had ‘very clearly’ described ‘two or three steps [Georgian Dream] could take to help set our relationship back on track’.
Dunnigan’s meeting with Botchorishvili was the first time formal talks were held between US officials and the ruling Georgian Dream party following the contested parliamentary elections in October 2024.
Nate Ostiller
The letter in question was then sent a few days later, Dunnigan said in the recent interview.
As the US thought of how to respond, Dunnigan said, Georgian Dream then sent the public letter.
Following this, Dunnigan said she had requested to meet with Georgian Dream’s billionaire founder Bidzina Ivanishvili, but he had refused. She clarified that she had been specifically asked to deliver it to Ivanishvili, not Kobakhidze, because ‘I think most people in the world recognise that Bidzina Ivanishvili runs the government’.
Later in the interview, Dunnigan described in more detail some of the steps Georgia could take to mend its relations with the US.
‘One of the first steps would be to stop the anti-American rhetoric. Stop saying things that aren’t true about the US. There is a lot that [Georgian Dream] says that is not true about the US: That we tried to start a second front here — not true’, Dunnigan said, referring to a regularly repeated conspiracy theory that the West has been pushing Georgia to attack Russia.
‘That my predecessor tried to foment revolution here — not true. That our strategic partnership is a partnership on paper only — not true. That I’m being recalled by my government — not true. I can go on and on’, she said.
On Monday, Parliamentary Speaker Shalva Papuashvili opted not to comment on the interview or Dunnigan’s description of the letter, saying that RFE/RL, ‘which itself was exposed by President Trump as a propaganda outlet, is spreading the interview of a retired ambassador. Neither the ambassador nor the outlet is of interest to us’.
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