Scientology insider at the center of White House Ukraine/Russia negotiation

[Trump with attorney John Coale in 2021]

Yesterday, we told you about President Donald Trump naming Scientology’s wealthiest donor, Trish Duggan, to the board of trustees at the Kennedy Center in DC.

But there’s an even more sensitive White House effort going on right now in Munich, and that’s the very dicey negotiations regarding Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine and whether the ensuing war can be ended on terms agreeable to both sides.

Trump’s new Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth caused a stir when he said that it would be “unrealistic” to think that Ukraine could return to pre-2014 borders or that it could expect NATO membership.

But then on Thursday, Reuters reported that another “senior US official” had contradicted that position, saying that the US had not ruled out either possibility, NATO membership or pre-2014 borders, and that everything was still on the table.

And who was that senior US official? None other than OT Scientologist and semi-retired attorney John P. Coale, who has been named the White House’s deputy Ukraine envoy.

Coale, who is married to television journalist Greta Van Susteren (who is also an OT Scientologist), is someone we’ve kept an eye on for years here at the Underground Bunker. But we were unaware that he had recently made the jump to Trump’s guy on Ukraine. How did that happen?

In 2021, after his first term as president ended, Trump hired Coale to file federal lawsuits against Twitter, Facebook, and Google, alleging that the technology giants had infringed Trump’s free speech rights by taking down his accounts after the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Last month, after Trump had returned to the White House, Meta settled its lawsuit over Trump’s Facebook ban for $25 million. The settlement occurred after Trump met personally with Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg.

“I’ve been working to get people to the table for two years now. Of course, the election helped,” Coale told Politico after securing the settlement for the president. (The Twitter lawsuit is on appeal, and the Google lawsuit is on hold in the meantime.)

So, after helping Trump with that problem, Coale has now been sent to Munich to see what he can do about the mess in Ukraine.

Coale has a long and very interesting history with Scientology. In 1986, he proposed that Scientology form a political action committee, the Freedom, Liberty And Good Government Political Action Committee, or FLAGG PAC.

Non-Scientologists would see a patriotic name, but Scientologists would hear an echo of the organization’s headquarters in Clearwater, Florida, known as “Flag.”

Coale’s attempt at a sneaky Scientology PAC failed, but he’s remained loyal to the church, despite Greta playing footsie with Christian preacher Franklin Graham in recent years.

In 2015, we had fun writing about the fact that both Coale and Greta had completed the auditing level of “OT 4” in Scientology, which has a subject put the invisible alien entities sticking to them through drug rehab.

Coale has continued his rise on the “Bridge to Total Freedom,” completing OT 6 in 2017, an auditing level that also involves a Scientologist chasing away unseen alien souls known as “body thetans.”

Two years ago, we spoke to Coale for our story about our interviews with Lisa Marie Presley, which had taken place in 2015. Lisa told us that it was Coale who had, on behalf of Scientology leader David Miscavige, pressured her to file for divorce from Michael Jackson. Coale told us that he had met with Jackson’s attorney Johnnie Cochran, but that it was “absurd” to suggest that he had pressured Lisa to file.

When the mainstream press refers to Coale in stories, they tend to identify him as an attorney who made his fame fighting tobacco companies in the 1990s, or that he’s married to Van Susteren. But they usually don’t mention his long involvement in Scientology or the years he’s spent ridding himself of unseen space cooties on the OT levels.

We’re not sure how that qualifies Coale to lead negotiations between Vladimir Putin and Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, but once again we’re struck by just how many connections there are between the second Trump administration and high-ranking Scientologists.

And it hasn’t even been a month into the term.

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New class-action lawsuit against Scientology over online privacy

A few weeks ago, we noticed ads like this popping up at Facebook, encouraging people to send in information if they had taken online courses with Scientology.

We determined that the ads had been placed by Hedin LLP, a law firm in Miami that appears to specialize in class-action suits about online privacy.

We called and wrote to the law firm, hoping to learn something about what they were looking into in regards to Scientology, but we got no reply.

Yesterday, the firm filed a class-action lawsuit against the Church of Scientology in a California federal court, alleging that Scientology was illegally sharing with Meta Platforms the video-watching habits of people visiting the church’s websites.

Hedin has reportedly filed numerous similar lawsuits against technology companies, and so we caution Scientology watchers about getting very excited over this litigation. It appears to be more of a technology privacy matter and may have little to do with Scientology itself. We’ll have more about it soon.

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Bonus items from our tipsters

A “closed-door briefing” about Scotland at Saint Hill?

We asked Alex Barnes-Ross for his thoughts on this mailer.

“That wording is just being used to make it seem more exclusive and special. It will just be a load of hogwash about how they’re ‘closer than ever’ to opening Edinburgh’s Ideal Org and how they've 10Xed their stats since the Golden Age of Admin. Like, instead of one book a week they’re now selling ten,” he says. “It’s just sad to see so many children used in those photos.”

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