Allen’s involvement with the Trump Virginia campaign effectively ended the night Trump won the primary in March 2016. But she still found ways to express her loyalty to Trump, becoming close to Alice Butler Short, the president of Virginia Women for Trump, who became a mentor figure of sorts and also let Allen stay at her home in Fairfax Station for several months.

“She was like my goddaughter. I was very fond of her,” Short said, recalling how she’d met Allen at a campaign event in 2015. “She cared about the Constitution. She cared about the Judeo-Christian principles on which our country was founded.”

The campaign quickly disassociated itself from Virginia Women for Trump, and the Trump campaign eventually sent Short a cease-and-desist letter because they said the group had used Trump’s image without permission in connection with fundraising activities. Short said that top Trump campaign lawyer Don McGahn later rescinded the cease-and-desist but a current Trump 2020 campaign official said the group is “not sanctioned by Trump Pence 2020” and the campaign sent the group a fresh cease-and-desist letter on Monday.

In response to the letter, Short said: “VWT has acted with the utmost integrity over four years. I can only conclude that they are trying to destroy the grassroots organizations. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of organizations around the country using the Trump name, and there are hundreds of vendors all over the country selling Trump merchandise. Why pick on me?”

Allen continued to ally herself with other entities the Trump campaign blacklisted, such as Students for Trump, which was shunned for improperly sharing Social Security numbers of young voters; and Corey Stewart, the former Virginia Trump campaign co-chairman who was ejected from the campaign for staging an unsanctioned protest against the RNC and eventually fell from grace due to his association with white nationalists.

Her most important relationship, however, would be with the lawyer Charles Gucciardo, whom she said she met while attending a law seminar for high school students at Stanford University, prior to her involvement in the Trump campaign. He eventually offered her an internship at his Long Island law firm. Allen’s connection to Gucciardo was first reported by Salon.

Years later, Gucciardo would be pulled into the Ukraine scandal when he invested $500,000 into a company started by Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, the two men who went to Ukraine to dig up dirt on Hunter Biden, based on Giuliani’s involvement in said company. (Unlike Parnas and Fruman, who were arrested in October, Gucciardo has not been accused of wrongdoing in any investigation involving Giuliani, and he told POLITICO in a comment: “Christianné is a phenomenal young lady with tremendous potential in her career.”)

At the time, Allen attended some of the same events as Gucciardo, according to Instagram posts and videos from that time, all the while burnishing her brand along with her backstory.

During one appearance at a “Moms 4 Trump” event in October 2016 at the Trump hotel in D.C., Allen gave a speech about how she had been hounded out of high school “due to controversy over my Trump internship.”

In a video of her speech, Allen described telling her principal, counselors and friends about her decision to support Trump. “And I can’t even begin to tell you, the controversy that got stirred up, and the hate that was sent my way, not just through social media, but through--just…” She trailed off for several seconds. “It was really hard for me, especially when all of your friends just dropped out of your life, all at once.”

But asked if anti-Trump bullying was a major factor in her leaving her high school, her father said: “I don’t think so. She’s a fighter. … [On social media] she would counter everybody that was negative towards Trump. Did she run from it? No. But she got fed up with it.”

“She didn’t find the school setting rewarding enough, even though she captained her lacrosse varsity team, won the Nationals with her team in competitive cheerleading, [and] had wanted to run for class president,” he continued.

“I never heard of any anti-Trump bullying or political bullying of any kind for that matter” at Allen’s high school, Clover Hill, said Becky Conner, whose son Evan was a classmate of Allen’s and was her partner in driver’s ed. Conner also said that Evan didn’t “remember her ever complaining about being bullied.” A spokesman for the school district didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Somehow, during all this time, Allen put even more bona fides on her resume. According to an old bio on her website, she was going to launch a beauty line called “Christianné Lorraine,” and a PR firm called Allen Strategies, neither of which seemed to get off the ground.

In a text, Allen also mentioned that she was the executive marketing director for a subscription box service for CBD products called Discovery Club—a business that actually did exist, if only for a short period of time.

Sadrina Ward, a CBD distributor based out of Las Vegas, worked on Discovery Club with the Allens starting in September of 2016, after they moved to Nevada to launch the venture. While Lee kept trying to convince investors to join him in the company, Allen filmed testimonials and reached out to social media influencers in an attempt to get them to link to their subscription page.

“She’s really good with being in front of the camera and speaking and everything,” said Ward, who sensed that Allen’s interests lay elsewhere. “She was trying to help her father get it off the ground but she was more interested in the Trump campaign.”

From start to finish, the Vegas endeavor — which contemplated a reality TV show, “High Stakes,” chronicling their attempt to launch the business — lasted for three months. “It was a startup that tanked on me, simple as that, because I couldn’t get the rest of the capital together,” said Lee. The business soon ran out of money and they left Las Vegas, breaking a year-long lease on a seven-bedroom house where they’d planned to shoot the show. “That’s just business, my friend,” he said.

Lee attempted to start the business again, but the Discovery Club’s websites and e-commerce stores have gone dark. Ward said she and her Vegas colleagues were never paid.



***

Following her Nevada adventure, Allen spent most of 2017 and 2018 on the outside looking in. She continued taking online courses at Liberty to get her high school diploma and start on her undergraduate degree. She appears to have attended every possible Trump event and conservative party she could get into, while at the same time running a few events with Virginia Women for Trump. At one point, she was paid for her work on social media for an anti-immigration California Republican who ran unsuccessfully for the House, according to campaign finance filings.

Her personal social media accounts, meanwhile, were soaring. Allen garnered tens of thousands of followers for her carefully-curated pro-Trump content: portraits of her attending right-wing galas, wearing MAGA hats, posing with guns, including a semiautomatic AR-15, and repeatedly visiting the White House — at least four times in April 2018 alone, including for the Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn — according to her Instagram account.

Much of the account shows a gallery of a young influencer living her best life: posing in a helicopter, staying in luxury hotels, trailing Trump in Paris as he visited Emmanuel Macron, flaunting a $5,800 Chanel handbag, and posting the occasional inspirational quote. (Shortly after POLITICO began reporting this story, several photos began disappearing from her accounts.)

Trump’s downtown D.C. hotel — a mainstay of those hoping to hobnob with administration officials and other Trump-friendly folks — soon became the center of her social life. Allen was spotted frequently at the bar with Fox commentator Stephanie Hamill and was a mainstay of the MAGA-centered networking event First Fridays. She often posted photos from the gilded lobby, posing with minor conservative celebrities like Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and fashion designer Andre Soriano, whose dress for pro-Trump singer Joy Villa sparked controversy at this year’s Grammy Awards.

In February 2019, Allen took a paid position as executive director of the Middle Eastern Women’s Coalition, run by Turkish author and women’s rights activist Rabia Kazan. Kazan and Allen had met through Virginia Women for Trump, and after Kazan launched her organization, Allen, who has never been to the Middle East, offered to run PR for her.

“I know that she’s going to be somebody,” Kazan said.

The Middle Eastern Women’s Coalition appears to have collapsed. “There [were] no activities for that organization,” said journalist Arwa Sawan, who’s listed as chairman of the group on the group’s website, and told POLITICO that she was only chairman because they put her photo on the site. “‘I told [Kazan], ‘Wow, what’s happening? What’s going on?’ and she told me ‘ah, I’ll let you know later,’ and she never said anything.”

Allen describes herself on Twitter as being part of the Trump Victory Committee but a person familiar with the matter said that anyone can sign up online to become a volunteer fundraiser for the committee. Allen, who said she had already raised almost $30,000 for the committee, hasn’t raised enough to hit the committee’s “member” level, said the person. (An RNC spokesman declined to comment when asked to confirm that she had raised that amount.)