James Stuart Gilmore III (born October 6, 1949) is an American politician, diplomat and former attorney who served as the 68th Governor of Virginia from 1998 to 2002.

A native Virginian, Gilmore graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and a Juris Doctor from the University of Virginia, and then served in the U.S. Army as a counterintelligence agent.

After his gubernatorial tenure ended in 2002, Gilmore unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in 2008 and for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 2008 and 2016 elections.

[2][3] In November 2018, Gilmore was nominated by President Donald Trump to serve as the U.S. Representative to United States Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, a position which carries the rank of ambassador.

[8] He graduated from John Randolph Tucker High School and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Virginia in 1971.

Gilmore met his future wife, Roxane Gatling, at a Jefferson Literary and Debating Society club meeting in the Fall of 1974 while he was a law student and she was an undergraduate.

degree from University of Virginia Law School in 1977, A decade later, he was elected Commonwealth's Attorney in Henrico County and was re-elected in 1991.

In 1993, he was elected Virginia's attorney general, defeating Democratic nominee William D. Dolan III by more than 10 percentage points (958,982 to 749,565 votes).

Gilmore campaigned heavily on the twin promises of hiring 4,000 new teachers in public schools and phasing out Virginia's personal property tax on automobiles.

[14] In his first year as governor, Gilmore pushed for car tax reduction legislation that was eventually passed by the Democratic-controlled General Assembly.

According to The Washington Post, "Virginia's politicians struggled to balance car-tax relief against demands for public services.

In another well publicized case, he pardoned Earl Washington, a former death row inmate, after DNA tests, ordered by Gilmore, implicated another person.

In 1998, Gilmore went to court to try to prevent the removal of a feeding tube of a car crash victim, the former Kentucky news anchor Hugh Finn, who had suffered from a persistent vegetative state for several years.

[19] Gilmore lost his petition that removal of a feeding tube was not removal of artificial life support because it amounted to starvation of an infirm person who could not feed himself and Finn was allowed to die, upholding his wishes as he had expressed them to his family while he was working on developing a living will when still in good health that he wished not to be kept alive in such a state.

Gilmore said that it would be "impractical" to run, citing the difficulty of raising enough money to be competitive in early-voting states Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.

[24] In an interview with Politico, Gilmore said that he had been approached to run for the Senate seat of John Warner, who had announced that he would retire at the end of his term in 2009.

By the end of the summer, many media outlets, most notably The Washington Post, thought it would be a foregone conclusion that Gilmore would jump into the Senate race.

[26] This was the worst showing for a Republican Senate candidate in Virginia since Chuck Robb defeated Maurice Dawkins with 71 percent of the vote in 1988.

On July 7, 2015, Gilmore told the Associated Press that he planned to announce his candidacy for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination in the first week of August 2015.

[2] The same evening, he appeared on Special Report with Bret Baier as the "center seat" where panelists Charles Krauthammer, Julie Pace, and Steve Hayes questioned him on a variety of issues.

[30] According to his campaign website, Gilmore's main issues that he would address if elected president include preserving the 2nd Amendment right to bear arms, immigration and border re-enforcement, healthcare reform, and restoring America's economy.

[41] Gilmore served on the board of Windmill International, a government contractor previously accused of trying to secure fraudulent contracts in Iraq.

Gilmore has also served as Chairman of the National Council on Readiness & Preparedness, a homeland security program focused on community involvement and public/private partnerships.

In 2021, Gilmore was interviewed,[48] by contributors Christopher Lim and Kendall O'Donnell from the UK-based think-tank The Bruges Group on his time as United States Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the European Union, US - China relations, and the Biden Administration's foreign policy.

Gilmore was praised for "asking hard-hitting, pertinent questions that need to be asked of the Biden Administration", and "reaffirming [his] place as one of the GOP's premier foreign policy minds" Gilmore was considered for the position of United States Ambassador to Germany by the first Trump administration,[49] but ultimately not chosen.

[5] Gilmore took his oath of office on June 25, 2019[6] and presented his credentials to OSCE Secretary General Thomas Greminger on July 2, 2019.