https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/jared-kushner-albania-corruption/
PoliticsJared Kushner Finds Trouble in a Gangster’s Paradise
The Trump princeling’s deal with alleged mobsters illustrates the depths of MAGA corruption.
by Jeet Heer
August 14, 2026
The Nation
PHOTO: Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference at the Sun Valley Lodge on July 8, 2026, in Sun Valley, Idaho. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
In 2021, while on a Mediterranean yacht trip, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought they had found heaven on earth in an unlikely spot: Sazan, a rocky island off of Albania.
As Trump later recalled in a podcast interview. “We swam to the islands. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.” Kusher, who had previously served as an adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, during the president’s first term, was in the midst of turning the political connections he had made in government into lucrative business deals. Albania, a struggling post-communist country with a government eager to win powerful friends in the West, seemed a promising location. Seizing the opportunity, Kushner initiated a deal to purchase Sazan, as well as marshland in nearby Zvërnec that was home to scores of endangered birds, including flamingos. And Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity Partners, working with the family of Qatari billionaire Moutaz Khayyat, started buying more land, with plans to build luxury hotels.
The scheme stank to high heaven from the start. Although Donald Trump was out of power, he was already indicating that he would seek the presidency again in 2024, which meant that foreign billionaires and political leaders had every reason to curry Kushner’s favor. (The president’s son-in-law would in fact return as a senior foreign policy adviser and emissary in Trump’s second term, making him an even worthier investment.)
Further, land deals in Albania were inherently suspect because of the heavy influence of organized crime over the nation’s government. Writing in The Nation in June, Mitchell Prothero noted:
Over the past two decades, Albanian clans have taken over much of Europe’s cocaine trade, which has immersed an otherwise poor country in illegal, hard-to-spend cash. And the government isn’t about to spurn the economic benefits of this influx….
It’s all a recipe for corruption on a massive scale, as powerful business interests coordinate new development projects with the government, and the international mafia ecosystem. Kushner and his consortium of investors aren’t direct players in this system—but it’s unthinkable that his local business backers and government officials friendly to the projects aren’t involved.
Prothero was right to suspect that Kushner’s deal would inevitably be entangled in political corruption and mob ties. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal published a detailed report on one of the key players in the deal, Artur Shehu, described by the newspaper as “a suspected gangster who fled to Miami after a gunfight at his bar.”
In 2024, villagers in Zvërnec wrote a letter to Kushner saying that land he was buying from Shehu in fact belonged to them.
The villagers had a strong case. As the Journal reports,
One chunk of land was secured by one of Shehu’s lawyers in 2007 by presenting property officials a mistranslated Ottoman-era land record. While translating from Ottoman Turkish, an archivist substituted out the original owner and inserted Seit Shehu’s name instead, a court found. The lawyer and the archivist were later convicted on falsified documents-related charges, though the lawyer’s case is being retried.
Shehu has been under repeated investigation by authorities in Albania and other European countries for decades. (He hasn’t been convicted and denies wrongdoing.) In June, Shehu was arrested on RICO-style charges by the Albanian special prosecutors’ office, which claimed he was a prominent member of a large drug gang.
It’s hardly a coincidence that Kusher and his Qatari cronies were involved in buying land from an alleged gangster. As the Journal notes, “Gains from cocaine filtered their way to Albania via cryptocurrency and cash smuggled on buses—with the group ultimately laundering money through Albanian real estate.” Albanian gangsters frequently operate by fusing cryptocurrency and real estate, with their corruption greased by access to political power. That is structurally very similar to Kushner’s own putatively legitimate business enterprises. The Trump family also thrives on crypto, real estate, and proximity to political power.
As The Guardian reported on Thursday, Trump’s second term has been a massive exercise in primitive accumulation by grift. In 2025, the president made $2.2 billion
by amassing big cryptocurrency holdings, benefiting from wealthy foreign interests, expanding his Truth Social business and more, while federal oversight of his actions has waned.
Trump last year raked in at least $1.4bn from his crypto ventures according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June…. Monetizing his presidency further this summer, Trump’s Truth Social media business is pushing a new scheme that offers wealthy buyers special early access to his posts for a fee of $100,000 a month.
The sheer scale of the Trump family’s graft is producing a heartening backlash. This is most visible in Albania, where there have been near-daily protests that have expanded into a wide-ranging attack on the country’s crooked government. The spirit of resistance in Albania should inspire Americans. As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann has lamented, Donald Trump in his second term has been brazenly corrupt, swaggering with a sickening impunity in part because Democratic Party leaders are gun-shy about challenging him. Fortunately, some in the party, notably Senator Elizabeth Warren, have kept beating the drums on Trumpian corruption. If Democrats win back Congress in the midterms, they’ll be in a strong position to investigate Trump family corruption, including the sleazy deals Kushner made in Albania.
In 2021, while on a Mediterranean yacht trip, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought they had found heaven on earth in an unlikely spot: Sazan, a rocky island off of Albania.
As Trump later recalled in a podcast interview. “We swam to the islands. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.” Kusher, who had previously served as an adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, during the president’s first term, was in the midst of turning the political connections he had made in government into lucrative business deals. Albania, a struggling post-communist country with a government eager to win powerful friends in the West, seemed a promising location. Seizing the opportunity, Kushner initiated a deal to purchase Sazan, as well as marshland in nearby Zvërnec that was home to scores of endangered birds, including flamingos. And Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity Partners, working with the family of Qatari billionaire Moutaz Khayyat, started buying more land, with plans to build luxury hotels.
The scheme stank to high heaven from the start. Although Donald Trump was out of power, he was already indicating that he would seek the presidency again in 2024, which meant that foreign billionaires and political leaders had every reason to curry Kushner’s favor. (The president’s son-in-law would in fact return as a senior foreign policy adviser and emissary in Trump’s second term, making him an even worthier investment.)
Further, land deals in Albania were inherently suspect because of the heavy influence of organized crime over the nation’s government. Writing in The Nation in June, Mitchell Prothero noted:
Over the past two decades, Albanian clans have taken over much of Europe’s cocaine trade, which has immersed an otherwise poor country in illegal, hard-to-spend cash. And the government isn’t about to spurn the economic benefits of this influx….
It’s all a recipe for corruption on a massive scale, as powerful business interests coordinate new development projects with the government, and the international mafia ecosystem. Kushner and his consortium of investors aren’t direct players in this system—but it’s unthinkable that his local business backers and government officials friendly to the projects aren’t involved.
Prothero was right to suspect that Kushner’s deal would inevitably be entangled in political corruption and mob ties. On Saturday, The Wall Street Journal published a detailed report on one of the key players in the deal, Artur Shehu, described by the newspaper as “a suspected gangster who fled to Miami after a gunfight at his bar.”
In 2024, villagers in Zvërnec wrote a letter to Kushner saying that land he was buying from Shehu in fact belonged to them.
The villagers had a strong case. As the Journal reports,
One chunk of land was secured by one of Shehu’s lawyers in 2007 by presenting property officials a mistranslated Ottoman-era land record. While translating from Ottoman Turkish, an archivist substituted out the original owner and inserted Seit Shehu’s name instead, a court found. The lawyer and the archivist were later convicted on falsified documents-related charges, though the lawyer’s case is being retried.
Shehu has been under repeated investigation by authorities in Albania and other European countries for decades. (He hasn’t been convicted and denies wrongdoing.) In June, Shehu was arrested on RICO-style charges by the Albanian special prosecutors’ office, which claimed he was a prominent member of a large drug gang.
It’s hardly a coincidence that Kusher and his Qatari cronies were involved in buying land from an alleged gangster. As the Journal notes, “Gains from cocaine filtered their way to Albania via cryptocurrency and cash smuggled on buses—with the group ultimately laundering money through Albanian real estate.” Albanian gangsters frequently operate by fusing cryptocurrency and real estate, with their corruption greased by access to political power. That is structurally very similar to Kushner’s own putatively legitimate business enterprises. The Trump family also thrives on crypto, real estate, and proximity to political power.
As The Guardian reported on Thursday, Trump’s second term has been a massive exercise in primitive accumulation by grift. In 2025, the president made $2.2 billion
by amassing big cryptocurrency holdings, benefiting from wealthy foreign interests, expanding his Truth Social business and more, while federal oversight of his actions has waned.
Trump last year raked in at least $1.4bn from his crypto ventures according to financial disclosure forms he filed in June…. Monetizing his presidency further this summer, Trump’s Truth Social media business is pushing a new scheme that offers wealthy buyers special early access to his posts for a fee of $100,000 a month.
The sheer scale of the Trump family’s graft is producing a heartening backlash. This is most visible in Albania, where there have been near-daily protests that have expanded into a wide-ranging attack on the country’s crooked government. The spirit of resistance in Albania should inspire Americans. As my Nation colleague Chris Lehmann has lamented, Donald Trump in his second term has been brazenly corrupt, swaggering with a sickening impunity in part because Democratic Party leaders are gun-shy about challenging him. Fortunately, some in the party, notably Senator Elizabeth Warren, have kept beating the drums on Trumpian corruption. If Democrats win back Congress in the midterms, they’ll be in a strong position to investigate Trump family corruption, including the sleazy deals Kushner made in Albania.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Jeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The Guardian, The New Republic, and The Boston Globe.
PLEASE NOTE: A consigliere is a person who serves as an adviser or counselor to the leader of a criminal organization. In Mafia terms, it’s the advisor to the boss and sometimes acts like a trusted “right-hand man.”
In this unforgettable scene below from The Godfather (1972), Tom Hagen visits Hollywood producer Jack Woltz with a polite request from Don Corleone:
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9xv9SqgPWM
In this unforgettable scene below from The Godfather (1972), Tom Hagen visits Hollywood producer Jack Woltz with a polite request from Don Corleone:
VIDEO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9xv9SqgPWM
ATTORNEY GENERAL TODD BLANCHE IS DONALD TRUMP’S PERSONAL CONSIGLIERE
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/us/politics/blanche-trump-attorney-general-justice-department.html
Blanche Refuses to Say He’ll Always Be Independent of Trump as Attorney General
The new head of the Justice Department said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the president had never asked him to prosecute specific people — and never would.
Listen · 4:53 minutes
VIDEO: Blanche Says He Will Not Pledge to Always Act Independently of White House. 1:19
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/16/us/politics/blanche-trump-attorney-general-justice-department.html
Blanche Refuses to Say He’ll Always Be Independent of Trump as Attorney General
The new head of the Justice Department said on “Meet the Press” on Sunday that the president had never asked him to prosecute specific people — and never would.
Listen · 4:53 minutes
VIDEO: Blanche Says He Will Not Pledge to Always Act Independently of White House. 1:19
by Glenn Thrush
Reporting from Washington
August 16, 2026
New York Times
Todd Blanche, the newly confirmed attorney general, refused to say on Sunday that he would always act independently of White House control but claimed during an interview that President Trump has “never” demanded he prosecute specific people.
Mr. Blanche, displaying a greater ease in fielding a variety of pointed questions than his predecessor, Pam Bondi, sought to balance his loyalty to the president and a commitment to the evenhanded administration of justice during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“There’s a big difference between saying we will always do our job and investigate any case, and act independently of the White House,” Mr. Blanche said when pressed to pledge his independence by the show’s host, Kristen Welker.
“No, I’m not going to pledge that, and no attorney general should ever pledge that,” he said.
But he suggested in another interview that he was not afraid to push back. “It’s my job to talk to him about those issues, which I have done for many years and I will continue to do,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Mr. Blanche told NBC that Mr. Trump had never asked him to do anything illegal or unethical — and claimed that reports of White House meddling in the department were overhyped.
“There is this extraordinarily false narrative that the president wakes up in the morning and calls me and says, ‘Todd, go prosecute X or Y,’” Mr. Blanche said. “He does not do that. He has never done that. He will never do that.”
In September, Mr. Trump demanded the immediate prosecution of several adversaries in a social media post aimed at Ms. Bondi. He fired Ms. Bondi in April, in part because he thought she was moving too slowly in prosecuting his perceived enemies whom he had identified, with scant or nonexistent evidence, as being criminals.
Mr. Blanche, then her deputy, was elevated to fill the post and was narrowly confirmed by the Senate earlier this month. His confirmation was imperiled by the opposition of some Republicans who questioned his role in a $1.8 billion compensation fund for purported victims of abuses by the Biden-era Justice Department and a deal granting Mr. Trump sweeping immunity from tax investigations.
After weeks of wrangling, Mr. Blanche secured the support of several holdouts by putting on paper a commitment to rescinding his previous order creating the fund and limiting the scope of the tax immunity agreement.
On Sunday, he repeated his claim that the fund was dead but said that those who felt they had been wronged — including Capitol rioters convicted of crimes and pardoned by Mr. Trump — could still apply for compensation through the courts.
On Friday, Mr. Blanche, a former federal prosecutor who served as Mr. Trump’s lead criminal defense lawyer, appeared alongside the president at an event in Long Island with Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive running for governor of New York.
“In my Department of Justice, if anybody touches a federal law enforcement officer in any way inappropriate, we will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law,” Mr. Blanche said at the event.
When Ms. Welker asked him to square that statement with Mr. Trump’s mass clemency to the rioters on the first day of his second term, Mr. Blanche offered the same answer he gave during his confirmation hearing: Presidents have the constitutional right to pardon anyone they want.
He also expressed support for Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington who has drawn Mr. Trump’s wrath over her dropping of charges against a man accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and blaming a “botched” renovation.
Mr. Blanche’s public support was a significant endorsement for Ms. Pirro, a longtime friend and ally of Mr. Trump, who has recently become a target.
“I absolutely support U.S. Attorney Pirro, as does President Trump,” he said — even though Mr. Trump has considered firing her and raged against her decision.
“Now, that’s different than whether the president is extraordinarily frustrated at what happened in that case, and I don’t in any way fault him for that,” added Mr. Blanche, who suggested the department was still investigating vandalism in and around the pool.
Mr. Blanche emphasized his commitment to focusing on law and order during a speech at Justice Department headquarters last week, seeking to shift the narrative away from the political maelstrom that has engulfed the department during his tenure.
Mr. Trump, he told Fox News, “wants law enforcement out there arresting bad guys.”
Glenn Thrush covers the Department of Justice for The Times and has also written about gun violence, civil rights and conditions in the country’s jails and prisons.
The Latest on the Trump Administration:
- U.S. Cuts Back Military Drills With South Korea: President Trump had ordered the Defense Department to reduce joint exercises with the key U.S. ally, declaring the drills “hostile” toward North Korea.
- F.D.A. Commissioner: The president plans to nominate Dr. Heidi Overton, a White House domestic policy official and a proponent of the administration’s Make America Healthy Again agenda, to serve as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to two senior administration officials.
- Trump’s Most Devoted Aide: Trump’s White House aide Natalie Harp is always by his side. What, exactly, does she do?
- University Investigations: A former Justice Department lawyer says Trump administration leaders ignored findings that elite schools, including Brown and Columbia, hadn’t broken the law as they pressed them into deals.
- Watchdog Replacements: Trump is installing his allies in the offices of inspector general, which are meant to provide independent government oversight.
- Logging in National Forests: The Trump administration advanced a plan to open nearly 45 million acres of wilderness in national forests to road construction and logging, removing protections that had been in place for a quarter century.
