Lucas: Politics makes strange bedfellows

What do Donald Trump and Edi Rama have in common?

They both hate Jack Smith.

President Trump hates him for trying to send him to prison.

Edi Rama, the prime minister of Albania, hates him for trying to send his friend to prison.

His friend is fellow Albanian Hashim Thaci, a former leader and spokesman of the Kosovo Liberation Army, on trial in The Hague over controversial war crime charges. They stem from the brief (1998-1999) but brutal Kosovo War.  He has denied the charges.

The war was an armed conflict between Yugoslav/Serbian forces and Albanian separatists in the Albanian-populated province of Kosovo in Yugoslavia that ended with the NATO bombing of Serbia and Kosovo’s independence.

During the war, Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic ordered the ethnic cleansing of the majority Albanians in Kosovo, burning villages and forcing some 700,000 Kosovo Albanians to seek refuge in neighboring Albania, which touched off NATO intervention.

Kosovo is now an independent nation with close ties to the U.S.

Thaci left studies in Switzerland to join the KLA when the fighting broke out, later becoming a key KLA representative in the western-brokered peace talks. Albanians consider him a hero. The Serbs disagree.

After the war, Thaci became the country’s foreign minister and prime minister. It was at that time that Thaci developed a friendship with Trump, who was serving his first term as president.

Thaci was president of Kosovo when he and three others were indicted in October 2020 before the Kosovo Special Chambers, a court made up of international lawyers and judges that was created to hold a trial outside of Kosovo in The Hague.

The prosecutor who brought the charges against Thaci was Jack Smith, who at the time was the chief prosector of the court. Yes, the same Jack Smith who later hounded and indicted Trump at the behest of Joe Biden.

Thaci at the time was enroute to Washington to meet with Trump at the start of Trump’s first term when Smith prematurely leaked news of the Thaci indictment to the press.

Trump had invited Thaci to meet with him and Serbian President Aleksander Vucic to iron out differences between the two countries based on economic interests. The meeting had been arranged by Richard Grenell, Trump’s special emissary.

However, the extraordinary leak of the indictment blew the meeting up, embarrassing both Trump and Grenell, which was probably the point.

Smith was later hired by the Biden administration to go after Trump out of fear that Trump, now out of office, would run for president again in 2024.

Hence the raid on Mar-a-Lago, the phony indictments on the mishandling of confidential document, the phony indictments over the January 6 Capitol riots and all the other legal bull they threw at Trump.

Now it is Smith who is under investigation by both the U.S. Justice Department and Congress.

All of this came to mind when Rama, attending Trump’s initial Peace Board meeting at the White House a week ago, buttonholed Trump to talk about Smith and Thaci, who has been in detention for almost six years.

The long trial finally ended last week, and a verdict is expected within three months. If found guilty Thaci could face 45 years in prison.

Earlier in prepared remarks on helping Gaza, Rama, without naming him, brought up Smith and the court, accusing both of failing “at every step to uphold the standards of democratic justice.”

Following the meeting, Rama had an unusual one-on-one aside with Trump, making his case to get Trump to somehow intercede to help Thaci.

It was also a friendly chat in that the towering Rama (6’ 7”) patted Trump on the arm and shoulder a couple of times, something few people do.

Rama later said, “I conveyed (to Trump) our national concern about the incredible masquerade of international justice in The Hague towards Hashim Thaci and the liberators of Kosovo.”

Who knows what, if anything, Trump will do. But if he can somehow free Thaci and stick it to Jack Smith, he will.

Veteran political reporter Peter Lucas reported from the Kosovo/Albania border in1999. He can be reached at: peter.lucas@bostonherald.com

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