Posted on 06/04/2023 8:29:20 AM PDT by bitt
Former US Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell Explains How Jack Smith Nearly Rekindled Conflict in the Balkans to Get Trump
Richard Grenell was one of the Donald Trump administration’s brightest stars. The former spokesman to the UN in the George W. Bush administration, Grenell was named ambassador to Germany in 2018, and in 2020 became acting director of National Intelligence where he declassified information that helped expose the Department of Justice’s anti-Trump plot. Lesser known is the role that Grenell played mediating between once warring sides in the Balkans as special presidential envoy for Serbia and Kosovo peace negotiations. And it was in that post where Grenell first came across Jack Smith.
At the time, the special counsel named to investigate the leading candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination was chief prosecutor for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers at the Hague, Netherlands. The international court is charged with investigating crimes committed during the wars that set the former Yugoslavia ablaze during the 1990s. In 2020, as the Trump White House was on the verge of brokering historic agreements between Serbia and Kosovo, Smith arrested the sitting Kosovar president, Hashim Thaci. And now some European leaders are up in arms about the allegedly phony charges against the man Joe Biden once called “the George Washington on Kosovo.”
As Grenell explains, it's a complicated story, but absolutely essential background for understanding the character and the methods of the man the DOJ has designated to lead the 2024 leg of its ongoing campaign to Get Trump. Here’s an edited transcript of my interview with Ambassador Grenell for my Epoch TV show Over the Target.
RG:
A lot of Western media outlets are starting to pay attention to this story because the prime minister of Albania was speaking before the Council of Europe and chastising it for allowing the president of Kosovo to remain in jail on trumped-up charges. He's in the Hague. And the president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, has been there for years and the charges are weak and the prosecutor who put him there is Jack Smith.
This is a very dense case. It's not super sexy, it's not going to be able to be told in 30 seconds. You're not going to understand it in one minute. But there's a long history of what's been happening. And I've been involved in it for a very long time.
...more
Thanks for posting.
The Hague is a roo court, but if anybody deserves to be locked up, it’s Hashim “The Snake” Thaci. Before we decided to become their airforce, Interpol called the narco-mafia UCK/KLA “The Scourge of Europe” and it was designated as a terrorist organization — and still to this day has ties with nasty terrorist organizations. Involved in illegal drug trafficking, arms trafficking, human trafficking, organ trafficking, murders all over Europe, etc., it’s no wonder Interpol called them that.
The German BND twice caught them training with Al Queda in the years before we bombed Serbia, and Richard Holbrook called them “Che Guavera wannabes” which was amusing at the time.
In Kosovo, they committed horrible crimes (including torture and murder) against ethnic Serbs and against ethnic Albanians who were followers of Rugova. (The vast majority of ethnic Albanians were followers of Rugova who advocated nonviolence.) He also ordered assassinations of rivals within the UCK/KLA (typical mafia stuff).
Sorry, but these were no trumped up charges. His crimes had long been well known, even before the bombing campaign. The scandal is that we treated him as a legitimate leader and allowed him to continue his criminal ways all these years.
While the timing may certainly be suspect, the charges are not. They are likely only the tip of the colossal iceberg of his crimes. Thaci is one nasty piece of work. So are Krasniqi, Haradinaj, Haliti, and some others, but Thaci is the big snake in that den of vipers.
At The Hague, it’s based on Roman Law, not Anglo-Saxon, same as the rest of Continental Europe.
There are no such things as coincidences. After 20 years of investigating both sides, the international court found nothing, yet as soon as Rick Grinell notified the DOJ that the U.S. had formed an agreement between both countries to let both sides investigate alleged crimes from all those years before, that suddenly, Smith is sent overseas to make a quick assessment, and find evidence to charge Thaci. The DOJ never cared about it until a representative from Trump's administration got involved, and alerted them about the agreement. This was done deliberately. The swamp couldn't have Trump get credit for normalizing trade relations between two enemy countries. Had it been Obama or Biden, the DOJ would have never bothered to get Smith involved, and bring charges against anyone. They would have taken credit for the agreement, and been praised unendingly in the media.
“Trump has kept his temper in remarkable control for a man that has been hammered on from the day he threw his hat in the Presidential ring. He’s been under a microscope for 7+ years.”
Absolutely!
The court found nothing? Really? There certainly was plenty to find! And evidence galore already collected.
I agree the timing is suspect, but Thaci really is guilty of what he is accused of and much more. They should have arrested him years and years before.
Thanks for this. I remember all the research and news about Thaci, but not the details. What about Joe Biden? I wonder if they were “familiar”. Seems McCain was part of it.
Back in the day, McCain was accused of having ties with and taking money from Albanian mafia figures here in the US. He was photographed in the company of one Albanian mafia guy and this was discussed on FR back then. How much truth to the accusations, I cannot say, but it looked quite fishy. (There were similar, but muted, accusations against Bob Dole about being the pocket of the Albanian mafia lobby).
Biden and Lugar were joined at the hip in our questionable doings in former Yugoslavia back in the 1990s. There was more in the news about Biden’s ties to certain Croatian and Bosnian Muslim figures than Kosovo/Albanian figures back then, but accusations against Biden began to pick up in later decades. Here’s an interesting one:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/bidens-strange-tolerance-for-albanias-narcostate
Wow. I’ve seen many, many very biased and incorrect news articles about Kosovo, but this one is right up there. Talk about rewriting history.
It remains to be seen what the Biden regime will do re Thaci. Hillary visited Croatia on Halloween after the Libyan debacle, and very soon thereafter, weapons from Gaddafi’s old stockpiles were shipped to our pet terrorists in Syria via Croatia (as reported by the NYT!) — and the Croat generals responsible for ethnically cleansing over 200,000 ethnic Serbs from Croatia were released from The Hague. Hmm.
NATO/EU has grown exasperated with the ethnic Albanian thugs running their little fiefdom who refuse to tame down after over two decades, so ... there’s that, too.
Yes, I covered much of that on my blog.
https://towncriernews.blogspot.com/2008/02/john-mccain-armed-kosovo-islamic.html?m=1
Biden praised Thaci, called him George Washington. Now he totally ignores Kosovo with Thaci on trial in the Hague.
Joe collected some cash on this, I am convinced. He visited Thaci days before Trump took the white house.
Before that he dragged Beau over there.
I’m not surprised. Lots of gritting to be done there.
There were old news stories linking US Albanian mafia lobby to bank robberies in California, but I no longer remember the year. You might try searching the web to see if any are still available.
Yes, now I remember DioGuardi. Good work, AuntB!
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