If I’m Not Bad
After more than two months of reports, investigations and chronicles, the international media is getting closer to the essence of what happened with the Trump family’s investment in Albania. The American daily Wall Street Journal, a conservative newspaper, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, therefore far enough from the liberal circles that use every opportunity to attack the incumbent president, has published a very strong investigation into the ties of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, with an Albanian suspected of being a drug trafficker.
The message given in the title (link below) is also accompanied by a black and white photo where Ivanka’s husband and Artur Shehu stand out, next to each other.
The newspaper builds an in-depth profile of Shehu, talking about his connections with drug trafficking, the persecution that several services of European countries have been pursuing him for years, which recently supplied SPAK with documents, for the crackdown on the man suspected of laundering money from cocaine produced in Latin America in Albania.
The whole story is far from innocent. It is noted that the company Albania Land Development, represented by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, has addressed about 125 million dollars to Artur Shehu’s accounts to purchase from him the lands with questionable ownership where Zvërnec’s investment would be built.
The first question that comes to mind after reading this investigation is: how is it possible that a representative of the US presidential family could end up linked to such a controversial character? To this question that runs through the newspaper article like a red thread, another one can logically be added: How is it possible that the Albanian Prime Minister, Edi Rama, who controls everything down to the smallest detail, the one who decides which owner will develop his property or not, which architect will build it or what shape he will give it, has been so inattentive to such a “detail”. But there are also other questions: How did it get to this point, when although the Prime Minister’s intention was to use the only opportunity to influence the corridors of the White House, this story produced this counter-effect? Didn’t he have the opportunity to order the emissaries sent to Kushner to first buy the land in order to remove any shadow of suspicion from the presidential family?
The fact that this did not happen, that the entire effort for influence turned into a spectacular own goal, raises a doubt in itself. Wasn’t Artur Shehu’s name deliberately hidden, to make him the groom’s direct partner? Was this the intention? Was he lobbied for this? Or maybe, just like in the case of former FBI agent McGonigal, Kushner had to be tainted with suspicious money to be more easily used?
This detail, which the WSJ brings to the surface, namely that the son-in-law of the American president became a partner in Albania of a man suspected of being involved in international cocaine trafficking, is enough to unleash the imagination of all fans of conspiracy theories. Their target is none other than Edi Rama, the man who invited Kushner to invest in Albania, who took care of every detail of his project and who was ready, in the end, to defend it even with his own chair.
One could claim that behind this “unfortunate coincidence” that political opponents are using against the Trump family, there was a hidden desire to corrupt one of its members. Someone else, with an even more conspiratorial mind, could see the hand of Soros, who, just like in 2016, has used his Albanian mask to hit his sworn enemy in the House of Representatives.
But beyond these extreme versions that try to make sense of the unimaginable fable of Kushner’s twinning with a trafficker, there may also be a simpler explanation. There is no question that it is Edi Rama who has seduced Trump’s son-in-law. There is no doubt that he has been willing to do everything to win Kushner’s heart: he has changed the law on protected areas, declared him a strategic investor, has been willing to break the law to grant permits without clear ownership, to tolerate barbed wire and animal bodyguards, who even prevent passage on the beach. But within this unlimited power, he seems to have had one thing in his hands. The only privilege he did not possess was to connect his prey with a clean partner. This was beyond the capacity and possibilities of this all-powerful autocrat. He couldn’t “give” Kushner anything more tidy than what he gave to the bosses of tourist resorts, whom he linked to drug traffickers, or the skyscraper builders, whom he turned into money laundering machines.
Under Rama’s rule, there is probably no alternative but to include one of them.
Even for the Trump family, in a country where it is impossible to make money without getting dirty, if Artur Shehu hadn’t been shot, there would definitely have been someone similar to him.
Beyond the conspiracy theories that take off every time something that seems incomprehensible needs to be explained, this is a closer version to explain the paradox of how it is possible that Edi Rama set out to give money to Jared and Ivanka and suddenly turned into their biggest problem. Everything is explained by the system he has set up, which is now being revealed to even the largest media outlets in the world. /Lapsi.al