Biden cozies up closer to Europe’s only narco state
[Note: this piece appeared at the Washington Examiner on 20 FEB 2024, but that website cannot be accessed in all countries, so here it is for all who wish to read it – enjoy!]
Timing, they say, is everything. Last Thursday, Secretary of State Antony Blinken made a stop in Albania. He did so while journeying to the Munich Security Conference in Germany. While in the capital Tirana, Blinken held a joint press conference with Socialist Prime Minister Edi Rama. America’s top diplomat hailed our NATO ally as an “extraordinary” American partner, praising Albania’s support to Ukraine, assistance to refugees from our recent defeat in Afghanistan, plus “a shared approach to countering dangerous distortions and lies and build a resilient information ecosystem” (whatever that means). Blinken continued:
Justice reform has not been easy, perfect, or quick, but it is showing real results, and you heard the prime minister describe them. Today I met with key judges and prosecutors who are helping to lead the reform effort. Corrupt officials are being held accountable. Members of organized crime are going to prison and losing their assets.
Does Blinken know what country he was visiting? Did he think he had landed in Denmark?
On planet Earth, the decade-plus of Rama’s rule has seen little Albania become a major global drug smuggling hub as well as the sole narco state in Europe. Under Socialist governance, Albanian criminals have gone global, spreading their tentacles around the world. Wherever Albanian gangsters go, violence and mayhem follow, most recently in Ecuador. This is no secret. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies worldwide are fully aware of how alarmingly Albania punches above its weight in organized crime on several continents.
In December, Spanish police broke up an Albanian gang in their country, seizing 11 tons of cocaine. A couple of weeks ago, police in four European countries took down another Albanian organized crime group involved in smuggling drugs from Latin America to Europe, arresting nearly five dozen mobsters. Surely Blinken has heard about all this.
Still, the timing for this visit certainly wasn’t great. The very next day after America’s top diplomat publicly praised Rama and his governance, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., sentenced a former senior FBI official to more than two years in prison for taking bribes from — the Rama government. Pursuant to his plea agreement with the Department of Justice, Charles McGonigal, who finished his long FBI career as the chief of counterintelligence in the Bureau’s powerful New York field office, received a 28-month prison sentence for taking $225,000 in bribes in 2017 from a former Albanian intelligence official who was acting on behalf of Tirana. This dirty deal included multiple meetings between McGonigal and Rama. On top of the sentence McGonigal received in December from a federal court in New York on separate charges relating to violating sanctions on Russia, in collaboration with a top Kremlin oligarch, the disgraced G-man is facing a total of 6 1/2 years behind bars when he reports to prison next month.
The Albanian aspect of the McGonigal case, which may be the worst corruption scandal in FBI history, is the more serious one since it occurred while he was still employed by the bureau. What damage McGonigal did to our national security in exchange for cash can’t be said yet, but it may be massive.
Neither does the media seem interested in finding out. As I have previously reported, there are credible accusations that McGonigal was involved in shakedowns of Balkan oligarchs to enrich the Rama government as well as the rogue FBI agent, to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. For whatever reason, however, much of the media appears to have no interest in exploring this. Neither does the Justice Department. The FBI understandably just wants this nightmare to go away.
For reasons that are difficult to decipher, the Biden administration keeps running interference for Rama and his gangster-allied government, including Blinken’s public endorsement last week. It may not be coincidental that Rama is in the good graces of Alex Soros, the 38-year-old who has taken over his famous billionaire father’s global mission of funding progressive causes all over the world. The younger Soros makes regular visits to Tirana to hang out with the prime minister, whom Alex Soros calls “my brother,” posting their bros-being-bros photo ops on social media, while Rama is equally effusive about his frequent meetings with “my dear friend.”
Why Alex Soros is so interested in a small Balkan country with less than 3 million people that frankly doesn’t register in the global economy (outside illegal drug smuggling) is something of a mystery. Last week, for Valentine’s Day, Alex Soros made public his new girlfriend, who turns out to be Huma Abedin, the 47-year-old former wife of disgraced Rep. Anthony Weiner, plus the longtime factotum/mini-me of Hillary Clinton. This makes Alex Soros part of the extended Clinton family.
If House Republicans can find the time, perhaps they should inquire about what’s going on.
John R. Schindler served with the National Security Agency as a senior intelligence analyst and counterintelligence officer.