Albania’s Sali Berisha is the charismatic champion of his country’s conservative opposition to an aging elite that holds power. Former President Joe Biden, while still in office, tried to get him sentenced to prison for the remainder of his natural life. Biden was helped by ideological left-wing prosecutors bankrolled by billionaire George Soros. Berisha is nearly 5,000 miles from the United States in the scarcely known nation of Albania, yet his political experiences mirror those of President Donald Trump. He has fought against the same brand of adversaries and faced the same kind of lawfare.

When I met the 80-year-old Berisha recently at the Albanian Democratic Party headquarters in Tirana, the similarities with Trump were striking. It’s not simply his wide, shiny, red necktie and his pale coiffed hair that evoke the American president. It is also that he fizzes with energy and is obsessed with visiting justice, or revenge, on his enemies. Berisha has been under house arrest for nearly a year in his small apartment. For 256 days, he was not charged with any crime. In his telling, it was the U.S. government under Biden and former Secretary of State Antony Blinken that put him in this predicament.

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On Jan. 31, 2019, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama asked Berisha, who was his predecessor, if he would be welcome in the U.S.

Berisha spent his youth working to overturn Albania’s communist dictatorship. After the tyranny fell, he was, from 2005 to 2013, the young democracy’s prime minister. After losing the premiership to Rama, head of the Socialist Party, Berisha ceded leadership of the Democratic Party to 44-year-old Lulzim Basha. 

Rama had known Berisha since the communist dictatorship’s demise. In the early ’90s, Berisha was a central figure in Albania’s liberation. But Rama, 20 years his junior, was an aspiring artist disenchanted with the Democratic Party and was in France during Berisha’s presidency, trying to make it as an artist. By the time Rama asked Berisha about how he was regarded in the U.S., the two had hated each other for years.

“I told him, ‘Yes, I could cross,’” Berisha said. Rama retorted that Berisha could not travel to America because he was under sanctions for conspiring to work against U.S. foreign policy.

This was not true. He had not been sanctioned and had not conspired against U.S. foreign policy. Two years later, however, on May 19, 2021, Blinken slapped Berisha with one of the single most severe penalties a secretary of state can inflict: persona non grata. Blinken said Berisha, as premier, had been “involved in corrupt acts, such as misappropriation of public funds and interfering with public processes, including using his power for his own benefit and to enrich his political allies and his family members at the expense of the Albanian public’s confidence in their government institutions and public officials.”

Nine days later, Yuri Kim, Biden’s ambassador to Albania, met and talked with officials at Albania’s Special Structure against Corruption and Organized Crime, or SPAK. SPAK runs a court system founded in 2019, an outgrowth of 2016 Albanian justice reforms partially funded and wholly endorsed by the Obama administration and the Soros family’s Open Society Foundations. Kim posted that SPAK was “committed to delivering justice and ensuring no one is above the law. … Whether for corruption, organized crime, or elections, the time of impunity is coming to an end.”

By the summer, the writing was on the wall. Kim lobbied Basha, who was the leader of Albania’s “conservative” Democratic Party, to expel Berisha and deny him the seat to which he had been reelected that April. Basha buckled and kicked Berisha out of the Democratic Party and out of parliament. The bulk of the Democratic Party revolted, voting Basha out of leadership by the end of 2021 and backing Berisha to reassume leadership by the beginning of 2022.

Biden, however, would not allow that to happen.

In a 2022 interview with Euronews Albania, Kim warned, “This has been made clear by Deputy Assistant Secretary [Gabriel] Escobar, it’s been made clear by Secretary Blinken, and it’s been made clear by the president: It is not normal and it is not acceptable to have someone designated for significant corruption to be the face of this country, the face of any party. If that were to happen, there would be consequences. So, we’re not telling you who you can vote for, but we think that you should make informed choices. And in that respect, we made very clear that if the Democratic Party or any party is led by somebody, is represented by somebody, who is designated by the secretary of state for significant corruption, then you cannot expect a normal relationship.”

Berisha accused Kim of cajoling the Albanian court system into using lawfare against him, a shocking feat of foreign election interference that Kim herself admitted.

“If ‘interfering in the judicial process’ means encouraging judges and prosecutors to do their jobs despite threats or inducements, making clear the U.S. will continue to support implementation of justice reform in Albania, underlining that no one is above the law, and urging that all of us must do our part to fight against corruption and impunity, then YES, the U.S. has done and will continue to do exactly that — because the fight against corruption and efforts to undermine democracy constitute a core U.S. national security interest,” Kim posted on Twitter on April 22, 2022.

Days before her term ended in 2023, Kim met Altin Dumani, head of SPAK, and the American pressure campaign succeeded in getting Berisha put under house arrest. He would not be charged with a crime until nine months later. By the end of 2024, Ilir Meta and Fatmir Mediu, the two remaining secondary opposition leaders, were also arrested and under investigation by SPAK.

Berisha is physically undiminished by his confinement. His son says he walks 10,000 steps a day or more in laps around his apartment. He is also battle-hardened, ready to rage against his internal exile and warn that if the Soros foundation can create a court to lock up opponents to socialists in Albania, the rest of the West is next.

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“In 1992, when George Soros came for the first time in Albania … I welcomed him,” Berisha lamented. “I saw that in other former communist countries, [NGOs] were playing a very important role, so I welcomed it. But step by step, I saw that Soros-sponsored NGOs were extreme left, and one day, Soros put all of them under the former Communist Party umbrella.”

It sounds like a conspiracy theory, but it was prophetic. In 2016, Soros’s Open Society Foundations, or OSF, spearheaded the most comprehensive reform of Albania’s constitution since 1998, with the backing of the Obama administration and at least $9 million from the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“George Soros, experts, and former communist judges and prosecutors, including the man who drafted the worst constitution of the world,” were all involved, said Berisha, referring to communist Albania’s constitution codifying atheism in the 1970s. “I was a young assistant at the time, and we rallied in a large room, supposedly to debate about the draft of the constitution. In that room was the secretary of central committee of the party for propaganda, Ramiz Alia. In that meeting, Alia asked, ‘Should we call Albania the state of proletarian dictatorship, and should we call Albania as the first atheistic state?’ Someone stood up and said, ‘I think Mr. Comrade Ramiz Alia, we should not because they are not in the previous constitution.’ But another man stood up and said, ‘No, we must be proud to sanction religion because the purest form of democracy is the proletarian dictatorship, and we must be proud with the fighting that we did against religions, sanctioning in the constitution us as the world’s first atheistic state.’ And this man was Luan Omari, the nephew of Enver Hoxha. This man was chosen by OSF Albania as the brain of the judicial reform.”

On paper, Berisha is being prosecuted over a tenth of an acre of land. The tiny piece of territory has been in dispute since the 1940s, when Italian imperialists under Mussolini began stealing Albanian land. Berisha estimates that half a million plots of land were restored to Albanians after being stolen by Italian fascists or Albanian communists. SPAK says the man who took possession of the land in 2008 was Jamarbër Malltez, Berisha’s son-in-law. Both Berisha and Malltez were charged with criminal passive corruption 16 years later.

John Schindler, a former National Security Agency analyst who specializes in the Balkans, said the corruption prosecution is lawfare. “Berisha is absolutely not corrupt by Albanian standards, and he is much less corrupt than the socialists who have been running the country since 2013,” Schindler said. “It’s frankly outrageous the U.S. government has gone to bat for the Rama regime at this point in their persecution of their domestic political enemies.”

The American half of this equation is very curious because, unlike other Balkan countries, Albania avoids close ties to Russia or China and is arguably the most pro-American nation in the neighborhood. Neither Rama’s Socialists nor Berisha’s Democrats have faltered in favoring the U.S. or in their desire to join the European Union. But Rama has criminal connections.

During the first Trump administration, he met repeatedly with Charles McGonigal, an FBI agent put in charge of the Russiagate investigation in New York City by then-Director James Comey. McGonigal received at least $225,000 from Agron Neza, a former Albanian intelligence officer who connected him with Rama. McGonigal got the FBI to open an investigation into an American lobbyist working against Rama’s Socialists. McGonigal was eventually arrested and sentenced to 28 months for concealing Neza’s payments from the FBI.

Rama denies any wrongdoing, and Blinken evidently approved of him.

“Feb. 15, Charles McGonigal was to be sentenced in Washington court,” Berisha said. “To a big surprise, on Feb. 16, in Tirana, [Blinken] came in a sudden visit, and he met no one from the opposition. In a press conference with Rama, Blinken called him an excellent and extraordinary leader. The next day, Charles McGonigal was sentenced to two years and four months for being corrupted by Rama and betraying the interests of the United States.”

Rama is also tied to Albania’s illegal drug trade. Saimir Tahiri, minister of the interior from 2013 to 2017, resigned over drug trafficking. The Socialist-controlled parliament tried to block Tahiri’s arrest, but he was convicted of abuse of office. Tahiri’s successor, Fatmir Xhafaj, also resigned over allegations of involvement with drug trafficking after his brother was convicted in an Italian court. Olsi Rama, the prime minister’s younger brother who worked for OSF from 1993 to 1997, was investigated for close connection to the illegal drug trade. Olsi Rama admitted that he drove in a car with a trafficker convicted for cocaine distribution, but SPAK announced at the end of 2024 that “the investigations have resulted in the absence of evidence” proving his criminality. The prime minister has repeatedly said he and his brother are innocent.

Albania has become Europe’s premier autocratic narco-state. From 2018 to 2020, Europol arrested 266 Albanians for cocaine trafficking in Europe, more than any other nationality. The next highest European source of cocaine traffickers was the Netherlands, with just 51 citizens arrested. According to the German magazine Bild, German investigators know that 32 Albanian gangs control the continent’s entire cocaine trade.

So, why did Biden and Blinken work to eliminate Rama’s opponents?

“A Blinken-Soros connection has to be a factor here,” Schindler said. “I think some of this is an ideological affinity, a sense that what Rama and the Socialists are doing in Albania, with much help from Soros and OSF — they’re all on the same team with the U.S. Democratic Party. … I would say Albania has become a fantastically corrupt country that’s a narco-state, and there’s massive amounts of illegal money pouring into Albania. Does that have something to do with this? It might. I am reliably informed that U.S. intelligence has known for years about Rama’s personal involvement in aspects of the state crime. … U.S. intelligence knows all about this, and the Biden administration has said, obviously, that was OK. I don’t want to speculate too far, but when you have that much drug money coming in anywhere, where is it ultimately winding up? Not only do we not know, no one officially in Washington is even asking.”

While Biden said his presidency was the last line of defense of democracy, his State Department expended suspicious time and political capital eliminating the democratic opposition to the socialist prime minister of the state that runs the European trade in illegal drugs. It was an American-funded court, egged on by the American ambassador, that incarcerated Berisha.

On his way out of Foggy Bottom, Blinken recognized Altin Dumani, head of SPAK, as a global “anti-corruption champion,” and Biden signed an executive order to seize any and all property in America of “any person designated” by the State Department in the Western Balkans. It was a symbolic gesture but a telling one. Meanwhile, the relationship between Rama and the Soros machine has never been closer. Alex Soros, who has inherited his father’s multibillion-dollar empire, regularly vacations in Albania with Rama, who he calls his “brother in Tirana” on social media. Biden awarded George Soros with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and Alex stood in for his father.

In November 2024, Berisha was released from house arrest pending trial on a technicality. Democratic protesters, who regularly congregated beneath Berisha’s window to hear him during his arrest, came out in celebration but were fired on with tear gas by security forces. The morning I interviewed Berisha in his office, SPAK went to court, seeking to reinstate his house arrest. Berisha’s call for a new “caretaker” government before this year’s elections on May 11 was rejected, and though Democrats are fighting for Berisha to retake control of the government, polls still favor Rama.

In the meantime, Berisha is appealing to Trump, whose election Berisha called “a miracle for humanity.”

“I will ask [the U.S.], according to the rules, to review a decision that is based on the corrupt lobbying of Edi Rama and George Soros,” Berisha said.

Considering the parallels between Berisha’s trials and Trump’s comeback, it’s a strategy that could persuade the president. Both Berisha and Trump were tried by Soros-funded prosecutors over trumped-up charges with the overt purpose of solidifying election odds for the left-wing incumbent.

“This is a European country that is a NATO member that we are pledged to defend for Article Five of NATO. This is a friend of the United States. We also should care because this shows that the Soros people, that billionaires with a political agenda, have, in many ways, completely transformed an entire country to their liking. And if they can do this to Albania, they can do it elsewhere,” Schindler said. “The template in Albania should scare everyone in the West. This is not good stuff. Do I think the Soros people are going to do it to America tomorrow? No, but this shows them a model that works.”

Tiana Lowe Doescher is an economics columnist for the Washington Examiner.