The Head of Albania’s Conservative Party Faces Criminal Charges, and an Ex-Trump Aide Is Involved

The prosecution follows a Mother Jones report.

Lulzim Basha pictured with President Donald Trump at a 2017 fundraiser for Wisconsin's then-governor, Scott Walker.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Prosecutors in Albania on Thursday announced plans to file criminal charges against Lulzim Basha, the head of the country’s main conservative party, regarding more than $600,000 in payments that his party reportedly made in 2017 to a Republican lobbyist in Washington, DC.

The move comes a year and a half after Mother Jones reported that a Scotland-based shell company connected to mysterious Russian nationals had bankrolled this lobbying effort. This matters because it means Russian-related entities may have helped back Basha’s lobbying in the United States, as he advocated relatively nationalist policies more suited to Russia’s preferences for the Balkans than his opponents’ more robustly pro-Western stance.

On Thursday, three top Albanian prosecutors sent Basha a letter summoning him for questioning about the lobbyist payments. The letter noted plans to charge Basha and two other officials of his party, the Democratic Party of Albania (DPA), with two violations of Albania’s criminal code that relate to money laundering and falsified documents. 

Ahead of Albania’s election in 2017, Basha hired Nick Muzin, a lobbyist who formerly worked for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and who also advised the Trump campaign, to help the center-right DPA establish ties with influential American conservatives as it waged an election fight in Albania against the ruling Socialist Party.

Muzin arranged for Basha to take a picture with President Donald Trump, which the Albanian leader touted at home, and set up meetings for Basha with members of Congress. In his 2017 campaign, which fell short of unseating the Socialist Party, Basha adopted Trumplike rhetoric such as vowing to “make Albania great again” and struck a more nationalist posture than his opponent.

The reported plans to charge Basha come as he leads large protests in Tirana against Prime Minister Edi Rama that have helped cause a political crisis over the timing of elections. Basha, who denies breaking Albanian laws, said Thursday that he is being prosecuted for opposing Rama, and alleged prosecutors are ignoring corruption by the ruling party. 

“Albanians are now seeing the true face of the politicised prosecution of Edi Rama: an institution that protects Rama and other corrupt officials and works only to fight the political enemies of the regime,” Basha wrote on Facebook.

Prosecutors have said they are acting on clear evidence that the DPA did not properly disclose its spending. “The investigation led to legitimate suspicion based on proof that there is a substantial difference between the official statements of expenditures from the Democratic Party and the real expenses that this incurred,” the prosecutors’ office said in a statement issued in March.

Prosecutors added that the DPA had declared making only $25,000 in lobbying payments, without revealing another $650,000 in expenditures. In filings with the Justice Department’s Foreign Agents Registration Act office, Muzin reported receiving that larger sum as his total compensation for his work for the DPA.

Albanian prosecutors also said in March they had corresponded with authorities in the United States and Scotland about fees paid by the DPA and a shell company, Biniatta Trade, to a lobbying firm run by Muzin. (According to Albanian publications, the Justice Department was the agency that provided information to the Albanian prosecutors.)

Muzin and the Sonoran Policy Group, which currently lobbies for the DPA in the United States, did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate