While President Donald Trump wages the most aggressive U.S. crackdown on drug cartels in nearly 40 years, his daughter and son-in-law are set to inject hundreds of millions of dollars into the illegal drug trade.
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner are not stupid people. While support for criminality is presumably not their intent, they are surely aware of what a money laundering gift their Albanian resort will deliver to the global drug trade. That they are pursuing these efforts anyway speaks volumes about the cronyism that increasingly defines the upper echelons of the Make America Great Again world.
IN FOCUS: TRUMP PROMISED TO DRAIN THE SWAMP. HE’S FLOODING IT
To be clear, Trump deserves credit for taking the fight to cartels such as the Venezuela-based Tren de Aragua, the Colombia-based National Liberation Party and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia groups, and the Mexico-based Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation cartel. These organizations wreak havoc at home and abroad, destabilizing democratic governments by eliminating honorable police officers, judges, journalists, and prosecutors so they can sell drugs to idiots abroad. And while the drug trade is too lucrative and large to be defeated, Trump is right to put pressure on its purveyors. His strategy has seen important victories, including the elimination of the leaders of both the CJNG and Tren de Aragua. Trump is also rightly bringing unprecedented political heat to the Mexican government to undermine the rule of the narcos. Albanian organized crime groups, which have enriched themselves by dominating drug imports into Europe, deserve similar American hostility.
It’s not going to come from the president’s family.
Kushner and Ivanka Trump’s project would see Kushner’s Affinity Partners and others spend approximately $1.5 billion to develop Albania’s Sazan Island into a series of luxury hotels and apartment complexes. The island, formerly a Soviet military bastion beset with bunkers, sits in the idyllic waters of the Adriatic Sea. Kushner received a special “strategic investor” dispensation from Albania in 2024 to develop the island, which was previously a protected natural preserve. Strategic investor status has quickly enabled organized crime groups to establish front companies in Albania, which can then invest in, or invent invoices to show, property development. Albania’s informal economy and the saturation of organized crime activity at all levels of the property industry, from permitting to manufacturing parts, to construction, to purchasing, underlines why the small country is a powerhouse narcostate. Ask any objective expert on Albania, and they will tell you there is no question that a sizable portion of that $1.5 billion, and any future profits from the project, will end up with organized crime.
The rot starts at the very top.
As the Washington Examiner has previously reported, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama has directly facilitated Sinaloa Cartel money launderer Luftar Hysa (the Trump administration has now sanctioned Hysa). And one key mechanism via which Sinaloa and Albania-based organized crime groups launder their billions of dollars in annual proceeds is via, you guessed it, luxury resorts. It is for these reasons that tens of thousands of Albanians are now taking to the streets to cry foul. And why Albanian anti-corruption investigators are scrutinizing the investment plan.
Rama doesn’t like this. After all, he has an intimate relationship with organized crime.
As the Washington Examiner noted last December, “In October 2020, Rama hosted a meeting at his official office in Tirana with one of his political fixers, Dorian Ducka; a former German parliamentarian, Mark Hauptmann; Luftar Hysa; and Besnik Lulaj. When the identities of the attendees became public two years later, Rama declared that they had met to discuss lawful investment opportunities. Apparently not getting the stay-on-the-same-script memo, however, Luftar Hysa claimed that they had discussed a tourism book that a British friend was writing. While most Albanian reports, including photographs of attendees leaving Rama’s office, have mysteriously been taken offline, archived links remain available.”
Again, Trump is right to confront cartels who have lived with relative impunity for far too long. He is right to have sanctioned crime figures in Albania whom the Biden administration protected in service of its relationship with Rama. But what Kushner and Ivanka Trump are doing isn’t just wrong, it’s utterly contradictory to Trump’s own drug strategy.
The president should not-so-kindly tell his daughter and son-in-law to abandon their indirect effort to assist the world’s worst criminals in laundering hundreds of millions of dollars.