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Albania doesn’t typically come up in midterm stump speeches. But making his case for reelection before supporters in Savannah, Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff told the story of a “beautiful little island off the Albanian coast called Sazan,” a “national treasure” featuring “some of the last pristine coastline in the Mediterranean.” This island, he said in late June, was coveted by Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, an “American prince” who received expedited approvals to develop it into a luxury resort. “Do you think that Jared Kushner would get special island-buying privileges if he wasn’t the president’s son-in-law?” Ossoff asked. “Isn’t he supposed to be doing diplomacy, not shady land deals?”

Ossoff’s tale of alleged corruption in Albania, reinforcing the Democrats’ message that Donald Trump and his family members have profited greatly since his return to power, struck a very different tone than Ivanka Trump’s Sazan story. During a May 31 podcast appearance, Trump recalled being on “a friend’s boat” — it was the baron Nat Rothschild — in 2024, in the Adriatic Sea, when she hopped off and explored the island. “Effectively, that’s how we found it,” she said. Sazan, a gorgeous outcrop inside a marine preserve, is one of the largest uninhabited islands in the Mediterranean and has been traded back and forth between major powers since antiquity. After hiking to the top of the island barefoot, Trump realized that she and Kushner wanted to be next in line. “It’s not even a business for me,” she said. “It’s more of a challenge than anything else.”

It was not the best time for Trump to talk about how she discovered an island in the ninth-poorest country in Europe that would allow her to get back to her “real-estate roots.” For weeks, Albanians had been protesting the Sazan development and the way in which the government of Prime Minister Edi Rama had handed Kushner and his partners a $1.6 billion deal to develop the........

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