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Jared Kushner Finds Trouble in a Gangster’s Paradise

The Trump princeling’s deal with alleged mobsters illustrates the depths of MAGA corruption.

Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump attend the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference at the Sun Valley Lodge on July 8, 2026, in Sun Valley, Idaho.

In 2021, while on a Mediterranean yacht trip, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump thought they had found heaven on earth in an unlikely spot: Sazam, a rocky island off of Albania.

As Trump later recalled in a podcast interview. “We swam to the islands. We went on a hike, barefoot all the way, up to the top. And we were just captivated.” Kusher, who had previously served as an adviser to his father-in-law, Donald Trump, during the president’s first term, was in the midst of turning the political connections he had made in government into lucrative business deals. Albania, a struggling post-communist country with a government eager to win powerful friends in the West, seemed a promising location. Seizing the opportunity, Kushner initiated a deal to purchase Sazam, as well as marshland in nearby Zvërnec that was home to scores of endangered birds, including flamingos. And Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity Partners, working with the family of Qatari billionaire Moutaz Khayyat, started buying more land, with plans to build luxury hotels.

The scheme stank to high heaven from the start. Although Donald Trump was out of power, he was already indicating that he would seek the presidency again in 2024, which meant that foreign billionaires and political leaders had every reason to curry Kushner’s favor. (The president’s son-in-law would in fact return as a senior foreign policy adviser and emissary in Trump’s second term, making him an even worthier investment.)

Further, land deals in Albania were inherently suspect because of the heavy influence of organized crime over the nation’s government. Writing in The Nation in June, Mitchell Prothero noted:

Over the past two decades, Albanian clans have taken over much of Europe’s cocaine trade, which has immersed an otherwise poor country in illegal, hard-to-spend cash. And the government isn’t about to spurn the economic benefits of this influx…. It’s all a recipe for corruption on a massive scale, as powerful business interests coordinate new development projects with the government, and the international mafia ecosystem. Kushner and his consortium of investors aren’t direct players in this system—but it’s unthinkable that his local business backers and government officials friendly to the projects aren’t involved.

Over the past two decades, Albanian........

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