An outspoken opponent of Hungarian American megadonor George Soros can finally visit the United States after the Biden administration banned him in 2021, accusing him of corruption.
Sali Berisha, former prime minister of Albania and head of the Albanian opposition party in an election Sunday, accused Soros and current Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama of conspiring with Secretary of State Antony Blinken to prevent him from visiting the U.S. When then-Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., pressed Blinken for evidence of Berisha’s alleged corruption, the State Department stonewalled him, Zeldin said.
Berisha, who served as Albania’s president from 1992 to 1997 and as prime minister from 2005 to 2013, originally welcomed Soros’ investments into Albania but has opposed Soros’ efforts for decades.
This week, a State Department representative said Berisha could come to the U.S. “We routinely grant waivers to facilitate designated individuals’ travel to the U.S. consistent with international obligations and our national interests,” the representative told Axios reporter Marc Caputo. “As such, we won’t let our foreign policy interests or relationship with Albania be held hostage by politicized Biden-era decisions
A State Department official independently confirmed this news to The Daily Signal.
“I plan to travel soon after the election,” Berisha told The Daily Signal in a text message Friday. He called the recent State Department decision “helpful.”
“The Blinken decision was based on corrupted lobbying of Edi Rama and George Soros with the deep involvement of famed McGonigal.”
Former FBI official Charles McGonigal was sentenced to two years in prison in 2024 for receiving about $225,000 from the Albanian government. According to an analysis by Berisha’s Democratic Party of the indictment against McGonigal, the FBI agent schemed with Rama’s government to target Berisha’s Democratic Party. McGonigal’s attorney declined to comment for this story.
“The U.S. State Department made a wise choice granting a visa to Berisha, much like when the U.S. gave a visa to [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi years ago before he ran for prime minister of India,” James Carafano, a senior counselor at The Heritage Foundation, told The Daily Signal in a statement Friday.
“Washington should not play the lawfare game of other countries where regimes deliberately try silence political opposition by manipulating the legal system,” Carafano added. “Albania has been the posterchild of judicial and legal abuse.”
An Upcoming Election
The policy reversal comes shortly before the May 11 election in which Berisha is leading the Democratic Party (no relation to the U.S. Democratic Party and, in fact, aligned with the American Republican Party) against Rama’s Socialist Party. Rama has served as prime minister since 2013. His Socialist Party, the successor to the communist Party of Labor, has an outright majority of 76 seats in the 140-seat legislature.
Berisha hired Chris LaCivita, U.S. President Donald Trump’s 2024 co-campaign manager, to help with his election, The Associated Press reported.
Berisha has cast himself as a Trump-like figure, using the slogan “Make Albania Great Again.”
Rama also has ties to the Trump family. In December, his cabinet approved entering into negotiations with Atlantic Incubation Partners LLC, owned by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, to develop a $1.6 billion luxury resort on the island of Suzan. The Strategic Investment Company awarded Kushner’s company the status of strategic investor for 10 years.
Albania was previously under the Soviet Union’s influence, with Enver Hoxha ruling the country through his Party of Labor. The Socialist Party rebranded after the fall of communism in the country, and now Rama has built his reputation on attempting to join the European Union.
Rama’s government launched judicial reforms in 2013 to address corruption in the country, reforms that the EU considers necessary to admit Albania.
“Albania remains vulnerable to money laundering due to corruption, growing organized crime networks, and weak legal and government institutions,” according to a 2019 State Department report. “Albania serves as a base of operations for organized crime organizations operating in the United States, Europe, the Middle East, and South America.”
That report noted that the justice reforms “have created a positive trajectory for Albania to address money laundering and financial crimes.” However, the report notes that the efforts are “still challenged by pervasive corruption.”
The Soros Influence
In the past year, Alex Soros has posted seven photos of himself with Albania’s Socialist Party Prime Minister, Edi Rama, often calling the foreign leader his “brother.” The Open Society Foundations—which George Soros founded and Alex Soros now leads—launched and funded so many non-governmental organizations in the country that critics say it dominates civil society, and American tax dollars funneled through the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development dovetail Open Society Funding.
My book, “The Woketopus: The Dark Money Cabal Manipulating the Federal Government,” outlines how Soros and other left-wing donors propped up left-leaning nonprofits that staffed and advised the Biden administration, using the bureaucracy to force racial “equity,” gender ideology, climate alarmism, and a preference for technocratic government on Americans.
Critics like Berisha say Open Society pushes “anti-family” policies in Albania and worked to entrench Rama’s power.
OSF touted its influence in a 2021 “fact sheet” on the Balkan country. George Soros’ foundation—which would become OSF—spent more than $57 million building 275 schools and kindergartens across the country in the early 1990s, and OSF touted that almost 70% of the population “has benefited from these schools.”
OSF celebrated having trained “more than 90 young Albanian student journalists” through a four-month program at the studios of Qendra Media Aktive, which the State Department awarded a $50,000 grant in 2019. Open Society also noted its support for Res Publica, a public-interest law firm that also enjoys funding from the National Endowment for Democracy, which has received hundreds of thousands in State Department grants.
In January, Albanian journalist Sami Neza said that Soros has so dominated the NGO space that no civil society groups can exist outside his influence. He said that he can count on one hand the number of staff at Albanian NGOs without a connection to Soros. Neza serves as executive director at the Center for Transparency and Freedom of Information, which received a contribution from the Charles Koch Institute in 2020.
Open Society earmarked $600,000 to support the process of overhauling the judicial system, according to the 2021 fact sheet.
Rovena Gashi, then general prosecutor in Albania, sent a letter to Congress submitted into the record in May 2017 outlining the close ties between the Soros Foundation and the bodies carrying out the justice reform.
Critics claim that Open Society and the Socialist Party seeded their allies in the justice system after ousting the previous corrupt judges.
“Appointments to judicial bodies often involve individuals with Socialist Party connections,” the Albanian Conservative Institute wrote in a report for The Daily Signal.
“It appears that while Soros and the OSF are trying to influence many places in Europe, Albania has been ‘targeted’ for extra attention,” Steven Bucci, a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former Army Special Forces officer who was stationed in Albania for about two years, told The Daily Signal.
“Soros appears to have made Albania a virtual laboratory of socialist conversion,” Bucci added. “If America wants to push back on the international Soros / OSF agenda, Albania is the place to engage!”
Neither the Open Society Foundations nor EWMI nor Rama responded to The Daily Signal’s requests for comment.
Prosecuting Berisha
The reforms launched the Special Structure Against Corruption and Organized Crime, or SPAK.
SPAK brought charges against Sali Berisha in October 2023. Criminal proceedings trace back to 2020 when then-Interior Minister Taulant Balla accused Berisha of corruptly awarding land to his son-in-law in a privatization effort. (Due to Albania’s troubled history under occupation by Italy during World War II and the Soviet Union later, the government has redistributed land to its previous owners, and Berisha claims his son-in-law’s ancestors had a claim to the land in question.)
“The Partizani Club dossier, as proven by official documents, is based on the false accusation of the chairman of the parliamentary group of the Socialist Party, Taulant Balla, as well as on the slander, manipulation, forgery and concealment of hundreds of documents by political prosecutors that exceed human imagination,” Berisha told The Daily Signal in an emailed statement.
“While the official notebooks of 1942 proved that that land belonged to my son-in-law’s grandparents and other owners and that that land had never been expropriated,” he added. “Other documents proved that the land had been confiscated by the Communist regime in 1946.”
The former prime minister noted that the privatization efforts began under his predecessor and involved distributing land to “several hundred owners.”
“My family and I have never illegally benefited from public funds or assets,” he insisted.
SPAK also prosecuted Ilir Meta, after he left the Socialist Party and founded his own political party, Bloomberg reported. Meta had served as Albania’s prime minister while a member of the Socialist Party from 1999 to 2002. Meta, left the Socialist Party to found his own party before getting prosecuted last year, condemned the charges against Berisha as unconstitutional and illegal.
SPAK did not just prosecute opponents of the Socialist Party, however. In February, it arrested Erion Veliaj, the mayor of the capital city Tirana and a member of the Socialist Party, Bloomberg also reported. Rama has defended Veliaj, long considered the prime minister’s likely successor, against accusations of corruption and spending on luxury goods.
SPAK head Altin Dumani has rejected claims of political motivation, according to Bloomberg.
Blinken’s Action
In May 2021, Blinken barred Berisha from entering the U.S. under Section 7031(c) of the Department of State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs Appropriations Act. He cited Berisha’s alleged “involvement in significant corruption.”
Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., repeatedly requested information on the alleged corruption, but he said the State Department stonewalled his requests.
“For months on end, the Biden State Department has refused time and again to provide real, detailed answers about the allegations of ‘significant corruption’ used to sanction former Albanian president Sali Berisha, an ally to both Presidents Bush and opponent of major Democratic Party donor and progressive activist George Soros,” Zeldin told The Washington Free Beacon in December 2021.
“Despite multiple requests for a meeting and additional information from my office, the State Department has only provided sporadic, cagey responses that dance around the questions and do not address Mr. Berisha’s specific actions that qualify as ‘corruption’ or the decision-making process the Administration used to determine that sanctions were appropriate,” Zeldin added.
Berisha condemned the sanctions and accused George Soros of inspiring them.
“This happened eight years after I no longer had any political leadership role, nor any kind of executive power,” he told The Washington Diplomat in 2022. “I was just a member of parliament. And during my time in power, I had very good relations with the United States. I never spared efforts to take decisions with the interests of the US in mind.”
He added, “Under Trump, this would never have happened.”
In February 2024, U.S. Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, sent a letter to then-President Joe Biden expressing concerns about what they described as misuse of Section 7031(c) sanctions. Marco Rubio, now secretary of state under Trump, joined the letter.
“Since January 2021, the overwhelming majority of public designations made under Section 7031(c) have targeted officials in Latin American and Caribbean governments that have cooperated with the United States on strategic diplomatic and national security interests,” the senators wrote. “In contrast, your administration has ignored well-documented cases of significant corruption by foreign government officials actively undermining U.S. national security interests and supporting U.S. adversaries in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
Risch, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, repeated these concerns in a statement to The Daily Signal when approached for comment on the Berisha situation.
“It is important that the U.S. examine how we deploy the full range of tools to help our allies remain healthy and stable so they can best work with us on advancing U.S. interests abroad,” he said.
Blinken’s father and step-mother, Donald and Vera Blinken, donated large sums to the Open Society Archives, a teaching and research department at the George Soros-founded Central European University. The archives bear their names as The Blinken OSA Archivum.
The Daily Signal repeatedly reached out to Blinken’s publisher, the consulting firm he founded, and the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked at the Penn-Biden Center, seeking comment from the former secretary of state.
