This Albanian Politician Can’t Enter The U.S. Due To Alleged Corruption. Trump’s Team Is Helping Him Anyway.

Sali Berisha is under travel sanctions from the U.S. and U.K. due to allegations of corruption. Still, his presidential campaign is getting a boost from some of Trump’s close allies.

A growing team of political operatives affiliated with Donald Trump is assisting in the election of an Albanian politician who is under travel sanctions for alleged corruption. Sali Berisha, who has called Trump’s election “a miracle,” appears to have engaged several people close to Trump in consulting work — while his team suggests their goal is the removal of the sanctions.

Chris LaCivita, co-manager of Trump’s 2024 campaign, was in Albania in February as part of his contract to help the campaign of Berisha, an Albanian presidential candidate under U.S. sanction, as reported by The New York Times. With him was Paul Manafort, who pleaded guilty for failing to register as a foreign agent in 2018. (Trump pardoned Manafort in December 2020.)

As Albania’s May 11 elections approach, HuffPost has found the team working with LaCivita appears to have expanded to include Trump pollster Tony Fabrizio and longtime Manafort associate Phil Griffin. Additionally, representatives from American Conservative Union, the organization behind the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, have also recently met with Berisha. The ACU meeting resulted in the scheduling of CPAC Balkans for the end of April, which would be co-organized by Berisha’s party, the candidate wrote on X (formerly Twitter).

This all follows the Trump administration’s push to further defang the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), paving the way for political operatives to collect large checks on behalf of foreign parties and leaders, all without any oversight in the U.S. While registration with FARA is still technically required, there are no longer any criminal penalties, like those previously used against Manafort, for not registering. As part of these efforts, the administration has disbanded the Foreign Influence Task Force, which monitored and investigated foreign influence and lobbying. A search of FARA Friday morning showed that no one involved in Berisha’s campaign has registered to lobby on behalf of the Albanian candidate.

Berisha, the head of Albania’s right-wing Democratic Party, has been under sanctions in both the United States and the United Kingdom for several years. The State Department declared Berisha and his family persona non grata in May 2021 due to “his involvement in significant corruption.” In July 2022, the U.K. banned him from traveling to the country “on the grounds of criminality and corruption,” noting that Berisha’s presence “was not conducive to the public good.” Berisha was formally charged with corruption last fall, for his alleged participation in a scheme that granted his son-in-law permits to make millions of euros by building apartments in Albania’s capital. Berisha spent time under house arrest after refusing to comply with the terms ordered by the court, claiming he was being politically persecuted.

Berisha has expressed hope that Trump’s administration would be willing to end the sanctions. On Inauguration Day, Berisha told Albanian media that he considered the election of Trump “a miracle” and would ask him to remove his persona non grata designation.

In a Jan. 27 interview, the Democratic Party’s press secretary, Floriana Garo, was asked if Trump would lift the sanctions on Berisha. According to a translation shared with HuffPost, Garo responded, “The sanctions of Mr. Berisha, I believe, the way I see — I believe they will be removed and lifted. It will be lifted, but it won’t be lifted just for Sali Berisha, it will be removed as a ‘bloc.’ It will include sanctions on other people.”

But on Feb. 5, according to a report in the Albanian Times, Berisha said at a press conference that he believed there was no hope Trump would lift the ban on his travel. He claimed he had not engaged in any lobbying efforts to get off the persona non grata list.

By Feb. 10, LaCivita and Manafort were in Albania to meet with Berisha’s campaign. LaCivita told The New York Times he was not there to lobby, only to consult on the campaign.

That day, Belind Këlliçi, a Democratic Party political leader, shared a livestream of the press conference with LaCivita. He captioned it, “say hello to all those worrying about the sanction.”

Over a week after LaCivita’s visit, Euronews Albania posted a video saying that Democratic Party leaders have been suggesting LaCivita’s influence on Trump will help end the sanctions.

In January, the Times reported LaCivita and Manafort, along with Fabrizio, were seeking consulting contracts with foreign right-wing political parties.

Last month, a conservative Albanian politician who is a strong ally of Berisha shared a video of himself with LaCivita in Washington, D.C., on the social media platform Threads. He claimed to have had a meeting in Washington with LaCivita and Griffin, and posted a photo of himself with the pair on Facebook. The politician said Griffin and LaCivita were working with Fabrizio. While it did not get picked up in U.S. media, Albanian media had also reported on Fabrizio’s involvement in February.

Fabrizio has a long history of working with Manafort. Before Manafort brought him into the Trump 2016 campaign, Fabrizio’s firm did work for Manafort in Ukraine from 2012 to 2013. Fabrizio was also the silent owner of a company that received about $19 million from a super PAC Manafort helped start during the 2016 election season.

Since the 2024 U.S. election, Fabrizio and LaCivita have signed on as senior advisers for Building America’s Future, a 501(c)(4) funded by Elon Musk.

Griffin also has a long working relationship with Manafort, going back at least as far as 2004, when Griffin was employed by Manafort’s firm, Davis Manafort Partners. Griffin worked closely with Manafort for clients in Ukraine, ultimately recruiting Konstantin Kilimnik. Kilimnik became Manafort’s number one man in Ukraine and “likely served as a channel to Manafort for Russian intelligence services, and that those services likely sought to exploit Manafort’s access to gain insight into the Campaign,” according to a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee report.

Griffin is already in Albania in preparation for the Democratic Party campaign launch, which is scheduled to take place Friday evening. Earlier this week, Garo, the press secretary of Berisha’s Democratic Party, shared a photo of herself with Griffin and Alfred Lela, the party’s director of press communications. The Washington Examiner ran an article by Lela in February, imploring Secretary of State Marco Rubio to rethink Berisha’s sanctions. (Lela, who lived in Boston in the 2000s, noted in his bio that he is an American citizen.)

Këlliçi recently claimed that Berisha’s sanctions have been lifted. The claim appears baseless, though neither the Albanian Democratic Party nor the U.S. State Department responded to attempts to verify the sanctions were still in place.

Despite Berisha’s statement that CPAC Balkans would take place this month, the event still lacks a functioning website, providing no information on the event, including dates. CPAC has made an effort to hold events in countries with right-wing leadership aligned with Trump. A conference co-hosted by Berisha’s party would be an implicit endorsement of his candidacy. When reached for comment about the organization’s meeting with Berisha and asked whether the event would happen on schedule, a spokesperson for CPAC replied, “CPAC is meeting with leaders around the world and is planning to expand to more countries in the coming year. We are looking to do a CPAC in the Balkans as a rallying cry for common sense policies and a finger in the eye to the globalists.”

LaCivita, Fabrizio, Manafort, Griffin and Berisha did not respond to requests for comment.

On Thursday night, however, LaCivita posted twice on X about Albania. In one post, containing a video of an owl, he wrote, “Who’s the ‘Owl’ and who’s the mouse ….#Albania”

The commentary references a riff between Berisha and his opponent, Edi Rama. The fight centers on Rama referring to Berisha as a “swamp owl,” and Berisha responding by embracing the insult, bringing an owl figurine to a press conference.

Rama has also praised Trump, and he has entered into contracts with Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Both Berisha’s and Rama’s parties have been under investigation by SPAK, an Albanian anti-corruption organization that has relied on funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development. Since Trump took office, SPAK and the U.S. Embassy have not shared much information about the status of the program, but some reporting in Albania has suggested that the Americans involved with it briefly left the country.

In another post, LaCivita linked to an article that referred to him as the sheriff coming back to town. The article was on a news site owned by Berisha’s son.

Berisha’s team has announced that LaCivita will be present for the official campaign launch, and Albanian media showed him arriving in the country Friday morning.