How Political Operatives Weaponised Trump’s Vendetta for War Criminals
EXCLUSIVE: Thaçi’s defenders weaponise Trump’s rage against Smith. Yet, historical sequence wrecks the script. The Kosovo court was a bipartisan reality, supported by Trump’s own State Department.
The source began with a warning, then an appeal, then a theory of power.
In the account shared with us, a person claiming familiarity with American official thinking described Richard Grenell as a man no longer trusted by Donald Trump, portrayed Hashim Thaçi as a political client of the American Democratic establishment, and insisted that Trump had never forgotten who had once embraced Kosovo’s former president. The source spoke of Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, old enmities, White House memory, Serbian lobbying, Albania’s interventions, and a battle over the Kosovo Specialist Chambers in The Hague. Yet the source offered no documents, no corroborating records, and no proof that could be published as evidence. What it offered, instead, was a map of suspicion.
Taken on its own, that map could not bear much weight. Anonymous sourcing is sometimes the beginning of reporting. It is never the end of it. So the question was not whether to believe the source wholesale. The question was whether the public record, laid out carefully and chronologically, supported any part of the underlying argument.
It does, though not in the way the source imagined, and not in the way many of Thaçi’s loudest defenders now present it.
