Long before Special Counsel Jack Smith charged former president Trump with multiple federal felonies in 2023, his work at the Hague collided with the Trump administration’s foreign policy in dramatic fashion.
It was the summer of 2020. The Trump administration was attempting to shepherd a historic truce between two Balkan antagonists: Serbia and Kosovo. Formed out of a part of Serbia in 2008, Kosovo’s independence was not recognized by Serbia, and the two countries were in a growing spiral of economic warfare. The deal the Trump administration was pushing would bring that to an end, and bring full recognition to Kosovo. President Aleksandar Vučić of Serbia and President Hashim Thaçi of Kosovo were due at the White House on June 27th where they would discuss and potentially ink the deal in front of Trump himself.
En route to DC, President Thaçi of Kosovo was informed he had been charged with war crimes by the Kosovo Specialist Prosecutor’s Office (SPO) at The Hague.
Charging the president, once called “Kosovo’s George Washington”, was a daring move by the chief prosecutor, an American lawyer called Jack Smith, who had been in that position since 2018. The special court, as it is known locally, includes a court and the prosecutor’s office. It had been created by an act of Kosovo’s parliament in 2015. Now, it had indicted some of the same leaders who signed that court into being.
The White House summit was canceled and Thaçi flew back to face charges, thus ruining the plans of the Trump administration to score a foreign policy win in an election year.
Events pertaining to Smith’s tenure at The Hague are now being delivered as a salvo against him in right-wing media. It comes in the form of a “whistleblower complaint” written by former DEA investigator John Moynihan and published by Overstock founder Patrick Byrne on his Deep Capture website titled: “The liver punch on Jack Smith“. The complaint accuses Smith of running an extortion racket in Kosovo through henchmen who extorted various luminaries, threatening them with prosecution if they didn’t cough up cash. “If you’ll put X in a suitcase this will all go away,” Byrne says, illustrating the alleged scheme.
Some of the most conspiratorial outlets in the right-wing sphere have pushed this storyline, including Gateway Pundit, Gen. Flynn, and CD Media, all citing Byrne’s website, in an attempt to delegitimize Smith. Trump himself has linked to these various articles on his Truth Social account multiple times.
However, the so-called “liver punch” does not implicate Jack Smith even if one takes its lurid, and often unbelievable account on faith. Four victims come forward to attest, in first-hand accounts, to being extorted by a swashbuckling conman, a man named Faik “Florian” Imeri, who represented himself as acting on behalf of Jack Smith. But beyond Florian’s wild claims, they do not connect Smith with the plot. One of the witnesses confirmed to me that he is not accusing Smith of the extortion. The four witnesses have colorful pasts of their own, often involving legal trouble. One of them has been credibly accused of being allied with a member of the Russian mafia.
When tracing the origins of the “liver punch”, the outlines of an op designed to exculpate the leaders of Kosovo on trial for war crimes become clear. After Smith was appointed as special counsel in Nov. 2022, these same events got twisted into an anti-Smith conspiracy by right-wing provocateurs.
The Special Court
The story the four alleged victims tell, insinuating that the prosecution of Thaçi is tainted with extortion and false testimony, is an attempt to delegitimize the SPO’s operations in Kosovo.
The Kosovo Specialist Chambers and the SPO were formed at The Hague to try war crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnic Albanian militia that fought for Kosovo’s independence from Serbia during 1998 to 1999. When Kosovo declared independence in 2008, many of the militia ran for office and became politicians. Even though the SPO had essentially been signed into being by Kosovo, some of its leaders became targets in the SPO’s investigation. Hashim Thaçi, the former president of Kosovo, was among them. He was charged with war crimes along with three other politicians who had also, like Thaçi, been leaders of the KLA.
The special court, reports the investigative journalism website Balkan Insight, is “widely resented by Kosovo Albanians who see it as an insult to the KLA’s war for liberation from Serbian rule.” Some KLA defendants in the trials felt that the SPO’s pursuit of their war crimes meant that comparable war crimes by Serbians were let off the hook. The four KLA defendants, including Thaçi, who were indicted by Smith’s office in 2020, are often called the “Hague Four” and are celebrated as liberators.
This is the backdrop against which the victims’ statements must be judged.
The extortion ring
All four witnesses, whose statements describing blackmail are attached to the whistleblower complaint, point the finger at the alleged conman named Faik “Florian” Imeri, an ethnic Albanian with a long familial acquaintance with Thaçi. They claim that Florian ran a blackmail racket in Kosovo, representing himself alternatively as a CIA agent, a US Dept. of State employee, or as speaking on behalf of Jack Smith of the SPO. Wielding these credentials, he blackmailed victims into giving him cash.
The four victims attest that they believed Florian’s threats of prosecution, and were convinced to fork over hundreds of thousands of euros, without requiring much in the way of evidence that he legitimately spoke for the SPO.
One witness, a well-known Kosovo-Albanian journalist named Milaim Zeka, a frequent talking head on Albanian TV, says he believed Florian’s false representations due to the presence of seemingly American plainclothes security men surrounding him. He was blackmailed out of €320K. He confirmed these details through a text sent to his WhatsApp account, but also said that he was accusing Florian, not Jack Smith.
Another witness is a Kosovan poker player living in Marbella, Spain, named Halit Sahitaj. He presents himself as a gullible dupe, taking Florian’s word at face value.
He says Florian showed him texts from a “Jack Smith” on his mobile phone with a profile photo depicting the image of the Scales of Justice; another time he heard a male American voice on the other end of a speaker phone that Florian claimed was Smith.
Sahitaj was thoroughly convinced by these telephonic encounters that he had spoken to Jack Smith of the SPO, despite the fact that he does not speak English and relied on Florian’s translation to understand what was being said. Allegedly, he was so trusting of Florian that he provided false testimony to the SPO under his tutelage.
Florian first contacted him in February 2020. Over time, as he started working with Florian, he was told he was signing a contract with the CIA. “I trusted him completely,” Sahitaj says.
He wound up being used as a cat’s paw in Florian’s extortion schemes. He made calls and threatened people into coughing up cash. He would, for instance, call up Russian oligarchs and offer to get them off the US sanctions list or keep them off it.
In a key episode, Sahitaj claims he was forced to call President Hashim Thaçi’s family to offer to have his charges dropped in return for cash. The notion that Florian, on behalf of the SPO, was accepting protection money, is the crux of the case against Smith. However, whether Sahitaj is lying or Florian is, it is simply not credible that the case would have been dropped in February 2022, after a year of pretrial motions by five teams of attorneys, in front of the special court and the eyes of the world, with hundreds of documents already entered into evidence.
There are several reasons to doubt Sahitaj is as gullible as he claims; not least of which is that he himself has been arrested for extortion multiple times. Calling him one of the “main lieutenants of the Russian mafia in Marbella,” Spanish news outlet El Confidencial reported that he was found with a wad of €30,00 at his bedside table and two luxury cars in the garage when he was arrested last August.
Some of the stories are so fantastical, they are straight out of a Hollywood spy potboiler. Florian made outlandish claims of having been one of the CIA agents involved in the killing of Osama Bin Laden, offering a grainy photograph as the only proof. Another time, instead of stating straightforwardly what US agency he worked for when asked, he wrote the letters “C I A” on a piece of paper to show on video.
While the extortion ring the victims attest to cannot be confirmed, Faik “Florian” Imeri at least is a real person with a real grudge against Thaçi. His brother, Haki Imeri, a Democratic League of Kosovo activist, was a victim of a war crime: murdered with a letter bomb in 1999. Another brother, Imer, was imprisoned and beaten by KLA guerillas. Florian penned an open letter in early 2020 accusing Thaçi of his brother Haki’s murder. In the letter he hoped the special court would bring justice. The Imeri family has sued Zeka, the journalist who attested to being blackmailed by Florian, for his defamatory statements.
It is clear that the four witness affidavits are a glimpse into a splintered, factionalized society scarred by a recent war. Jack Smith and the SPO are merely collateral.
The false testimony
Defense counsel seized upon one particular episode regarding Halit Sahitaj, the poker player, to cast doubt on the detention of Thaçi and another KLA leader, Kadri Veseli.
Sahitaj was first brought to the SPO’s office at The Hague by Florian, the fake CIA agent, on Oct. 1, 2020. There, he says, he met for hours with American prosecutor David Harbach and provided false testimony as tutored by Florian. Citing his fondness for Americans, he says he agreed to say what Florian told him to say, thinking the man spoke for the CIA and Jack Smith.
The next month, Thaçi and other KLA leaders were arrested and taken to The Hague. Sahitaj believes it was his false testimony that gave prosecutors enough evidence to put them in detention.
In 2022, Sahitaj had a change of heart following a spat with Florian. He reached out to the SPO, and on April 22nd, gave a statement correcting the record. The transcript of this interview is attached to Moynihan’s complaint.
Once defense counsel got wind of Sahitaj’s withdrawn testimony, it set off a months-long standoff, with defense arguing that the KLA leaders ought to be released from detention because “a witness” — who is now known to be Sahitaj — had withdrawn his testimony. In a Nov. 14, 2022 filing, they stated: “The witness withdrew his allegations and claimed, not only that he had lied, but that he had been put up to lying by an informant who has been in regular contact with the SPO.”
While the names are redacted, a transcript of a hearing a week prior makes it clear that Imeri — i.e. Florian — is the informant in question. The prosecutors’ response from Nov. 24, 2022 identifies Sahitaj by his informant code: “W04730”.
The filing suggests that Sahitaj was not the only witness that Florian fed lies to. “[REDACTED] appears to be at the centre of a network of witnesses whom he [h]as provided, directly or indirectly, to the SPO. The Defence has records of 15 contacts that [Florian] has had with the SPO[…].”
But Sahitaj’s testimony appears to have been not credible from the start. Even in his own telling, the prosecutor who took his 2020 statement saw through him, asking him point blank who had instructed him to speak as he did.
Prosecutors pushed back, arguing that neither of Sahitaj’s interviews were reliable. “Counsel for Veseli and Thaçi construct their house of cards argument on information from two individuals who are not witnesses in this case,” they argued, adding that Sahitaj had made “fanciful allegations.” They also denied that Florian speaks for the SPO as an intermediary. They refer to Florian by his identifier: “W04326”.
The trial panel eventually did not find that Sahitaj withdrawing his testimony had any impact. The decision to detain the KLA leaders was not based on his testimony, they ruled. Thaçi remains in detention at The Hague as of this writing.
Sahitaj may be overselling his gullibility. He presents himself as an ignoramus who knew nothing about the KLA leaders. However, a May 2019 report on the Albanian mafia by documentary channel InDoks shows Sahitaj in company with Kadri Veseli, one of the KLA leaders charged along with Thaçi. This was almost a year before he claims to have ever met Florian. This is why his withdrawn testimony looks more like an op designed to aid the KLA leaders’ defense rather than an honest mistake.
The role of Serbia
Woven through the affidavits is the insinuation that the Serbian government manufactured evidence that put Thaçi and the other KLA leaders away. But Serbia actually stood to gain from the peace accord that Jack Smith blew up by releasing the indictment of Thaçi.
Zeka states his point-of-view upfront. He sees the SPO as a tool of the Serbian lobby.
Repeatedly, the victims of Florian’s extortion insinuate that Serbia backed his criminal enterprise. Zeka claims to have heard from sources that Florian was a “de facto member of the Serbian Secret Service”. Sahitaj claims that Florian took him to Belgrade to meet a Serbian intelligence official and had several secret talks with him.
Defense counsel has also suggested strongly that SPO prosecutors may have relied on evidence cooked up by the Serbians. In a July 12, 2022 filing they demand disclosure of material that might demonstrate Serbia’s role in providing evidence against the charged KLA members.
“Serbia remains engaged in an ongoing disinformation campaign against Kosovo and the KLA, aimed at destabilizing the State,” the filing says. “Serbia has repeatedly used deceptive means to incriminate the KLA, […] procured false testimony through torture and duress.”
Defense appears to have taken seriously the notion that both Sahitaj and Florian were connected with Serbian intelligence, and demanded redress on that basis. Although the text is heavily redacted, the trial panel ruling gives up the game: “two SPO witnesses with an alleged connection to Serbian intelligence,” it says while discussing Sahitaj and Florian.
The Serbia-Kosovo accord that the Trump administration hoped would enhance their foreign policy credentials in an election year was shaped largely to Serbia’s benefit.
Richard Grenell, the Trump administration’s special envoy, had pursued the deal with gusto, pressuring Kosovo to sign an agreement that almost all foreign policy analysts considered ill-advised because it ceded too much ground to Serbia.
Grenell pressured the coalition government of Kosovo led by Thaçi’s opposition to drop all tariffs on Serbian imports while getting nothing in return. His pressure tactics “precipitated the fall of a popular and promising reformist government,” Just Security reported.
In these negotiations, Thaçi, then president of Kosovo, was Grenell’s ally. Analysts were warning that Thaçi was set to give away the farm, including by agreeing to land swaps with Serbia.
The agreement never took place. Smith released Thaçi’s indictment three days before it was to be inked.
The role of Grenell
Grenell seems to have taken the indictment of Thaçi badly. He has repeatedly insisted on X that Thaçi is innocent, and insinuated that Smith’s indictment of the KLA leaders was politically driven. He has also stated that the Trump administration was intending to shut down the Kosovo special court and he had personally negotiated that agreement. It is unclear what he meant. He did not respond to an email sent to his group Fix California’s email address.
Two days after Smith’s appointment as Special Counsel in investigations against Trump, Grenell ominously said, “He’s ruined The Hague’s reputation forever – and boy do I have a story about him to tell.”
It is that story, ominously presaged by Grenell, that now appears in the form of the whistleblower complaint that Byrne calls the “liver punch”.
Months before Byrne got into the game, Grenell was in Tirana, Albania, digging for dirt on Smith. In January of 2023, he met up with Zeka, who shared with him what Grenell called “taped recordings from The Hague – of ‘witnesses’ withdrawing their testimony against [Thaçi] because Jack Smith used fake CIA agents to manipulate their testimony.”
Once Grenell went public with his conversation with Zeka, Zeka revealed in the Albanian press that the “fake CIA agent” he told Grenell about was Florian. The witness who withdrew his testimony was “the Spaniard”, Sahitaj.
But he did not pin the blame on Smith. “These people, by abusing and speaking in the name of Jack Smith, have taken millions of euros from people, supposedly so that they can drop the charges,” Zeka explained (translated by Google).
Zeka was contacted over WhatsApp. He confirmed that while he accused Florian of extortion and inducing false testimony, he was not accusing Jack Smith of any of those things.
The accusation that Jack Smith was the one directing the plot — Grenell made that part up himself.
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