US media accuses Albanian opposition of lobbying against candidate for US Ambassador
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The Democratic Party of Albania has been involved in a lobbying operation against Kathleen Kavalec, which President Trump has appointed as a candidate for US Ambassador to Albania.
The US media has shed light on this destructive involvement of the Democratic Party in the US foreign policy.
Daily Beast, a US online media, has dedicated a long article to the efforts of DPA to discredit the US diplomats.
From the US online media:
“Foreign governments have settled on a new strategy to sideline American officials they don’t like: peddling conspiratorial dirt on those officials to portray them as enemies of President Donald Trump”, says the Daily Beast.
Kathleen Kavalec, a career State Department official, was nominated by Trump to be the ambassador to Albania last July. She was quickly vetted by the White House and the State Department, and the typical consultations with diplomatic counterparts in Tirana had taken place without incident, according to a U.S. official familiar with the process.
As the date of her Senate Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearing arrived, Kavalec sat down for what she thought would be a perfunctory meeting with aides to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) on Aug. 16, 2018, to introduce herself and prepare for the hearing.
Instead, according to a source familiar with the meeting, Kavalec found herself under interrogation. The Johnson aides wanted details of an October 2016 meeting between Kavalec and one of Trumpworld’s most reviled political villains, Christopher Steele, whose “dossier” of salacious and unverified allegations against Trump had circulated in law enforcement and intelligence circles, where officials were scrutinizing Russian contacts of individuals in Trump’s orbit.
It quickly became clear to Kavalec that Johnson was less interested in her qualifications as a diplomat, or in U.S. policy toward Albania, than he was in Kavalec’s supposed role in Steele’s anti-Trump “witch hunt.”
Johnson’s office says he didn’t oppose her nomination. But after the meeting, officials at the State Department, concerned that Kavalec’s hearing was about to turn into a show trial, pulled her from the witness stand. Weeks later, she was informed that no action would be taken on her nomination, and that when it expired at the end of the year, she would not be renominated. Kavalec was out of the running for the ambassadorship.
Neither Kavalec nor her colleagues at State knew at the time that a few weeks earlier, Johnson’s staff had opened up a line of communication with lobbyists for the Democratic Party of Albania, the country’s leading opposition party.
In June, the party had hired the Sonoran Policy Group, which bills itself as a “global private diplomacy” firm. SPG Chief Executive Christian Bourge reached out to Johnson’s senior policy adviser on Aug. 5. He reported briefing the adviser on “corruption/security/narcoterrorism issues.” But Bourge also brought up Kavalec’s nomination.”
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