On August 8, the Wall Street Journal published an investigative piece on Jared Kushner's $1.4 billion resort development on Sazan Island, Albania. The article tied the project to Artur Shehu, a landowner who sold property to Kushner's development group before Albanian authorities sought his arrest on cocaine trafficking and money laundering charges.
The WSJ had two co-authors. One was Eliot Brown, a Journal staff reporter. The other was Vladimir Karaj, an editor at the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network's Albania office, which operates an outlet called Reporter.al.
The Journal didn't disclose one relevant detail about Karaj's employer.
BIRN's anti-corruption program is explicitly funded by George Soros's Open Society Foundation Albania. Reporter.al receives grant funding from the same foundation. BIRN's own donor page states this directly.
Standard journalistic practice is clear: when a contributor's employer receives money from parties with political or financial stakes in the story being covered, readers are told. That information lets them evaluate the reporting with full context. The WSJ provided none.
Here is why that matters.
The Open Society Foundation Albania has been the dominant funder of Albanian political reform for years. Andi Dobrushi, executive director of OSF Albania, has said publicly that "OSF Albania has been the main funder of the entire reform process" — referring to Albania's 2016 justice system overhaul. The foundation's own materials describe its work as operating "through investigative reporting and closer cooperation between journalists and civil society organizations." BIRN is, by Soros's own description, part of that political program. The journalists it employs aren't just reporters — they are, by the foundation's own framing, instruments of the reform effort Soros is funding.
That political program has a specific connection to the story the WSJ just ran.
Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama is the central figure in Albanian politics. The Kushner resort project requires his government's cooperation to proceed. Rama has vowed publicly that it will. Alex Soros — George Soros's son and the current head of the Open Society Foundations — calls Rama his "brother in Tirana." That is Rama's own word for the relationship.
So the chain looks like this: Soros's foundation finances the network that employs the journalist who co-authors a WSJ investigation targeting Kushner's Albania project. Soros's son calls the Albanian prime minister his brother. The WSJ published the story without telling readers any of it.
This is not a new pattern in Albania. In 2017, six Republican senators — including Mike Lee and Ted Cruz — pressed the State Department to examine USAID's relationship with Soros foundations in the country. Judicial Watch later obtained embassy records showing the U.S. mission in Tirana had given the Soros organization input into program funding reviews — roughly $270 million in USAID spending over fifteen years directed through Soros-aligned organizations to reshape Albanian political systems.
The Wall Street Journal's credibility rests on a simple premise: the people writing its stories don't have undisclosed financial ties to political actors with stakes in the outcome. That premise is worth something.
The Journal ran an investigation co-authored by a journalist from a Soros-funded outlet, targeting a project that Soros-connected figures in Albania oppose, without a single line explaining where the co-author's paycheck comes from.
Readers deserved to know. They weren't told.
