Jack Smith’s Second Most Famous Defendant, ‘The Snake,’ Readies for Verdict on Charges of Crimes Against Humanity

The man who Special Counsel Jack Smith prosecuted before he levied criminal charges against President Trump will soon learn from the International Criminal Court whether he is guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.That defendant is the former president of Kosovo, Hashim Thaçi, whose verdict is due on September 16. He was first indicted in 2020 — when he was president —and his trial occurred in 2023. Mr. Smith charged Mr. Thaçi when the prosecutor led the Kosovo Specialist Chambers, which is charged with investigating war crimes committed by the Kosovo Liberation Army near the end of the Kosovo War. The war claimed some 13,000 lives.Mr. Thaçi, whose nom de guerre during the Kosovo War was “Gjarpëri” or “The Snake,” was charged by Mr. Smith with war crimes and crimes against humanity, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture. The indictment holds Mr. Thaçi responsible for 100 murders during the conflict, which ended in 1999 when NATO airstrikes pushed Yugoslav forces out of Kosovo. Also involved in that war was the president of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milošević, who was convicted of genocide. Milošević died of a heart attack in his prison cell at the Hague.Mr. Smith stepped down from his role at the Kosovo Specialist Chambers on November 18, 2022 — the same day that then-Attorney General Merrick Garland announced his appointment as special prosecutor to criminally investigate Mr. Trump for election interference and the storage of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. That came three days after Mr. Trump announced his intention to regain the White House. Mr. Smith elected to charge Mr. Trump in both cases, each of which carried the possibility of decades in prison in the event of a conviction. Unlike the case Mr. Smith built against Mr. Thaçi, though, neither reached trial. Both were dismissed after Mr. Trump won reelection in 2024, but had already foundered before the election. The election interference case was dealt a blow in the summer of 2024 when Mr. Smith lost at the Supreme Court on the question of presidential immunity. The Mar-a-Lago case, which some reckoned to be the strongest of the four criminal prosecutions — two of them state ones — levied against Mr. Trump, was dismissed the summer before the election when Judge Aileen Cannon ruled that Mr. Smith had been unlawfully appointed by Mr. Garland. While Mr. Smith had served as a prosecutor at the Department of Justice before he plied his trade at the Hague, he has never faced the gauntlet of confirmation by the Senate.Messrs. Thaçi and Trump enjoyed a warm relationship before they grew to share a common adversary in Mr. Smith. The two negotiated in an effort to solve the conflict between Kosovo and Serbia, and in 2020 Mr. Thaçi awarded the American leader Kosovo’s highest honor, the Order of Freedom. Mr. Thaçi learned of his indictment by Mr. Smith when he was flying to the District of Columbia for a peace summit with Mr. Trump. Mr. Trump has subsequently defended Mr. Thaçi, alleging that he is being prosecuted because he is a “Trump-positive person.” A former special envoy of Mr. Trump’s, Richard Grenell, has criticized what he describes as the “wrongful imprisonment” of the Kosovan leader, whom he called the “founding father of Kosovo’s statehood.”Mr. Thaçi’s impending verdict comes as the Trump administration is gearing up to, in the words of Secretary Marco Rubio, “dismantle” the International Criminal Court. The State Department calls the court an “unaccountable global arbiter” that is “positioning itself above and beyond the nation state as a supranational enforcement arm of a globalist bureaucracy empowered to persecute American servicemen and officials at will.”Mr. Thaçi, who has pleaded “not guilty” to all charges, told a Kosovan outlet last month that he expects to be acquitted of every charge. “I have nothing to add to the arguments of the defense team or to my final statement in the courtroom,” he said. Meanwhile, Mr. Smith faces the risk of being charged himself for allegations that he lied under oath following a criminal referral issued to the Department of Justice in July by the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Jim Jordan.

Jack Smith’s Second Most Famous Defendant, ‘The Snake,’ Readies for Verdict on Charges of Crimes Against Humanity

Jack Smith’s Second Most Famous Defendant, ‘The Snake,’ Readies for Verdict on Charges of Crimes Against Humanity

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