Your professional connection to this case, you worked on it, did you not, at The Hague?

I did.

And actually my first connection with working on a Kosovo case was actually way back in the early 2000s.

In 2002, I went to become a trial attorney.

at the Yugoslavia Tribunal, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

And the first case I did there was a Kosovo case, an investigation and ultimately a prosecution of several members of the Kosovo Liberation Army for committing crimes largely against fellow Albanians who were accused of collaborating though they weren't really collaborating they just were insufficiently loyal to the kosovo liberation army you know for example they may have had serb friends or worked in a serb business or something and for that they were considered collaborators and targeted for detention torture and death and that that case was against somebody named fat merely my and two other people, Izak Musiu and Herod Mbala, for running a camp.

It was a specific camp in Kosovo, a camp called Lepushnik, where these victims were held, detained, beaten, tortured, and some of them murdered.

And obviously the US government is pro-Israel

Yeah.

And, um, the people that I worked with at the court, uh, they are, they're not political.

Um, the court is, lives in a political world, and it's influenced by politics.

It is, it is sometimes constrained by politics, but it is not itself political.

The people there are Serious, committed, hardworking, often to the point of breaking.

You know, they- there are many people who have to leave because they're, they're, they're burned out, they're worn out.

Um, it is, it has very, very heavy on process, um, especially at the International Criminal Court.

Mm

Yeah.

Twenty-one? Twenty-one states.

Uh, it i- it's a body that's, um, uh, created in the Rome Statute, uh, and it basically, it's, it's 21 states that gets elected for a period of, I think it's two years.

Uh, and they essentially manage the Assembly of States Parties, which is 125 states.

Um, and the Bureau then received all this information, and they then m- pass their own judgment, uh, on the report and on the advice given by the three judges.

Uh, and they, by a- apparently, this has not been made public, but it's been reported that by a two-thirds majority, they concluded that Mr. Khan had conduct... had engaged in serious misconduct as defined under Article 46 of the statute, and then referred it to the Assembly of States Parties for a vote, which is what occurred last Friday.

So those are the stages of the process.

So I just wanted, um, either of you or both of you to address, is that correct in your estimation that the outcome or the ultimate outcome, the A- uh, ASP, the Assembly of State Parties', uh, decisive decision to remove Mr. Khan, let's put it this way, would not have occurred, uh, without the factor that I've just described of, um, US government and Israeli government, uh, pressure?

Can you give us just an, an example of what those changes look like?

Yeah, I'll give you two examples.

So one example is that historically, at least since the, very firmly since the 1970s but even preceding that, there's been a clear separation between the White House and the Justice Department.

So there's been care that the...

Al- although the Justice Department is within the executive branch, the president selects the attorney general who, who's then confirmed by the Senate, there has been a norm of independence for the Department of Justice, uh, so that, for example, the president doesn't instruct the attorney general who to prosecute, who not to prosecute.

That norm has essentially been torn down because the president has ordered the department to investigate certain people and has also rewarded friends and supporters with either pardons or dropping their cases.

So there's been direct control of the Department of Justice from the White House on a number of big cases.

I mean, it feels like that is working now, right? It is shutting people down.