Trump lifted sanctions on the former leader of Republika Srpska, Milorad Dodik, a year ago. Since then, the law firm that employs the daughter of the White House chief of staff has been paid 35,000 a month from Dodik’s republic. Two of Trump’s campaign managers got paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for work there. His son went on a business tour there, and his envoy came back with a list of power projects. The State Department flagged the issue: Christopher Landau wrote that the “envoy’s deals might be illegal.”
Dodik ran Republika Srpska, the Serb half of Bosnia that sides with Moscow, until he lost the job last year: banned from office and forced to resign, because his push to break the republic away violated the 1995 peace deal the United States brokered. Dodik calls the Srebrenica killings “the greatest deception of the 20th century.”
Obama’s Treasury sanctioned Dodik in 2017. The first Trump administration kept the sanctions, and Biden tightened them. Treasury took Dodik and 47 others off its Western Balkans list on Oct. 29, 2025, and the State Department credited “constructive actions” by Republika Srpska’s assembly.
Landau wrote 17 days later, on Nov. 15, 2025, that Paolo Zampolli, Trump’s envoy, planned to keep “undertaking unauthorized and possibly unlawful ventures in commercial and economic matters.” Landau copied 15 colleagues and warned that it could mean “disciplinary action, dismissal, and legal liability.” Nobody at State looked, but Narativ continues our exhaustive investigation, which runs from the White House, through Republika Srpska, and to the Kremlin.
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