NYT: Trump's advisers took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Republika Srpska government before the elections. The US already lifted sanctions on Dodik in October 2025

Two of Trump's closest political advisers, James Blair and Chris LaCivita, each received hundreds of thousands of dollars for working for the government of Bosnia's Republika Srpska ahead of Sunday's elections, according to the New York Times. The paper reports that the money flowed through a Washington law firm hired by the government, controlled by Dodik's SNSD party, for advice on the vote, and the RS did not respond to the newspaper's questions. The US had already lifted sanctions on Dodik and his circle back in October 2025, and we found nothing about this report itself in the Slovak and Czech media we reviewed over the past week. N1 Bosna ↗

What the NYT reports and what other sources confirm

The newspaper writes that Blair and LaCivita worked in Republika Srpska shortly before the October 4 elections and received sums in the hundreds of thousands of dollars each. This was not a direct contract with the government, but work through an American law firm engaged by the RS. Susie Wiles, Trump's chief of staff, met with Cvijanović at the White House in September. Index.hr ↗ We did not find the firm's name or exact sums in the transcripts we read. The NYT's conclusion, according to HRT, is that this is "the latest example of how Trump's advisers profit from cooperating with far-right politicians abroad who are seeking to curry favor with the American president while also defying the international community." HRT ↗

The broader picture according to NYT: since the start of 2025, the RS government has paid lobbyists connected to Trump more than four million dollars. Rod Blagojevich's firm reportedly received around $1.3 million since March 2025, and Alex Garcia, a former member of Trump's campaign team, received $35,000 a month. Donald Trump Jr. visited Republika Srpska in April 2026. Klix.ba ↗ According to these transcripts, the payer is thus the RS government and not directly the SNSD party, although Klix frames it in its headline as work for Dodik's party.

Sanctions: what is documented and what is merely suspicion

On October 29, 2025, OFAC removed 48 individuals and companies from the list, including Dodik, his children, and Željka Cvijanović, without explanation. The State Department cited "constructive steps" by the RS National Assembly, which repealed separatist laws. RFE/RL ↗ The decision was preceded by intense lobbying, and Michael Flynn received $100,000 from the firm RRB Strategies in October 2025. CBS News ↗

The timing matters: the work by Blair and LaCivita reported by NYT is tied to the October 2026 elections, meaning it came after the sanctions were lifted. The report therefore does not by itself prove that money bought the delisting. Democrats in the House of Representatives, however, make that claim about a $1.5–1.7 billion pipeline awarded to AAFS Infrastructure & Energy, a company founded on November 24, 2025, and led by Michael Flynn's brother and a former Trump lawyer. This is their accusation. A White House official told CBS it reflects "a pragmatic and forward-looking foreign policy" that prevented instability in the Balkans. N1 Bosna ↗

What this means for Bosnia and the EU

The US first imposed sanctions on Dodik in 2017 for undermining the Dayton Agreement. OCCRP ↗ After Sunday's elections, he said that without Trump's victory they would have been "politically dead," and thanked Putin. His SNSD won 38.93 percent in the RS assembly, and Cvijanović won the seat of the Serb member of the Presidency, with turnout of only 42 percent. Balkan Insight ↗

For Slovak readers, the catch is that a politician who thanks both Putin and Trump at once emerged strong from the elections, and Washington had previously lifted his sanctions. Balkan Insight ↗ The open question is what this means for the European Union, which treats Bosnia as a candidate country and has lost unified Western pressure over Dodik. This is our interpretation, not a conclusion of the sources. We have described the dispute over the pipeline and oversight of Bosnia in the article on the High Representative.

Limitations of this coverage

We could not access the NYT article itself, so we are reading it through the mediation of Bosnian and Croatian media (N1, Klix, Index.hr, HRT). The transcripts differ on who paid, and none state the firm or exact sums. We found no response from Blair or LaCivita. None of the texts claims this was illegal activity; foreign consulting is legal. The Democrats' pipeline accusations are a political interpretation, not the conclusion of an investigation. The original text is from an American newspaper, and regional outlets reproduce it according to their own editorial stances, which is why we added CBS and RFE/RL as independent confirmation of the sanctions part. The voice of Dodik's party is missing from this account.

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*Photo: Milorad Dodik in 2019. Mauro Bottaro, European Commission, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.*