“It is my deep conviction that this declaration against me has been based entirely on misinformation that Mr. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has gotten from a corrupted lobby process involving Edi Rama and George Soros, who are close friends,” Mr. Berisha said. “They have no evidence. None at all. If they announced one bit, I will be most thankful. But they have no concrete proof based on fact, not manipulation or slander.” Mr. Berisha, who has declared his innocence in a letter to Mr. Blinken, spoke with The Times roughly a week after the secretary of state declared the 76-year-old Albanian politician — one of the Balkan nation’s first post-communist presidents during the early 1990s and later its prime minister from 2005 to 2013 — persona non grata.