John Coale also spoke and said that “together with his team, he helped lead to the release of three Poles and two Moldovans.”
He is the one who negotiates with Lukashenko for the release of political prisoners. Who is John Coale
It was Coale who was responsible for negotiations with Lukashenko on behalf of the Trump administration for many months. He has been cooperating with the American president for several years and is his envoy to Belarus, but previously he had not established himself as a diplomat.
For years, he was known in Washington and New York as a lawyer against large tobacco companies and weapons manufacturers. In the late 1990s, he was one of the authors of a court settlement between the largest tobacco companies and state authorities, according to which these companies were to pay as much as USD 386 billion. (the final amount turned out to be much lower) to cover health care costs in specific states.
In the 1990s and early decades of the 21st century, Coale was an outspoken Democrat. He donated large sums to the accounts of Democratic Party candidates, and supported Hillary Clinton in the 2008 party primaries. However, when she lost the nomination fight against Barack Obama, he switched support to the Republican candidate, John McCain. Behind the scenes, he also advised Sarah Palin (McCain's vice presidential candidate), and at one point he even tried to get Palin, who was hated by the Democrats, to establish contacts with Clinton and thus win over some Democratic voters to the Republican side. This plan had no chance of succeeding, and Obama became president.
When Clinton ran again in 2016, Coale initially supported another Democratic candidate, Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland, but he had no chance of winning the nomination and quickly withdrew from the election. Coale endorsed Clinton again.
In the meantime, Coale gradually moved away from supporting democratic politicians, and towards the right – as he said in an interview with Bloomberg – he was pushed by “wokeism”, which he accused the left side of the political scene of promoting.
Trump's special envoy to Belarus
In turn, negotiations in December 2025 resulted in the release of 123 political prisoners, which the Americans exchanged for the lifting of sanctions on the export of Belarusian potash.
After the end of those negotiations, Coale claimed that political prisoners still in Belarusian prisons (there were about a thousand of them at that time, including Andrzej Poczobut, who was released on Tuesday) could “be released in one large group in the coming months.”
