Turkey’s president is visiting the White House and it’s not hard to imagine that somewhere in an alternate universe, Turkey and not Ukraine is at the center of the foreign-policy scandal gripping Washington. Trump’s relationship with Recep Tayyip Erdogan has plenty of the same elements that have made his Ukraine diplomacy the subject of an impeachment inquiry: allegations of political interference in criminal cases and a former New York mayor running back-channel diplomacy with the help of some personal clients. So what’s Trump been up to in Turkey and how does it parallel the scandal over Ukraine?
Welcome to Rabbit Hole.
Golden boy: At the heart of the controversy over Trump’s relationship with President Erdogan is a criminal case. Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian gold trader, was charged in 2016 with helping Iran violate U.S. economic sanctions in New York by then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. The Turkish bank implicated in Zarrab’s sanctions-busting scheme, Halkbank, was under investigation by New York prosecutors for similar Iran sanctions offenses for years until the Southern District of New York finally indicted the bank in October.
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Turkey has long tried to get the U.S., under both the Obama and Trump administrations, to ditch the charges against Zarrab and the investigation of Halkbank. During a 2016 meeting with Joe and Jill Biden and Erdogan and his wife, Ermine, Erdogan pressed the vice president to fire the prosecutors involved in the Zarrab case. After all, Erdogan had done the same thing himself in 2013 when prosecutors there charged Zarrab and the case threatened to implicate family members of senior officials in Erdogan’s cabinet.
Erdogan’s pitch to Biden to intervene in a criminal case echoes exactly what Trump and his associates have accused the former vice president (without any evidence) of doing in Ukraine. Unlike Biden, however, Trump appears to have at least contemplated taking Erdogan up on the request.
Bitch, pleas: For years, the U.S. mostly ignored Erdogan’s pleas. That is, until Trump.
Just two months after the Trump administration came to office, prosecutors in the Zarrab case learned that the defendant had hired Trump pal and soon-to-be personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.
Rudy soon went into action, lobbying then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to intervene in the Zarrab case. Officials told The Washington Post that Trump also pressed Tillerson for help with the idea of using the Zarrab case as leverage to secure the return of an American pastor arrested by Turkish officials on bogus charges after a 2016 coup attempt in the country.
Call me, maybe: The efforts to kill the Zarrab case ultimately proved futile—Zarrab pleaded guilty in October 2017, served his sentence, and returned to his home country. But the case against Halkbank, which had featured prominently in the Zarrab case, carried on, much to Erdogan’s annoyance.
In an April phone call eerily similar to Trump’s infamous July 25 chat with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Erdogan pressed Trump to kill the investigation against Halkbank, according to Bloomberg News. And like the Ukraine call, Trump reportedly told the foreign leader that he’d put him in touch with Attorney General William Barr, who would handle the issue.
Like the Zarrab case, Halkbank ultimately couldn’t avoid charges. Federal prosecutors in New York indicted the firm for sanctions violations and money-laundering charges in October. The charges came just as Trump was getting flak from Republicans incensed over his abandonment of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Syria to a Turkish invasion. The timing of the charges in the midst of a presidential Twitter tirade about possible sanctions on Turkey raised questions about whether the Trump administration had used the case this time not as a carrot but a stick against the Turkish government.
'Stache house: In any event, the appearance of political interference in a criminal case is the main point of tangency between Trump’s Turkey and Ukraine scandals. The most important difference—and the one that explains their differing impact in Washington—is that the alleged quid pro quo in Ukraine involved a personal and political benefit for Trump. The payoff for Trump’s alleged criminal-justice interference for Erodgan, however, is less clear.
Of course, Trump has always had an affinity for strongmen cut from the same cloth as the increasingly authoritarian Erdogan. He’s called Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi “my favorite dictator,” and claimed he “fell in love” with Kim Jong Un
Trump’s fired national-security adviser has come out and raised the possibility of an improper motivation for his former boss’ Turkey policy. NBC News reported Tuesday that John Bolton told an audience at a private speech in New York that Trump’s fondness for Erdogan is likely due to either a personal or financial relationship on Trump’s part.
“I have a little conflict of interest because I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” then-candidate Trump said in 2015 about Trump Towers Istanbul, a luxury apartment building which licensed the Trump name. As The Daily Beast reported back in 2015, one of the most famous tenants of that building was Zarrab.
But Trump has a number of similar licensing deals in a number of different countries, none of which seem to have enjoyed the same inexplicable favor as Turkey in the administration’s foreign policy and it’s unclear what, if anything, Bolton could’ve been referring to.
