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Prosecutors indicted Michael Flynn’s former business partner on charges that he was part of an illegal lobbying campaign for the Turkish government to get its hands on a dissident cleric in Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gulen. The indictment didn’t come from the special counsel’s office and it targeted Flynn’s business partner, Bijan Kian, not Flynn himself. Nonetheless, the charges flesh out an emerging portrait of foreign influence efforts during the 2016 campaign that go beyond just meddling from the Kremlin.
Serving two governments: The dates listed in Monday’s indictment tell their own story about how Flynn’s work for the Turkish government went on simultaneously with his work for the Trump government-in-waiting. Prosecutors say Flynn’s business partner Bijan Kian had a “detailed discussion with Flynn” about “what needs to be done”—presumably a reference to the lobbying proposal—on July 26, 2016, barely a week after the Republican party nominated Trump as its candidate. By September, the money for the lobbying started arriving in Flynn’s bank account. On election day in November, The Hill published Flynn’s op-ed bearing Kian’s Gulen talking points.
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Anyone notice a pattern? So during the 2016 election, a member of the Trump campaign was haggling over a big dollar contract that required the blessing of a foreign government with important business before the next administration. You could be forgiven for thinking it sounds familiar to another Trump associate who landed in Mueller’s crosshairs: Michael Cohen.
In his plea agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller, Cohen admitted that he lied to Congress about when planning for a Trump Tower in Moscow ended. Cohen later admitted that plans for the real estate deal hadn’t ended before the campaign, as he told Congress, but continued from January through June 2016 as Trump racked up Republican primary victories. As Mueller’s sentencing memo on Cohen laid out, that project “sought, and likely required, the assistance of the Russian government" to go through and would’ve been "highly lucrative for the Company and himself."
Not just Russia: Taken together, the charges against Cohen, Kian, and Flynn paint a broader picture of foreign influence during the 2016 campaign. Sure, Moscow could’ve dangled a Trump Tower project in front of Trump hoping to win his policy favor. And a whole lot of Russians reached out to the Trump campaign hoping to build bridges. But the Turkey lobbying charges show that the Kremlin wasn’t the only one hoping to buy influence. And as the Daily Beast’s Erin Banco has reported, forthcoming filings from the Mueller’s office in 2019 will likely show that a few Middle Eastern governments were also in the market for Trump associates then, too.
Not just Flynn: Kian allegedly did a little lobbying of his own on the Gulen issue independent of the work he had Flynn doing. In October 2016, Kian “visited with and lobbied a member of Congress, a Congressional staffer, and a state government official” about Gulen, according to the indictment. The goal of the meeting was to spur a congressional hearing about Gulen’s presence in the U.S. and convince legislators he was a threat who needed to leave the country.
Considering it anyway: The irony is that the Trump administration is reportedly still considering extraditing Gulen even though Flynn is no longer a part of the administration and his business partner has been charged with a crime over the Gulen scheme. In November, NBC News reported that Trump was considering booting Gulen from his compound in the Poconos and either extraditing him directly to Turkey or sending him to a third country like South Africa.
The move wouldn’t be because of any great fondness between Trump and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but reportedly because Trump is trying to get Turkey to ease up on his buddies in Saudi Arabia. Erdogan, no fan of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, has leaked a relentless barrage of gory details about the Saudi government’s murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. At least in the Turkish government’s telling, the leak hasn’t tanked the proposal. Turkey’s foreign minister said Trump told Erdogan the plan was still in the works when the two met during the G20 summit in Argentina.
Alternate history: Extraditing Gulen back to Turkey was not the policy area where Flynn and Ankara were in agreement. Way back in early 2016, the de facto capital of ISIS still stood in Raqqa, Syria surrounded by the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). Erdogan didn’t want the U.S.-backed SDF to lead the final assault on Raqqa because it considers the group an arm of Kurdish terrorists and likely to inflame Kurdish nationalism across the border in Turkey.
During the Trump transition, Flynn saw things Turkey’s way. McClatchy news reported in March 2017 that Trump’s incoming national security adviser told the Obama administration to hold off on arming the SDF for an assault on Raqqa, thereby delaying it. There’s no evidence that anyone from Turkey lobbied Flynn on the SDF issue, but the timing of his decision, shortly after receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby for Turkish government interests, offered at least the appearance of a conflict of interest. It’s not hard to imagine that, had Flynn not sealed his fate by lying to the FBI, the war against ISIS could’ve looked fairly different with him in office.
