Flynn ex-associate charged with illegal lobbying
ALEXANDRIA, VA. — Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment Monday charging two business associates of Michael T. Flynn with acting as agents of the Turkish government, describing in remarkable detail how the three attempted to convince the U.S. to expel a rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Throughout the fall of 2016, while Flynn served publicly as a key surrogate and foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, prosecutors say he and business partner Bijan Kian took hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Turkish government to push for the extradition from the U.S. of dissident cleric Fethullah Gulen. Their efforts, prosecutors said, were directed by Kamil Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish businessman with close ties to the country’s leadership.
U.S. law enforcement has repeatedly rejected Turkey’s efforts to bring Gulen back to his home country — despite intense pressure from Erdogan, who believes the cleric responsible for a failed 2016 coup attempt despite Gulen’s denials. By prosecutors’ account, the foreign government found a powerful and enthusiastic ally in Flynn — one who was willing on the eve of the presidential election to pen an op-ed pushing for Gulen’s expulsion.
Flynn already admitted last year to lying about his business with the Turkish government and agreed to cooperate with law enforcement in a deal with Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team. That almost certainly helped produce charges against Kian and Alptekin. But the indictment Monday spells out for the first time how intimately Flynn was involved in the effort, which involved weekly conference calls to coordinate with Turkish officials.
Flynn’s piece in The Hill, which called Gulen a “radical cleric … running a scam,” was the culmination of a monthslong public and private lobbying campaign for which the Turkish government agreed to pay Flynn’s consulting firm $600,000, according to the indictment.
The money was funneled through a company run by Alptekin — who also arranged meetings and delivered guidance from his country’s leaders — to obscure that the effort was directed by Turkey, according to the indictment.