Turkish suspect donated to Clinton
Manhunt underway for alleged coup plotter enmeshed in complex political network
An Istanbul-based college professor, accused by the Turkish government of coordinating last month’s failed coup attempt, is at the center of a group of suspicious contributions in 2014 to a super PAC supporting Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
Adil Oksuz is the subject of a massive manhunt in Turkey.
Two years ago, an apparently fictitious company that Oksuz created made a $5,000 donation to the Ready for Hillary PAC, a group preparing for Clinton’s presidential campaign.
The Clinton campaign did not respond to USA TODAY’s questions about the donations. The campaign did not control the operations of the super PAC.
A company called Harmony Enterprises gave $5,000 to the PAC on June 27, 2014, campaign finance records show. Oksuz registered Harmony in New Jersey in 2010, according to state corporate records. It is the only campaign donation the company ever made. The company website sug- gests it is a paper manufacturing business, but the address listed on the corporate records is a used-car lot on a highway in Lodi, N.J. Harmony’s phone number is disconnected.
Foreign nationals are not allowed by law to make campaign donations, but foreign-owned companies are allowed to donate as long as they use U.S.-generated profits and the decision to donate is made by U.S. citizens who work for the company, according to election lawyer Charlie Spies. There is no public information showing whether the Harmony donation complied with campaign finance laws.
The donation was one of a halfdozen donations made to Ready PAC that same day totaling more than $62,000 from Turkish Americans in and around Lodi. Much of that money came from companies that no longer exist or may have never existed, or from donors who cannot be located,
campaign and corporate records show. Other donors in the group were also donors to the Clinton presidential campaign as well as the Clinton Global Initiative.
Most of the donors have clear ties to a religious movement led by a cleric named Fethullah Gülen, who lives on a compound in the Pennsylvania countryside.
The Turkish government claims Gülen runs a worldwide network trying to overthrow the regime. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly called on the United States to extradite Gülen. In the wake of the coup attempt July 15, the Turkish government declared Oksuz was a leader of the plot. He was briefly detained. He denounced the coup attempt, telling USA TODAY he had nothing to do with it.
The Gülen movement, also known as Hizmet, has been active in U.S. politics.
A network of Gülen-affiliated groups provided members of Congress and staff hundreds of free trips to Turkey, many of which USA TODAY discovered were secretly funded by Turkish entities in violation of congressional travel rules.
Gülen-linked Turkish Americans have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in suspicious gifts to U.S. political campaigns.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-N.H., re- turned $43,100 in Turkish-American donations last year after USA TODAY’s reporting indicated that some of the donors were unaware even of basic facts about Ayotte — such as the fact she is a woman.
The pattern re-emerges in the donations to Clinton’s PAC on June 27, 2014. Along with Oksuz’s Harmony Enterprises, a second business at the Lodi, N.J., address — Under 70 Auto Sales, also a used-car lot — donated $7,500 to Ready PAC that day. That company was owned by Abdulhadi Yildirim, whom Turkish news reports identify as Oksuz’s U.S.-based brother-in-law. Yildirim’s LinkedIn page lists him as “Executive Director at Harmony Enterprises.” The phone number at Under 70 Auto Sales is disconnected.
Bergen County land records indicate that a company called Sansun USA, owned by Abdulhadi Yildirim, sold the car lot for $510,000 the day before the donations were made.
Two other used-car lots on that same stretch of highway made donations to Ready PAC on the same day, totaling $12,500.
That same day in 2014, two leaders of the Gülen-affiliated Turkish Cultural Center of New York made large donations to Ready PAC.