Trump urged Tillerson to help accused client of Giuliani
President Donald Trump pressed then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to help persuade the Justice Department to drop a criminal case against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader who was a client of Rudy Giuliani, according to three people familiar with the 2017 meeting in the Oval Office.
Tillerson refused, arguing that it would constitute interference in an ongoing investigation of the trader, Reza Zarrab, according to the people. They said other participants in the Oval Office were shocked by the request.
Tillerson immediately repeated his objections to then-Chief of Staff John Kelly in a hallway conversation just outside the Oval Office, emphasizing that the request would be illegal.
Neither episode has been previously reported, and all the people spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the conversations.
The White House declined to comment. Kelly and Tillerson declined to comment via representatives. Another person familiar with the matter said the Justice Department never considered dropping the criminal case.
Zarrab was being prosecuted in federal court in New York at the time on charges of evading U.S. sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program. He had hired former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Giuliani, who has said he reached out repeatedly to U.S. officials to seek a diplomatic solution for his client outside the courts.
The president’s request to Tillerson, which included asking him to speak with Giuliani, bears the hallmarks of Trump’s governing style, defined by his willingness to sweep aside the customary procedures and constraints of government to pursue matters outside normal channels. Tillerson’s objection came to light as Trump’s dealings with foreign leaders face scrutiny after a July 25 call with Ukraine’s president that has sparked an impeachment inquiry in the House.
It isn’t clear whether Trump considered his request for Tillerson to intervene to be improper or was just testing the bounds of what he could do as president on an issue that could provide diplomatic benefits while also helping Giuliani, a longtime supporter. The Oval Office meeting occurred in the second half of 2017, and Giuliani wasn’t the president’s personal lawyer at the time, as he is now.
This month, Giuliani initially denied that he ever raised Zarrab’s case with Trump but later said he might have done so. He said he’d been speaking with U.S. officials as part of his effort to arrange a swap of Zarrab for Andrew Brunson, a U.S. pastor jailed in Turkey who was later released in 2018.
“Suppose I did talk to Trump about it — so what? I was a private lawyer at the time,” Giuliani said. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe at some point I dropped his name in a conversation. Or maybe one of his people talked to him about it because I was trying to do a prisoner swap.”
Giuliani said he discussed the Zarrab case with State Department officials and disclosed that two years ago, although he declined to say if he ever spoke directly to Tillerson about the case, saying “you have no right to know that.”
At one point, the State Department under Tillerson got involved in discussions over possibly swapping Zarrab for Brunson, but the matter was eventually dropped because Turkey kept escalating its demands, according to another person familiar with the timeline of events.
Tillerson has said publicly that the president frequently asked him to do things that were illegal.
“So often, the president would say ‘Here’s what I want to do, and here’s how I want to do it,’ and I would have to say to him, ‘Mr. President, I understand what you want to do, but you can’t do it that way,”’ Tillerson said in an on-stage interview with Bob Schieffer in Texas last year. “It violates the law, it violates treaty. … And he just, he got really frustrated when we’d have those conversations.”
After Zarrab was arrested in early 2016, prosecutors accused the gold trader of using his network of companies to move money through the U.S. financial system to help Iran evade sanctions as the U.S. was stepping up economic pressure on the country.
Zarrab later pleaded guilty and testified against Mehmet Hakan Atilla, who headed international banking at state-owned Turkiye Halk Bankasii AS, known as Halkbank. Zarrab said Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan knew of and supported the laundering effort on behalf of Iran. Erdogan and other senior Turkish officials repeatedly rejected the accusations, saying they were fabrications.
Zarrab’s release was a high priority for Erdogan until he agreed to cooperate with prosecutors in New York.
Atilla was eventually convicted of helping Iran evade economic sanctions on billions of dollars of oil revenue and served 28 months in a U.S. prison before returning to Turkey in July to a hero’s welcome.
Zarrab was never sent back to Turkey. Once he agreed to testify, he was moved to a county jail for safety, and he stayed there until after Atilla’s trial was over. By then, Zarrab’s home and assets in Turkey had been seized by Erdogan.