The president and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have been doing the junior prom slow-dance thing ever since 2016
By Charles P. Pierce Oct 29, 2020
In keeping with our Thursday theme of international financial bunco, the New York Times brings us yet another story about the administration*’s devotion to foreign strongmen and the president*s devotion to shady money, to say nothing of another tale of Attorney General William Barr’s slavish devotion to his employer. Souls For Sale, three for a quarter.
The top federal prosecutor in Manhattan, Mr. Berman had traveled to Washington in June 2019 to discuss a particularly delicate case with Attorney General William P. Barr and some of his top aides: a criminal investigation into Halkbank, a state-owned Turkish bank suspected of violating U.S. sanctions law by funneling billions of dollars of gold and cash to Iran. For months, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey had been pressing President Trump to quash the investigation, which threatened not only the bank but potentially members of Mr. Erdogan’s family and political party.
When Mr. Berman sat down with Mr. Barr, he was stunned to be presented with a settlement proposal that would give Mr. Erdogan a key concession. Mr. Barr pressed Mr. Berman to allow the bank to avoid an indictment by paying a fine and acknowledging some wrongdoing. In addition, the Justice Department would agree to end investigations and criminal cases involving Turkish and bank officials who were allied with Mr. Erdogan and suspected of participating in the sanctions-busting scheme.
The president* and Erdogan have been doing the junior prom slow-dance thing ever since 2016. And you may recall that Berman was the U.S. Attorney who refused to resign back in June when Barr announced his resignation for him, forcing the president* to fire him and thereby look as though he was hiding even more sleazy behavior. Now, it appears, we know what that behavior was.
It was not the first time Mr. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York, had fended off attempts by top Justice Department political appointees to disrupt the Halkbank investigation. Six months earlier, Matthew G. Whitaker, the acting attorney general who ran the department from November 2018 until Mr. Barr arrived in February 2019, rejected a request from Mr. Berman for permission to file criminal charges against the bank, two lawyers involved in the investigation said. Mr. Whitaker blocked the move shortly after Mr. Erdogan repeatedly pressed Mr. Trump in a series of conversations in November and December 2018 to resolve the Halkbank matter.
And it also appears that some of the rodents scurrying down the ratlines stopped to add their two cents as well.
At the White House, Mr. Trump’s handling of the matter became troubling even to some senior officials at the time…Former White House officials said they came to fear that the president was open to swaying the criminal justice system to advance a transactional and ill-defined agenda of his own.
The resume-laundering when the hammer finally falls is going to be a sight to see.
Source: https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a34523893/trump-erdogan-turkish-bank-investigation/