At an event just before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland in July 2016, retired Gen. Mike Flynn tore into Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdogan during a speech about the dangers of radical Islam.
“There’s an ongoing coup going on in Turkey right now. … There’s a coup,” Flynn told the crowd. He explained that Turkey’s government “began to move towards Islamism. This is Turkey under Erdogan, who is actually very close to President Obama.”
Flynn then clearly praised the military coup, telling the crowd that Turkey’s military leaders, unlike the Erdogan regime, wanted to be seen as a secular power that recognized its NATO duties — in contrast to Erdogan’s regime. “That is worth clapping for,” he said as the crowd began to applaud.
Less than four months later, on Election Day, Flynn was sounding a very different note on Erdogan and his regime. “Our ally Turkey is in crisis and needs our support,” was the headline on Flynn’s op-ed at the Hill. In that piece, he attacked Obama for “keeping Erdoğan’s government at arm’s length — an unwise policy that threatens our long-standing alliance.”
Flynn argued in the op-ed that the United States needed to extradite Muslim cleric Fetuleh Gulen, whom Erdogan blamed for that July coup, back to Turkey.
“We need to see the world from Turkey’s perspective,” Flynn wrote.
Why the shift from applauding the coup to calling for the arrest of the coup’s alleged mastermind? Well, $530,000 from a Turkish consultant with ties to Erdogan’s government might have helped Flynn see the world from Turkey’s perspective.
The timing here makes this more than just an unsavory pay-to-play op-ed. Flynn was a close foreign policy adviser to the Trump campaign and clearly in line for a job in a Trump administration, and throughout the fall, he was in the pay of Turkish interests advancing the demands of the Turkish regime.
It’s not a slur, then, to call Flynn a foreign agent. It’s a clear-eyed assessment of the facts.
Flynn is in the news these days because the Justice Department has dropped charges against him. It sure looks like the FBI used dirty tactics to push him to plead guilty to lying about a Russian phone call. But before calling on President Trump to rehire Flynn, we should remember his work as a foreign agent.
Flynn was literally a registered foreign agent. After the 2016 election, his firm filed belated paperwork to declare he had been a foreign agent, advancing Turkey’s case against Gulen.
Flynn later admitted that even that belated paperwork covered up what Flynn knew, in the autumn of 2016, of Turkey’s involvement in his firm’s $530,000 contract.
A jury convicted Flynn’s business partner of being an undisclosed foreign agent and conspiring to cover it up. A federal judge has overturned that conviction, and maybe the judge was right that prosecutors didn’t prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt.
But if you look at all the evidence, it sure looks like Mike Flynn was a foreign agent.
Here’s the background:
A week after Trump became the Republican nominee for president, and about 10 days after Flynn applauded the coup attempt in Turkey, Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin reached out to Flynn’s consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group. Alptekin ran his own consulting firm in the Netherlands, but from the beginning, Alptekin made it very clear to Flynn and his partner Bijan Rafiekian, that he was acting on behalf of the Turkish government and wanted to hire Flynn and Rafiekian to advance Turkey’s cause.
As explained by federal judge Anthony Trenga: “On July 29, 2016, Alptekin stated by email that he had met with Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs Melvüt Çavusoglu, who was ‘interested in exploring this seriously’ … and would likely want to meet with Rafiekian and Flynn.”
Alptekin, as he worked to hire Flynn and Rafiekian, “described the discussions he was having with various Turkish officials about retaining [Flynn’s firm] for the purpose of promoting the extradition of the Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen.”
Alptekin only proceeded to offer a contract with Flynn after saying he got the “green light” from multiple Turkish government officials. Flynn Intel Group was supposed to provide research for a 60-minute documentary attacking Gulen. That never materialized, but Flynn did deliver the Election Day op-ed arguing for Gulen’s extradition.
So while Flynn’s client was technically Alpetkin’s firm, Inovo, it sure looks like Flynn knew he was doing the bidding of Turkey’s government and getting paid, through a middle man, by Turkey’s government.
In fact, before the contract was inked, Alptekin told Rafiekian he was setting up a meeting between Flynn and Turkish officials, including possibly even Erdogan. Flynn and Erdogan never met, but in September, Flynn did sit down in New York with Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu as well as Erdogan’s son-in-law.
So why didn’t Flynn and Rafiekian file as foreign agents at the time, as required by the Foreign Agents Registration Act? In their January filing, Flynn’s lawyer stated that Flynn considered his client to be a foreign corporation— Inovo, run by pro-Erdogan Turkish consultant Alptekin — rather than a foreign government, and thus Flynn didn’t need to register.
That filing by Flynn’s lawyer granted, in an understatement:
“Because of the subject matter of Flynn Intel Group’s work for Inovo BV, which focused on Mr. Fethullah Gulen, whose extradition is sought by the Government of Turkey, the engagement could be construed to have principally benefitted the Republic of Turkey.”
If the “principal beneficiary” of your consulting or lobbying work is a foreign government, you are, by law and by fact, a foreign agent. When you are brought on board to call for the arrest of a regime critic and the man cutting you the check repeatedly states regime officials are behind this contract, it seems pretty obvious that you are doing the work of the regime.
Rafiekian was charged and convicted for these FARA violations. Federal prosecutors said he and Flynn knowingly acted as foreign agents, making their failure to file in 2016 a violation and making their early 2017 letter a lie. Prosecutors dropped the FARA charges against Flynn as part of the now-defunct plea deal between the federal government and Flynn.
Rafiekian’s defense in his trial was that there were actually two negotiations the Flynn Intel Group held with Alpetkin. The first involved potential work for the Turkish government, through Alpetkin, to fight for the extradition of Gulen. That never happened, Rafiekian argued. After that, supposedly, the Flynn Intel Group pursued a contract simply with Alpetkin, who supposedly covered most of the $530,000 from his own pocket, to fight for the extradition of Gulen. That did happen.
So to believe Flynn wasn’t acting as a foreign agent, we are supposed to forget about all of Alpetkin’s emails indicating that the Turkish government was behind this campaign to punish a foe of the Turkish government.
Rafiekian in July 2019 was convicted of acting as a foreign agent without registering and of conspiring to cover up this work. Federal judge Trenga later overturned Rafiekian’s conviction, based largely on his specific reading of the word “agent,” but also noting that Rafiekian was less involved with the Turkey deal than Flynn was. Trenga wrote that the evidence of “Flynn’s involvement in the engagement paralleled, and in some aspects, exceeded that of Rafiekian.”
So there is room to argue that Flynn and Rafiekian weren’t really acting as Erdogan’s agents — that they were merely Erdogan’s lobbyists, or PR flacks.
In any event, Flynn, while purportedly working for Trump, was really in the pay of Turkish interests. One can disagree over whether “foreign agent” is the best term for what Flynn did, but it’s certainly a reasonable label.
