Oh look, another impeachable offense
by digby
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| Erdogan bodyguards beating Kurdish protesters in Washington DC They also beat up members of the Secret Service |
As we all watch the impeachment hearings unfold while Trump entertains his bud Recep Tayyip Erdogan in the White House let’s keep in mind that Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg.
This is from the Daily Beast’s Rabbit Hole:
Golden boy: At the heart of the controversy over Trump’s relationship with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is a criminal case. Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian gold trader, was charged in 2016 with helping Iran violate U.S. sanctions in New York by then-U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. The Turkish bank implicated in Zarrab’s sanctions-busting scheme, Halkbank, was under investigation by New York prosecutors for similar Iran sanctions offenses for years until the Southern District of New York finally indicted the bank in October.
Turkey has long tried to get the U.S., under both the Obama and Trump administrations, to ditch the charges against Zarrab and the investigation of Halkbank. During a 2016 meeting with Joe and Jill Biden and Erdogan and his wife, Ermine, pressed the vice president to fire the prosecutors involved in the Zarrab case. After all, Erdogan had done the same thing himself in 2013 when prosecutors there charged Zarrab and the case threatened to implicate family members of senior officials in Erdogan’s cabinet.
Erdogan’s pitch to Biden to intervene in a criminal case echoes exactly what Trump and his associates have accused the former Vice President (without any evidence) of doing in Ukraine. Unlike Biden, however, Trump appears to have at least contemplated taking Erdogan up on the offer.
Bitch, pleas: For years, the U.S. mostly ignored Erdogan’s pleas. That is, until Trump.
Just two months after the Trump administration came to office, prosecutors in the Zarrab case learned that the defendant had hired Trump pal and soon-to-be personal attorney Rudy Giuliani.Rudy soon went into action, lobbying former of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to help him intervene in the Zarrab case. Officials told the Washington Post that Trump also pressed Tillerson for help with the idea towards using the Zarrab case as leverage to secure the return of an American pastor arrested by Turkish officials on bogus charges after a 2016 coup attempt in the country.
Call me, maybe: The efforts to kill the Zarrab case ultimately proved futile—Zarrab pleaded guilty in October of 2017, served his sentence, and returned to his home country. But the case against Halkbank, which had featured prominently in the Zarrab case, carried on, much to Erdogan’s annoyance.
In an April phone call eerily similar to Trump’s infamous July 25 chat with Ukainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Erdogan pressed Trump to kill the investigation underway against Halkbank, according to Bloomberg. And like the Ukraine call, Trump reportedly told the foreign leader that he’d put him in touch with Attorney General William Barr, who would handle the issue.
Like the Zarrab case, Halkbank ultimately couldn’t avoid charges. Federal prosecutors in New York indicted the bank on sanctions and money laundering charges in October. The charges came just as Trump was getting flak from Republicans incensed over his abandonment of U.S.-backed Kurdish forces in Syria to a Turkish invasion. The timing of the charges in the midst of a presidential Twitter tirade about possible sanctions on Turkey raised questions about whether the Trump administration had used the case this time not as a carrot but a stick against the Turkish government.
‘Stache house: In any case, the appearance of political interference in a criminal case is the main point of tangency between Trump’s Turkey and Ukraine scandals. The most important difference—and the one that explains their differing impact in Washington—is that the alleged quid-pro-quo in Ukraine involved a personal and political benefit for Trump. The payoff for Trump’s alleged criminal justice interference for Erodgan, however, is less clear.
I’m going to go with money on that one.
By the way, those bodyguards are back in town. Because:
U.S. prosecutors have quietly dropped charges against 11 of the 15 members of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s security detail who were criminally indicted in an assault on protesters last year during a visit by Erdogan to Washington.
Criminal charges related to the incident against four of the bodyguards were dismissed last November while the indictment against the seven others was withdrawn February 14, the day before outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Turkey to meet with Erdogan in a bid to mend ties between the two NATO allies.
The timing has fueled speculation that the decision to dismiss the indictment was made as a goodwill gesture to Erdogan, who saw the charges against his security personnel as an affront and called the indictment “a complete scandal.”
Why he needs all these “goodwill gestures remains a mystery.”
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