If America decides to re-elect this corrupt, authoritarian administration, expect to see a lot more of this:
Barr personally attempted to head off prosecution of Halkbank in a suspected multibillion-dollar scheme to evade sanctions against Iran, CNN reported, citing “a person familiar with the discussions.” He reportedly tried to steer a settlement that would have allowed the bank to dodge an indictment shortly after Erdogan pressed Trump for help last spring. Barr ultimately failed to stop an indictment, however. U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman of the Southern District of New York insisted on criminal prosecution, CNN reported.
The CNN account appears to ratify a Bloomberg report from last year. After Erdogan pressed Trump for help with the Halkbank case in April, the president told the Turkish leader that Barr and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin would handle it, sources told Bloomberg in an article in October.
Mnuchin’s office has confirmed to Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) that Treasury officials became involved in the case at Trump’s direction, according to a letter Wyden wrote last week to Barr. Officials also revealed that Trump, senior White House adviser Jared Kushner and Mnuchin met with Turkey’s finance minister and Erdogan’s son-in-law in the Oval Office in April, though they did not reveal details of the meeting, according to Wyden.
Barr directed Halkbank officials how to work out a deal, Bloomberg reported. But the bank failed to do so and was ultimately charged in October with fraud, money laundering, and sanctions offenses by Berman’s office.
The charges followed Turkey’s invasion of Syria and political blowback for Trump. The indictment was filed a day after Trump imposed sanctions on Turkey for the Syria incursion.
Former national security adviser John Bolton expressed concerns last year that Trump was doing personal favors for the “autocratic” leaders of Turkey and China, according to draft of a manuscript for his upcoming book obtained by The New York Times.
I just want to point out the human devastation that Trump’s inexplicable desire to give Erdogan everything he desires has wrought:
This piece by Trudy Rubin tell the tale:
The most urgent Syrian refugee crisis of the entire nine-year civil war has exploded since mid-December, with the potential to further destabilize Europe, or create islands of human misery from which jihadis can recruit.
Nine hundred thousand desperate men, women, and children have flooded toward the Turkish border — two-thirds of them since December — as Russian and Syrian warplanes repeatedly bomb hospitals and other civilian sites, as well as fleeing families on the road — war crimes that an indifferent world is ignoring.
U.S. and international aid agencies are scrambling to get humanitarian assistance across the Turkish-Syrian border in the dead of winter. Sheltering in tents, cars, mosques, and schools, many of these refugees had previously fled their homes in rebel-held cities and towns besieged by Syrian government forces. Now they have come to the end of the road, as the Syrian regime seeks to retake the northwestern province of Idlib, one of the last rebel-held areas.
But the ugly repercussions of Syrian and Russian war crimes in Idlib will be felt all the way to the United States…President Donald Trump’s eagerness to pull out U.S. troops from the Kurdish region of Northeast Syria no doubt emboldened Moscow and Damascus to do their worst in Idlib…
This is a moment when the United States — if its diplomacy were functional — should be pressing its supposed NATO ally Turkey and Russia to agree to a ceasefire in Idlib.
It is not functional, of course. And Trump thinks this sort of thing is just something shithole countries do. He’s happy to let his buddies Erdogan and Putin do their worst. Those kids should have been born American then maybe they’d deserve to be helped. Well, if they were smart enough to be white anyway.