By: JV Staff
Another October surprise has insinuated its way into the controversial 2020 election season, according to published reports. On Thursday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration pressured federal prosecutors to settle an investigation into a state-owned Turkish bank suspected of violating U.S. sanctions law after President Trump received repeated pressure from Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Those who were briefed on the proposal had said that Erdogan had asked Trump to quash a Justice Department investigation into Halkbank over accusations of giving billions of dollars in gold and cash to Iran, according to a report on the TheHill web site.
In June of 2019, Attorney General William Barr asked the then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, to give the Turkish bank the option of paying a fine in order to avoid having an indictment leveled against them, according to the report in the NY Times.
The Hill reported that Barr also reportedly asked Berman to end the investigation into the bank.
“This is completely wrong,” Berman later told lawyers in the Justice Department (DOJ), according to people familiar with the matter who spoke with the Times. “You don’t grant immunity to individuals unless you are getting something from them — and we wouldn’t be here.”
The Times added that six months before this meeting, Matthew Whitaker, the acting attorney general who ran the DOJ from November 2018 until Barr took over in February 2019, rejected Berman’s request to file criminal charges against the bank, according to two lawyers involved in the investigation, according to the Hill report.
The rejection came shortly after Erdoğan repeatedly asked Trump in talks from November to December 2018 to end the Halkbank investigation, the Times reported.
In a report that appeared on the Mother Jones web site it indicated that “in December 2015, Donald Trump, then a presidential candidate, made a casual admission. “I have a little conflict of interest ’cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump told his interviewer, Steve Bannon, who would later take over Trump’s presidential campaign, on a Breitbart radio show. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers—two towers, instead of one, not the usual one, it’s two.”
According to a report on the Talking Points Memo web site, in one case described by former National Security Advisor John Bolton, for example, Erdoğan handed Trump a memo filed in the case by Halbank’s lawyers. The President glanced through it and promptly replied, “Well, it looks convincing to me.” Later, after a call between the leaders, the Justice Department told federal prosecutors in New York that Cabinet members including Mike Pompeo and Steven Mnuchin, as well as the main Justice Department itself, would be getting involved in the case.
The TPM report said that one quote from Bolton points to a potential post-presidential issue for Trump. Acknowledging that he did not know the details of Barr’s attempts to get SDNY prosecutors to reach a “global settlement” in the Halkbank case, Bolton said the dynamics between Trump and Erdoğan disturbed him.
“It was so idiosyncratic, so personal to Trump in the pursuit of personal relationships, that it was very dangerous,” Bolton said. “And it does look like obstruction of justice.”
The Times said the reporting on the internal conversations came from interviews with more than two dozen current and former Turkish and U.S. government officials, lobbyists and lawyers with direct knowledge of the interactions, as was reported by TheHill.com web site.
The Hill reported that while the DOJ initially declined to provide a comment to the Times, spokeswoman Kerri Kupec later gave a statement saying that Barr had supported indicting the bank last fall.
“The attorney general instructed S.D.N.Y. to move ahead with charges and approved the charges brought,” she said, referring to the federal prosecutors in Manhattan.
