5 Points On The Huge Story About Trump And A Turkish Bank That's Flying Under The Radar
By: Matt Shuham (TPM)
The President and senior administration officials — including multiple attorneys general — repeatedly meddled in a federal investigation into the state-owned Turkish bank Halkbank
So we have conservative media going crazy
over a story about the Hunter Biden hard disk
that Sean Hannity had... but "lost".
It now appears that the author of the original
story is a person who... doesn't exist.
Meanwhile... the Trump Administration...
King Donald himself... is trying very hard to
cover up for a Turkish bank... and the media is silent...
BIDEN 2020
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
December 4, 2019, US President Donald Trump (L) and Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (R) leave the stage after the family photo to head to the plenary session at the NATO summit
Photo by PETER NICHOLLS / POOL / AFP
But the Times laid out a fresh chain of events that pulls back the curtain on the involvement of Trump officials and the President's business interests in Turkey, and may even amount to obstruction of justice.
Trump administration meddling in the case happened early and often.
The report describes several conservations in which the Turkish president pressed Trump in conversations to resolve the case and Trump responded receptively, despite the fact that doing so undermined his hard line on Iran.
In one case described by former National Security Advisor John Bolton, for example, Erdoan 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.
Former Acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker was another key player: After taking office in late 2018, Whitaker reportedly shot down U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Geoffrey Berman's request to file charges against the bank at the beginning of 2019 — just after Erdoan pressed Trump on the matter in a series of talks.
Whitaker reportedly wanted the case shut down entirely. Why? Per the Times: "Mr. Whitaker cited concern that charges against the bank might result in a threat to U.S. forces in Syria." Prosecutors didn't buy that.
The story sheds light on the fate of fired U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman?
Eventually, after Attorney General Bill Barr took office, Barr reportedly pressed SDNY prosecutors in June 2019 to let Halkbank off easy — and, just as importantly, to not charge several high-ranking individuals at the bank, a concession to Erdoan. Barr, per the Times, wanted to let off the suspected co-conspirators without any cooperation.
"This is not how we do things at the Southern District," Berman told Barr, per the Times.
Charges were eventually filed against the bank, in October 2019, but no additional individuals have been charged.
Berman was fired in June of this year. T he Times reported that the administration's "bitterness" over Berman's resistance to Barr's proposal did eventually contribute to the firing.
Trump and key allies' financial interests permeate the story.
Trump has admitted that he has a fondness for strong men and dictators, but that's not the only thing that may be motivating his behavior in this case.
For one thing, the Times noted, there's a Trump Tower in Istanbul. Erdoan was present at the ribbon-cutting. And Trump has reported receiving nearly $3 million in income from the country in recent years, the Times noted.
Then there's the Trump swamp surrounding the President: Rudy Giuliani, his personal lawyer, represented a gold trader involved in the Iran sanctions violations. Another Trump ally, former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, has acknowledged that he filed false information about his lobbying work for Turkey. And the firm of a key lobbyist and fundraiser in Trumpworld, Brian Ballard, was paid $4.6 million by Turkey over two years, the Times noted.
Ukraine redux.
This whole thing feels a bit like deja vu, as it involves many of the same players that testified or were otherwise connected to Trump's pressure campaign on Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelensky.
For one thing, John Bolton has narrated many of the exchanges between Trump and Erdoan in his book and interviews with the Times. Barr, Pompeo and Giuliani also played a substantial role in both scandals. So does key impeachment witness Fiona Hill.
"This was a relationship that was really important for the United States to handle," she told the Times of the Halkbank situation. "And at every turn, the president kept leaping in, and he wasn't following the strategic threads of the relationship."
'That does look like obstruction of justice.'
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 Erdoan 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."
He's not alone in those sorts of concerns. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) on Thursday called the Times' reporting "unreal."
As we learned during the Mueller probe, motivation is key when it comes to obstruction of justice: Why did the President do what he did? But the probe had another significant takeaway: The Justice Department's current policy against indicting Presidents only applies when they're in office.
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Author Behind Bogus Hunter Biden Report Isn't Real Either
As if this Hunter Biden smear campaign couldn’t be more clearly manufactured, Martin Aspen, the author behind a viral phony “intelligence” document about the Vice President’s son that made it to Trump’s inner circle, is not the Swiss security analyst he claims to be. Namely because Martin Aspen doesn’t exist. Even his profile picture is apparently computer-generated.
Hunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, addresses the virtual convention on August 20, 2020.
DNCC (Getty Images)
One of the institute researchers, Elise Thomas, said that the picture contains several telltale signs indicating that it’s a computer-generated fake—and a bad one at that. His ears are asymmetrical and his left eye appears to have two pupils upon closer inspection, the latter of which is a common error among computer-generated faces, she told the outlet.
“The most obvious tell was the irregular shape of the irises,” Thomas said. “The profile picture looks pretty convincing in the Twitter thumbnail, but when I popped it up into full view I was immediately suspicious.”
When she relayed this evidence to Ben Nimmo, the director of investigations at the analytics firm Graphika, he found another clear red flag.
“One of the things he and his team have figured out is that if you layer a lot of these images over the top of one another, the eyes align,” Thomas told NBC. “He did that with this image, and the eyes matched up.”
When reached for comment, Christopher Balding, a blogger and professor who was one of the first to post the document and took partial credit for writing it, confirmed to the outlet that Aspen doesn’t exist. According to Balding, Aspen is “an entirely fictional individual created solely for the purpose of releasing this report.”
The fake intelligence report was first posted in September to the anonymous blog Intelligence Quarterly, though the registered owner of that domain told NBC that he received the document from Balding. In an email to the outlet, Balding claimed that he wrote “small parts of the report” and that “the primary author of the report, due to personal and professional risks, requires anonymity.” He also said that Apple Daily, a Hong Kong-based tabloid, originally commissioned the document.
The document, which went viral on the right-wing internet one month before the New York Post reported on an unverified leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, draws an elaborate conspiracy theory between the Vice President’s son and the Chinese government. Far-right influencers have since latched onto these baseless claims to accuse Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden of being in cahoots with Beijing. President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and his former chief strategist Steve Bannon have also promoted the conspiracy theory, and former speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich shared a copy of the report on Twitter that Balding posted on his personal blog.
One of the loudest voices pushing these bogus claims, Fox News host Tucker Carlson, abruptly dropped the subject on Thursday, just one day after he devoted an entire segment of his show to supposedly damning documents against Biden that got lost in the mail on the way to their LA studio. He said he refused to be involved in “piling on [Hunter Biden] when he’s already down” and that he isn’t the one running for president, his father is. I’m honestly surprised Carlson didn’t pull something with how fast he backpedaled on that one.
I think the real story isn't that Trump is corrupt but that Barr has corrupted the DOJ. Trump is just one man whereas the DOJ is an institute that has been damaged.
I agree... and the same sort of "capture" of federal agencies has been operated throughout the Administration.
"The Deep State" did not exist until Trump invented it.
I think Barr's DOJ and other agencies are the Deep State only they aren't looking to subvert trmp...they're looking to subert American democracy
Cleaning out the trash will be Biden's first priority.
So a US Attorney gets fired because he tried to do his job? Could Barr's DOJ get any more corrupt?
I'm afraid the answer is probably yes.
That is really scary