# Turkish Influence > [!note] Scope > This page covers **Turkey's influence operations directed at the United States** — lobbying, funding, information operations and elite capture. > For the country itself see [[Turkey]]. Turkey holds a founding place in the Trump-era foreign-influence record: the [[Michael Flynn]] affair was the **original Trump-world FARA scandal** — an incoming National Security Adviser secretly on a foreign government's payroll while advising a presidential campaign, publishing his client's talking points in an American newspaper on Election Day itself. A decade on, the file has matured into something larger: a NATO ally run by a strongman whom [[Donald Trump]] openly admires, pressing a personalized, leader-to-leader channel to dissolve the three legal barriers between it and full rehabilitation — the [[Halkbank]] prosecution, [[CAATSA]] sanctions, and the F-35 ban. Turkey's method is distinct from the Gulf checkbook and the Albanian retainer: it negotiates state-to-state, but through the president personally, offering deals and flattery where its neighbors offer investment pledges — and as of the July 2026 NATO summit, the method is visibly working. ## The Flynn Affair: The Original FARA Scandal The template case for undisclosed foreign agency at the top of American politics. | Date | Event | |------|-------| | **August 2016** | [[Flynn Intel Group]] — the consulting firm of retired Lt. Gen. [[Michael Flynn]], then candidate Trump's top national-security surrogate — signs a **$600K contract** (of which **$530K was paid**) with **Inovo BV**, a Dutch shell company of Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin, to run a campaign against exiled cleric [[Fethullah Gülen]], whom Erdoğan blamed for the July 2016 coup attempt | | **September 2016** | Flynn meets Turkish ministers at a New York hotel; former CIA director James Woolsey, present at the meeting, later said the group discussed removing Gülen from the U.S. outside the extradition process — a claim widely reported as a rendition discussion; no charges were ever brought on it | | **November 8, 2016 — Election Day** | *The Hill* publishes Flynn's op-ed calling Gülen a "radical cleric" and urging his extradition — prosecutors later showed the piece was reviewed by his Turkish clients in draft; his partner emailed Alptekin that it was "very high profile exposure one day before the election" and that "a promise made is a promise kept" | | **November 2016 – February 2017** | Flynn becomes National Security Adviser without disclosing the Turkish engagement — a paid agent of a foreign power sitting atop the NSC | | **March 7, 2017** | After his Russia-related firing, Flynn Intel Group files a **retroactive FARA registration** admitting its work "could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey" | | **July 2019** | Flynn's partner **Bijan Rafiekian (Kian)** is convicted by a federal jury of conspiring to act as an undisclosed agent of Turkey; the verdict is overturned by the trial judge, then **reinstated on appeal** in 2021 | The Turkey engagement is the half of the Flynn story that his Russia-dominated public profile obscures — and it is arguably the more structurally important half, because it demonstrated the mechanism (undisclosed foreign retainer → policy advocacy inside a campaign) that FARA exists to expose. Flynn escaped Turkey-related charges through his Mueller cooperation deal and was pardoned in November 2020. ## Halkbank: The Sanctions-Evasion Case That Won't Die **[[Halkbank]]**, the Turkish state-owned bank, was indicted federally (SDNY, 2019) for a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade U.S. sanctions on [[Iran]] — laundering Iranian oil revenue through gold trades and falsified food shipments, the scheme at the center of the earlier Reza Zarrab and Mehmet Hakan Atilla prosecutions. The case is Erdoğan's most persistent personal ask across both Trump terms: - Erdoğan pressed Trump directly to kill the case during the first term; reporting by SDNY's own former U.S. Attorney ([[Geoffrey Berman]]) described extraordinary DOJ pressure to go easy on the bank. - The bank fought U.S. jurisdiction to the Supreme Court twice, losing its immunity claim in 2023 and again on remand. - At the **September 25, 2025 White House meeting**, Turkish officials proposed **settling the case for roughly $100 million** — a fraction of the billions laundered. Halkbank makes the Turkey file unique in this folder: the foreign ask is not a policy or a weapons system but the **shutdown of a specific U.S. criminal prosecution** — influence aimed directly at the justice system. ## The Erdoğan Channel in Term Two Erdoğan's September 25, 2025 White House visit — his first in six years — and its aftermath mark the rehabilitation arc: | Element | Detail | |---------|--------| | **The asks** | Lift [[CAATSA]] sanctions (imposed 2020 over Turkey's Russian S-400 purchase), readmit Turkey to the **F-35 program**, resolve [[Halkbank]] | | **The deliverables offered** | A major **Boeing aircraft purchase**, a **civil-nuclear cooperation deal** signed at the meeting, F-16 modernization purchases | | **The atmospherics** | Trump praised Erdoğan as a friend; the leader-to-leader channel explicitly bypassed the congressional and interagency processes where Turkey's problems live | | **July 2026 NATO summit** | At the [[NATO Summit Ankara 2026]] — hosted in Turkey's capital — Trump announced he plans to lift the sanctions blocking F-35 sales — "We're going to be taking the sanctions off, OK?" — over bipartisan congressional pushback, with critics noting the S-400s remain on Turkish soil. The same summit produced Trump's trade-cutoff outburst against [[Spain]] and the resumption of strikes on Iran. | The pattern rhymes with [[Egypt]]'s "favorite dictator" dynamic — personal strongman rapport converting into policy outcomes that the institutional process had blocked for years — but with higher stakes: an alliance-grade weapons platform and the integrity of a federal prosecution. ## The Commercial Substrate Trump's Turkey entanglement predates his politics: **Trump Towers Istanbul** (licensed 2012) made Turkey home to one of his earliest major foreign licensing deals, and in 2015 he said of Turkey, "I have a little conflict of interest, because I have a major, major building in Istanbul." The [[Trump Organization]]'s licensing partner, Doğan Holding, sits in the crosshairs of Erdoğan's domestic business purges — giving Ankara standing leverage over a revenue stream that reaches the president's family. It is the same family-business channel documented at larger scale in the Gulf files and in [[Albania]] and [[Serbia]], operating here since before the first campaign. ## The Lobbying Layer Beyond the Flynn case, Turkey sustains a conventional FARA operation — multiple firms, embassy-directed advocacy on Halkbank, CAATSA, F-35 readmission, and suppression of Armenian-genocide recognition and Kurdish-policy criticism — tracked in aggregate in the [[FARA Registrant Map]]. Ankara's distinguishing habit is supplementing K Street with informal, personality-based channels: the Flynn retainer in 2016, and the direct Erdoğan–Trump line thereafter. ## Significance Turkey earns a top-tier file on three grounds. Historically, the Flynn affair is the foundational demonstration that Trump-world's foreign-influence exposure was transactional from the start — a foreign government bought the campaign's chief national-security voice for $530K and got its talking points into print on Election Day. Structurally, the Halkbank ask makes Turkey the clearest case of foreign influence targeting a U.S. criminal prosecution rather than a policy. And currently, the 2025–26 rehabilitation arc — nuclear deal, Boeing purchase, F-35 sanctions reversal announced at a NATO summit — shows the leader-to-leader channel delivering what a decade of institutional lobbying could not. The Turkey file is where the vault's authoritarian-affinity thread ([[Hungary]], [[Egypt]]) and its transactional-influence thread (the Gulf files) converge in a single NATO ally. ## See Also - [[Michael Flynn]] - [[Fethullah Gülen]] - [[Halkbank]] - [[CAATSA]] - [[Recep Tayyip Erdoğan]] - [[FARA]] - [[FARA Registrant Map]] - [[Hungary]] - [[Egypt]] - [[NATO Summit Ankara 2026]] - [[Foreign Influence Ecosystem]]