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Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin

(107,838 posts) Sun Feb 16, 2020, 04:26 PM Feb 2020

Barr Protected Turkish Bank From Prosecution to Appease Erdogan

President Donald Trump took to Twitter on Friday to claim he has a “legal right” to interfere in Justice Department cases, but insisted that he has “so far chosen not to.” Anyone following Trump’s social media presence knows that not to be the case. He regularly tweets about business before the Justice Department and only last week praised Attorney General William Barr for softening the department’s sentencing guidance for Roger Stone, a Trump ally who was convicted of lying to Congress and obstruction of justice last year.

On Saturday, CNN turned up an egregious example of Barr running interference for Trump at DOJ, reporting that he “personally spearheaded” an effort last year to save Halkbank, a state-owned Turkish bank, from being indicted after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “pressed Trump in a bid to avoid charges.” Erdogan’s personal involvement complemented a months-long lobbying campaign by Turkey to avoid prosecution. As my colleague Dan Friedman has reported, Turkey spent millions of dollars “pressing the White House, the State Department, and Congress to ask the Justice Department not to prosecute the Turkish bank. The top lobbyist working on that case, Brian Ballard, extensively contacted Trump’s lawyer Jay Sekulow during that time.

Despite the immense lobbying effort, CNN reported that Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, wanted a criminal prosecution anyway and Halkbank was eventually indicted on October 15 as part of a scheme to evade US sanctions on Iran.

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The indictment against Halkbank came soon after. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who had been investigating Trump’s role in the Halkbank investigation, tweeted that CNN’s story “confirmed” his suspicions about Barr “was trying to orchestrate a sweetheart deal to please President Erdogan.”