BREAKING: Michael Flynn's business partner Bijan Kian was convicted on both charges

[CousinIT]

5. Bijan Rafiekian - He was Trump's transition advisor

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/23/trump-adviser-bijan-rafiekian-convicted-1428176

Trump transition adviser convicted on foreign-agent charges

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Bijan Rafiekian, a former business partner of Michael Flynn, on a pair of foreign-agent felony charges stemming from work the two men did for Turkish interests during the final months of the Trump presidential campaign in 2016.

The verdicts, returned by jurors in Alexandria, Va., after a weeklong trial and only about four hours of deliberation, amount to a belated courtroom victory for special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated the $600,000 lobbying and public relations contract at the heart of the case and then handed the matter off to other federal prosecutors after Flynn’s guilty plea to a false-statement charge in 2017.

Rafiekian, 67, faces up to 15 years in prison on the two felony counts against him: acting as an unregistered foreign agent in the U.S., and conspiracy to violate that law as well as to submit false statements to the Justice Department in a foreign-agent filing. Defendants are typically sentenced in accord with federal sentencing guidelines that result in far less than the maximum.

Flynn, who would go on to serve 24 days as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, had been expected to be a key witness at Rafiekian’s trial, offering testimony that would incriminate his former partner in a scheme to avoid disclosing that the Flynn Intel Group’s lobbying and public relations effort was actually directed and controlled by Turkish government officials.