Turks refuse to meet w highest level envoys ever sent by USA

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Turks refuse to meet w highest level envoys ever sent by USA

Postby Jerky » Wed Oct 16, 2019 11:22 am

A shocking development and an abject humiliation.

Pence, Pompeo and others left knocking on a door that won't open for them, with their dicks in their hands and idiotic looks on their faces.

Historically unprecedented.

J.
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Re: Turks refuse to meet w highest level envoys ever sent by

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 16, 2019 11:55 am

well there's a little problem with a Turkish bank to clear up, you want to talk about that come on down and we will have ourselves a chat

there is not a scandal that Giuliani is not part of

and he tried to send Fethullah Gulen back to Turkey after Flynn was arrested and could not go through with his kidnapping plans

multibillion-dollar scheme to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran


Adam Klasfeld

BREAKING: SDNY charges Turkish state-run bank Halkbank in sanctions violations in connection with the record-breaking money-laundering scheme to Iran executed by gold trader Reza Zarrab.

Zarrab was the client whose release Giuliani pushed for between Trump and Erdogan.
Image
1:49 PM - 15 Oct 2019


This is how the 45-page indictment begins. Uploading it now.

Look out for a story on this soon at @CourthouseNews.

Image

SDNY prosecutors charge the bank with six counts, including money laundering, bank fraud, and conspiracy counts.

Doc: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/press ... 1/download

Since this was believed to be a multibillion-dollar conspiracy, the fine to the Turkish state-run bank could be quite large.

Background, from May 2018:

https://www.courthousenews.com/turkish- ... ing-in-ny/

Notable: Halkbank indictment signed only by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman--no relation to the judge--who was Giuliani's partner at the firm Greenberg Traurig.

Halkbank case is an offshoot of case of Zarrab, a Giuliani client.

No names of the line prosecutors from the Zarrab case appear on the Halkbank indictment.
However, the SDNY press release notes that the same prosecutors from the Zarrab case will continue with the Halkbank one.

They’re just not on the original filing. So there’s some continuation.
Image
https://twitter.com/KlasfeldReports/sta ... 9218581506


Turkish Markets Brace for Banker’s Sentencing in NY
ADAM KLASFELDMay 11, 2018
MANHATTAN (CN) – As Hakan Atilla learns what sentence he must serve for helping Iran launder billions of dollars, Istanbul’s fragile markets will watch closely Wednesday for cues about the fate of the Turkish banker’s former employer.

Atilla had served as one of 13 managers at Halkbank, a Turkish government-run institution implicated in massive violations of U.S. sanctions, before his arrest last year at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport.

With his conviction in January on sanctions violations, Turkey experts from here to Istanbul expect another shoe to drop soon for Halkbank.

“I think the markets are prepared for a fine of some sort from U.S. Treasury, but how much?” Asli Aydintasbas, a senior fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said in a phone interview. “That’s the question.”

The question could carry profound implications for the future of Turkey’s economy, which has been roiled by a recent coup attempt against the country’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his fevered hunt for supposed enemies under the country’s State of Emergency.

At Atilla’s trial, U.S. prosecutors could only estimate the scale of the Halkbank money-laundering scheme. In one sentencing brief, for example, they noted testimony from gold trader Reza Zarrab, who had been a key witness against Atilla, that he funneled “a few billion” euros in Iranian oil proceeds through the bank.

“The trial record also showed that the scheme involved both billions of dollars’ worth of gold transactions … and billions of dollars’ worth of fraudulent food transactions,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Lockard wrote in a memorandum.


Taken from federal surveillance footage, this still image shows U.S. authorities frisking Mehmet Hakan Atilla after his arrest on March 27, 2017. A former manager at the Turkish state-run bank Halkbank, Atilla is being tried in New York over transactions that flouted sanctions against Iran.
How U.S. regulators tabulate the damage, Aydintasbas said, could send Turkey’s markets into turmoil.

“So, if we’re talking about $1 or $2 billion, $3 billion, I think the markets have prepared for something like that,” she said. “But if we’re talking about $8, $9, $10 [billion], that would send shockwaves through the Turkish economy at a time when things are looking very, very fragile, particularly in terms of liquidity.”

Experts on U.S.-Turkish relations in both countries believe that is what Erdogan has feared most from the start of the Iran sanctions case.

Insisting upon deep cover, a U.S. Treasury official refused to decline comment on the record.

“Treasury does not comment on investigations, including to confirm whether one exists,” the official said.

The Erdogan Establishment
New York-based expert Steven Cook, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow who wrote the book “False Dawn,” noted that the case against Atilla here traces its origins to a 2013 corruption scandal implicating Erdogan’s political allies.


Reza Zarrab, a 34-year-old gold trader who was charged in the U.S. for evading sanctions on Iran, is pictured in this Dec. 17, 2013, photo surrounded by the media at a courthouse in Istanbul. (Depo Photos via AP)
One of the targets of that corruption investigation was Zarrab, whose arrest in the United States prompted years of lobbying by Erdogan’s government for his release.

“I think it’s clear that Reza Zarrab sat at this nexus of influence between the [Turkish] government and this world of corruption and sanctions-busting, and he was at arm’s length,” Cook said. “He was the plausible deniability.”

Erdogan cast the corruption probe as an attempted “judicial coup” organized by an Islamic cleric named Fethullah Gulen, now a U.S. resident living in self-imposed exile in rural Pennsylvania. Abandoning their onetime alliance, Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party accused the Gulenist movement’s followers of creating a shadow government inside its police, judiciary and academia.

The shift to archenemy status led to a purge of thousands of civil servants, effectively dismantling the corruption investigation.

Zarrab’s arrest in Miami some three years later revived the old allegations, much to the noticeable frustration of the Erdogan’s administration.

”Because [Zarrab] had knowledge of all these kinds of corrupt practices … Erdogan fought so hard, fought so hard to prevent this trial from happening,” Cook explained.

When his entreaties to two U.S. presidential administrations failed to secure Zarrab’s release, Erdogan last year retained high-profile allies of President Donald Trump for the gold trader’s legal team.


President-elect Donald Trump, right, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani pose for photographs on Nov. 20, 2016, as Giuliani arrives at the Trump National Golf Club Bedminster clubhouse in Bedminster, N.J. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster, File)
Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who had been Trump’s campaign surrogate, and ex-Attorney General Michael Mukasey both joined Zarrab’s legal team and attempted to negotiate a prisoner swap between Washington and Ankara.

When that fizzled, Zarrab struck a deal with U.S. prosecutors to take the witness stand against Atilla in New York. But the gold trader’s testimony also implicated high-ranking Turkish ministers in bribes of tens of millions of dollars, and he accused Erdogan of personally ordering sanctions-busting trades.

For Cook, the Turkish government’s failure to avert a trial showed that they cannot influence U.S. justice.

“From what I understand of the post-trial deliberations and the penalty phase, those lawyers working for the Department of Justice are once again insulated from the politics of the U.S.-Turkey relationship and diplomacy,” he said.

Turkey’s deeply polarized society has helped Erdogan navigate the domestic political fallout so far.

“Those who support the government – about 50 percent of the population, give or take around 5, 6, 7 percent – are going to believe the government’s narrative that this was politicized, that the United States is somehow in cahoots with Fethullah Gulen in trying to change the regime in Turkey,” Cook said.

“Then, there’s the other part of the Turkish citizenry who were paying attention to the trial, because they were keenly interested in the evidence that did emerge in the trial and were keenly interested in the process of the trial and who felt that this was the only place that they could have recourse,” he continued.

Overall, however, Cook said, Erdogan has weathered the storm.

“There is a large number of people in Turkey who believe these stories,” he noted. “So, he’s safe politically, but on the economic front, that’s a different story and that’s what they are worried about.”



Pressure on Press Rights
Erdogan mitigated the political fallout of the revelations, in part, because of his tight control of Turkish media.


Under the watchful eye of a Turkish army soldier standing guard outside a court, protesters demonstrate on Sept. 11, 2017, against a trial of journalists and staff from the Cumhuriyet newspaper, accused of aiding terror organizations. The journalists and staff from Cumhuriyet newspaper being tried in Silivri, Turkey, are staunchly opposed to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. One of the protesters holds a Turkish flag with an image of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. (AP Photo/Emrah Gurel)
On top of her fellowship at the European Council on Foreign Relations, Aydintasbas has been a writer for Turkey’s oldest serious newspaper Cumhuriyet, a publication that Erdogan’s prosecutors targeted for a string of prosecutions denounced by international press-freedom monitors.

“There wasn’t much in mainstream media,” the veteran Turkish journalist said of the Zarrab case.

“I think it was pretty much confined to Twitter and social media,” she continued. “There were a couple of Turkish journalists following it over there, but they haven’t fully reported the details, particularly those working for mainstream outlets haven’t fully reported all the details.”

“I would say, all in all, there was a bit of a blackout on the case,” she said.

Reporters Without Borders ranked Turkey 155th out of 180 nations in its most recent press-freedom index.

Slamming the Turkish government’s anti-media “witch hunt,” the Paris-based watchdog chronicled how Turkey shut down dozens of news outlets and became the world’s leading jailer of journalists.

Erdogan’s anti-press clampdown may have muted embarrassing revelations inside his country, but the international criticism it engendered has made some investors queasy.

“Turkish banks are not having an easy time borrowing,” she said. “It’s not like a decade ago, when Turkey was a rising star as an emerging market – also, an exemplary country so to speak as an emerging democracy.”


Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan gestures as he delivers a speech during a rally for his ruling Justice and Development (AKP) Party in Mersin, southern Turkey, on March 10, 2018.(Kayhan Ozer/Pool Photo via AP)
Erdogan had been Turkey’s prime minister at the time, a position he served from 2003 and 2014, the year he became the nation’s president.

“Now, things are looking very different in that sequence,” she said.

Cook, the New York-based Turkey expert, noted that Atilla’s prosecution came to a head at a sensitive time for Erdogan, who is seeking a second term in office.

“In the end, it was not really about, for Erdogan, the revelations from the United States court that would come out publicly,” he said. “I think it was the fear that it would result in actions from the United States and the U.S. Treasury and the U.S. Justice Department that would harm the Turkish economy that would in turn harm him as he stands for election again scheduled in late 2019.”

Shortly after the interview with Cook, Erdogan kneecapped the opposition by fast-tracking elections for June 24. One of his rivals, Kurdish opposition leader Selahattin Demirtas, is currently in prison. Republican People’s Party (CHP) candidate Muharrem Ince, the main opposition leader, has complained about lack of media coverage. Erdogan has refused to debate him.
https://www.courthousenews.com/turkish- ... ing-in-ny/



Zachary Basu
22 mins ago
Turkish bank tied to Giuliani client indicted in money laundering scheme

Reza Zarrab. Photo: Ozan Kose/AFP/Getty Images
A Turkish bank known as Halkbank has been charged in a 6-count indictment for "fraud, money laundering, and sanctions offenses related to the bank’s participation in a multibillion-dollar scheme to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran," federal prosecutors in New York announced on Tuesday.

Why it matters: Bloomberg reported last week that in 2017, President Trump pressed former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to help convince the Justice Department to drop a sanctions evasion case against an Iranian-Turkish gold trader named Reza Zarrab — a client of Rudy Giuliani's whose case was a high priority for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Zarrab later pleaded guilty and testified against the CEO of Halkbank, alleging that "Erdogan knew of and supported the laundering effort on behalf of Iran."

"Halkbank, a Turkish state-owned bank, allegedly conspired to undermine the United States Iran sanctions regime by illegally giving Iran access to billions of dollars’ worth of funds, all while deceiving U.S. regulators about the scheme. This is one of the most serious Iran sanctions violations we have seen, and no business should profit from evading our laws or risking our national security."
— Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers
https://www.axios.com/halkbank-turkish- ... 89461.html



Anna Massoglia


Turkey's govt-owned bank Halkbank paid $2M+ to Trump-tied foreign agents & lobbyists since its deputy chief was arrested over a money laundering scheme with Rudy Giuliani's client allegedly funneling Iran millions of dollars to secretly evade sanctions http://crp.org/bplob
https://twitter.com/annalecta/status/11 ... 5659845632





Kyle Griffin

Giuliani "brought up Gulen so frequently with Trump during visits to the W.H. that one former official described the subject as Giuliani's 'hobby horse.' He was so focused on the issue ... W.H. aides worried that Giuliani was making the case on behalf of the Turkish government."
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Turks refuse to meet w highest level envoys ever sent by

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 16, 2019 4:52 pm

OMG

Image
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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Re: Turks refuse to meet w highest level envoys ever sent by

Postby seemslikeadream » Wed Oct 16, 2019 6:57 pm

Trump told Erdogan that Barr and Mnuchin would handle his pleas to avoid charges against Halkbank over sanctions evasion. Barr pushed them to settle for a fine. but the months-long effort ended with criminal charges Tuesday.

Trump-Erdogan Call Led to Lengthy Quest to Avoid Halkbank Trial
Nick Wadhams
Donald Trump shakes hands with Recep Tayyip Erdogan the White House in Washington on May 16, 2017.

President Donald Trump assigned his attorney general and Treasury secretary to deal with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s repeated pleas to avoid charges against one of Turkey’s largest banks, according to two people familiar with the matter.

In an April phone call, Trump told Erdogan that William Barr and Steven Mnuchin would handle the issue, the people said. In the months that followed, no action was taken against Halkbank for its alleged involvement in a massive scheme to evade sanctions on Iran. That changed when an undated indictment was unveiled Tuesday -- a day after Trump imposed sanctions over Turkey’s military operation in northern Syria.

It marked an unusual intervention by a president to get his top cabinet officials involved in an active federal investigation. It’s not clear whether Trump instructed Barr and Mnuchin to satisfy Erdogan’s pleas or whether the president was simply tired of being asked about it.

But according to a third person who’s familiar with Turkey’s position, discussions over a deal that would resolve the issue out of court made little headway before Barr took over as attorney general in February and then became involved in the discussions.

Over the summer, the White House sought to stop Erdogan and his aides from pestering Trump on the matter, according to a person who was briefed on a number of phone calls that took place and asked not to be identified discussing private deliberations. In June, the person said, then-National Security Advisor John Bolton told a Turkish official, Ibrahim Kalin, that Trump wouldn’t engage on the issue directly after delegating it and that Turkish officials should stop raising it with the president.

In a call at about the same time, Barr told his Turkish counterpart, Abdulhamit Gul, that he needed to reach a deal with the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, where the case was under consideration, or it would go to trial. He said Turkey’s best option would be to accept a deferred prosecution agreement under which Halkbank would pay a fine and take steps to avoid further wrongdoing.

After months of negotiations, Turkish officials ultimately refused because they believed doing so would constitute an admission of guilt, according to the person. A second person familiar with the discussions confirmed that Turkey refused to accept the deal but said there had been progress toward a resolution.

President’s Priority

Trump’s involvement and his decision to assign Barr and Mnuchin to address the sensitive issue, working with Secretary of State Michael Pompeo, reflected the degree to which the Halkbank case became a priority for the president.

In the end, U.S. prosecutors filed criminal charges against Halkbank, accusing it of fraud, money laundering and violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. It’s unclear exactly when the Halkbank indictment was filed, raising questions about whether it was set aside until it became politically expedient for the Trump administration to unseal it.

The White House didn’t have advance notice there was an indictment against the bank or when it was going to be unsealed, according to an administration official.

Read More: Trump Bets Syria Chaos Is Outweighed by Campaign Vow

Justice Department officials declined to comment when asked about Barr’s efforts, and the Treasury Department declined to comment on Mnuchin’s role. The White House declined to comment, and the State Department declined to discuss the part Pompeo played. Bolton declined to comment.

The politically explosive indictment came as Turkish-U.S. tensions are soaring over Turkey’s military offensive in Syria after Trump’s withdrawal of American forces from key border posts last week. On Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence and Pompeo were due to travel to Ankara for talks with Erdogan over the conflict in Syria.

The charges against Halkbank also come after years of public and private lobbying by Erdogan and other top Turkish officials -- starting in the Obama administration -- to get the investigations into violations of Iran sanctions dropped.

The matter is the latest instance linked to Turkey in which Trump has pressed for a solution beyond the bounds of the courtroom. In multiple meetings in 2017, Trump urged then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to persuade the Justice Department to drop the case against Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian gold trader at the center of the scheme to violate the sanctions.

Rudy Giuliani, who later became Trump’s personal attorney, represented Zarrab and pressed Trump to intervene on his client’s behalf.

Zarrab, a Turkish gold trader, ultimately pleaded guilty and became the star witness against a bank executive, Mehmet Hakan Atilla. Zarrab recounted how he’d helped Iran tap funds from overseas oil sales that were frozen in foreign accounts. Atilla was convicted in early 2018.

Read more: Turkey’s Halkbank Faces U.S. Charges as Tensions Mount

Together, the episodes demonstrate Trump’s receptiveness to Erdogan’s desire to avoid criminal proceedings that could shed an unflattering light on his government.

Mnuchin and the Treasury Department were also involved because they had a role in determining the size of a regulatory penalty against Halkbank after Atilla was convicted in January of last year of helping violate the Iran sanctions.

Critics said they grew alarmed that the fine hadn’t been issued more than a year after the executive’s conviction in January 2018. Some suspected that Erdogan’s persistent lobbying about the Halkbank case -- he brought it up during the Obama administration, including twice in meetings with Vice President Joe Biden, only to be rebuffed -- successfully persuaded Trump administration officials to hold back.

Evidence ‘Overwhelming’

“The evidence against Halkbank and, by extension, the Turkish government was overwhelming in this case,” said Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “But the Turks went full-force lobbying the Trump administration on this to avoid accountability. Frankly, some in the Trump administration were all too receptive to arguments that the mess was the result of Obama rather than a deliberate scheme on the part of the Turks.”

Halkbank did hire powerful lobbyists to advocate on its behalf before the Trump administration, according to Justice Department filings. One such lobbying firm was Ballard Partners, which was paid almost $780,000 from November 2018 through March of this year to work on Halkbank’s behalf. It renewed its contract for $40,000 a month in late July.

“What we had been doing was making the case to relevant administration officials about the importance of this bank to the financial system of Turkey and Turkey’s economy and that, in taking into account that Turkey is a NATO ally and the potential implications, the steps against the bank would have profound repercussions,” Ballard partner Jamie Rubin, a State Department spokesman in the Clinton administration, said in an interview.

Rubin said Ballard ended its contract with Halkbank as of Wednesday.

“Since the matter is now in the judicial system this is a natural endpoint for our representation,” Rubin said in an interview.

Turkey Decision-Making

Critics of Trump’s decision-making on Turkey also point to his refusal so far to sanction the country over its decision to purchase the S-400 missile defense system from Russia, as U.S. law requires. When Turkey started receiving parts for the system this summer, the State Department forwarded a list of recommended sanctions to the White House, only to have Trump ignore them, Bloomberg News reported at the time.

While Trump has been silent on the Halkbank case, public evidence suggests that he’s talked to others beyond his top staff about it. In an August phone call with a pair of Russian pranksters who presented themselves as Turkey’s defense minister, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said Trump was “very sensitive” to the “case involving the Turkish bank,” according to Politico.

“The president wants to be helpful, within the limits of his power,” said Graham, a close Trump ally.

— With assistance by Chris Strohm

(Updates with administration official comment in 10th paragraph.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles ... bank-trial
Mazars and Deutsche Bank could have ended this nightmare before it started.
They could still get him out of office.
But instead, they want mass death.
Don’t forget that.
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seemslikeadream
 
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Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2005 11:28 pm
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Re: Turks refuse to meet w highest level envoys ever sent by

Postby Jerky » Wed Oct 16, 2019 8:31 pm

NO FUCKING WAY.

For those who might come across this and wonder if it's a parody... IT IS NOT.

https://www.msnbc.com/deadline-white-ho ... 1409221925

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