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Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin, two former business associates of Michael Flynn, have been indicted “as part of a federal investigation into Turkey’s secret 2016 lobbying campaign to pressure the United States to expel a rival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan,” according to the New York Times.

The Times also notes that the “indictment is further evidence of a broad crackdown on unregistered foreign lobbying growing from the inquiry by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel who has investigated foreign flows of money from Ukraine, Turkey and other countries designed to manipulate decision-making in Washington.”

According to the indictment, “The defendants sought to discredit and delegitimize the Turkish citizen in the eyes of politicians and the public.”

The Washington Post notes “the indictment demonstrates the extent to which Flynn was secretly working to advance the interests of his Turkish clients while publicly serving as a key surrogate to Donald Trump and auditioning for a role in his administration.”

This latest indictment only further’s Tim O’Brien’s argument that entire presidential campaign was a “criminal conspiracy:” “What we’ve learnt from this raft of legal documents that have landed in our lap over the last couple of weeks is that there’s the very real possibility that the Trump campaign was a criminal conspiracy from its beginnings and that bled into the Trump transition, where various criminal acts might have been committed. Now you have the Trump White House dealing with the consequences of all these.”

 

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