Who's Getting Indicted Today? Oh, Just All Michael Flynn's Friends

Nice company he keeps.

Let's talk about Turkish people and Iranian-American people whose names you won't remember in five minutes, because you forgot them five minutes after last time we talked about them!

When we looked at Robert Mueller's sentencing memorandum on Michael Flynn, we noted that there was a lot of REDACTED BLACK INK that suggested Flynn was helping the feds with a whole lot besides just the Russia investigation. We surmised that at least one of the BIG BLACK REDACTED INK SECTIONS probably had something to do with all of Flynn's literal actual foreign agent work for Turkey, and it turns out we were right, because the DoJ has just indicted two of Flynn's former associates in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA).

Iranian-American businessguy Bijan Kian, who also goes as Bijan Rafiekian, co-founded and helped Flynn run his consulting firm Flynn Intel Group, and has been indicted for conspiracy, failure to register as a literal actual foreign agent, and also a bunch of lying. (To be fair, he was probably WITCH HUNTED like Michael Flynn was, because Flynn didn't know lying to federal agents is bad and therefore never told his friend.)

You'll remember that Flynn was hot 'n' heavy with the Turks during the campaign , going so far as to publish an op-ed in The Hill on election day , about how it was absolutely necessary that we kidnap this exiled cleric, Fethullah Gülen, who has been happily living in Pennsylvania for years, and send him back to Turkey so Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan could have him killed, as punishment for starting a coup against his government that Gülen says he actually did not start.

Flynn's other pal Kamil Ekim Alptekin, the Turkish man who directed the operation, was also named in the indictment, but he wasn't in court today like Kian was, because he lives in Not America (Turkey). Flynn and his boys were all working hard on their influence campaign to get Gülen sent back to Turkey for a good murderin', which everybody in US American law enforcement thought was kinda weird at the time.

"The arrow has left the bow!" Kian emailed Alptekin on Nov. 4, 2016, sharing a draft of an op-ed Flynn had written arguing that the United States should not provide a "safe haven" for Gulen. "This is a very high profile exposure one day before the election."

Flynn's op-ed was published in The Hill on Nov. 8, the day Trump was elected. It prompted concern in the Justice Department's national security division and criminal division, where officials wondered why Flynn, aspiring to be national security adviser to the next president, was parroting the talking points of the Turkish government.

Now, did Michael Flynn actually write that op-ed all by himself? Nah. It would appear that Kian (mostly) wrote it, and it was published under Flynn's name, we guess because he was really popular with the "Lock her up!" crowd at the time, and ain't nobody knew who the fuck Bijan Kian was. The op-ed was full of talking points about how Gülen is a bad, bad man, just like Ayatollah Khomeini, talking points that had been repeated since the inception of the project.

They had been working on their plan, originally dubbed the "Truth Campaign" and later rebranded as "Project Confidence," since late July of 2016, and they lied about ALL OF IT, KATIE. They lied about who was really paying them (Turkey, not just Alptekin's company like they insisted), they lied about why they were doing it, and they lied about why they were having all these top secret meetings in the months before the election, even though witnesses as esteemed as former CIA Director James Woolsey fuckin' heard the dudes talking about their plans.

This is the work Flynn did for which his company was paid $530,000, which he somehow forgot to mention in all his filings upon becoming national security adviser for one-and-a-half Scaramuccis. He woulda made a lot more if he had actually kidnapped Gülen, and he would probably be going to a lot more prison under that scenario, as well.

Read the entire indictment here if you'd like. Basically it's just about a buncha literal actual foreign agents, one of whose names is Michael Flynn, acting like a buncha literal actual foreign agents, and lying to the authorities about it repeatedly.

Again, it sucks how Michael Flynn didn't know that was bad. Somebody should tell him next time he and all his friends want to commit a metric shit-ton of crimes.

[ Washington Post / indictment ]

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