Former CIA director James Woolsey pitched a $10 million contract to two Turkish businessmen to help 'discredit' a CIA-linked Turkish cleric while Woolsey was an adviser to Donald Trump's election campaign, three people familiar with the proposal said.
According to Reuters' exclusive report, just eight days after formally joining Trump's campaign as an adviser on national security issues, Woolsey met on Sept. 20, 2016 with businessmen Ekim Alptekin and Sezgin Baran Korkmaz over lunch at the Peninsula Hotel in New York, they said.
Woolsey and his wife, Nancye Miller, proposed a lobbying and public relations campaign targeting U.S-based Islamic preacher Fethullah Gülen, one of the masterminds of last years' coup attempt. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wants his former ally Gülen extradited to Turkey to face trial.
In an email memo seen by Reuters, Woolsey and Miller sketched a plan to "draw attention to the cleric's possible role in the coup attempt" and encourage an official investigation into his activities.
Alptekin, an ally of Erdoğan, had already agreed through one of his companies to a $600,000 contract with the consulting firm of Michael Flynn to research Gülen. Flynn was also a Trump campaign adviser and later became his national security adviser before being fired in February, Reuters reported.
Woolsey was a member of Flynn's firm, the Flynn Intel Group, according to a Justice Department filing by the firm and an archive of the company's website, although a spokesman for Woolsey disputed that characterization, saying he was an unpaid adviser and his affiliation was "loosely defined."
At the Sept. 20 meeting, Miller said she and Woolsey were in a better position than Flynn to influence decision-makers about Gülen's role in the coup, according to Alptekin and two other people familiar with the discussion. Bidding for a lobbying or consulting contract with a foreign company or government is not illegal, and Woolsey and Miller did not win the contract in any event, the report says.
But the previously undisclosed meeting shows for the first time that two Trump aides were competing with each other to win the lucrative business deal with Alptekin. The deal is now being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his wider probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment, the report added.
Flynn is a central figure in Mueller's investigation because of conversations he had with then-Russian ambassador Sergei Kislyak last year and because he waited until March to retroactively register with the Justice Department as a foreign agent for the work he did for Alptekin.
In that filing, Flynn's lawyer, Robert Kelner, said the work done for Alptekin's company "could be construed to have principally benefited the Republic of Turkey," according to Reuters.
Flynn was fired as national security adviser in February after misleading Vice President Mike Pence about the extent of his conversations with Kislyak.
Jonathan Franks, a spokesman for Woolsey and Miller, described the Sept. 20 meeting as "unremarkable" and said Miller could not locate the email memo or remember writing it. He also said Woolsey had pursued with Turkish interests an "economic development proposal in the wake of the coup that centred around reassuring folks that Turkey was a safe place to do business" but that the project's focus was not on Gülen.
Alptekin said Woolsey and Miller pursued his business at the Sept. 20 meeting, pitching the project to target Gülen, but he decided to stick to his contract with Flynn's firm. Kelner declined to comment for this story. The White House did not respond to a request for comment, Reuters says.
Fethullah Gülen had been a close ally of the then-Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, helping him to redesign and install his Islamic-rooted Justice and Development Party (AKP) in power in 2002. The network of Gülen religious cult are said to number in the millions and own a variety of businesses, media outlets, cultural centres and a network of schools both in Turkey and abroad. But his alliance with the Erdoğan's AKP government has faltered in recent years.
