Lev Parnas’s latest adventure draws back the curtain on Trump-Turkey relations

One of the many enduring mysteries of Donald Trump’s foreign policy has been his enthusiastic embrace of Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan. At times, Erdogan phoned Trump as often as twice a week, “put through directly to the President on standing orders from Trump”. Former National Security Adviser John Bolton characterised the relationship between the two presidents as a “bromance” and alleged that Trump had instructed American officials to back off on a Turkish state-owned bank, Halkbank, which was under investigation by US prosecutors for allegedly helping launder money for Iran.

The rapprochement between Ankara and Washington has alarmed foreign policy experts and politicians alike—just last week, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee requested documents, including details about Erdogan and Trump’s many phone calls, from the director of national intelligence to try and unravel the tight ties between Trump and his Turkish counterpart.

Bit player from Ukraine drama re-enters the scene

Some answers on how exactly Erdogan managed to bend Washington to his will recently cropped up from an unexpected source: Soviet-born businessman Lev Parnas, better known for trying to flee the country after his work trying to dig up damaging information about Donald Trump’s political opponents in Ukraine came to light. Once close with Rudy Giuliani and deep in what he now describes as the “Trump cult”, Parnas flipped during the impeachment inquiry, handing over reams of information to House Democrats.

Indeed, Parnas became somewhat of a Where’s Waldo of conservative politics, pulling out a seemingly endless supply of snapshots with prominent figures—flashing a thumb’s up next to Trump, hanging out with former Attorney General Jeff Sessions or pulling Florida governor Ron DeSantis into a bear hug.

Facing new charges that a company he founded— ironically named Fraud Guarantee— was a scam, Parnas has lifted the lid on a fresh set of dodgy deals and backchannel influence peddling with his oligarch friends which helped kick off the Trump-Erdogan bromance and convince the White House to let Halkbank off the hook.

From the Watergate to the Wynn Las Vegas

It all started on the day before Trump’s inauguration at that grande dame of political scandals, the Watergate Hotel, where Parnas and Turkish-Azerbaijani shipping magnate Mübariz Mansimov—who reportedly donated a $25 million oil tanker to Erdogan’s family— had arranged a meeting between Brian Ballard, dubbed “the most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington”, and the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavusoglu. That meeting, according to Parnas’s recent account, was the kindling for the warm relationship which developed between the Trump administration and Turkey as a result of what’s likely “the most successful foreign lobbying effort of the Trump presidency”.

Mansimov was far from the only oligarch Parnas and Ballard courted in order to seal two multimillion dollar contracts lobbying for Turkey and Erdogan, including a $125,000-a-month deal for Ballard’s company to represent Halkbank. As a native Russian speaker, he was a valuable go-between connecting the fixtures of Trump’s Washington with fellow businessmen from the Soviet bloc. One of these was Azeri-born Russian oligarch Farkhad Akhmedov, who’s previously boasted about being a go-between between Putin and Turkey.

Parnas claims that he joined Akhmedov on his $500 million superyacht Luna—now a major bone of contention between Akhmedov and his ex-wife, Tatiana, to whom Akhmedov is trying to avoid paying a $600 million divorce settlement ordered by the UK’s High Court—and flew around the country on his private jet, setting up meetings. In particular, Parnas introduced the Russian tycoon to Ballard and escorted Akhmedov to a Republican National Committee (RNC) retreat in Palm Beach, Florida, introducing him there to disgraced gaming magnate and prominent Republican donor Steve Wynn.

A lawyer for Wynn, who was forced to resign from both his posts as the chairman of his eponymous casino empire and the RNC’s finance chairman after the Wall Street Journal reported that he had sexually assaulted and harassed dozens of women, played down photos of Wynn embracing Parnas and Akhmedov, insisting that the two men were “strangers” to the gaming tycoon.

Wynn may not have been familiar with the two Soviet-born businessmen, but they were familiar with his Las Vegas casino. According to Lev Parnas, he and Akhmedov stayed at Wynn’s hotel in February 2017— a jaunt bankrolled by an Armenian-American mobster with ties to Erdogan, Lev Aslan Dermen, who was convicted earlier this year on ten felony counts of fraud and money laundering.

To bolster his account of the Las Vegas trip, Lev Parnas released a photograph of himself beaming next to Akhmedov at the gambling table—the sight of the oligarch pictured smoking, drinking and gambling, given his attempts to portray himself as a pious Muslim and use Sharia courts in the UAE to avoid handing over assets to his ex-wife, is more than a little ironic. While his ex-wife told the New York Times that she never saw Farkhad worship either at home or in a mosque, the billionaire began insisting that he was a “devout Muslim believer” right about the time that Emirati sharia courts were considering his case, a characterisation that the Parnas photos cast further doubt on.

Akhmedov’s spokesman has previously claimed that, while he had met Parnas in Florida, their interaction was brief and mostly consisted of him declining a number of investment opportunities which Parnas presented. The photographs of the two men together in various locations around the United States, released recently by Parnas, are likely to draw renewed scrutiny to their relationship.

Behind the scenes

Parnas’s account of arranging backchannel meetings at the Watergate, jetting around on Akhmedov’s private plane and rubbing shoulders with Steve Wynn only cements the image of him as a smooth operator who played up his Soviet roots and his connections in Trump’s swamp to live the high life and snag investments for his own dubious ventures.

Ballard Partners and the Turkish government alike have tried to minimise Parnas’s involvement in securing the two lobbying contracts, insisting that the lobbying deals were completely legal and conventional. Reporters from the OCCRP, Courthouse News and NBC, however, were able to verify Parnas’ key claims by crosschecking them with independently gathered evidence. Trump’s friendship—often bordering on obsequience—with Erdogan had already sparked red flags. The knowledge that that relationship was carefully cultivated by Parnas and a motley group of oligarchs only makes it more worthy of swift investigation.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors or management of EconoTimes