Recep Erdogan
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan put pressure on his American counterpart Donald Trump because of the investigation by the US Department of Justice of financial crimes of the Turkish bank Halkbank. The details of the deal between the leaders of the two countries are given by The New York Times.
According to the publication, after the Obama administration relaxed the sanctions against Iran as part of the nuclear deal, Trump strengthened them and used them as the core of his strategy in the region. Soon, Halkbank violated these sanctions, and the US authorities launched an investigation into the case.
Then Erdogan asked Trump to cancel the investigation, and he, as the newspaper writes, agreed to this. Two people loyal to the US president – Matthew Whitaker and William Barr – pressured federal prosecutors to rush to drop the charges against the Turkish bank. In mid-June 2019, Barr, then the US Attorney General, is said to have met with the then US Attorney General for the Southern District of New York, Jeffrey Berman, and asked him to stop investigating the suspects in the Halkbank case. However, Berman refused to do so and was fired. It is noted that it was persistence in the Turkish case that became the main reason for his dismissal.
In June 2020, former Trump National Security Assistant John Bolton said in an interview with ABC TV that Trump wants to fire Berman because of Erdogan's request to stop investigating a Turkish bank. According to Bolton, the US president told Erdogan that he would “take care” of the settlement of the Halkbank case when he replaced “Obama's men” in the prosecutor's office with his own.
