Turkey's Torrid Love Affair With Michael Flynn

A failed coup and a national obsession with an elderly cleric embroiled Trump’s formed national security adviser in scandal.

By ZIA WEISE November 25, 2017

STANBUL—Were Michael Flynn a Turkish citizen, it’s very likely he would be sitting in prison right now, awaiting trial for terror crimes.

In July of 2016, before he briefly became Donald Trump’s national security adviser, the former general was giving a speech in Cleveland just as soldiers were taking over the bridges and airports of Istanbul. “There’s an ongoing coup going on in Turkey right now—right now!” Flynn told his audience. The Turkish military, he continued, was a secular institution, whereas the country was heading “toward Islamism” under the leadership of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. His audience broke into applause; the event was hosted by a local branch of ACT for America, a national security group with strong Islamophobic tendencies. “Yeah,” Flynn said, “that is worth applauding.”

By morning, however, the coup had failed, and the Turkish government was busy detaining anyone it believed had supported the plotters. Any Turkish citizen heard making such remarks, and on video, would undoubtedly have been arrested and jailed, as Erdogan’s government considers supporting the coup attempt an act of terrorism. Of the tens of thousands of people detained over the past year, many had said not a word about the coup; just having a certain app, a certain one-dollar bill, even a daughter born in a certain hospital counts as incriminating evidence in Turkey’s highly politicized courts.

Any foreign official would, at the very least, have been roundly condemned and vilified in the Turkish pro-government press. But for Flynn, Turkey appeared happy to make an exception. For, by the time the video surfaced last November, Flynn had performed a heel turn, lobbying in favor of Erdogan’s government and denouncing the man Ankara holds responsible for the failed putsch: Fethullah Gülen, a Turkish cleric living in Pennsylvania’s Pocono Mountains.

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https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/11/25/michael-flynn-turkey-215865