A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Bijan Rafiekian, a former business partner of Michael Flynn, on a pair of foreign-agent felony charges stemming from work the two men did for Turkish interests during the final months of the Trump presidential campaign in 2016.
The verdicts, returned by jurors after only about four hours of deliberation, amount to a belated courtroom victory for special counsel Robert Mueller, who investigated the $600,000 lobbying and public work relations contract at the heart of the case and then handed the matter off to other federal prosecutors after Flynn’s guilty plea to a false-statement charge in 2017.
Rafiekian, 67, faces up to 15 years in prison on the two felony counts against him: acting as an unregistered foreign agent in the U.S., and conspiracy to violate that law as well as to submit false statements to the Justice Department in a foreign-agent filing. Defendants are typically sentenced in accord with federal sentencing guidelines that result in far less than the maximum.
Flynn, who would go on to serve 24 days as President Donald Trump’s national security adviser, had been expected to be a key witness at Rafiekian’s trial, offering testimony that would incriminate his former partner in a scheme to avoid disclosing that the Flynn Intel Group’s lobbying and public relations effort was actually directed and controlled by Turkish government officials.
Less than two weeks before the trial opened, however, an acrimonious row broke out between prosecutors and Flynn’s new defense attorneys, leading to an abrupt decision to drop Flynn as a witness.
The late shift — which appeared to upend the government’s case — came after prosecutors accused Flynn of retreating from admissions he made as part of his plea deal that he submitted false information to the Justice Department in a belated, March 2017 Foreign Agent Registration Act filing about the Turkey-related work.
Flynn’s lawyers claimed Flynn’s assertion that he did not recall reading the submission before approving it was consistent with his prior statements, but prosecutors strenuously disagreed.
In Flynn’s absence, prosecutors relied on emails, Skype chats and other witnesses to make their case that the Flynn firm project Rafiekian spearheaded was approved at the highest levels of the Turkish government.
The research, public relations and lobbying effort focused on building public and government support for a key goal of the Turkish government: getting the U.S. to expel and extradite a dissident Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen. Gulen has lived in Pennsylvania for two decades and was blamed by Turkey’s current leadership for a coup attempt in July 2016.
Despite that focus, Flynn and Rafiekian claimed that the project was funded and directed by a private Dutch company owned by a Turkish businessman, Ekim Alptekin. Alptekin was indicted alongside Rafiekian last year but remains overseas.
While Flynn never took the witness stand, his role loomed large during much of the case, including in the defense’s closing arguments on Monday.
Rafiekian did not testify in his own defense.
Whether the verdicts will stand is unclear. During the trial, U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Trenga indicated that he was giving serious consideration to a defense motion to acquit Rafiekian on the grounds that the prosecution’s evidence was too weak to sustain a conviction.
Trenga still has that motion under advisement and is sure to face new urgings from Rafiekian’s defense attorneys to throw out the jury’s verdicts.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine