ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A jury on Tuesday convicted a one-time business partner of former national security adviser Michael Flynn on charges he illegally acted as a Turkish agent when he and Flynn undertook a project to discredit an exiled cleric wanted by Turkey's government.
The jury concluded that Kian worked to conceal Turkey's involvement in the contract, which targeted Fethullah Gulen. The cleric is blamed by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for a failed coup there in 2016. Prosecutors say Flynn and Kian received hundreds of thousands of dollars through their joint business venture, the Flynn Intel Group, to discredit Gulen. Those efforts included a November 2016 op-ed piece in The Hill newspaper in which Flynn compared Gulen to Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Prosecutors argued that Turkey's involvement in the project was deliberately hidden when Flynn Intel Group received payment through a Dutch company run by a prominent Turkish businessman.