Rudy Giuliani is denying reports that he repeatedly pushed President Donald Trump to deport Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen to be tried on charges that he'd instigated a failed military coup in Turkey in 2016.
“That would be totally crazy. I couldn’t have gotten Gulen extradited. Why would I have gotten involved?” Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, told The New York Times. “It’s definitely untrue. I had nothing to do with Gulen.”
Gulen is a permanent American resident living in exile in Pennsylvania and has denied claims that he was involved in a plot to overthrow Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has made his deportation a key concern.
Last year, Trump said deporting Gulen was "not under consideration."
Former White House officials on Tuesday said Giuliani was so insistent on Gulen's deportation that they came to believe the former New York City mayor was lobbying for Turkey. One official checked to see if he was registered to lobby for the country, which he wasn't.
Giuliani told the Times that his only interest in sending someone to Turkey was as part of a prisoner exchange involving one of his clients, Turkish-Iranian businessman Reza Zarrab, who had been accused in a scheme of more than $10 billion to stop sanctions on Iran.
The disclosure about Giuliani, first reported by The Washington Post, came as he defied a congressional subpoena for documents concerning the push on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for dirt on former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
Inside the White House, officials thought the matter of deporting Gulen should be handled by the Justice Department, and ultimately, the DOJ, then under Jeff Sessions, opted not to return the cleric.
Two former administration sources said that in 2017, before Giuliani started representing Trump as his attorney, he came to the White House to discuss several issues concerning Turkey, and eventually, officials tried to divert Giuliani to the president's senior advisors rather than dealing with the president directly.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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