A close business partner of Trump's former national security adviser Michael Flynn has been indicted by federal prosecutors in Virginia.
Flynn's partner, Bijan Kian, has been charged with acting as an unregistered foreign agent stemming from his role in Flynn's scheme to extradite Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen from Pennsylvania to Turkey.
The Washington Post first reported the news early this morning.
Bijan Kian made his first appearance in Alexandria federal court Monday morning. According to the indictment, Kian, who ran a lobbying firm with Flynn, conspired with a Turkish businessman to illegally influence government officials and public opinion in the United States against Gulen.
The indictment demonstrates the extent to which Flynn was secretly working to advance the interests of his Turkish clients while publicly serving as a key surrogate to Donald Trump and auditioning for a role in his administration. According to the newly-unsealed court document, Flynn was texting and emailing frequently about how to advance the Turkish agenda throughout the final weeks of the presidential campaign.
This may or may not be the first step in special prosecutor Robert Mueller's pivot to the Middle East that was reportedly going to begin after the new year.
While we haven't heard much about this specific case for a long time, we've known about Flynn's scheme to deport Gulen from almost the very beginning.
We should never stop repeating the fact that some of the Trump's closest advisers and officials were acting as foreign agents during and after the 2016 campaign. We've never seen something like this before and we'll likely never see it again.