SDNY brings new criminal charges that blow Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani’s Turkey scandal wide open

| 5:30 pm EDT October 15, 2019
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Why is Donald Trump suddenly handing northern Syria to Turkey, even at the cost of great bloodshed and the loss of a key American ally in the region? You might need look no further than the fact that Rudy Giuliani represents a Turkish criminal named Reza Zarrab. In fact the SDNY did look into it, and they just brought new criminal charges that blew the whole thing wide open.

The SDNY announced announced criminal charges against Turkish bank Halkbank, which was running a massive money laundering scheme to work around United States sanctions against Iran. The announcement doesn’t mention Rudy Giuliani, but it doesn’t have to, because it specifically states that Rudy’s client Reza Zarrab was one of the people carrying out the scheme. This matters, because Zarrab cut a cooperating plea deal last year.

It’s well established that the SDNY only grants cooperating plea deals to individuals who are willing to give up everyone and everything. Today’s announcement makes clear that Zarrrab helped give up the Turkish bank to the SDNY. This essentially confirms that Zarrab has been cooperating with the SDNY in its case against Rudy Giuliani all along as well. This would help explain how the SNDY was able to get its hands on enough evidence to obtain subpoenas of Rudy’s bank records.

While it’s becoming more clear by the minute that Rudy Giuliani is going to be arrested before too much longer, the bigger story here is this. We’ve seen in Donald Trump’s Ukraine whistleblower scandal that Trump pretty much does whatever Rudy tells him to do on foreign policy. Now Trump is making the bizarre and self-defeating move of handing a major win to Turkey, at a time when we’re learning that Rudy’s client Zarrab was helping Turkey run a huge money laundering scheme. How much longer before it comes out that Rudy told Trump to pull U.S. troops out of northern Syria? And if Trump did it for that reason, he’s never getting out of prison.