August 09, 2019
An Iranian-American has been convicted in Northern Virginia of lobbying illegally for Turkey’s government, a charge having nothing to do with Iran or US relations with Iran.
Federal District Judge Anthony J. Trenga had described the evidence against Bijan Kian as speculative and very circumstantial, but let the case go to the jury, which found Kian guilty. Judge Trenga could still toss out the verdict and scheduled a September 5 hearing on that option.
During the short trial in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, DC, prosecutors had accused Kian and his business partners of trying to “subvert the American process” when they secretly agreed to work for Turkey, as it tried to extradite a Turk from the United States.
Kian’s defense lawyers repeatedly tried to undercut the US government’s case, saying there was no actual agreement with the Turkish government to influence American policy. Prosecutors, Kian’s lawyers said, could not even demonstrate that Turkey paid for anything.
“There’s no evidence any Turkish official gave any direction,” Mark J. MacDougall, Kian’s lawyer, said during closing arguments. Later he added, using another name for Kian: “So now we’re all here. You’re here because the prosecutors claim that Mr. Rafiekian didn’t fill out the [lobbying report] form the way they would like.”
Kian, 67, was charged last year with conspiracy to violate lobbying laws and failure to register as a foreign agent.
The case got considerable attention because Kian is an associate of Michael T. Flynn, President Trump’s first national security adviser for several days after Trump was inaugurated. He was fired for concealing talks he had with the Russian ambassador before he took office.
Flynn was convicted of lying to federal investigators, but agreed to allow his sentencing to be postponed until after he testified against Kian, in part to secure more lenient punishment.
But on the eve of the Kian trial, Flynn abruptly changed his story and blamed his previous lawyers for filing inaccurate foreign lobbying disclosure forms without his knowledge.
That prompted prosecutors to scrap Flynn as a witness, a seeming blow to their case against Kian
Kian was indicted in December, along with another man, Ekim Alptekin, as part of a federal investigation into Turkey’s secret 2016 lobbying campaign to pressure the United States to expel Fethullah Gulen, a rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Kian was on the Trump transition team and worked on national security matters.
The outcome of Kian’s case could buoy efforts by the government to crack down on violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires people lobbying the US government on behalf of foreign nations to notify the Justice Department.
Once viewed as an outdated statute that could be evaded with little consequence, FARA has recently been aggressively applied in a number of high-profile criminal cases.