Flynn’s Iranian American business partner at the Flynn Intel Group, Bijan Kian, who will later be indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on “charges of trying to influence American politicians” on behalf of Turkey without registering as an agent of a foreign government, is responsible for introducing Flynn to Zamel.37 Illegal lobbying on behalf of a foreign government is, according to CNN, a “rarely charged crime,” suggesting that federal investigators may in 2018 be more interested in Kian’s dealings with Flynn and Zamel during the 2016 general election than in Kian’s role as an intermediary between Flynn and the Turkish government during the same period. The Flynn-Zamel relationship appears to be key to Trump campaign–Israeli collusion in the months before Election Day.38
In late summer 2016, after he has been serving as a top national security advisor to candidate Trump for a year, Flynn meets at the JW Marriott Essex House New York hotel “with top Turkish government ministers and discusse[s] removing a Muslim cleric [Fethullah Gulen] from the U.S. and taking him to Turkey.”39 The action discussed by the parties would violate the federal kidnapping statute, as it would be orchestrated to “get Gulen … to Turkey without going through the U.S. extradition legal process,” according to the Wall Street Journal.40 One of the attendees at the meeting, former CIA director James Woolsey, will summarize the plan under consideration at the time as “a covert step in the dead of night to whisk this guy away,” and says the only reason he didn’t speak up to decry the proposed federal felony was that Flynn and the Turkish officials never got around to discussing “actual tactics for removing Mr. Gulen from his U.S. home.”41
Three weeks after the White House fires him in early 2017, Flynn’s consulting firm, the Flynn Intel Group, will file with the Department of Justice as a foreign agent for Turkey. When this happens, press secretary Sean Spicer will tell the media that “Mr. Trump was unaware Mr. Flynn had been consulting on behalf of the Turkish government when he named him national security adviser,” even though Congress had informed Vice President–elect Mike Pence (the head of Trump’s presidential transition team) of this fact in a public letter in November 2016, and President Obama had, in a face-to-face post-election meeting with Trump in the Oval Office, strongly warned him against hiring Flynn.42
That the summer 2016 meeting Flynn attended in which the kidnapping of Gulen was discussed was a high-level event is demonstrated by the fact that the Turkish president’s son-in-law and the country’s energy minister both attended it. Also present at the meeting were both Turkish businessman Ekim Alptekin (see chapter 6) and Bijan Kian.43 Woolsey, who by November 2016 is serving as a “senior adviser” to Trump’s presidential transition team alongside Flynn and Kian, will later say that he was so concerned about the content of Flynn’s mid-2016 conversation with Turkish agents that he informed the sitting vice president of the United States, Joe Biden, through an intermediary—an exchange that may offer yet another explanation, besides what President Obama called Flynn’s “crazy ideas,” for Obama’s warning to Trump not to hire the former DIA chief.44 According to Politico, in their meeting at the White House two days after Trump’s election victory, Obama didn’t just advise Trump against hiring Flynn but “forcefully told [him] to steer clear of Flynn,” unambiguous advice from the nation’s commander in chief (and Flynn’s former boss) that Trump ignored for reasons that have never been explained.45
Kian is not merely a business partner of Flynn’s at the Flynn Intel Group as the presidential transition begins in November 2016 but also, with Flynn, an incoming member of Trump’s national security transition team; during the period from Election Day to Trump’s inauguration, the Flynn Intel Group is shuttered.46 As the Washington Times has noted, “[Kian’s] Trump transition role offered influence in the selection of intelligence agency candidates and access to internal discussions of U.S. national security policy.”47 In a filing in his 2019 criminal case, Kian will appear to allege, through his attorneys, that Flynn secretly had contact with Kirill Dmitriev after the 2016 election and never disclosed the meeting to the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Defense Department, or any other federal agency—a possibility that would fundamentally change investigators’ understanding of Dmitriev’s meeting with George Nader and Trump adviser Erik Prince at a bar in the Seychelles in early 2017 (see chapter 6).48 Dmitriev’s denials of any such clandestine meeting with Flynn will lose much