Rudy Giuliani, the president's personal lawyer, repeatedly urged President Donald Trump to arrange for the deportation of a Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, calling him a violent extremist who needed to face justice in Turkey, former White House officials said Tuesday.
Turkey has requested that the United States hand over Gulen, a permanent U.S. resident living in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, to be tried on charges that he instigated a failed coup in Turkey in 2016.
The disclosure came as Giuliani escalated his battle with Democratic lawmakers Tuesday by defying a congressional subpoena for documents about a rogue campaign that pressured Ukraine's president to dig up dirt on Trump's political rivals.
The characterization of Gulen as a dangerous extremist echoed language that Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser, used to describe the cleric when he was serving as a secret lobbyist for the Turkish government while also advising Trump's campaign in 2016.
Giuliani was at times so insistent that a number of White House officials came to believe he was secretly lobbying for Turkey, one of the former officials said. Officials said they even checked lobbying records to see if Giuliani was registered on behalf of Turkey. He was not.
Giuliani's push to have Gulen deported was first reported by The Washington Post.
In a phone interview Tuesday night, Giuliani denied ever trying to intervene in the Gulen case and accused people of intentionally making things up to damage his credibility.
"That would be totally crazy. I couldn't have gotten Gulen extradited. Why would I have gotten involved?" Giuliani said. "It's definitely untrue. I had nothing to do with Gulen."
He said his only interest in sending someone to Turkey was a prisoner exchange involving his client at the time, Reza Zarrab, a Turkish-Iranian businessman who was accused in a more than $10 billion scheme to thwart sanctions on Iran.
Gulen has denied accusations that he plotted to overthrow Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in 2016.
The idea that Trump should order Gulen deported was fiercely opposed inside the White House, where officials saw the issue as a matter to be handled by the Justice Department, not a political decision. Ultimately, that was what happened. The Justice Department, which was led at the time by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, did not see merit in deporting Gulen, said one former official familiar with the matter.
Throughout 2017, before Giuliani began representing Trump as his personal lawyer, he appeared at the White House to discuss a number of issues related to Turkey, according to two former administration officials. At one point, officials tried to divert Giuliani's access to the president so that he was raising his issues with the president's senior advisers instead of Trump directly, sources said.
Giuliani has emerged as the central character in the effort by Trump and officials in his government to get Ukraine's president to begin an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden, a Democratic candidate for president, and his son Hunter Biden.
Giuliani is said to be under investigation by federal prosecutors in Manhattan, N.Y., who are trying to determine if he broke lobbying laws in his dealings in Ukraine. The investigators are examining his efforts to undermine the then-U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, who was recalled by Trump in the spring.
A Section on 10/17/2019