WASHINGTON (CN) — The day before President Donald Trump’s impeachment, Senator Ron Wyden had been nearly two months deep into his investigation of the next international scandal to stain the White House.
“I was struck by the parallels between Turkey and Ukraine, but Turkey wasn’t getting the attention it deserved,” Wyden said in a Dec. 17, 2019, interview.
With Congress’ holiday recess in the air, Courthouse News sat down with the 6-foot-4 senator at his office for an extended chat on a broad range of topics during a pivotal time in Washington. Trump’s Eastern European intrigue had captured the headlines, but Wyden’s gaze sharpened where that continent crosses over into Asia.
From Trump’s impeachment the next day through the Senate trial, Wyden steadily plugged away at uncovering the Trump administration’s interference in a record-breaking money-laundering case involving Turkey’s state-run Halkbank. A look back on that discussion shows how his ongoing probe has borne fruit.
Since launching his Halkbank investigation in October, Wyden — the Senate Finance Committee’s top Democrat — has seen more than a dozen of his peers join him in scrutinizing President Trump’s ties to Turkey.
“That’s kind of what this work is all about,” Wyden philosophized, before this critical mass swelled. “It’s keep banging on the rock pile.”
Long before Edward Snowden’s leaks laid bare mass surveillance, Wyden put the National Security Agency’s former director James Clapper on record denying that the agency swept up data on hundreds of millions of Americans.
“He looked at the committee, and he looked at me, and he lied to the American people,” Wyden said, referring to Clapper’s denial.
Wyden also launched an investigation of the National Rifle Association’s ties to the Kremlin in March 2018, months before Russian agent Maria Butina was arrested for infiltrating the gun-lobbying group.
Now, Wyden's curiosity about Trump and Turkey has spread to other party leaders. Senators Robert Menendez and Sherrod Brown, the top Democrats on the Foreign Affairs and Banking Committees, respectively, joined Wyden in asking a question during the impeachment trial about Trump’s affinity for authoritarian leaders like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who for years has been dogged by allegations that he ordered gold trades with Iran through Halkbank in violation of U.S. sanctions.
“Has the president engaged in a pattern of conduct in which he places his personal and political interests on top of the national security interests of the United States?” Wyden, Menendez and Brown jointly asked during the impeachment inquiry on Jan. 30, in a question read aloud in the Senate by Chief Justice John Roberts.
Trump’s Turkish interests also troubled Wyden during the sit-down interview.
“Donald Trump has significant financial interest in Turkey,” Wyden noted at the time, referring to Trump Towers Istanbul. “We read regularly that his family has forged personal relationships with important Turkish officials. And so, you have to ask — which is what is part of our inquiry — whether the Trump policy toward Turkey is in a significant way colored by his personal and political interests and not the national security of the country.”