1/ I'm going through FARA registrations for personal reasons. Today I found this email sent to lawmakers by Ballard Partners, a powerful Washington lobbying firm, which calls Turkey "the world's most humanitarian country." It's basically regime propaganda fara.gov/docs/6415-Info…
2/ Whose signature is at the end of the email? Former congressman Robert Wexler, who signed on as a senior counselor at Ballard in April 2017. That’s all normal Washington revolving-door stuff, I suppose… politico.com/tipsheets/poli…
3/ But Wexler currently holds another position: President of the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace (@AbrahamCenter).
4/ The Abraham Center doesn’t work directly on Turkish issues. Still, it seems more than a little suspect to me that the president of a think tank devoted to Middle Eastern affairs is also a lobbyist being paid to advance the interests of a specific Middle Eastern country.
5/ How can the Abraham Center claim to be a neutral broker of any kind when its leadership is beholden to foreign interests in this way? And how can the Center’s judgment be taken seriously when its leader is broadcasting verifiably false propaganda into the halls of power?
6/ I might even be okay with this arrangement if it were disclosed more often, but mentions of Wexler and the Abraham Center in the media pretty much never note that he’s a lobbyist, let alone a lobbyist whose firm is registered as a foreign agent of the Republic of Turkey.
7/ A supposedly nonpartisan think tank’s president is blasting out emails that say Turkey’s snap elections are "moving up the timeline on democratic elections." This is a farce, and the MENA policy community and media should be more transparent about these sorts of conflicts.
8/ (As an addendum, shouts out to @KARepublic for her great outline of Turkey’s lobbying efforts in the United States, which mentions Ballard Partners and many other Washington actors with Turkish ties.) ahvalnews.com/us-turkey/turk…
