NEW: An investigation by @rbccjcbs and I has revealed that in 2017, the son of a $1 million Trump inauguration/RNC donor appears to have used his political access to grant a close ally of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan an audience with the president. citizensforethics.org/turkish-busine… @rbccjcbs Wadie Habboush, whose father dropped a total of $1 million on Trump's inauguration and the RNC as a first-time donor in January 2017, was at the time the CEO of the Habboush Group, an investment and construction firm based in New York and Istanbul.

Okay, here's a THREAD, because people have been asking me for one, about Jamal Khashoggi's little-known Turkish ancestry, Arabized Turkish surnames, and the overlooked interconnectedness of the Ottoman world. If you read Turkish media, you may have noticed over the past week that the name of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was allegedly murdered inside the Saudi consulate in Istanbul this month, is typically rendered in a Turkified form: "Cemal Kaşıkçı."

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…