WASHINGTON--Former CIA director James Woolsey pitched a $10 million contract to two Turkish businessmen to help discredit a controversial U.S.-based cleric while Woolsey was an adviser to Donald Trump's election campaign, three people familiar with the proposal said.
Just eight days after formally joining Trump's campaign as an adviser on national security issues, Woolsey met on Sept. 20, 2016 with businessmen Ekim Alptekin and Sezgin Baran Korkmaz over lunch at the Peninsula Hotel in New York, they said.
Woolsey and his wife, Nancye Miller, proposed a lobbying and public relations campaign targeting Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish cleric who lives in Pennsylvania. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan accuses Gulen of instigating a failed coup in July 2016 and wants him extradited to Turkey to face trial. Gulen has denied any role in the coup.
In an email memo seen by Reuters, Woolsey and Miller sketched a plan to "draw attention to the cleric's possible role in the coup attempt" and encourage an official investigation into his activities.
Alptekin, an ally of Erdogan, had already agreed through one of his companies to a $600,000 contract with the consulting firm of Michael Flynn to research Gulen. Flynn was also a Trump campaign adviser and later became his national security adviser before being fired in February.
Woolsey was a member of Flynn's firm, the Flynn Intel Group, according to a Justice Department filing by the firm and an archive of the company's website, although a spokesman for Woolsey disputed that characterization, saying he was an unpaid adviser and his affiliation was "loosely defined."
At the Sept. 20 meeting, Miller said she and Woolsey were in a better position than Flynn to influence decision-makers about Gulen's alleged role in the coup, according to Alptekin and two other people familiar with the discussion.
Bidding for a lobbying or consulting contract with a foreign company or government is not illegal, and Woolsey and Miller did not win the contract in any event. But the previously undisclosed meeting shows for the first time that two Trump aides were competing with each other to win the lucrative business deal with Alptekin. The deal with Flynn is now being investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his wider probe into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, declined to comment. Jonathan Franks, a spokesman for Woolsey and Miller, said his clients were not under investigation.
