Trump has been working behind the scenes to get Andrew Brunson out of Turkey recently, and I don’t mean the speech and warning that was given yesterday.
Check this out:
NY POST – Israel freed a Turkish woman accused of ties to Hamas following a request by President Trump to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of a deal to get Ankara to release a US pastor, according to a report.
Ebru Özkan was arrested last month during a visit to Israel as a tourist and was indicted July 8 for smuggling money and goods to the Palestinian Islamist militant group — charges her lawyer denied and which angered Turkey.
Özkan was released the day after the July 14 Trump-Netanyahu phone call, after a month in detention, according to the Israeli Haaretz newspaper.
Israeli officials have refused until now to confirm the reason for her release, but told Haaretz the 27-year-old was deported, not released, and that she would have been deported anyway eventually.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Trump had asked Netanyahu to let Özkan go in a “trade” for Andrew Brunson, an American pastor who has spent 21 months in Turkish detention.
“I can confirm that there was such a request by President Trump,” an Israeli official told Reuters on condition of anonymity, without elaborating.
So Israel released this terrorist supporting chick, but there was no trade. I would guess, however, that this probably explains why Turkey let Brunson out of jail and put him on ‘house arrest’.
The Turkish Foreign Ministry is denying there ever was a deal, of course:
According to the Israeli paper, Turkish Foreign Ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said: “Media reports claiming that Ebru Özkan was released in Israel in return for the release of Andrew Brunson are completely baseless and unreal.”
Aksoy added in a statement that an Israeli court decided on her conditional release on July 9, and that she was later freed pending trial and returned to Turkey.
According to the Washington Post, the request for a swap came as part of an agreement made between Trump and Erdoğan during their July 11 meeting on the sidelines of the NATO summit
But Ankara said it had not agreed to any Özkan-Brunson exchange.
“Those reports are completely baseless,” a senior Turkish official said, according to Reuters. “The Turkish government has no intention of meddling in the affairs of the country’s independent judiciary.”
Özkan had been held by Israel on “bogus terrorism charges,” the official added.
I think all of this likely explains Trump’s warning to Erdogan yesterday. Trump made this trade deal in good faith and Erdogan didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. Erdogan got his girl, but Trump just got a measly ‘house arrest’.
So now Trump is turning up the heat, threatening significant sanctions on Turkey if they don’t release Brunson. And rightly so.
Erdogan is pure evil and it looks like he wants to play hardball in order to get Gulen. The problem is, though, Turkey’s economy isn’t doing very well and these sanctions Trump is warning about, depending on what they are, could make it worse.
But it sounds like that’s the road we’re going down.