Turkey wants things from Washington. It wants sanctions relief, fighter jets, friendlier coverage in the American press, for America to stop supporting the Kurds – and its ruling party has spent the past two years building direct relationships with exactly the people positioned to hand those things over.

According to newly submitted filings with the Justice Department, the pattern goes back more than a year. You would not know any of it from reading the filings themselves, though. They're signed by Halil Mutlu, the cousin of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who runs the operation for the Justice and Development Party, commonly known as AKP, out of a mansion purchased in 2024 for $4.8 million, according to D.C. property records.

The operation is both immense and astonishingly vague. In a recent federal filing in the DOJ’s Foreign Agents Registration Act database, Mutlu and the party logged roughly 85 meetings and events between December 2025 and May 2026. Nearly all of them, no matter who they met, are logged as either "Discussion regarding U.S.-Turkiye relations" or "Public Event."

This same boilerplate description shows up throughout virtually every filing logging the office’s activity, whether describing meetings with sitting members of Congress from both parties, podcasters, executive branch officials, or even the co-founder of Tucker Carlson's media company.

The Government Contacts

Throughout the filings, one thing is abundantly clear: the AKP enjoys access to the highest levels of American politics, concentrated among the people positioned to decide what Turkey actually gets.

An earlier filing shows that on a single day in April 2025, Mutlu met with four sitting members of Congress, including Michael McCaul, who had chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee until that January. He attended an event featuring the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's current chairman and met with its staff on both sides of the aisle, along with dozens of congressional staffers.

Rep. Joe Wilson, co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on U.S.-Türkiye Relations and Turkish Americans, turns up multiple times. His staffer, Stephanie Pendarvis, appears in the filings seven times over the last year.

Meeting With Podcasters and Far-Left Groups

Mutlu and AKP met with the Chinese government-linked CodePink, former Al Jazeera journalist and Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan, and attended a banquet held by the Council on American-Islamic Relations' New York chapter. Between a CCP-linked advocacy group, a prominent progressive broadcaster, and an alleged Muslim Brotherhood front group, AKP's outreach spans nearly the entire ideological map of American media and activism – clearly by design.

A particularly notable meeting that Mutlu and AKP conducted was on March 11, 2026, with disgraced former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who pleaded guilty to leaking the identities of multiple covert CIA officers to the media, endangering their lives. Kiriakou currently hosts a show on the U.S.-sanctioned Russian state media network RT.

The Tucker Carlson Connection

On March 12, 2026 – just one day after the Kiriakou meeting – AKP logged a virtual meeting with Neil Patel, co-founder of both the Daily Caller and the Tucker Carlson Network. Just several weeks later, Kiriakou appeared on Carlson’s podcast, and later announced that he was publishing a book under Carlson’s publishing house.

The timing of the Patel meeting lands after months of scrutiny over Carlson’s ties to Middle Eastern regimes. In December 2025, Carlson interviewed Qatar's prime minister on stage at Doha Forum and, addressing accusations that he had taken Qatari money, announced he was buying a house in Doha instead. In January 2026, he was in Riyadh for a real estate conference, having already sat down with Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. Within a few months, the Tucker Carlson Network had built documented relationships with three separate governments jockeying for influence over how their region is covered in Western media. In response to this exposé, Patel posted on X that “These boring and disingenuous smears don't work anymore. I meet with all sorts of people every week to try to figure out what's really going on in an increasingly complicated and dangerous world.” He did not address questions regarding what they actually spoke about.

A Question Turkey Hasn't Answered

Turkey’s ever-so-obvious goal here is to cultivate the specific people in government, in media, and in activist circles, who end up shaping what Americans hear and think about Turkey and the region in the first place.

What makes this so disturbing is the sheer scale of it. An Islamic, Muslim Brotherhood-linked dictatorship is embedding itself across the institutions that shape American policy and American media coverage, all in plain sight. Whether that access adds up to actual coordination with domestic media figures and content creators is a question Turkey has not yet been forced to answer, or even been confronted with. But better late than never.

This article was written with the help of AI