Justice Dept. drops case against Bijan Rafiekian, former business partner of Michael Flynn

The Justice Department said Monday it is dropping a five-year-long illegal-lobbying case against Bijan Rafiekian, an ex-business partner of former Trump administration national security adviser Michael Flynn.

In a court filing, Justice officials said they were moving to dismiss the case against Mr. Rafiekian in light of an appellate court ruling.

“After carefully considering the Fourth Circuit’s recent decision in this case and the principles of federal prosecution, the United States believes it is not in the public interest to pursue the case against defendant Bijan Rafiekian further,” the filing said.

In a statement to CNN, Mark MacDougall, an attorney for Mr. Rafiekian, said that the case “should never have been indicted.”

“Mr. Rafiekian has been the target of baseless federal prosecution for the past five years, only because he made the poor decision to be in business with Michael Flynn,” Mr. MacDougall said. “Along with his family and his lawyers, Bijan is particularly grateful to the Court for its unwavering commitment to equity and for ensuring that justice would be done.”

Mr. Rafiekian was convicted in 2019 on charges of conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, conspiring to make false statements and willful omissions in a Foreign Agents Restriction Act filing, as well as acting as an agent of a foreign government for his illegal lobbying in the U.S. for the Turkish government.

But the conviction was overturned months later and a new trial was ordered when Judge Anthony Trenga in the Eastern District of Virginia determined that prosecutors didn’t have enough evidence to convict him and cited other problems with the case.

Since then, the case has been on appeal for years.

Prosecutors said in the original case that Mr. Rafiekian plotted to garner support in the government to have Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen extradited from the U.S. back to Turkey — a goal of the Turkish government because Mr. Gullen had been accused of being a part of a failed coup in 2016.

In the summer of 2016, Mr. Flynn along with Mr. Rafiekian used Flynn Intel Group, Mr. Flynn’s lobbying firm, to attack Mr. Gulen’s reputation. They kept it a secret that the Turkish government was paying them to do so, according to the indictment.

Mr. Flynn wasn’t charged in the case, but was believed to be “Person A” in the indictment. It laid out his lobbying on behalf of Turkey in late 2016, the same time he was working as an adviser to the Trump campaign.

The case was related to special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russia’s involvement with the 2016 election, and in 2017 Mr. Flynn pleaded guilty to lying to investigators as part of a cooperation deal with Mr. Mueller. President Trump pardoned him as the Justice Department was moving to withdraw the case against him.