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Notes -
Eric Adams indicted
NYC mayor Eric Adams has been indicted in federal court. The indictment details a scheme where he took illegal benefits from Turkey in a quid-pro-quo scheme, and there's an additional scheme where he applied for matching campaign funds using illegal campaign contributions. https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/26/us/whats-in-nyc-mayor-eric-adams-indictment/index.html
And that's pretty much the meat of it. There's the full indictment in the link if you want to read 56 pages of legalese.
Naturally, the right wing punditsphere is speculating that this dropped because Adams is critical of the open border, but I think it more likely that he just got caught, and maybe there's some sort of low-profile diplomatic dustup with Turkey that got the FBI investigating Turkish influence in the US. Bigger question- what are the odds he tries to play up that story in the hopes of a Trump pardon? I suspect that if he was going to pull an Eric Johnson over his disagreements with the DNC(and he is not a standard democrat) he would have already done it, but there doesn't seem to be much way he can really dispute these charges and federal courts almost always convict, and Trump just might pardon him like he did Blagojevich.
In 2017 (was it that long ago!) there was an incident where Turkish secret police attacked anti-Erdogan protestors in Washington DC. It might have got Turkey on the radar.
The other thing that comes to mind is Turkey holding up Finland’s NATO admission, which would line up with the timeline quite well.
To completely sidetrack the conversation, is there a way to kick members out of NATO? Because Turkey needs to go. They just kinda... suck on every dimension.
There's no official mechanism that allows removal of a member that doesn't consent. If the alliance is dependent on however the USA feels about a member at any given time this diminishes the value of joining the alliance. The value of the alliance is also diminished by an adversarial member that does adversarial things too. Maybe to a lesser extent.
There's nothing that practically stops all the other members agreeing to boot Turkey out, considering that decision "unanimous", then writing a new rule about removal after the fact. Officially the alliance member needs to consent to removal to leave.
That's all a lot of mess when NATO and the US can just wait out Erdogan and hope the next guy is more compliant. Despite the theatrics and politics they did host support for US through the GWOT. Turkey also hasn't kicked all NATO personnel out of the country recently. Which they did in the 70's as I recall. So maybe they've always been a bit of an adversarial partner in the alliance. The grandstanding, bloviating, and opportunistic haggling is the price to pay for a relatively, if not quite as important as 50 years ago, important strategic ally.
I mean, if it's literally unanimous, then they totally can dump Turkey; they'd just need to agree to all leave NATO and make a new organisation that is literally copypasted NATO except Turkey doesn't get admitted.
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