Trump team to block Erdogan gun deal by Joel Gehrke

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan will be banned by the Trump administration from purchasing weapons from a U.S. manufacturer, according to a new report.

The decision blocks a $1.2 million deal that would have supplied arms to Erdogan's security detail, months after Erdogan's team outraged U.S. leaders by beating protesters against his regime during a trip to Washington, D.C. The violence added new stress to an alliance that has grown fraught in recent years, despite Turkey's status as a key member of NATO.

"The State Department, in informing Congress that it was formally withdrawing the planned sale, said it was at the request of Sig Sauer, which had requested the license from the U.S. government that's needed to export weapons outside the U.S.," according to the Associated Press, which first reported the cancellation. "But the U.S. had already quietly put the sale on hold after the violence, and the Trump administration had informed the Turkish government that the sale wouldn't be allowed to take place. Sig Sauer appeared to have pulled its request for a license from the U.S. government after hearing from the Turks that it no longer expected to purchase the weapons."

The cancellation drew immediate applause from Congress, where Republican and Democratic lawmakers have demanded that Trump punish Erdogan. "Erdogan thinks he can beat up people with immunity from our law," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., told the Washington Examiner. "He may behave that way in Turkey but he can not do that in America."

Rohrabacher previously urged Trump to bar Erdogan from entering the United States, a symbolic rebuke he hoped would sidestep the logistical problems inherent in trying to prosecute his security detail. "We have a message for [Erdogan]: We don't need people like you visiting the United States anymore," he said during a hearing in May.

"This was an attack on American sovereignty," added California Rep. Brad Sherman, a senior Democrat on the committee. "Quasi-military forces of a foreign nation beat and attacked Americans on American soil. This was deliberate, because Erdogan believes that this helps him politically back in Turkey. We have to demonstrate to the world that aggression on American soil is not going to pay off."

At the same, Trump's team has been trying to rehabilitate the relationship with Turkey after years of tension that traces back to Erdogan's authoritarian leanings and disagreements over how to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. Russian President Vladimir Putin has taken advantage of those difficulties by developing a relationship with critical NATO member. That effort culminated most recently in Erdogan's decision to finalize a deal for Russian missile defense system that is incompatible with NATO technology.

"It is a very significant development," said Marc Pierini, former EU diplomat and analyst at Carnegie Europe, told Deutsche Welle last week. "[I]t is going to come with a significant number of Russian advisors, trainers, and operators and so on. So at the top of the Turkish air force defense architecture, you're going to have Russians."

The State Department declined to comment directly on the cancellation of the Sig Sauer deal. The report surfaced as Erdogan arrived in the United States for the U.N. General Assembly in New York City. The trip raised concerns among lawmakers who feared another outbreak of violence involving Erdogan's team and urged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to block anyone involved in the previous incident from traveling to New York.

"Mr. Secretary, foreign officials, including security personnel, must respect U.S. law while visiting this country," House Foreign Affairs Chairman Ed Royce, R-Calif., and ranking member Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., wrote in a Friday letter to Tillerson. "Those who fail to do so must only be allowed to return to the United States to face the charges against them."

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