WASHINGTON – Ten days before he was tapped as President-elect Donald Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn published an opinion column that immediately raised suspicions at the Justice Department.

“We need to adjust our foreign policy to recognize Turkey as a priority,” Flynn wrote in The Hill on Nov. 8, 2016, the day of the presidential election. “We need to see the world from Turkey’s perspective.”

He argued for a range of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s talking points, defending his ruthless crackdown on dissidents, calling for the extradition of Erdogan's rival, Fethullah Gülen, and calling Turkey “vital to US interests.”

What nobody knew then was that three days earlier, Flynn had received the third and last installment of $530,000 in compensation for lobbying for Turkey’s interests. He would not register as a foreign agent until March, a month after he was fired from the White House.

According to a document obtained by BuzzFeed News, the Justice Department’s counter-espionage division contacted Flynn about his Turkey work as early as Nov. 30. They also shared their suspicions with White House counsel Don McGahn in January, a former senior Justice official told BuzzFeed News.

In the court filing released on Friday, Flynn admitted that “officials from the Republic of Turkey had provided supervision and direction” over his firm's lobbying work, called the “Turkey project” in the document.

While Flynn's work for Turkey was overshadowed by his guilty plea for lying to the FBI about contacts with Russian officials, Friday's court filings were the first time the retired Army lieutenant general has acknowledged that a foreign government directed his actions while he served on the Trump campaign. This contradicts previous statements by Ekim Alptekin, the Turkish businessman whose company paid Flynn, and by Turkish officials, who have vehemently denied that Flynn’s lobbying was connected to their government.

“For the record: nobody remotely linked to the Gov. of Turkey knew about Gen. Flynn's article in advance and I wasn't consulted either,” Alptekin, an Erdogan ally, tweeted on March 8, the day after Flynn registered as a foreign agent.