On Thursday, the Russia investigation saw a significant development with the revelation that former presidential national security adviser Michael Flynn had seemingly flipped and begun to cooperate with Special Counsel Robert Mueller. The New York Times broke the story, reporting that Flynn’s lawyers had told lawyers working for President Trump that they’d no longer be sharing information. That development indicates that Flynn and Trump are no longer on the “same side.”

Trump has seemingly responded to that development, but not directly. On Friday morning, he announced via Twitter that he would be calling the president of Turkey. Besides the fact that Trump still seems to be unaware of the fact that policy announcements should not be made on Twitter, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is closely connected to Flynn’s part of the Russia scandal.

For one, Flynn concealed his financial connections to the Turks to the point that he attracted federal scrutiny for failing to register as a foreign agent. He was paid large sums of money by the Turkish government to do lobbying work in the U.S. on their behalf — and just a short time after the revelation that Flynn had apparently flipped, Trump was on the phone with the Turkish president.

Having been paid for theoretically legitimate lobbying work by the Turks isn’t even where Flynn’s connections to the Turkish government end. Flynn is also accused of negotiating a deal in which he would be paid to facilitate the kidnapping and extrajudicial execution of Turkish-American cleric Fethullah Gulen, who has been living in America for some time and is wanted by the Turkish government on trumped up charges.

Earlier this month — on November 8, to be exact — a Turkish-Iranian businessman awaiting trial for violating sanctions against Iran was released from prison — but not to complete freedom. His whereabouts are not immediately known, but it’s been widely suggested that he’s cooperating with Mueller’s investigation of Michael Flynn.

All of these things together make it very suspicious that Trump decided to call Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan this Friday morning.

He, of course, didn’t say that it was to see what Erdogan knew about whatever Flynn had done. Instead, he tweeted that he would be speaking to Erdogan to discuss “bringing peace to the mess that I inherited in the Middle East.”

Aside from the direct issues with Flynn, Trump’s obvious poor grasp of issues relating to the Middle East doesn’t lend towards believing him that such is all our president planned to talk about with Erdogan. Trump’s idea of negotiating Middle East peace is to say “I will get it all done.”

He might have just wanted to get on Erdogan’s good side; the possibility, of course, remains that the two did not discuss Flynn’s case outright. Trump functions in a public image based world, so maybe he just wanted to try and make the dictatorial Erdogan like him so he’d want to protect Trump and his team and help keep any crimes hidden.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Trump had diverged from the stated topic of conversation in a call with Erdogan. Late last year, Erdogan placed a congratulatory call to Trump after the latter’s election win, and during that call, Trump praised a Turkish business partner of his — and that business partner of Trump’s was arrested shortly thereafter. The arrest of that businessman was widely reported to be an attempt at gaining leverage with the U.S. with which to force the Trump Administration to release the aforementioned Gulen.

Featured Image via Kevin Dietsch/Pool via Bloomberg