On Aug. 8, the Turkish Defense Ministry hired DC lobbying giant Ballard Partners for $2.4 million, apparently as part of its long-stalled effort to rejoin the F-35 fighter jet program. Turkey was previously excluded from acquiring these jets from the U.S. after it bought Russian S-400 defense systems in July 2019.
Ballard Partners is not the only company of its kind. Middle Eastern powers have long hired high-powered and well-connected firms to lobby on their behalf, often through personal meetings with congressional staffers and executive-branch officials used by the lobbyists to advance their interests in Washington.
Today, however, the effort to influence outcomes is undergoing a dramatic shift. Under the second Trump administration, Middle Eastern countries – not only Turkey but also Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates – have refocused on buying proximity to decision-makers rather than policy expertise. A small number of leading lobbying firms, largely staffed by Trump administration alumni and former members of Congress, are best positioned to sell access to a handful of people around the president. As a result, Gulf and Turkish influence now runs through fewer hands, with less public visibility than ever.
Saudi Arabia’s Reputational Cleanup Campaign
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s recent efforts demonstrate just how important concerted lobbying campaigns have become. In the years after the gruesome killing of Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Saudi agents in Turkey in 2019, President Joe Biden vowed to make the kingdom a “pariah” for its actions.
Saudi Arabia responded by hiring top DC firms to polish its image, pouring millions of dollars into the effort.
A main player in the campaign to rehabilitate the Kingdom’s reputation is Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, one of the firms that chose to maintain its contracts with the kingdom as other firms cut ties with the Saudis after the murder of Khashoggi.
BHFS lobbyist Alfred Mottur told the Colorado Sun in November 2018: “We don’t believe it is in our client’s interest, in our interest or in the United States’ interest to abandon them during this crisis.”
Qorvis Communications — another DC firm focused on public relations — has represented the Kingdom since 9/11.
According to Qorvis’ website, after September 11 [t]he Saudi government selected Qorvis to help neutralize widespread negative media coverage and support efforts to reestablish the Saudi-U.S. relationship, beginning what would become a decades-long partnership.”
Nick Cleveland-Stout, a research associate in the Democratizing Foreign Policy program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told MBN that Qorvis was also instrumental in managing the fallout of the Khashoggi killing. [Qorvis was] paid $18 million after the killing of Jamal Khashoggi… an unheard-of amount in the world of foreign lobbying,” Cleveland-Stout said.
In July 2022, Biden — who had formerly cast the Saudi Crown Prince as a pariah — was pictured fist-bumping him on a visit to the Kingdom. Biden had previously said he wouldn’t even meet the Saudi leader.
According to Cleveland-Stout, Saudi has also hired international legal practice Hogan Lovells to manage messaging around Saudi’s ongoing military campaign in Yemen. One figure crucial to this effort is former U.S. Senator from Minnesota Norm Coleman, who now acts as senior counsel at the firm.
During his time in the Senate, Coleman was a ranking member of the Near East Subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“[He] did a lot of work on the messaging around trying to whitewash the war in Yemen — trying to make the Saudi-led intervention a lot more palatable to American audiences that were questioning the U.S. role in that, and trying to ensure [the continued] flow of arms from Washington to Riyadh,” Cleveland-Stout said.
UAE’s “Little Sparta” Push
The UAE’s dominant firm in Washington is Akin Gump, whose roster includes former Florida Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, “probably their most well-known current lobbyist on roster,” according to Cleveland-Stout.
Much of the UAE’s messaging centers on positioning itself as the Gulf’s most sophisticated, Westernized partner, a smaller nation that “punches above its weight,” an image summed up in the nickname “Little Sparta.” Ros-Lehtinen has used that branding herself in public remarks.
That reputation has largely held, even as the UAE has faced accusations of arming Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary group implicated in atrocities during Sudan’s civil war. The UAE’s involvement in Sudan “hasn’t gotten much attention in Washington, and I think that speaks in part to how effective their lobby has been,” Cleveland-Stout said.
Ros-Lehtinen did not respond to MBN’s request for comment.
Cleveland-Stout ties that silence to the UAE’s investment in Washington’s think tank ecosystem. Citing the Quincy Institute’s own funding tracker, Cleveland-Stout said the UAE has given $20 million since 2019 to institutions including the Middle East Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you’re working at a think tank, and even if your portfolio is supposed to be East Africa or the Gulf, you’re going to be less likely to bring attention to what’s taking place in Sudan and the UAE’s complicity if you’re aware that your funders might be upset about something like that,” he said.
Ballard Partners – Access as the Product
Ballard Partners’ newly signed Turkish contract underscores a broader dynamic reshaping foreign lobbying under the second Trump administration: Influence increasingly runs through personal proximity to a small circle around the president.
“The circle of people that can get things done just has shrunk so much, because there are only a select number of people that Trump entrusts to carry out his policies,” Cleveland-Stout said, naming Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Steve Witkoff, and Jared Kushner alongside Trump himself. “If you have access to any of those people, then you are just able to trade on that and sell that to potential clients.”
Ballard Partners, he said, has capitalized on that dynamic more successfully than any other firm in Washington, thanks to alumni who moved directly into the administration, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and former Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Ballard did not respond to MBN’s request for comment.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE have taken the access strategy a step further, investing directly in Trump’s inner circle, according to Cleveland-Stout.
Saudi Arabia has put around $2 billion into Affinity Partners, the investment firm Jared Kushner founded in 2021, and a firm that, Cleveland-Stout said, “hasn’t demonstrated a return on investment” and “appears to be just a vehicle for laundering influence.”
Affinity has pushed back on that characterization. Kushner has said the firm intentionally moved slowly to invest its capital, in part because a flood of venture capital into the market made it difficult early on to find attractive deals.
In a statement, Affinity’s chief legal officer, Chad Mizelle, called inquiries a political move: “Partisan politics aside, Affinity Partners is an S.E.C.-registered investment firm that has always acted appropriately and any suggestion to the contrary is false. We are fortunate to have the support of some of the world’s most sophisticated investors and work hard on their behalf every day.”
The UAE’s national security adviser also invested roughly $500 million in World Liberty Financial, the Trump-Witkoff cryptocurrency venture, as the U.S. weighs the Emirates’ access to advanced American AI chips.
World Liberty did not respond to MBN’s request for comment.
Turkey’s Two-Track Operation
Cleveland-Stout said Turkey has historically had less success than Saudi Arabia or the UAE in Washington.
That may be starting to shift. At a NATO summit in Ankara in July, President Trump said the U.S. would lift the CAATSA sanctions imposed on Turkey and would “consider” reviving F-35 sales, a sign that Ankara’s renewed investment in Ballard Partners could pay off.
Robert Wexler, a former Florida congressman, is working on the account. Wexler co-founded the Caucus on U.S.-Turkish Relations, and served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
But registered lobbying contracts only capture part of the picture, according to writer and open-source intelligence investigator Eitan Fischberger. The ruling Turkish Justice and Development Party maintains its own Washington operation, separate from the Turkish embassy. It is run out of a D.C. office and led by Halil Mutlu, Erdogan’s cousin.
Fischberger published an investigation tracing Clash Report — an X account with more than 850,000 followers whose posts are regularly shared by U.S. senators, congressmen, and journalists — to Monolog Medya, an Istanbul-based firm run by Cüneyt Polat, a former digital director at Turkey’s state broadcaster TRT. Monolog’s disclosed clients include TÜRGEV, a charitable foundation tied to Erdogan’s family.
Fischberger’s research also revealed intriguing insights about the people the AKP’s Washington office chooses to meet with. They fall into a strikingly wide ideological range that includes Tucker Carlson’s business partner, progressive commentator Mehdi Hasan, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the anti-war group Code Pink, and UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, an outspoken critic of Israel.
Fischberger points to one sequence of meetings he called particularly notable. The Turks met with former CIA officer John Kiriakou, now a host on Russian state broadcaster RT. The following day, the representatives of the AKP office met with Neil Patel, Tucker Carlson’s business partner. About five weeks later, Kiriakou appeared on Carlson’s show, and the Tucker Carlson Network soon after announced it would publish one of Kiriakou’s books.
Fischberger described the strategy as consistent with what he called an “inside-outside game” that Turkey and Qatar both play, cultivating relationships across the ideological spectrum, including rival or hostile political camps, to ensure influence regardless of who holds power.
“If you’re friends with everybody, you kind of hedge your bet, so that it doesn’t matter who’s in power or what conflict is sort of brewing. You will always be on the winning side,” he said.
The Iran War Test
The Iran war tested where that influence reaches. Cleveland-Stout said Gulf states’ wartime lobbying — including reported efforts to delay U.S. strikes over fears of retaliation against their energy infrastructure — ran through direct diplomacy, not registered lobbyists.
“That is much more direct diplomacy,” he said. “If it’s like a real crisis… that’s usually handled by the officials themselves.”
Whatever role Gulf capitals played behind the scenes, the pattern holds: The firms, the access, and the investments detailed above are the visible layer of influence in Washington. But what happens when the stakes are highest may be negotiated at levels less accessible to public view.
