A global proxy war between the president of Turkey and his No. 1 nemesis played out early this year in an otherwise routine public-school board meeting in Fremont, Calif.
On the agenda during the January meeting was a pitch from the chief executive of a California charter-school chain, which had proposed opening an outpost in the Silicon Valley...lso in attendance, and bearing a long list of objections, was a lawyer representing the Republic of Turkey.
The attorney, from London-based Amsterdam & Partners LLP, “has been following us around lately” trying to block the chain’s projects,Caprice Young, chief executive of Magnolia Public Schools, told the Fremont board. “He is a representative of the Turkish government who seems to believe that we are affiliated with a religious group with whom we are not affiliated.”
Turkish officials blame Mr. Gulen for orchestrating a
July 15 coup attempt. They accuse him of trying to subvert the democratically elected government via positions his sympathizers hold in the judiciary, police and academia.
Turkey has asked the U.S. to extradite Mr. Gulen on charges unrelated to the putsch. U.S. officials have said they would consider all evidence Turkey presents as part of an extradition request; privately, many senior U.S. officials said they are skeptical of Turkey’s claims against Mr. Gulen.
Mr. Gulen’s network is hard to define. His supporters run schools and foundations around the world with clear ties to him. His links to other institutions are less clear, including to U.S. schools such as Magnolia. The chain was founded by two Gulen sympathizers and counts Gulen admirers among its teachers, said its CEO, Dr. Young. She said Magnolia has no legal, financial or governance connection with him.
Robert Amsterdam, whose firm was hired by Turkey, said he has about 25 employees and consultants fanned out around the globe to prove a theory, an effort that predated the coup attempt and has gathered momentum since. Roughly 150 schools in the U.S., and hundreds of other academic institutions and businesses around the world, he claims, channel millions of dollars annually to the Gulen movement.
“This is truly a global political and criminal movement,” said Mr. Amsterdam. “In the U.S., they’re teaching 60,000 students. I don’t know how they have time to teach when they spend so much time gaming the system.”
A Turkish embassy official in Washington referred inquiries to Mr. Amsterdam.
His representatives referred inquiries to Yuksel Alp Aslandogan, executive director of the Alliance for Shared Values, a nonprofit that promotes
Mr. Gulen’s ideas and his “Hizmet” movement. Mr. Gulen denies involvement in the failed coup, denies trying to subvert the government and is opposed to violence, said Mr. Aslandogan. The cleric, he said, is 77 or 78 years old.
Mr. Aslandogan defended the movement, saying: “There are hundreds of businesses and NGOs within the Hizmet movement that have been legally operating around the world…and have been praised by local authorities and heads of state for their contributions to the country in which they operate.”
Some U.S. schools on Mr. Amsterdam’s hit list were founded by Gulen sympathizers but Mr. Gulen doesn’t run them, said Mr. Aslandogan, who himself helped start a school in Chicago.
‘Money laundering’
Mr. Amsterdam is aiming to tie the schools on his list to Mr. Gulen and expose what he said is a “money laundering” scheme. Some schools, he said, illegally use public funding to pay for immigration lawyers to win visas for teachers and administrators from Turkey. The schools then expect these Turkish employees to donate to the Gulenist movement, he said, and pressure them to donate to American politicians who advocate for Mr. Gulen.
The schools, he said, illustrate why Mr. Gulen should be extradited. They “give him political influence in a very big way,” he said.
Mr. Aslandogan said the schools Mr. Amsterdam accuses of impropriety “are American institutions serving American children and their parents. Any illegal or unethical action by individuals who are allegedly sympathizers of the Hizmet movement would be against the movement’s core values.”
Both camps are focused on Washington, D.C., where they are enlisting lawmakers and lobbyists to argue for or against Mr. Gulen and his causes. The Alliance, which backs Mr. Gulen, hired the Podesta Group Inc., co-founded by the chairman of
Hillary Clinton’s White House campaign, John Podesta, and now run by his brother,Tony Podesta.
Mr. Gulen rose to prominence in Turkey in the 1980s with his moderate Islamic teachings combining religion, democracy and science. When Mr. Erdogan rose to power in 2002, his party and Mr. Gulen shared some goals, working closely to break the military’s political monopoly and to overhaul laws they saw as discriminating against some conservative Muslims.
Mr. Erdogan and Mr. Gulen eventually broke their alliance. The cleric accused the president of becoming dangerously authoritarian. Mr. Erdogan accused his opponent of attempting a soft coup when prosecutors and judges announced a corruption investigation against Erdogan allies. Mr. Erdogan and his allies denied the corruption allegations, and Mr. Erdogan’s government helped quash the investigation.
In December, Mr. Amsterdam helped sue Mr. Gulen in Pennsylvania federal court on behalf of a rival religious group in Turkey, claiming Mr. Gulen directed followers to carry out human-rights abuses. In June, a U.S. district judge dismissed the case, saying it was in the wrong jurisdiction. Mr. Aslandogan called the suit part of a “smear campaign.”
Mr. Amsterdam said his team in the U.S. has been rounding up documents, filing complaints with state school administrators, interviewing students and parents and mining data on administrators and affiliates.
“We’re moving methodically from state to state. We have hit Texas, California, Ohio and Illinois. We are going to go to the Eastern Seaboard: New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey and down to Florida,” he said, sitting in a New York hotel cafe on a recent day. “We’re going to do our own whistle-stop tour.”
In Texas, Mr. Amsterdam filed a complaint this summer about the Harmony Public School network to the Texas Education Agency. He alleged that the parent company of the schools hired Gulen supporters from Turkey, paid them more than other teachers and required them to donate to politicians.
The TEA said it is reviewing the complaint to determine if it should launch a formal investigation into some of the allegations, including whether the schools gave preferences to some vendors and misused state and federal funds. Harmony denied Mr. Amsterdam’s allegations and said it is cooperating with the review.
Harmony’s CEO, Dr. Soner Tarim, called the complaints “unfounded,” “ridiculous” and “frivolous.” As in many school chains on Mr. Amsterdam’s list, one of Harmony’s founders was of Turkish descent. Harmony, with 48 schools, said 197 of its 3,545 teachers are on H-1B visas. All of them are from Turkey. It has offered Turkish as a foreign language.
Mr. Amsterdam said he is preparing a complaint against Concept Schools in the Midwest, which is on his list of charter schools with ties to Mr. Gulen. A Concept spokesman said the school chain wasn’t aware of Mr. Amsterdam’s investigation and denied Gulen ties.
At Beehive Science and Technology Academy in Utah, Assistant Principal Germaine Barnes noticed the school on a list of supposedly Gulen-linked schools. The school has no ties to Mr. Gulen, she said. “We’re being unfairly portrayed and we have no control over it.”
In Massachusetts, at least three schools are on Mr. Amsterdam’s list. Among them is Pioneer Charter School of Science, which opened in 2007 near Boston. Pioneer declined to comment. Dominic Slowey, a spokesman for the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association, wrote in an email that the three schools get erroneously linked with Mr. Gulen because they have some Turkish administrators and offer Turkish as a language option. “This keeps showing up on various websites and we keep playing Whack-a-Mole with it.”
Magnolia, the charter-school chain that proposed a school in Fremont, was founded by Gulen sympathizers who were Turkish graduate students in California, said Dr. Young, the CEO. The Los Angeles-based chain of 10 schools offers Turkish language, which Dr. Young said is in demand for State Department jobs.
Dr. Young said that some of Magnolia’s teachers are Turkish-Americans who have been influenced by Mr. Gulen, that the chain’s trustees include at least two Turkish-Americans and that the school has no affiliation to the Gulen movement. In a previous job as head of the California Charter Schools Association in 2007, she said, she joined a trip with educators and community leaders to Turkey funded by the Pacifica Institute, which supports Mr. Gulen’s ideas. She isn’t a Gulen follower, she said. LIAR http://www.pacificainstitutegulen.blogspot.com
At the Fremont school-board meeting, Dr. Young came prepared. A month earlier, representatives of Magnolia had been blindsided by an Amsterdam attorney, John Martin, at a school-board meeting in Anaheim, Calif. In that meeting, Mr. Martin alleged Magnolia had improperly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on H-1B visas to bring in Turkish teachers and said he suspected that those teachers were being forced to send money to Gulen organizations. Dr. Young denied the allegations.
In Fremont, Dr. Young, who became CEO in 2015, wanted to show the attacks were part of a larger fight. Before Dr. Young testified to her schools’ success, an employee handed out contracts showing that Turkey was paying Mr. Amsterdam’s firm $50,000 monthly. “We don’t understand it really any better than you do,” she told the group, “but I am here and happy to respond to any of the accusations.”
Mr. Martin took the podium, saying the Magnolia chain lacked transparency, overpaid external vendors for questionable services, “practices extremely poor fiscal discipline” and was tied to Mr. Gulen.
Afterward, Dr. Young and her colleagues from Magnolia “surrounded me and asked me ‘Why are you picking on the kids?’ ” Mr. Martin said. Dr. Young said only she approached him, adding: “He is telling baldfaced lies intended to hurt the children we serve.”
The Fremont board later in January denied Magnolia’s petition to start a school. In its written decision, without mentioning Mr. Martin’s assertions or Mr. Gulen as a factor, the board said Magnolia was “unlikely to successfully implement the program presented in the petition.”
Dr. Young said Magnolia asked to withdraw its petition before the rejection because the chain determined it couldn’t find an appropriate facility. Board spokesman Brian Killgore said it acted despite the withdrawal request.
In a February complaint to the California Department of Education, Mr. Amsterdam’s firm wrote that “California should not ignore the documented evidence that Magnolia has a long history of ambiguous financial practices, numerous business dealings posing conflicts of interest, all of the markers commonly associated with Gülen Organization charter networks under investigation.”
Dr. Young said the assertions are false. Magnolia lawyers have written to Mr. Amsterdam’s firm demanding it “cease-and-desist” making “false” statements.
In June, Magnolia published a release saying more than 30 alumni, parents and children had submitted a letter to the Turkish Consul General in Los Angeles “demanding the Turkish government stop spending substantial resources on high-powered lobbyists and lawyers to spread false information about their schools in an attempt to shut them down.”
A parent, Lourdes Gonzalez, said she agreed to be quoted in the release because she was furious Turkey would meddle in an American school. “We will not allow our children to be used as pawns,” she said in the release, “in a political game taking place 7,000 miles away.”
—Margaret Coker and Devlin Barrett contributed to this article.
Corrections & Amplifications:
An earlier version of this article misspelled Fremont school-board spokesman Brian Killgore’s name. (Sept. 22, 2016)
