The Turks, worried about escalating problems with America, wanted a way out, or so we thought, trying to wrap an exchange for Brunson into the Halkbank criminal investigation. This was at best unseemly, but Trump wanted Brunson out, so Pompeo and Mnuchin negotiated with their counterparts (Mnuchin because Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control was also looking into Halkbank).5 In three-way conversations, Mnuchin, Pompeo, and I agreed nothing would be done without full agreement from the Justice Department prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, where the case, involving over $20 billion in Iran sanctions violations, was pending. (In my days at the Justice Department, we called the Southern District the “Sovereign District of New York,” because it so often resisted control by “Main Justice,” let alone by the White House.) Several times, Mnuchin was exuberant he had reached a deal with Turkey’s Finance Minister. This was typical: Whether Mnuchin was negotiating with Turkish fraudsters or Chinese trade mandarins, a deal was always in sight. In each case, the deal fell apart when Justice tanked it, which was why trying this route to get Brunson’s release was never going to work. Pompeo said, “The Turks just can’t get out of their own way,” but it was in fact Justice prosecutors who rightly rejected deals worth next to nothing from the US government’s perspective. In the meantime, Turkey’s currency continued to depreciate rapidly, and its stock market wasn’t doing much better.