Turkey’s defence ministry has signed a $2.4mn year-long contract with Washington, DC-based Ballard Partners led by Brian Ballard, Middle East Eye reported on August 26.

Ballard is a Republican fundraiser in Florida. His firm is currently the top-earning lobby shop in the US capital. It generated more than $30m in federal lobbying revenues in 1Q.

Filings with the US justice department reveal the firm will receive $200,000 per month to provide “government relations services, strategic consulting and advocacy” to the Turkish ministry as well as to monitor congressional developments.

The contract runs from August 15, 2026 to August 14, 2027. Additional expenses will also be billed to the Turkish defence ministry.

Speculation says F-35s on agenda

Given that the hiring party is the defence ministry, Middle East Eye speculated that the task in hand is to secure F-35 fighter jet purchases from the US for Turkey. However, no official information is available on the matter.

The F-35 saga has run for around a decade. Turkey was among the partners developing the fifth-generation fighter jets, the most advanced such stealth aircraft in the world. However, the US ended the Turkish role in the programme and took away Ankara's right to acquire F-35s after Turkey's Erdogan administraton defied its wishes by buying S-400 missile defence systems from the Kremlin following the failed coup attempt made against President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in 2016.

To this day, analysts are unsure of what truly drove Erdogan to make the headline-grabbing military hardware acquisition from Vladimir Putin's Russia. Ankara keeps the missile systems inactive.

Donald Trump has lately indicated he may act to remove the ban on selling F-35s to Turkey, but there is a lot of opposition in Congress to any such change in policy and Turkey's regional rival, Israel, which itself deploys F-35s, is fiercely opposed to any such threat to its air supremacy.  

Old customer

This is not the first time Ankara has turned to Ballard’s firm. In 2017, during Trump’s first term in office, Turkey awarded Ballard Partners a $1.5mn contract. It was one of the first big deals secured by Ballard following the opening of his lobbying outfit. In 2018, Turkey renewed the contract for $0.75mn.

Media reports suggested that the 2017 contract centred on mitigating fallout from a US sanctions-evasion case brought against Halkbank (Istanbul/HALKB), a Turkish government-run lender. The US justice department under the Trump administration ultimately dropped the charges against the bank in June.

In 2019, US title Courthouse News reported how Turkish lobbying expenditures in the US ballooned during the first Trump presidency. An investigation by the publication studied the US Justice Department’s foreign lobbying database to identify the five largest recipients of money linked to the Turkish government between 2014 and 2018: Amsterdam & Partners, Ballard Partners, Gephardt Group, Greenberg Traurig and Mercury Public Affairs.

It found that their budgets, along with those of their subcontractors, more than quadrupled collectively, from more than $1.7mn in 2014 to more than $7.3mn in 2018.

Pro-Israel circles

To execute the mandate, Ballard has assembled a bipartisan team with extensive connections to influential establishment figures. It includes Robert Wexler, a former Democratic congressman from Florida who co-founded the Congressional Caucus on US-Turkey Relations and maintains strong links to pro-Israel circles in Washington.

The account team also features Thomas Boodry, a former special assistant to Trump and senior director for legislative affairs at the National Security Council. Boodry was dismissed from his White House post in April 2025 during a purge of officials following an intervention by far-right activist Laura Loomer, who presented opposition research accusing several staff members of disloyalty to the president.

Syl Lukis, a senior partner and close associate of Ballard, will also advise on the account.

Ballard Partners’ network of alumni includes White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and former attorney-general Pam Bondi.