UPDATE 1-U.S. jury finds partner of former Trump adviser guilty of secretly lobbying

A U.S. jury on Tuesday convicted Bijan Rafiekian, who was the business partner of former U.S. national security adviser Michael Flynn, over charges of secretly lobbying for Turkey, a Department of Justice spokesman said.

Rafiekian, a co-founder of the consultancy firm Flynn Intel Group, was accused of conspiring to lobby on Turkey's behalf to try to persuade the U.S. government to extradite Fetullah Gulen, whom Turkey has blamed for orchestrating a failed coup in 2016. Rafiekian was indicted in December, along with Ekim Alptekin, a Turkish-Dutch businessman, and was charged on two accounts: conspiring to act as an agent of a foreign government, making false statements to the Justice Department and acting as a foreign agent.

A Justice Department spokesman, Joshua Stueve, said Rafiekian was found guilty on both counts, after a week-long trial in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Sentencing was set for Oct. 18. Flynn, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant general whose brief tenure in 2017 as part of President Donald Trump's inner circle is still causing legal aftershocks, was not charged as a co-conspirator with Rafiekian.

But the case could influence how U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan sentences Flynn later this year, following Flynn's guilty plea in December 2017 of having lied to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigators about his contacts with Russian officials. Flynn had previously agreed to cooperate with U.S. prosecutors and testify against Rafiekian, known as "Kian," in hopes of getting a lighter sentence.

Flynn had not testified in court, Stueve said. In a reversal earlier this month, Flynn and prosecutors had a falling out and Flynn backed away from earlier admissions of making false statements to the U.S. Justice Department in paperwork that disclosed his work as a Turkish government lobbyist.