In 2018, officials with a controversial pro-Trump nonprofit called the Urban Revitalization Coalition (URC) -- which recently lost its tax-exempt charity status and made headlines earlier this year with suspicious cash giveaways to Black voters -- facilitated an off-the-books foreign influence campaign on behalf of powerful people in Turkey, according to social media posts and people familiar with the organization.

URC officials Darrell Scott and Kareem Lanier, both prominent Trump surrogates in the Black community, are said by multiple sources to have used the organization as a vehicle to "solicit donations," including from wealthy Turkish nationals. Some of these solicitations came by way of former MAGA-world star Rabia Kazan, whom they hired strictly for that purpose, according to Kazan and people familiar with the arrangement.