Washington Post
The Washington Post is a major American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper in the Washington metropolitan area and widely read around the country. The newspaper has won 47 Pulitzer Prizes. It employs around 800 journalists and had a 2015 daily circulation of 356,768. Its digital circulation was 1,000,000 in 2018.
Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013. Tensions between he and the newsroon have continued; in 2024 and 2025, multiple personnel resigned over the paper's non-endorsement of Kamala Harris and editorial changes advanced by Bezos.
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President Trump sought to enlist then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in the fall of 2017 to work with Rudolph W. Giuliani to help stop the prosecution of a Turkish Iranian gold trader represented by the former New York mayor, according to people with knowledge of the request.
Trump urged Tillerson in an Oval Office meeting to try to craft a diplomatic “deal” to stop the U.S. case against Reza Zarrab on corruption charges in exchange for concessions from Turkey. The request shocked the then-secretary of state, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private conversations involving the president.
At the time, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was personally lobbying Trump to get the charges dropped.
Trump, in turn, repeatedly raised the topic with Tillerson — including directly in the Oval Office meeting, according to people with knowledge of the episode.