Duh, Erdogan is his buddy.
Via Bloomberg:
President Barack Obama rejected claims that the U.S. had prior knowledge of last week’s attempted coup in Turkey and urged Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to tamp down any rumors of American involvement.
Any suggestions of early U.S. knowledge of the rebellion by a faction of the Turkish military “are completely false, unequivocally false,” Obama said at the White House on Friday. He said he spoke this week with Erdogan, who “needs to make sure that not just he but everybody in his government understand that those reports are false.”
Obama’s remarks were his most extensive to date on the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey, a key NATO ally and partner in the battle against Islamic State. Erdogan has blamed the plot on supporters of a U.S.-based religious leader Fethullah Gulen, and Turkey’s ambassador to the U.S. said Friday that his government had formally submitted documents requesting Gulen’s extradition.
Asked whether the U.S. would hand over Gulen, a former Erdogan ally, Obama said the Turkish government would need to present sufficient evidence of the 75-year-old cleric’s involvement. The two countries signed an extradition treaty in 1979.