While the former owner of the Turkish daily Karşı, Turan Ababey, keeps insisting on his claim that officials from the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul visited him and offered him close cooperation and money, officials from the U.S. consulate confirmed that they had a meeting with the paper but denied the allegations.Karşı daily was founded on Feb. 9, 2014, shortly after the Dec. 17 and Dec. 25, 2013 operations that were allegedly orchestrated by the Gülen Movement in an attempt to overthrow the government. The paper ended its brief journey on April 13 due to financial complications after the ruling Justice and Development Party's (AK Party) landslide victory in last year's local elections held on March 30. Although the debt-choked newspaper began with the motto, "Unbiased news," in his recent interview with A Haber, Ababey said that that the paper was established to publish the Gülen Movement's news. Ababey claimed that members of the Gülen Movement would send articles to the paper and the editors would publish them. He added that Gülenists claim to support the freedom of the press, but the daily was basically established to serve the movement and that every article that was published was in favor of the movement.Apart from his allegations of the Gülen Movement, Ababey also claimed that officials from the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul visited him and offered him close cooperation and money. However, a senior official from the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul denied the allegations while confirming that they visited Karşı. "I'd like to clarify that the nature of the meeting with Karşı was just a courtesy call" a U.S. diplomat said.A senior U.S official, who spoke to Daily Sabah under the condition of anonymity, denied the allegations. "With Karşı, it was just another paper that we have met with, and I did go with several other members from my staff. But we did not present any proposals or anything, just introduced ourselves to learn about their work and to explain what we do and that was it. Thus, some of the information that is provided in the article about us providing some sort of proposal was not true" the U.S official asserted.