TRUMP HAD NO PROBLEM WITH IRAN’S REVOLUTIONARY GUARD WHEN HE WAS DOING BUSINESS WITH ITS ASSOCIATES

According to an exhaustive report, the group the president just labeled a terrorist organization reportedly had financial ties to the Trump family business.

BY BESS LEVIN
APRIL 8, 2019

Not mentioned in the statement? Allegations, detailed in an extensive investigative report, that the Trump Organization participated in a scheme that likely helped the I.R.G.C. launder money and acquire weapons of mass destruction. (Must have been an oversight!) In 2017, The New Yorker published a story about Trump Tower Baku, a hotel in Azerbaijan that never opened and appeared “to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.” According to reporter Adam Davidson, in 2012, the Trump Organization signed multiple contracts to build the tower with the Mammadov family, whose patriarch, Ziya Mammadov, was the Transportation Minister at the time. (Ziya Mammadov was described by a U.S. diplomat as “notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan,” which is among the most corrupt nations in the world.) The Mammadovs were financially entangled with the Darvishi family, at least three members of which were reportedly associates of the Revolutionary Guard. (When the tower was originally announced, Ziya Mammadov “awarded a series of multimillion-dollar contracts to Azarpassillo, an Iranian construction company” run by the Darvishis.) Ivanka Trump, the most senior Trump Organization official involved in the project, toured the site in October 2014, reportedly offering “very strong feelings, not just about the design but about the back of the hotel—landscaping, everything.” (Ivanka, who declined The New Yorker’s request for comment at the time, was said to “personally approve everything” on the project.)


https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/04/trump-iran-revolutionary-guard-terrorist-organization

Donald Trump’s Worst Deal

The President helped build a hotel in Azerbaijan that appears to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.

By Adam Davidson March 5, 2017

...

The more time I spent in the neighborhood, the more I wondered how the hotel could have been imagined as a viable business. The development was conceived, in 2008, as a high-end apartment building. In 2012, after Donald Trump’s company, the Trump Organization, signed multiple contracts with the Azerbaijani developers behind the project, plans were made to transform the tower into an “ultra-luxury property.” According to a Trump Organization press release, a hotel with “expansive guest rooms” would occupy the first thirteen floors; higher stories would feature residences with “spectacular views of the city and Caspian Sea.” For an expensive hotel, the Trump Tower Baku is in an oddly unglamorous location: the underdeveloped eastern end of downtown, which is dominated by train tracks and is miles from the main business district, on the west side of the city. Across the street from the hotel is a discount shopping center; the area is filled with narrow, dingy shops and hookah bars. Other hotels nearby are low-budget options: at the AYF Palace, most rooms are forty-two dollars a night. There are no upscale restaurants or shops. Any guests of the Trump Tower Baku would likely feel marooned.

...

A former top official in Azerbaijan’s Ministry of Tourism says that, when he learned of the Trump hotel project, he asked himself, “Why would someone put a luxury hotel there? Nobody who can afford to stay there would want to be in that neighborhood.”

...

The available evidence strongly suggests that Ziya Mammadov conspired with an agent of the Revolutionary Guard to make overpriced deals that would enrich them both while allowing them to flout prohibitions against money laundering and to circumvent sanctions against Iran. Based on Ziya Mammadov’s past, it seems reasonable to assume that his main motive was profit. Like most Azerbaijanis, he is a secular Shiite Muslim, and he has no known ties to hard-line factions in Iran. Why did the Darvishis want to work with the Mammadovs? It might have caught their attention that the Mammadovs had their own private bank—one that had unfettered access to the global financial system.

...

Throughout the Presidential campaign, Trump was in business with someone that his company knew was likely a partner with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. ..."


https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal

Ivanka’s signature real estate deals were disasters linked to drug cartels and money laundering

The president’s daughter has been at the center of a pair of the presidential projects tied most closely to grand corruption.

CASEY MICHEL
NOV 18, 2017, 4:47 PM

Before her father became president, Ivanka Trump tied herself more closely to two of her father’s international projects than any others.

One, in Panama, was the current president’s first international foray — a building, according to the developer, that Donald Trump wanted to be Ivanka’s “baby.” The other, in Azerbaijan, was a project Ivanka herself claimed she “oversaw” — one for which, according to an Azeri lawyer involved with the project, the president’s daughter “personally approved everything.”

Neither project succeeded, at least from the Trumps’ point of view. The board of directors of Panama’s Trump Ocean Club eventually fired Trump’s management company, citing budget over-runs and improper bonuses. Meanwhile, the development of Trump Tower Baku was so poorly managed — thanks to shoddy construction and missing payments — that The New Yorker dubbed the building “Trump’s worst deal.” Both remain marked blots on the president’s supposed business chops — and on the record of his daughter, who remains a special adviser to the president.

But a pair of recent, in-depth investigations reveal the bungled buildings point to far more concerning missteps than mistimed bonuses or poor designs. The president and his daughter appear to have been, at best, unwitting accomplices to money laundering and grand corruption on a significant scale.


https://thinkprogress.org/ivankas-real-estate-deals-corruption-33f65f778d0f/

Trump's 'business ties' to Iran's Revolutionary Guards reemerge, a day after he designated it a terror group

President's firm entered partnership with 'notoriously corrupt' official to build Trump Tower Baku

Tom Embury-Dennis @tomemburyd
Tuesday 9 April 2019 16:21

A day after Donald Trump designated Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) a terrorist organisation, reports are reemerging of the Trump Organization's alleged participation in a scheme that likely helped the IRGC launder money to fund its interests abroad.

...

But according to a 2017 report by the New Yorker, the Trump Organization signed contracts in 2012 with developers to build a skyscraper in Azerbaijan that appeared “to be a corrupt operation engineered by oligarchs tied to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard”.

The family the Trumps partnered with on the Trump Tower Baku project were the Mammadovs, whose billionaire patriarch Ziya Mammadov was the then-Azerbaijani transport minister, on a reported salary of little over £9,000.

Trump Tower in Baku, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps

The NewYorker covered another of those non-collusive coincidences of the Trump family, because who follows the money trail in deals.

The designation of the IRGC as a terror group seems to represent the provocative hope that Iran can be enticed into an attack that would require US dog-wagging.

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/4/8/1848694/-Trump-Tower-in-Baku-and-the-Iranian-Revolutionary-Guard-Corps

The Fact Sheets under the Blog tab list the ugly details about the unfit, biased judges corruptly rammed through the judicial confirmation process by Trump and Moscow Mitch as they pack the courts.
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The Fact Sheets are one page, quick to read and easy to share. The post on each judge also includes extensive background information if you want to know more.

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Trump and McConnell are counting on the resumes of their hand-picked extremist judges going generally unnoticed. The opposite needs to happen - we need to shine a light on them. Download Fact Sheets and post them, share them, tweet them, mail them or hand them out. Force accountability on every GOP senator who voted to confirm these judges. The American people deserve answers from these senators about their votes.
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Trump and the Senate GOP are using the judicial confirmation process as a political tool — filling lifetime appointments with unfit and unqualified radical conservatives whose records prove they will not protect our rights.
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An excellent explainer can be found here: What Trump Has Done to the Courts, Explained.
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Americans deserve fair, impartial, independent and non-partisan judges and justices who will safeguard the rights of all —not unqualified, smug political hacks, closed-mined ideologues, self-righteous zealots, liars, predatory corporatists, abusive bullies, hate group leaders, racists, bigots and misogynists. Which the Trump judges are.

As of January 2020, 85% of Trump's judicial nominees confirmed by the GOP Senate are white and 75% are male. Some Trump judges have never even tried a case. Most are members of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society or have been selected and groomed by the Federalist Society to pervert our justice system and enact a fascist agenda that fundamentally undermines democracy and human dignity, especially for vulnerable Americans. They are using the courts to execute a wildly unpopular, minority agenda that they could not accomplish at the ballot box.

Republicans blatantly abused or ignored the rules of the Senate to hold vacancies open for years, contemptuously blocked President Obama's nominees, and rammed through (with less than two hours of debate allowed per nominee) an unprecedented number of Trump judges with the express, stated purpose of packing the courts. They don't deny it. They laugh and brag about it. Ratfucking the courts.