Connecting the Dots

I have become a fan of Rachel Maddow.  I really like her opinionated and passionate style, but what I really love is her ability to tell a story.  As with any good storyteller, she begins with something that at first seems innocuous until she weaves all the elements of the story together, carefully and skillfully , until the overall picture  begins to come into focus.

That is what she did last night on her program on MSNBC.  Starting with a backgrounder on Bechtel, the giant infrastructure company that completes huge projects around the world, which evolved from an interesting history of the Seatac Narrows Bridge in Washington , she enumerated the scope of the companies activities worldwide.  Then she focused on a particular project Bechtel was bidding on in Azerbijian. 

Azerbijian has become very wealthy because of it’s oil reserves and with lots of money, wanted to build a huge road infrastructure throughout the country.  When Bechtel’s bid of $4-5 Million per kilometer of road was rejected in favor of another contractor’s bid of $18 Million per kilometer, Rachel asked the obvious question:  Why would Azerbijian choose to pay 3 times the cost to this alternate construction company?  Turns out the alternate construction company was a front for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, the largest purveyor/exporter of terrorism in the world right now.  Hmmmm.

So you might ask why Iran’s Revolutionary Guard has a construction company…..well, it turns out that using front companies is how they launder money out of IRAN to support their worldwide terrorism activities.  You see, the Azerbijiani Transportation Minister responsible for letting those contracts pays all that money to the Revolutionary Guard of Iran’s Construction company which is then free of any restriction to distribute that money abroad.  So he is supporting the terrorist activity……and of course is making a huge ‘fee’ while doing it.  This is the quintessential definition of a corrupt business practice, not to mention supporting a terrorist organization.

Then Rachel turned to her most salient part of the story.  It turns out that Donald Trump, up until a month after the election, was a business partner with the Azerbijiani Transportation Minister’s family to build the new Trump Tower in Baku, the capital of Azerbijian.  He even sent Ivanka there in 2014 to manage the deal.  The only fly in this ointment is that the new hotel was being constructed in a place that was probably the least desirable location in the city, far from the place where a tourist hotel of the caliber of a Trump project would expect to be seen.  It was in the middle of some railroad yards and surrounded by highways with no ‘off ramps’ to get to the building.  There are some sketchy financial records that were part of Trumps presidential filings prior to the election that shows he received several million dollars from this project before he backed out of the deal in December of 2016.  What do you suppose was going on there?

Is it too much to surmise that Trump was doing business with a family that has the reputation of being the ‘Corleones of the Caspian’, as described in Foreign Policy Magazine in 2014?   This inexplicable project which was inexplicably abandoned 1 month after the election, makes it highly likely that Mr. Trump was doing business with a corrupt, bribery ridden supporter of terrorist activities worldwide.

It is against US Law to do business with people, companies or countries in which simple due diligence shows that their activities are sanctioned, corrupt and illegal.  Under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Law, you cannot go into business with people like this—it is punishable with jail time…..and yet he did.

How many other deals like this are there around the world that the Trump Organization has or is still participating in?  How many of their business partners are in the business of laundering money, paying outrageous sums for projects that make no sense, supporting front organizations that support international terrorism?  (How about the $30 Million house in Palm Beach that the Trumps bought and then immediately sold to a Russian for $90 Million without even opening the front door, and then saw it demolished?    A quick $60 Million for moving money around?)

This is just the tip of the iceberg friends.

And so, we see the dots being connected by journalistic professionals who are doing real digging.  This President’s financial records must be examined.  The American people need to understand the moral or amoral motivations of this man before it is too late.

And I encourage all of you to watch Rachel Maddow.  She is perhaps the most articulate and coherent story teller we have seen in many a moon.  And her stories are so important to listen to….. for the health and safety of our democracy.