After Trump, The Culture Of Corruption Will Never Be The Same-- Take Azerbaijan

Monday, both Rachel's researchers and New Yorker writer Adam Davidson made a few small-- but significant-- errors (and omissions) in the report that each filed on the Trump Azerbaijan scandal. Maddow's long, circuitous dramatic report-- once she got to it-- was just based on Davidson's article. As usual, she had nothing substantive to add, just some entertainment-value drama and random superfluous facts barely-- at best-- related to the matter at hand. The video above came after the long circuitous thing, which I won't bore you with, and is her interview with Davidson who spent more time in Baku than I did-- but must have not talked to the right people there... which I did... back in June.

-snip-

What Davidson missed (he got it wrong) was that Trump Tower Baku did open (albeit without a "Grand Opening&quot and did start renting out rooms-- and was almost immediately shuttered-- and that eventually-- after it was clear it would not be in business in time for the week long festivities around the Formula 1 Race (the 2016 European Grand Prix), the Mammadov mafia tried burning it down, presumably for the insurance money. Davidson messing up on that caused Maddow to go off on her theory about how if the business was never meant to make any financial sense, it must have had another reason to exist. She isn't necessarily wrong about the money-laundering aspect from Iran's Revolutionary Guard-- the CIA had been talking about that and that relationship with Trump's partners, the Mammadovs, for years. But Trump Tower Baku was very much meant to be-- at least by Trump and Ivanka-- a profitable, on-going enterprise.

What they didn't quite understand was that Baku is a "with it" cosmopolitan and highly-educated and connected city/society. Other than the politics of a kleptocracy/kakistocracy, the city is not some impoverished backward backwater. As soon as Trump went on a campaign-related rampage against Muslims, this progressive and relative secular city realized he was shit-talking them. And that was the end of any chance Trump Tower Baku could be a success. By the time I got there, they were already debating how long it would take before they could change the name and re-open.

Here's the stuff Davidson missed that my sources in Baku told me. A team claiming to be part of the Trump Organization went through Baku's 5-star hotels hiring away many of the best employees. How could that have happened? They offered to pay people high salaries that included 6 month advances. Nothing like that had ever happened in the Baku hotel industry and Trump Tower was soon far more filled with employees than Trump doddering administration has been.

Read more: http://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2017/03/after-trump-culture-of-corruption-well.html