The Trump Organization's two degrees of separation from Iran's Revolutionary Guard

After President Trump announced Monday that the United States now officially considers Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, the president said that anyone doing business with the IRGC is "bankrolling" terrorism. The thing is, that might actually include one of the Trump Organization's business partners.

In 2017, The New Yorker reported that Trump's daughter Ivanka was the senior Trump Organization official involved with a hotel project in Baku, Azerbaijan — she made the trip to Baku in October and toured the site, which she posted about on her Instagram account.

It turns out, though, that the Mammadovs, the Azerbaijani family with whom the Trump Organization worked with on the development was financially entangled with an Iranian family whose construction company is controlled by the IRGC. In 2008, family patriarch Ziya Mammadov — at the time Azerbaijan's minister of transportation — awarded a series of of multi-billion contracts to Azarpassillo, an Iranian construction company run by the Darvishi family. The New Yorker reported that at least members of the Darvishi family were associates of the IRGC. One brother, Habil, is apparently a senior official in the organization. The other two brothers, Kamal and Keyumars, were known to frequently visit Azerbaijan and reportedly developed a "close" relationship with the Mammadovs.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

"At a moment when Iran was struggling to find ways to send money outside the country, Keyumars Darvishi joined Azarpassillo and began making one deal after another in Azerbaijan," The New Yorker writes.

There is no evidence, however, that Trump or any Trump Organization officials, including Ivanka, conducted any illegal business throughout their dealings with the Mammadovs. Trump, in fact, was reportedly not heavily involved in the process, if at all. But if the Mammadovs were laundering money for the IRGC, as The New Yorker suggests, the Trump Organization may have unwittingly enriched the very group the president just declared a terrorist organization. Read more at The New Yorker.