Today I'm joined by a staff writer for The New Yorker, whose recent article, Donald Trump's

worst deal, set Twitter on fire for a few days in March.

He tells a story of a deserted luxury hotel in Baku, emblazoned with the Trump name. The Trump organization's partner in

the deal was a member of an ostentatiously corrupt family, and that family, in turn, had close ties

to Iran's Revolutionary Guard. But one of the biggest questions looming over the story is not even

how this deal came together, although that's strange enough, but why it came together.

Adam Davidson, thank you for speaking with me about your article and about the research behind it.

Thanks so much for having me on, and thanks for being so helpful when I was researching the article.

We're using this podcast to discuss financial crime. In many respects, your article represents

a potential hat trick with corruption,

money laundering, and sanctions violations. I decided to do this story, really, because once President

Trump won the election, but before the inauguration, I found myself as a business reporter

just feeling like even though I had read however many hundreds or thousands of articles about Donald Trump and the Trump organization, I really didn't have a good picture of, well, how did they work?

And what were they up to, especially overseas?

And so I started doing a kind of survey just on my own, reading publicly available stuff, on a variety of his overseas. And so I started doing a kind of survey just on my own, reading publicly available

stuff, on a variety of his overseas deals. And at first I thought I was going to focus on a deal

he has in Indonesia with a man there, Harry Tano, who's now running for president because he loves Vladimir Putin and

Donald Trump and wants to bring their form of leadership to Indonesia. And he's also associated

with some figures who are fairly corrupt. But the one that just kept sticking out to me was the

Baku-Azerbaijan deal. I just became obsessed with it. And pretty soon,

that was the one I was going to focus on fully. My decision being, you know, as a business reporter,

there are a lot of ways to approach this kind of thing. You could do an article about the business

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