On Monday, Donald Trump announced that his administration was designating the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, the first time in history the U.S. had classified another country’s government as such, an action that flips the switch on a range of sanctions on the military unit and companies, individuals, and organizations with ties to it. According to The New York Times, top C.I.A. and Pentagon officials argued against the designation, saying it will “allow hard-line Iranian officials to justify deadly operations against Americans overseas, especially Special operations units and paramilitary units working under the C.I.A.” But Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and national security adviser John Bolton reportedly pushed for it, and ultimately persuaded the president. “This action will significantly expand the scope and scale of our maximum pressure on the Iranian regime,” Trump said in a statement on Monday. “It makes crystal clear the risks of conducting business with, or providing support to, the I.R.G.C.”

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.)

It was around the time the Trumps went into business with the Mammadovs that international banks had become increasingly reluctant to accept money from businesses owned by the I.R.G.C., making it necessary for Iran to find an alternative way to send money outside the country, including to allies like Hezbollah and the Syrian government. As Davidson noted today, the I.R.G.C. came up with “a clever scheme [to] create hundreds of ‘private’ companies, owned by I.R.G.C. officers, that would fund terror, seek W.M.D, launder money and do other bidding of the central organization.” Many of these companies, including the Darvishi’s Azarpassillo, were “barely disguised.” As The New Yorker reported in 2017, anyone paying half an ounce of attention would have noticed that the Trump Tower project sure carried some hallmarks of a money-laundering operation: