Bayrock proposed to bring the Trump brand to hotels around the country and overseas, where Mr. Trump’s flamboyant taste for gold and glitz played well among wealthy foreigners with a caricatured notion of American success.
Years later, in a lawsuit deposition, Mr. Trump said that he discussed “numerous deals all over the world” with his new partners, and that “this was going to be Trump International Hotel and Tower Moscow, Kyiv, Istanbul, etc., Poland, Warsaw.”
At the same time, Mr. Trump asserted that because he was not actually the developer, he knew very little about what Bayrock was doing just two floors below his office. But internal Bayrock do ents reviewed by The Times show that the company, right from the start, went looking for financing from Russia to pay for its Trump-branded hotels.