Editors From The United States

"... "In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation.""

"Michael Hayden... called... Trump "a clear and present danger" to America's... security and "a ," a term... attributed to Vladimir Lenin..."

"John Brennan declared Trump... "...in the pocket of Putin" and... on '... he... called Trump’s behavior "treasonous, which is to betray... trust and aid and abet the enemy...""

"[[w:Intelligence assessment|[I]ntelligence]] operations are designed to operate within the law... [L]ax regulations... enforcement, and the... nature of counterintelligence, has given the Russians... latitude."

"[D]uring the 2016 election cycle, the... FSB... found plenty of ways to subvert America’s elections without breaking the law."

"s are intended to lead toward prosecution; are not. Instead, they... thwart... espionage, or ... Even though... not... about breaking the law... counterintelligence... may... involve issues... far more serious. In this case... Russian interference in... elections. From .... disinformation... Russian assets... groomed for... perhaps decades, and were... in place to... damage... vital American institutions."

"[T]he Mueller probe... regarding criminal activities... led to.. indictment of thirty-four individuals and three companies. Ten men pleaded guilty or were convicted... including... Trump associates... Paul Manafort... Rick Gates... Michael Flynn... George Nader... Roger Stone.... , and... Michael Cohen."

"A serious counterintelligence investigation... would presumably have asked... whether Trump had been compromised... by Russia. ...[H]ow deeply Trump was indebted to the ...laundering millions of dollars... Was he a Russian asset? ...How much did he make laundering ..?"

"[A]s long as they had money... Trump was listening."

"Within... intelligence, assets... include those who... prefer... [a foreign country's] ideology, those who betray... for monetary gain, those... ed, and... useful idiots who... provide... information through... lapses or blind pursuit of their own agendas."

"[A] ... 1999 article by... Knute Royce... cited a 1994 FBI file characterizing Kislin] as a "member/associate" of the mob organization headed by ... "godfather of Russian organized crime in the United States." ...Kislin had started Trans Commodities Inc. ..."...known to have laundered millions of dollars from Russia to New York." ...Trans Commodities, and Anton Malevsky... contract killer for the , were... allegedly tied to... Mikhail Chernoy... a major figure in the... Aluminum Wars... marked by embezzlement, money laundering, and murder. ...[T]he report said... Kislin was... a "close associate" of... arms smuggler Babeck Seroush and that he... cosponsored a visa for Malevsky."

"Trump... had a personality that was ideal for a potential asset—vain, narcissistic, highly susceptible to flattery, and greedy."

"Yuri helped Litvinenko assemble and analyze a dossier linking senior officials, including... Putin, to the Tambov organized crime group, which laundered money and facilitated drug trafficking for the Colombian cartel."

"Trump was a dream for officers looking to develop an asset," Shvets told me. "...with Trump it wasn't just weakness. Everything was excessive. His vanity ...Narcissism ...Greed ...Ignorance, excessive."

"Kislin... came to Trump’s aid after his massive bankruptcies in Atlantic City in the nineties by issuing mortgages for condos in Trump World Tower..."

", who lived in until his death... helped bail out Trump by funding... Trump SoHo..."

"I had dozens... of hours with... ... a major in the in the 1980s... stationed in Washington D. C. and his colleagues in... New York... were recruiting Donald Trump as an asset..."

"[O]ther people in the started reaching out to him and assessing whether it was worthwhile expending resources... to develop him. That... led... to his being invited by the KGB to the Soviet Union in 1987. ...You can see some of this develop in the newspaper clips during this time. ...In ' and in The New York Times, Trump is starting to present himself as an expert on nuclear weapons. He says that he should be running the nuclear arms limitations talk for Ronald Reagan..."

"He is invited to the Soviet Union and the... trip is overseen by the . ...Ivan Gromakov ...initiates the invitation. It goes through the Soviet ambassador ...to Trump and he's flown in by ...a subsidiary of the KGB ...It makes sure that you're fully monitored ...All the while, Trump, according to Yuri, is being force fed talking points by the , and that leads... to his exploratory run for the presidency... for the 1988 nomination."

"[I]n September of 1987 Trump takes out a full-page add in ', ' and ' ...full of wacky s about ...America's being taken to the cleaners ...we're being screwed over by NATO ...our allies like Japan are ...not worth it. ...No American politician was talking like this ...or any time since."

"David Bogatin comes in. He has 5 million dollars in cash... meets personally with Donald Trump and... says, "I'll take five condos." 5 million... back then is... about 15 million today. ...Trump doesn't ask ...questions. He takes the money ...The two predicates for are all cash transactions with an anonymous enterprise... Trump did this repeatedly... The State of New York attorney general... said this was money laundering... There were at least 1300 similar cases... Trump condos sold under similar conditions that could pass for money laundering. ...That's a pattern!"

"It continues later... in Atlantic City and a company... Bayrock... opened in ... this was money... from enterprises tied to the Russian mob, and the and its successors in the Russian Federation."

"Trump] was regarded by Russian intelligence and the ... as a special unofficial contact... that's different from being an active agent who who can be [assigned] certain operations. It's a slightly more informal designation where he's a trusted friend. He can be relied upon to do favors for Russia... It was a constant refrain when he was president. He did exactly what the Russians wanted. He withdrew American troops from Syria. He abandoned our Kurdish allies and left the Russians in that vitally important strategic area. ...[M]y book ...shows one after another event like that ...that Trump is working as a Russian asset, and according to ... he was."

"Jimmy Carter's 100 years old and I think it's long past due... for history to be honest to him. He... lost his reelection campaign in 1980 and was... characterized as a weak president who allowed the United States to be humiliated... [W]hat I write about in Den of Spies is a run by the Republicans that sabotaged... Carter's attempts to bring home the hostages... [T]hey... hijacked American foreign policy and I believe it was a treasonous covert operation by the Reagan Bush campaign."

"Foreign money, often untraceable, began transforming the high-end real-estate market, and the pools of cash that Bayrock promised appealed to Trump."

"Vladimir Putin... waged a shadow... "virtual" war... of s, disinformation, and cyber warfare."

"[W]ith Trump you have a candidate who is very close to Vladimir Putin. He's close to Bibi Netanyahu, and he's close to MBS who gave $2 billion to his nephew... These are serious relationships and they're all players on the world stage, so... will it happen again? ...I don't know ...but ...does anyone think there will be an election with no malfeasance?"

"One reason it was so explosive... Israel did not want it known that it was participating in a that would an American presidential election, especially because America is Israel's biggest patron."

"Nixon... believed all those conversations he had with LBJ were taped, and he was worried about what documents the democrats had, so he dispatched a group of burglars... to break into the Brookings Institute and Watergate Hotel, and... in 1972 you have Watergate."

"[I]n 1968... Richard Nixon got... to intervene with the Paris Peace Talks. Lyndon Johnson was trying to end the Vietnam War with Peace Talks in Paris and Richard Nixon's gofer got the South Vietnamese to back out at the last minute and made the Democrats look ridiculous, and Nixon won in a squeaker."

"In 1980 you have the October surprise... In 2000 you have the Brooks Brothers riots. In 2016 you have Trump-Russia. So you've had it again and again, and what the Republicans have done, is that they will stop at nothing. They will do s, align with hostile foreign powers, whether it's with Russia or Iran, and it's played a role in changing the outcome of quite a few elections."

"My book... is not just about trying to uncover this conspiracy.... it's about the national conversation, about how the news we consume is shaped and what is repressed."

"', the satyrical magazine, had a book at the end of the century and... saluted that day with a fake headline from The New York Times saying "Reagan inaugurated, urges America not to put two and two together." ...[T]hat's one of the things that's so intriguing about the whole story. On some level it seems obvious on its face, and yet when you try to nail it down it was very hard to do so. ...Casey was a truly great spy and he would go in a dozen different directions at once. No one knew everything he was doing. Things were very... compartmentalized. But he would meet secretly in London with a South African arms dealer... selling arms to Iran... I went to Israel and met with who was the head of Israeli military intelligence and he said, "Oh sure, Casey and I would talk regularly." This is back at the time of the Iranian Revolution..."

"Witkoff... in New Yourk real estate circles, he is a big... player. He owns the Woolworth building... He owns a lot of other buildings, like the Daily News building... He's a multibillionaire. He's got at least $2 billion... There was a bust in Trump Tower of... a $100 million poker game on the 63rd floor.... considered the most desirable apartment in the building. It is directly under Donal Trump's penthouse suite. ...34 people were busted. It was a raid by the Southern District of New York... under ... It... morphed into a movie called Molly's Game... because a lot of Hollywood celebrities like Matt Damon... Ben Affleck and Leonardo DiCaprio were part of it."

"I'm not sure I've been discovered in this country. ...[T]he last few weeks, I have gotten a lot of attention from media overseas, in the UK... France... Austria, Poland, Germany, but... not so much in the United States. ...I wrote House Of Trump, House of Putin... seven years ago, and I got a fair amount of attention then, but now you can't say what I was saying back then."

"[N]ow you can't say... that Donald Trump is a Russian asset, and I've done two books that... tell... step by step... how that happened... Overseas people started paying attention to it the minute Zelenskyy was in the with Trump... clearing siding with Vladimir Putin, and you could see in real time what it meant for him to be a Russian asset. So suddenly... I had enormous credibility, but now in the United States I don't think you can... say that in the main stream media... You could 5 years ago..."

"[O]ne of the principals in the game was a Russian mobster... Anatoly Golubchik, and while he was being sentenced... he wanted to buy another apartment and... needed a reference... his name was ... [W]hy was Steve Witkoff vouching for the Russian mafia? ...[I]t was followed up by the real estate industry newsletter... The Real Deal and they... interviewed Witkoff... in 2013... [H]e said "Oh, I didn't really know Golubchik. I was doing it for a mutual friend." Well, who's the mutual friend? I don't know... but the first name that comes to mind would be Donald Trump... It may not be Trump and there were a lot of other people of interest who were busted then, but... the Russian mafia is... the engforcement arm of Russian intelligence.... [B]ack in the days of the Soviet Union that was true for the , and it's true for the FSB and the SVR today."

"38 years have passed. ...[I]f you go to the advertisement that he took out in the The New York Times, '... [etc.] It was just a few weeks after he had returned from his first trip to the Soviet Union... that was completely orchestrated by the . They had... set a trap for him. They had been luring him in, giving him... a deal on some cheap TV sets for the... Grand Hyett Hotel. So suddenly he's friendly with these guys. ...[A] big franchise operation like or Marriott... generally make deals with [a major vendor like] Sony or LG or Samsung... But Trump got them from... Joy-Lud Electronics... a front for the KGB, and that's how the... relationship started... There may have been some other contacts even earlier... If you look at how they lured Trump in, it was a good deal he couldn't refuse on cheap TVs."

"Trump is sending Witkoff as an envoy to the two hottest spots in the world diplomatically, the Middle East and Moscow. He's had zero diplomatic experience. ...But he's friendly with the Russian mafia, or... friendly enough to give a recommendation for them. ...Witkoff has also been a golfing buddy of Trump for decades and that's all you need to know, is that he's going to be doing whatever Trump wants him to do, and Trump, in turn, is doing what Vladimir Putin wants him to do."

"Craing Unger's... book has... made headlines... because of a charge from an ex- colonel, , that Donald Trump has been a KGB asset for 40 years. ...Unger points out ... ...called Trump an "unwitting agent" ... ...described him "in effect... an intelligence asset"; and ...John Brennan ...said Trump is "wholly in the pocket of Putin". So Shvets' accusation isn’t... surprising. ...[T]he meaning of ...scores of anecdotes ...in these pages—is never fully explained. ...[T]he author ...throw[s] in almost every bit of unconfirmed gossip ever published about everyone from ...Jeffrey Epstein to ...Robert Maxwell. ...[T]hroughout Unger’s book: dozens ...of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all "too good to check" ...Details ...keep you turning the pages. But Unger’s willingness to include almost anything to titillate makes this book ...unsatisfactory."

"[I]n Russia... scores of people... died mysteriously after investigating the alleged crimes of Putin and his oligarchs."

"[[w:1999 Russian apartment bombings|[H]einous bombings]] that killed... three hundred... were likely the product of a "" operation that enabled Putin to consolidate power, much as Adolf Hitler did after the ."

"Mogilevich’s plans for globalization continued.... Having set up... YBM Magnex, he... dispatched Dr. Jacob (Yakov) Bogatin... David Bogatin’s brother, to its... Pennsylvania branch to become CEO. ...1998, the FBI raided... In 2003, Mogilevich... Bogatin, and Igor Fisherman... were indicted on... counts for... $150 million stock fraud."

"...Eduard Nektalov ...bought a condo ... directly below ...Kellyanne Conway. ...Nektalov ...related to Lev Leviev ...was being investigated by a Treasury Department ...for mob-connected money laundering. He and his father, Roman Nektalov, had been targeted in Operation Meltdown... that uncovered a scheme through which diamond merchants laundered $8 million in Colombian drug proceeds. ...May 2004 ...a ...man ...fired once in ...Nektalov’s head ...two more ...into his back ..."

"Russian intelligence; hijacked social media and exploited algorithms to make... provocative "fake news" go viral; transformed Facebook into one of the biggest purveyors of Russian propaganda... used... "" and... bogus s that pretended to correct fake news, and... upended the... notion of truth, of reality..."

"Americans cracked down on organized crime, Putin co-opted...[and] weaponized it."

"Russians had billions of dollars from illicit sources... Trump ...in dire need of financing, had ...ideal vehicles for laundering ...real estate ...casinos ...and a history of not asking too many questions ..."

"... was Bayrock's... man... Sater’s FBI handler described Felix’s father, Michael Sheferovsky... "a... Mogilevich crime syndicate boss." Felix... as a teenager, counted among his friends Michael D. Cohen..."

"[A]ccording to Shvets, Kislin... spotted Donald Trump, who... became a special unofficial contact—a rare variation of trusted contact that was applied to high-level intelligence assets, like... and... Robert Maxwell."

"It's the old access game. If you want access to Donald Trump, you don't ask him the tough questions. That's true of most politicians, but Trump... plays it to a tee, and people go along with it. ...[I]t's good for ratings to get him on your show. ...[L]ook at Fox News. It's still around. ...[I]t's unbelievable to me."