Journalists From The United States

"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."

"[T]his is a very dark chapter in American history and... we don't like coming to terms with the dark, dirty parts of our American history."

"But ' and ' and... a wave of journalism characterizing investigative reporters, including me, as... tin foil hat wearing conspiracy nuts, and the story was just killed. It was dead, over and over for many decades, and a colleague... Bob Perry ended up following it at great length on his website. He investigated it for many... years until his death in 2018, and I went back to it from time to time... I went to Israel where I interviewed people in Israeli intelligence who were communicating with the Republicans during the campaign, and it's very... odd. If you follow American political campaigns... Dave Axelrod wasn't meeting with Israeli intelligence all the time... That's not the way it works. But Bill Casey was. ...[H]e had a real secret network, he had arms dealers all over the world, he had Israeli agents he talked to, he had fixers who spoke Farsi and could set up meetings with Iranian officials..."

"[I]magine how difficult this is to be running a winning presidential campaign... and secretly doing a covert op to get millions of dollars worth of weapons to a hostile foreign power against which there's an embargo. So it's blatently illegal, and... you have to avoid being detected by opposing intelligence... [etc.]"

"', 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..."

"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."

"Trump SoHo... changed hands in 2014, after a foreclosure sale, but, according to Pro Publica, the Trump Organization still manages and markets the property, for which it pays Trump 5.75 percent of the condo tower’s operating revenues."

"I would argue Mogilevich... has a direct relationship to Putin... [T]hat's come out in ...WikiLeaks releases... David Bogatin, going back to 1984, was tied to the Mogilevich crime gang, and Mogilevich is tied to Putin."

"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."

"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."

"[Jody] Kriss... alleged that Bayrock was "covertly mob-owned and operated... backed by oligarchs and money they stole from the Russian people... engaged in... financial-institution fraud, tax fraud, partnership fraud, , , , and, on occasion, real estate.""

"House Of Trump, House of Putin came out... 7 years ago, and back then you could say that Trump was a Russian asset. ...But gradually it's been supressed, and we've heard again and again that Trump Russia is a hoax... The Mueller Report didn't have anything in it, and people don't have the attention span... to do the deep dives, and it's very sad... I think Fox News has been part of the problem, and social media, it's been dreadful for the most part."

"The suit claimed... the real purpose... in addition to marketing... condos bearing the Trump brand, was "to launder many millions... and evade taxes.""

"[A]lmost every time I followed a footnote to check the source... I found... an old newspaper or magazine story rather than... [his] interviews or... sleuthing. ...The ...extent of Russian involvement in Trump’s rise ...may only become known when the Russian intelligence services open up their archives ...This is a ...competent collation of what we already know."

"Without the 's move into New York, Donald Trump would not have become president of the United States."

"Russians had begun collaborating with Italian mobsters as early as 1980..."

"Mogilevich... probably the most powerful mobster in Russia for more than 30 years. ...According to FBI files... in... prostitution... drug running... elaborate stock fraud scandals... [etc.] [R]enowned for... . ...the "brainy don" ...[came] up with... elaborate schemes... trusted by ...mobsters to launder their money... $1.3 trillion... it would be great to have a real estate mogul who had thousands... of luxury condos you could trade... through shell companies..."

"I regard Trump's] temperament as that of a mobster. ...Russian intelligence is very ...closely tied to Russian organized crime. ...Russian organized crime is part of intelligence. Trump will deal with anyone..."

"Yeltsin... would... describe Russia as "the biggest in the world.""

"[A] free-for-all where he's laundering massive amounts of Russian money?"

"[A]ttorneys Frederick Oberlander and Richard Lerner... qui tam suit against Bayrock... charged ...laundering $250 million in profits from Trump SoHo and other projects, and... evading] $100 million in... taxes."

"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."

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

"Doing business with Trump allowed the ... to assault America’s most essential democratic institutions..."

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

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

"[[Dissolution of the Soviet Union|[D]isintegration of the Soviet Union]]... opened... hundreds of billions of dollars in flight capital... from oligarchs, wealthy s, and mobsters... Trump’s zeal to sell condos, no questions asked, to shell companies meant... Russians could launder vast amounts of money while hiding... personal identities."

"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..."

""...Trump came to the conclusion that it is better to do business with crooks than with honest people," said ..."

"In Vladimir Putin's regime, business... organized crime and intelligence... can... be used as weapons of the state. ...[O]ne company that potentially questionable Russian money flowed through was Bayrock."

"Jonathan Winer... [said] "What anyone in Trump’s position should have done is investigate those allegations [about Sater’s criminal past] to ensure that there was not a money-laundering operation.""

"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 ..."

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

"Bayrock’s relationship with Trump dates... to 2002... Trump was ... licking wounds over his Atlantic City over-expansion a decade earlier, after which he had a more difficult time borrowing money."

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

"Trump struck a deal... to attach his name to three high-rises in Sunny Isles Beach ... known as "Little Moscow." ...[A]t least sixty-three buyers with Russian addresses or passports spent $98 million on Trump's properties in South Florida."

"Bayrock’s leadership... billionaire oligarchs from the former Soviet Union."

"We in the media could help [the insurance situation] if we put in proper perspective long range hurricane forecasts that often are exaggerated and play into insurers’ hands."

"Life is a game and a gamble."

"Ideas are harder to promote than products or personalities."

"Be as nice as possible and as nasty as necessary."

"In my book, an S.O.B. is someone who uses whatever tactics it takes to get the job done—to rise to the top."

"Only cream and S.O.B.s rise to the top."

"Everyone should fail in a big way at least once before they’re forty. I don’t mean little disappointments, like screwing up an important assignment or quitting a good job or even getting fired from a normal job. It needs to be a big failure. You can only fail big if you take a big risk. The bigger you fail, the bigger you’re likely to succeed later."

"I saw every day how many things can go wrong, but I also saw that somehow my mother prevailed. And she had her two sons to help her do that. When my brother was in eighth grade, he worked in a grocery store making a dollar or a dollar and a half a week. My first real job was a dollar a week in a butcher shop. Every dime or every dollar that the three of us brought in helped my mother hold this group of three people together, because her income was absolutely unpredictable. All she had when my father died was a small house that was paid for. I got to the point in grade school where I felt that I had to try anything—or everything—to succeed, and I learned to expect a lot of knocks, because I had seen my mother take them. I really think... that was my real education, what I learned at home in my early years."

"The difference between a mountain and a molehill is your perspective."

"Eat only when you are hungry. Drink only when you’re thirsty. Sleep only when you’re tired. Screw only when you’re horny."

"The saddest people I know are those who have spent thirty or forty years working for the same employer doing something they almost like."

"You have to ask yourself, What do I really want to do or be? Then make yourself this promise: I will not look over my shoulder; I will use whatever I have learned, but I will not dwell on the mistakes I have made. Whether you're seventeen, twenty-seven or sixty-seven, you bring experience to your new venture or adventure. If you draw from your own experience and use it as a guide, focus on today and not yesterday, your chances of success are greatly improved."

"How, why, did I sit with some of these characters long enough to not only obtain quotes, but glean their reptilian essence? Easy. My mind was on the payoff: thousands of people receiving an antidote to the Hallmark Card reality of America. Consider this book an emetic for the soul."