All Quotes

"I am very grateful to have the opportunity to come to this country with Mauricio representing Argentina. It is an honor and a great responsibility that I take with great enthusiasm"

"We talked about our roles, our countries with so much history and ties in common, and also about what we live as women and as mothers of two girls. I felt very comfortable and the conversation flowed naturally"

"“I have no intention of going into politics – the rumors circulating, I stress, are totally unfounded.”"

"“I believe a society expresses a sense of common morality … Political representatives who are called to govern well, to make the community prosper, are also required to safeguard the values that it expresses, possibly elevate them. I do not therefore believe that a politician can afford to make a distinction between public life and private life.”"

"“The proposal to renovate San Siro is ‘another way of doing nothing’. The project seems generic and unlikely to me. From the in‑depth studies we had done, it costs less to build a new one.”"

"“I lost ten years of my life.”"

"I would say that what has happened is a professional tragedy, not just for me, but for all of NCES and my staff."

"But for me, it really was a personal tragedy because I have spent my career helping NCES build its solid reputation as a premier statistical agency in the federal system."

"Developing a “device agnostic” test would allow students to take it on different kinds of devices, like Chromebooks or school-issued laptops, and adaptive testing could allow for researchers to collect more detailed information about the capabilities of very high-performing and very low-performing students."

"Our ambition at Treepz is to build the largest shared mobility platform on the African continent, starting with West Africa."

"In 23 months, we have been able to complete 490,000+ rides and register over 960 vehicles on our platform. We plan to double these numbers with our Nigerian and Ghana operations, then replicate our existing model across 6 other African cities."

"Yuri... was in headquarters in September... 1987, and the KGB circulated an internal memo celebrating the acquisition of a new asset... and a successful active ...act of propaganda."

"Gorbachev has taken over by then, but it's before the real thaw... The Soviet Union crumbled in 1991. This is several years earlier and... Donald Trump has taken out a full-page add in three of the nation's most prestigious newspapers... putting forth s... and the KGB... circulate the... internal memo announcing that as a successful active measure... by their new asset, Donald Trump."

"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."

"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..."

"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."

"[T]his was a critical moment in American history. It was... a watershed... the start of the so-called Reagan Revolution... the birth of American conservatism... [W]hat I show is, they got into office thanks to a treasonous, that d an American presidential election..."

"[T]his is in a critical time in terms of American foreign policy. The Shah of Iran, long an American puppet, has just been overthrown, and when he was in charge... the entire West had access to Iranian oil reserves at very reasonable prices. So suddenly...Iran... went from being a very close ally and friend of both America and Israel to an enemy... as it became an Islamist theocracy."

"Israel and Iran had been very close allies... [T]here's still an... oil pipeline between Israel and Iran, but both... had powerful militaries, and almost all their military equipment came from the United States. So when the Iranian Revolution happened, suddenly Iran... flipped from being an ally to becoming an adversary, but they were also about to be attacked by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, and they needed weapons... [B]oth Israel and the United States didn't want Iraq to win."

"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."

"If Iraq had... taken over Iran and all its oil... the combined oil resources... in one hostile country... would have been terrible for the entire West... So there were... national interests in both countries... wanting... Iran armed. Jimmy Carter... didn't want to give weapons to a hostile foreign power that had just ceased American hostages, and it was seen as being a horrible... thing to do. But Willian Casey, who was campaign manager of the Reagan Bush campaign, and Israel were far more cynical, and they put in motion a secret plan to do this."

"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."

"[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?"

"[W]hen Lyndon Johnson was president and signed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in '64 and '65, the very next election was Nixon's, and it was known as the ... [I]f you look at the electoral map, the red and blue map... of almost every election (there are a couple of anomolies)... since 1968, the red states... sure look a lot like the Confederate States of America... After the Voting Rights Act, all the racist right wing Democrats joined the Republican party and that gave birth to what we have today."

"[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."

"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."

"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."

"[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."

"[W]hen I started investigating this in 1991... for Esquire magazine... [it] was the first... fleshed out narrative of... how the Republicans made a secret deal with Iran and delayed the release of the hostages... I was immediately hired by ' magazine. I was led to believe we would be leading a full bore investigation... with the substantial resources of Newsweek and its correspondents all over the world. But... the experience was almost like a "" operation that brought me on board so that I couldn't write it... Newsweek ended up doing three stories in a row saying the October surprise didn't happen..."

"When things happen, that's news. When things don't happen, that's not news, and you don't keep reporting that it didn't happen."

"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.]"

"He's is a wonderful character... He was dazzling brilliant but he mumbled when he talked... His nickname was "mumbles." It was often said that of all the people in the CIA, most people needed scramblers on their phone, but not Bill Casey. ...[P]eople often ask... what did Ronald Reagan know about the October surprise, and Ronald Reagan's response is... "You know, I couldn't understand a work Bill Casey said... you can't ask three times. You just sound rude, so I would just nod.""

"', 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..."

"[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..."

"Donald Trump is carrying out Putin's policies. It's... as simple as that."

"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."

"[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."

"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."

"There were beautiful women, no doubt, when they took him to Moscow... [T]he idea of putting up Trump Tower, and this is now being revived... to put a Trump Tower near in the ... [B]ack in '87 during his... first trip there, that was absurd. ...The Cold War, even though Gorbachev was... General Secretary of the Soviet Union... a genial peacemaker, he was still very much a communist, and... the idea of having a monument to conspicuous consumption, a gaudy, glitzy, Vegas-like monument on Red Square near the Kremlin? That did not make sense to anyone, except for Donald J. Trump."

"In 1987, the lie that Trump had met with Gorbachev appeared in The New York Times and... I strongly suspect... Trump fed it to the reporter on background and said, "You can't use me as a source, but I met with Gorbachev." That's the way it appears to have been written. It was a lie, and that's the way Trump works, but he is aided and abetted by a media that is complicit in that regard, and it's still going on..."

"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."

"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."

"In doing all these interviews, people ask me... "Can Europe trust America in terms of sharing intelligence?" and I say, "Absolutely not!" ...To say that my country thinks of Europe as an enemy. ...[I]t is ...horrifying. The Western Alliance helped build democratic institutions in 30 countries ...in Europe, strong market economies and strong military allies. Why are we turning against it? It doesn't make any sense... The only one it makes sense to is Vladimir Putin, and I think that's why Trump is moving in that direction."

"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."

"This is how Unger thinks. His previous two books tried to cement the idea that Donald Trump is an asset of Vladimir Putin. Unger’s ' is to point to many different dots and then wonder at how they might connect, even when he can’t connect them himself or when those dots are being served up by deeply unreliable sources, such as a former agent. Suspicion is what matters. He traffics in doubt."