Investigative Journalists

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

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

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

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

"Cohn, as for the two biggest crime families in New York, the Genoveses and the Gambinos, was invaluable in helping Trump traverse... contractors... and the like, controlled by the mob."

"As early as 1990... Trump had negative . ...[I]n 1991, the Trump Taj Mahal ...became the first of six ...bankruptcies. ...Later two other Trump casinos ...agreed to pay fines for "willfully failing to report" currency transactions ...and failing to comply with laws ...to prevent ."

"landed at JFK... 1992, just after the fall of the Soviet Union... the most powerful Russian mobster in the United States... oversaw the mob’s growth from a local racket in Brooklyn’s to a multibilliondollar-a-year criminal organization."

"Ivankov’s mandate from Mogilevich... consolidate the Russian Mafia in the US... form alliances with... other Mafias... bribe politicians....infiltrate governments... [T]he Russians began scrutinizing... vulnerabilities of America’s campaign finance system, the K Street lobbying system, Wall Street... [etc.]"

"Strategic relationships... were vital to Mogilevich... to insinuate himself into the... Ukraine energy trade... to siphon... huge sums of money. A key figure... helping... was Dmitry Firtash. ...His most important link... Igor Fisherman... a high-level aide to ... Department of Justice ...identified Firtash ...an "upper-echelon [associate] of Russian organized crime.""

"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."

"Firtash’s “success was built on remarkable sweetheart deals brokered by associates of... Vladimir Putin, at immense cost to Russian taxpayers.""

"[A]n American businessman... [was] talking to a rich Uzbek cotton trader about the pay-for-play K Street lobbyists in Washington. The Uzbek... "You mean you have firms with highly paid professionals who are paid to bribe congressmen?" He couldn’t get over it. Americans had sanitized corruption, institutionalized it, and made it into part of the white-collar, professional world! Not only was it legal, it was a highly paid profession."

"[T]he Russians knew, real estate was... [an] efficient way to launder billions in flight capital, and Trump’s newest projects were perfectly suited... [e.g.,] Trump World Tower..."

"...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 ..."

"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 ..."

"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."

"... 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..."

"[T]hough Sater had lost his license to trade stocks, in 1993, he... had... a penthouse office suite at ... owned by Donald Trump. ...Sater and ...friends sold the stocks ...in an illegal pump-and-dump scheme..."

"Bayrock planned to build the Trump SoHo in New York,.. [and various Trump Projects and properties]. ...[I]ts ...list of strategic partners was topped with... "The Trump Organization"..."

"Bayrock... brought into Donald Trump’s orbit a host of oligarchs and alleged mobsters involved in laundering money, the trafficking of underage women, feeding intelligence to the Russians... [etc.]."

"Vnesheconombank, or VEB... bought $850 million of stock... from Shnaider... $15 million... went into the Trump Toronto project. ...[T]he chairman of VEB’s ...board ...Vladimir Putin."

"[O]ne Trump-branded project after another was beset by corruption, lawsuits... [etc]. Trump licensed Trump Tower Baku to close relatives of ... described in a diplomatic cable as "notoriously corrupt even for Azerbaijan.""

"[T]he biggest contributor to ... was Leviev... who had a direct line to Rabbi ... Donald Trump, and... Putin... Leviev would make major real estate transactions with Jared Kushner..."

"[[Donald Trump|[H]e]] was a vulgar... vile... misogynistic, racist... buffoon who knew only his own pecuniary interests and prejudices... He was clownish and repellant... his... spectacles amplified by a sycophantic right-wing media."

"[T]he public record makes clear that Trump built his business empire in no small part with a lot of dirty money from a lot of dirty Russians—including the dirtiest and most feared of them all."

"James Clapper asserted... Trump was... an intelligence "asset" serving... Putin."

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

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

"In 1984... David Bogatin... former pilot in the ... specialty... shooting down Americans over ... plunked... $6 million to buy... five [Trump Tower] luxury condos. ...According to ... Trump personally attended the closing... Russian mobsters were beginning to invest in high-end real estate... an ideal vehicle to launder money..."

"During the '80s and '90s, we... repeatedly saw... criminals... use condos and high-rises to launder money," says Jonathan Winer... "it was a way of turning dirty money into clean money... and it explained why there are so many high-rises... sold but no one... living in them."

"Boris Yeltsin's shift to a market economy was so abrupt that... s and corrupt government officials were able to privatize and loot state-held assets in oil, , s, and banking."

"James Moody... told Friedman. "...we found out that Ivankov] was living in a luxury condo in ." ...high-level Russian mobsters came to view the future president's properties as a home away from home."

"[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.""

"[[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 ."

"[V]ast sums from the 's various s had to be laundered. So in 1984, David Bogatin, a Russian mobster who had scored millions in the Red Daisy gas scam with Balagula, went shopping... at... ... closing, with Donald Trump... in attendance... five condominiums ...$6 million... cash, the equivalent of... $15 million in 2020. According to the New York State attorney general’s office... the Russian Mafia had just laundered money..."

"[T]he Jackson–Vanik Amendment to the allowed the Soviet Union... normal trade relations... General ...saw it as a great opportunity for the . ..."We told [the émigrés] ...you will provide ...information. And they pledged their services..." ...the KGB had leverage on any family left behind. ...And what was their task ..? "To penetrate... Western institutions. Government ...and ...high technology... And some did succeed" ...huge numbers of Russian criminals and KGB spies ...did inundate the United States ...fueling the growth of the and a new generation of KGB assets... one of whom was Donald Trump."

"[I]ntelligence operations... [brought] Trump into the 's fold... compromised him through... money-laundering schemes, sycophantic flattery... extravagantly well-paid franchising projects... [etc.]"

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

"[T]he Mueller Report... part... dealing with was one... paragraph, saying... the FBI "embedded personnel... did not work on the Special Counsel’s investigation, but... sen[t]... summaries of foreign intelligence and counterintelligence... to FBIHQ and... Field Offices. Those communications and other... not all... contained in this Volume." ...there was no counterintelligence investigation."

"[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."

"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."

"(excerpt from Big Chicken: The Incredible Story of How Antibiotics Created Modern Agriculture and Changed the Way the World Eats by Maryn McKenna, pp, 24–25 of 1st edition ((isbn|1426217668}})"

"… most people read for some combination of intellectual enchantment and emotional identification. And the challenge for so many stories around is the emotional identification. How do we find something to engage the reader’s, or viewer’s, emotion in such a way that they stick with us through the technical, didactic parts?"

"We give antibiotics to most of the meat animals on the planet on most days of their lives — and we don't give them those antibiotics because the animals are sick. We give them because, back in the 1950s, it was discovered that if you give tiny doses of antibiotics to animals — much too small to cure an infection — you will cause them to put on weight faster, which is an economic benefit to the farmer or the producer. And, then, a little while after that, it was discovered that if you gave a slightly larger dose — but still not enough to cure an infection ... what would technically be called a sub-therapeutic dose — you could protect animals from the diseases that spread in crowded barns and feedlots — those barns and feedlots becoming crowded because of this temptation to grow animals faster and faster. So that’s where we are today — all around the world."

"We stand today on the threshold of the post-antibiotic era, in the earliest days of a time when simple s ... will kill people once again. In fact, they already are. People are dying of infections again, because of a phenomenon called antibiotic resistance."

"For most people, antibiotic resistance is a hidden , unless they have the misfortune to contract an infection themselves or have a family member or friend unlucky enough to become infected. Drug-resistant infections have no celebrity spokespeople, negligible political support, and few patients’ organizations advocating for them. If we think of resistant infections, we imagine them as something rare, occurring to people unlike us, whoever we are: people who are in nursing homes at the end of their lives, or dealing with the drain of chronic illness, or in intensive-care units after terrible trauma. But resistant infections are a vast and common problem that occur in every part of daily life: to children in day care, athletes playing sports, teens going for piercings, people getting healthy in the gym. And though common, resistant bacteria are a grave threat and getting worse. They are responsible for at least 700,000 deaths around the world each year: 23,000 in the United States, 25,000 in Europe, more than 63,000 babies in India. Beyond those deaths, bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics cause millions of illnesses — two million annually just in the United States — and cost billions in health care spending, lost wages, and lost national productivity. It is predicted that by 2050, antibiotic resistance will cost the world $100 trillion and will cause a staggering 10 million deaths per year."

"Believing wealth to be good, the people believed the wealthy to be good. But, again in history, power has intoxicated and hardened its possessors, and pharaohs are bred in counting-rooms as they were in palaces."

"Probably millions of men read or heard Mr. Lloyd's ideas without being aware of the real authorship. But I judge that with this condition he was well content. No man ever entered such a fight with a smaller share of personal vanity to gratify. He desired that his countrymen should be informed of existing conditions, but not that he himself should gain fame or rewards."

"Our system, so fair in its theory and so fertile in its happiness and prosperity in its first century, is now, following the fate of systems, becoming artificial, technical, corrupt; and, as always happens in human institutions, after noon, power is stealing from the many to the few."

"The yacht of the millionaire incorporates a million days' labor which might have been given to abolishing the slums, and every day it runs the labor of hundreds of men is withdrawn from the production of helpful things for humanity."