Craig Unger > Quotes

“According to research conducted jointly by experts from the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University in Wales, no fewer than 150,000 Twitter accounts linked to Russia began to tweet inflammatory and divisive messages about Brexit, Muslims, and immigrants”
― Craig Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

“But in the end, Mogilevich eluded their grasp and settled in Moscow. The FBI closed down the Budapest outpost from which it had tracked Mogilevich. Meanwhile, the foreboding assortment of murderous gangsters and tattooed thugs known as the Russian Mafia had climbed the ladder of white-collar respectability, insinuated itself in multibillion-dollar global corporations, and taken on the protective coloring provided by K Street lobbyists and white-shoe law firms. They were now hard-wired into some of the most powerful Republican politicians in the country.”
― Craig Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

“For Donald Trump, the fact that the entire city was on the verge of bankruptcy was good news indeed, because prices could not go much lower.”
― Craig Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

“As to the impact of all the “active measures” undertaken by Russia leading up to the 2016 election, it is difficult to quantify exactly how much they changed the outcome of the presidential race. However, according to the study by the University of California at Berkeley and Swansea University in Wales, automated tweeting alone by thousands of bots added 3.23 percentage points to Trump’s vote in the US presidential race.77”
― Craig Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

“It wasn’t enough that William S. Sessions had taken on Mogilevich, the most feared mobster in the world, as a client. Sessions’s successor as FBI director, Louis Freeh, was also working for the Russians.”
― Craig Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

“Dear friends, respected colleagues!” Nikonov said. “Three minutes ago Hillary Clinton admitted her defeat in US presidential elections and a second ago Trump started his speech as an elected president of the United States of America and I congratulate you on this.”1 Even though Nikonov did not add what many in the Kremlin already knew, his brief statement was greeted by enthusiastic applause. Donald J. Trump had just become Vladimir Putin’s man in the White House.”
― Craig Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

“Similarly, in 2014, former Senate majority leader Trent Lott (R-MS) and former senator John Breaux (D-LA) became the main lobbyists for Gazprombank, a subsidiary of Russia’s largest supplier of natural gas. More recently, in 2016, millions of dollars in Russian money was funneled to Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell3 and other high-profile Republicans to finance GOP senatorial candidates.”
― Craig Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

“Foreign nationals are prohibited from contributing to Senate races, but, according to the Dallas Morning News, during the 2015–16 election season, Ukrainian-born oligarch Leonard “Len” Blavatnik, who has British-American dual citizenship, put a small fraction of his $ 20 billion fortune into GOP Senate races. McConnell, who took $ 2.5 million for his GOP Senate Leadership Fund from two of Blavatnik’s companies, was the leading recipient. Others included political action committees for Senator Marco Rubio, Senator Lindsey Graham, Ohio governor John Kasich, and Arizona senator John McCain.”
― Craig Unger, House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia

“Widely hailed as the most popular director of Central Intelligence since Allen Dulles, Bush had enormous support within the Agency. As the campaign got under way, Reagan-Bush posters appeared all over CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, many cut in the middle with only the right side, the Bush side, on display.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“For more than three decades, at least thirteen people with known or alleged links to the Russian Mafia held the deeds to, lived in, or ran criminal operations out of Trump Tower in New York or other Trump properties.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“Trump may not have been doing anything illegal at the Mayflower, but the Russians were there and in a position to expose him. That was kompromat. That was how it worked. The press covered the event as something that was completely normal. In fact, nothing illegal was taking place. Nevertheless, Russian intelligence had essentially hijacked Trump’s foreign policy in plain sight and nobody noticed.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“IN 1993, after First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton put an end to smoking in the White House, Bill Clinton would sometimes retreat there to smoke a cigar in a celebratory moment, as he did after the United States rescued a soldier in Bosnia.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“It was often said that he was in the CIA, but [James] Bath denied that to Time. Later, he equivocated. "There's all sorts of degrees of civilian participation [in the CIA]," he says. "It runs the whole spectrum, maybe passing on relevant data to more substantive things. The people who are called on by their government and serve- I don't think your're going to find them talking about it.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“From the KGB’s point of view, the most appealing quality about Trump was probably that he had a personality that was ideal for a potential asset—vain, narcissistic, highly susceptible to flattery, and greedy.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“Bush had been warned about using Noriega as an asset by the legendary head of French Intelligence, Count Alexandre de Marenches, who warned him with regard to Noriega, "My own philosophy has always been that when you have something particularly dirty to do, you hire a gentleman to do it. If the gentleman is persuaded that what we are contemplating is an act of war, and by extension an act of patriotism, then we will find some very good people to work for us. By contrast, if we hire a thug, then eventually we will be compelled to kill the thug in one way or another because eventually we would be blackmailed by him.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“Secret agreements between the Saudis and various U.S. presidents dated back to the early postwar era and continued into the twenty-first century. Thanks to a pact between President Harry Truman and King Ibn Saud in 1947, the United States vowed to come to Saudi Arabia's defense if it was attacked. Likewise, in 1963, President Kennedy sent a squadron of fighter jets to protect Saudi Arabia when Egypt's Gamel Abdel Nasser attempted to kill members of the Saudi royal family.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“In terms of his personality,” Shvets added, “the guy is not a complicated cookie, his most important characteristics being low intellect coupled with hyperinflated vanity. This combination makes him a dream for an experienced recruiter.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“dictator in waiting who would intentionally allow hundreds of thousands of his fellow citizens to die so long as it helped him stay in power.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“The explosion of the Black Lives Matter movement didn’t take place in a vacuum. It materialized in the midst of the greatest health crisis of the century—the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the United States, the pandemic was being handled with all the proficiency that one might expect to find in a corrupt and dysfunctional regime led by a superstitious, science-defying authoritarian leader of a banana republic who had decided to let the people fend for themselves—and die accordingly. Notices about COVID-19 had appeared in the president’s daily briefings (PDB) as early as January 2020, but, as was usually the case with PDBs, Trump didn’t bother to read them.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“And two former models said that Trump’s agency suggested they lie on customs forms about where they planned to live. All of which meant they were perpetually scared of getting caught and pretty much at the mercy of the agency. All of which was ironic indeed, given Trump’s hard-line immigration policies as president and his assertions that undocumented immigrants are taking American jobs.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“BCCI's ascendancy was also due to business practices that were highly unusual in the staid world of banking. Other banks gave toaster ovens to new depositors; BCCI provided prostitutes... The report says that the woman was reputed to have first won the attention of the royal family "by arranging to get virgin women from the villages from the ages of 16 to 20... According to one U.S. investigator with substantial knowledge of BCCI's activities, some BCCI officials have acknowledged that some of the females provided some members of the Al-Nahyan family were young girls who had not yet reached puberty, and in certain cases, were physically injured by the experience. The official said that former BCCI officials had told him that BBCI also provided males to homosexual VIPs.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“Oil, they had discovered, could be used as a weapon. Suddenly, Saudi Arabia took on the position Texas itself had once had and became the swing oil producer for the great industrial nations of the world. The biggest transfer of wealth in human history was under way. Hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenues poured into the Saudi Kingdom. The Saudis were drowning in petrodollars.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“In effect, as attorney general, Barr, a leading figure in the newly emergent Catholic right—with its ties to Opus Dei, a mysterious fringe sect with roots in fascist Spain—was bringing in a new strain of religious authoritarianism and theocratic nationalism to join forces with Trumpism on their way to collision after collision with the US Constitution. All this in a world of decadence and depravity tied to figures like Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, whose pedophile operation trafficked in underage girls as young as eleven, and also had links to Russian intelligence.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“In other words, America was in crisis and there was no coordinated national health policy. And worse, like a slow-motion Reichstag fire, the disease itself was being weaponized and politicized by Trump and his followers. Much like the 1933 arson attack that allowed Germany’s newly elected chancellor Adolf Hitler to consolidate power, the pandemic provided cover for Trump and Barr to do likewise.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“A senior member of the Washington diplomatic corps, Bandar has played racquetball with Secretary of State Colin Powell in the late seventies. He had run covert operations for the late CIA director Bill Casey that were so hush-hush they were kept secret even from President Ronald Reagan. He was the man who stashed away thirty locked attache cases that held some of the deepest secrets in the intelligence world. And for two decades, Bandar built an intimate personal relationship with the Bush family that went far beyond a mere political friendship.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“Shvets’s assessment is strikingly similar to those of various CIA officers. “Trump is extremely vulnerable to flattery,” Rolf Mowatt-Larssen told me. “He almost defines relationships entirely by who flatters him and who doesn’t, as opposed to the intrinsic value of what people say. He doesn’t care at all about the fact that Russians are masters at manipulation.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“But if arming Iran to support Israel was insane, the flip side of the policy, in the long run at least, was truly demented: Weinberger and Shultz favored defending Saudi Arabia and the enormous U.S. oil interests there by secretly bolstering the brutal Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. As a result of their efforts, billions of dollars in aid and weapons were funneled to Saddam's regime.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“Under Trump, norms were violated so frequently that conflicts of interest became the rule rather than the exception. The thieves and kleptocrats, or their lawyers, really, were in control.”
― Craig Unger, American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery

“True, as villains go, Saddam was straight out of central casting. He had killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians, thousands of his own citizens, used chemical weapons, and committed atrocity after atrocity. But because Saddam had long been an ally of the Reagan and Bush administrations, such heinous crimes had gotten little attention in the media and few Americans thought of him as a dangerous enemy.”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties

“According to Mustafa Elhussein, secretary of a center for Muslim intellectuals known as the Ibn Khaldun Society, “There is a great deal of bitterness that such groups have tarnished the reputation of mainstream Muslims” because “self-appointed leaders . . . spew hatred toward America and the West and yet claim to be the legitimate”
― Craig Unger, House of Bush, House of Saud: The Secret Relationship Between the World's Two Most Powerful Dynasties