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Craig Unger

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Craig Unger (b. March 25, 1949) is an American journalist and writer. He has served as deputy editor of The New York Observer and was editor-in-chief of Boston magazine. He has written about George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush for The New Yorker, Esquire magazine, and Vanity Fair magazine. He has written about the Romney family and Hart InterCivic.

Quotes

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Note: All below Ref's are not necessarily cited in Unger's books and/or articles below, from which quotations are extracted. There are some additional reference materials to substantiate the veracity of quotations.

"Trump’s Russian Laundromat" (Jul 13, 2017)

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"How to use Trump Tower and other luxury high-rises to clean dirty money, run an international crime syndicate, and propel a failed real estate developer into the White House", The New Republic. Source.
  • Yeltsin... would... describe Russia as "the biggest mafia state in the world."
    • Note: Boris Yeltsin, address to the Duma (1994) Ref: 1) Kate Ebbage, "Russia: What has Precipitated the Rise of Criminal Activity?" Journal of Money Laundering Control, Vol. 3, No. 1 (1999) See also: Stephen Handelman, "The Russian 'Mafiya'" Foreign Affairs (Mar/Apr 1994)
  • In ...2013 ...police ...rounded up... suspects in... gambling rings... prosecutors called "...world's largest sports book," ...in Trump Tower—including the entire fifty-first floor ...[A] condo ...below one owned by Trump ...served as headquarters for a "sophisticated money-laundering scheme" that moved ...$100 million out of the former Soviet Union ...into ...the United States ...under ...protection of Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov ...

"Married to the Mob" (Jul 20, 2017)

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": Investigative Journalist Craig Unger on What Trump Owes the Russian Mafia." A video Source.
  • [A] free-for-all where he's laundering massive amounts of Russian money?

Why Robert Mueller Has Trump SoHo in His Sights (Aug 13, 2017)

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Vanity Fair Source.
  • The suit claimed... the real purpose... in addition to marketing... condos bearing the Trump brand, was "to launder many millions... and evade taxes."
  • 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."
  • Trump would not... put up a ... penny, but... get 18 percent of... profits... for licensing... as Bayrock financed and developed... Trump... SoHo.
  • 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.

House Of Trump, House of Putin (2018)

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: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia A Source @archive.org.
  • Russians had begun collaborating with Italian mobsters as early as 1980...
    • Ref: Russian Organized Crime in the United States, Hearing Before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, 104th Congress, Second Session, May 15, 1996.
  • Trump, the Soviets... discovered... was... intoxicated... with boatloads of cash... in dubious transactions...
  • [A]s long as they had money... Trump was listening.
  • Russian gangsters became... Putin’s enforcers. Oleg Kalugin... told me, in effect, "the Mafia is one of the branches of the Russian government..." ...Putin’s greatest triumph is his... Mafia state... of, by, and for organized crime.
  • Ivankov recruited two brigades... of 250 athletes and... veterans of the Afghan war... to kill his enemies and establish ties...
    • Ref: Intelligence Section, Organizational Intelligence Unit, "Semion Mogilevich Organization Eurasian Organized Crime," Federal Bureau of Investigation, August 1996.
  • Vladimir Putin... had leapfrogged... to take charge of the Russian secret service... bringing in confederates from ...the KGB, and purging... enemies...[including two counterintelligence Directorates]... charged with investigating high-level economic crimes, which... involved Putin and his allies. ...Putin made sure ...both ...were ...eliminated. Having control over agencies that had the power to investigate you was... indispensible...
  • [A]fter Putin’s appointment... Anatoly Levin-Utkin's newspaper... headlined "Vladimir Putin Became Head of the FSB Unlawfully." ...[T]wo men assaulted him ...shattering his skull ...He died ...[S]ix men... held a... press conference in Moscow. All... had investigated organized crime for the FSB... [T]hey told... journalists... the... unit... had been transformed into a brutal and corrupt criminal enterprise...
    • Ref: Steven Lee Myers, The New Tsar: The Rise and Reign of Vladimir Putin (2016)
  • [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 ...
  • "...Trump came to the conclusion that it is better to do business with crooks than with honest people," said Anders Åslund...
  • 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 ...
  • [T]o turn a blind eye to practices that allowed the Russian mob to launder money through his real estate on a massive scale... required a third party... largely staffed, owned, and financed by émigrés from... the former Soviet Union... [on] the twenty-fourth floor of Trump Tower.
  • In the wake of his massive debts and multiple bankruptcies, Wall Street... said no... The banks... said no to Trump. ...But Bayrock ...said yes...
  • Given... control over.. oligarchs was crucial to... power, Putin needed to... keep tabs on... their money... If... the Russian Mafia or other forms of flight capital were funding a Trumpbranded project... If oligarchs were buying scores of Trump condos... Putin wanted to know.

American Kompromat (2021)

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: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery. A Source @archive.org.
  • [H]e... implemented anti-science... policies that... led to... deaths of hundreds of thousands...
  • A serious counterintelligence investigation... would presumably have asked... whether Trump had been compromised... by Russia. ...[H]ow deeply Trump was indebted to the Russian Mafia ...laundering millions of dollars... Was he a Russian asset? ...How much did he make laundering ..?
  • [T]he Jackson–Vanik Amendment to the Trade Act of 1974 allowed the Soviet Union... normal trade relations... General Oleg Kalugin ...saw it as a great opportunity for the KGB. ..."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 Russian Mafia and a new generation of KGB assets... one of whom was Donald Trump.
  • Kislin... and his partner, Tamir Sapir... set up... Joy-Lud Electronics... ultimately controlled by the KGB... always filled with KGB agents and high-level Soviet dignitaries. ..."The KGB was... paranoid about... bugging...” said Shvets. But since Kislin was... with the KGB, Soviet dignitaries had no such concerns.
  • Sapir told Forbes magazine, his customers included the former Soviet minister of petrochemicals, who granted Sapir rights to distribute tens of thousands of tons of fertilizer and tens of millions of barrels of oil, while pocketing fees... [S]elling oil was impossible without KGB approval.
    • Ref: Matthew Swibel, "The Boomerang Effect" Forbes (Mar 31, 2006)
  • In 1995, Shvets published Washington Station: My Life as a KGB Spy in America, his memoir...
  • [A]fter... residence in the White House, people asked... what the Russians had on Trump. ..[I]t’s... simple: They owned him.
  • "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."

Was Trump Really That Stupid? (Feb 2, 2021)

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(w/ Craig Unger) Thom Hartmann Program. A YouTube video.
  • According to... Yuri Shvets... [who] recruited spies... you see them pumping him full of KGB talking points, saying "Wow, you have these wonderfully unorthodox views on foreign policy. You should... run for higher office. You should be president. You should make all these views public."
  • He is invited to the Soviet Union and the... trip is overseen by the KGB. ...Ivan Gromakov ...initiates the invitation. It goes through the Soviet ambassador ...to Trump and he's flown in by Intourist ...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 KGB, and that leads... to his exploratory run for the presidency... for the 1988 nomination.
  • Yuri... was in KGB 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.
  • 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 money laundering 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!
  • [Trump] was regarded by Russian intelligence and the KGB... 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 Yuri Shvets... he was.

Episode 113: Den of Spies with Craig Unger (Oct 7, 2024)

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RADICALIZED: Truth Survives Podcast. A Creative Commons License Video Source.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
    • Ref: Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House (2024) by Craig Unger
  • [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 Newsweek 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 "catch and kill" 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 Newsweek and The New Republic 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 Onion, 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 Yehoshua Sagi 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...

BREAKING: Donald Trump is STILL a Russian Asset (Apr 30, 2025)

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with Craig Unger, RADICALIZED: Truth Survives Podcast. A Creative Commons License Video Source.
  • 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 Whitehouse 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 Preet Bharara... 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 Steve Witkoff... [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 KGB, 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, The Washington Post... [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 KGB. 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 Hyatt 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.
    • Background Ref: Jeff Stein, How the KGB Hooked Trump: 'American Kompromat,' a new book by Craig Unger, gets the lowdown from former Russian and U.S. spies. (Jan 26, 2021) SpyTalk.
  • 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 Red Square in the Kremlin... [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.

Quotes about Unger

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  • Craing Unger's... book has... made headlines... because of a charge from an ex-KGB colonel, Yuri Shvets, that Donald Trump has been a KGB asset for 40 years. ...Unger points out ...Michael Morell ...called Trump an "unwitting agent" ...James Clapper ...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.
    • Charles Kaiser, "American Kompromat review: Trump, Russia, Epstein ...and a lot we just don't know" The Guardian (Feb 7, 2021)
  • 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 modus operandi 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 KGB agent. Suspicion is what matters. He traffics in doubt.
    • Gal Beckerman, "The Journalist Who Cried Treason" The Atlantic (Oct 2, 2024)
  • The standard of proof when writing about the president of the United States... needs to be higher... Unger... [cites] dozens of books and journalistic accounts... He's weak, however, on the primary sources needed to sway a skeptical reader, much less a jury. ...[T]here is a volcano's worth of smoke in House of Trump, House of Putin, which ...has obscured the fire.
  • [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.

See also

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Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia has an article about:


  • American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery (2021) by Craig Unger @archive.org.
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