American Kompromat: The Craig Unger Interview
Now that Jeffrey Epstein is dead and Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison, who is serving their billionaire global market of pedophiles? Is Bill Barr, with his connections to traitor FBI agent and Russian spy Robert Hanssen, a Russian asset like Trump? Why isn’t the mainstream media sounding the alarm about the many Kremlin connections to Trump and his family, as well as Russia’s infiltration of the so-called “Deep State,” the FBI, and the CIA?
In this special live taping of Gaslit Nation, celebrating George Orwell’s birthday, we break down all this and more with fearless investigative journalist Craig Unger. He is the author of several internationally bestselling books on the far-right’s war on democracy, including House of Trump, House of Putin; House of Bush, House of Saud; and American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery. Unger will return for another live taping in the fall to discuss his latest book, Den of Spies: Reagan, Carter, and the Secret History of the Treason That Stole the White House.
This week’s bonus show, available to subscribers at the Truth-Teller level ($5/month) and higher, is a continuation of our discussion with Unger, featuring questions from our audience. Thank you to everyone who joined our live taping and asked fascinating questions in the chat! We look forward to seeing you at our next live taping on July 15th with cult expert Dr. Janja Lalich, who will help us make sense of the MAGA death cult rally known as the Republican National Convention!
Cult Expert Dr. Janja Lalich Live-Taping - July 15 8pm ET
July 15th kicks off the Republican National Convention/Hitler rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. To help us cope with the mainstream media, especially the New York Times, continuing to normalize Trump and his MAGA cult, we’re producing a live taping with cult expert Dr. Janja Lalich. Bring your questions about how to navitage this perilous time of rampant disinformation and manipulation, learn the signs of cult grooming, and how to help loved ones who have fallen victim. This will be Dr. Lalich’s second time on the show. You can listen to the interview with her from April 2022 here.
In the Shadow of Stalin Book Launch - September 4th at 7pm
Gaslit Nation will host a live taping at a book launch in New York City for In the Shadow of Stalin, the graphic novel adaptation of Mr. Jones, at the Ukrainian Institute of America. It includes scenes that didn’t make it into the final cut of the film, or it would have been three hours long! The evening will include a special meet-up just for Patreon supporters. We look forward to sharing more details as we get closer. If you want a book event/live taping of Gaslit Nation in your town or city, let us know!
Indivisible x Gaslit Nation Phonebank Party! - July 18 at 8pm ET
Open to all, Gaslit Nation and Indivisible are kicking things off early this year, really early! When there’s such a thing as Project 2025, there’s no time to waste. Come join us for our first phone bank party of the season, as we make calls to our fellow citizens in Republican hostage states, to refuse to abandon those on the frontlines of American authoritarianism, and to plant seeds of change. We’re going in!
RSVP here to join us! https://www.mobilize.us/indivisible/event/628701/
Thank you to everyone who supports the show – we could not make Gaslit Nation without you!
Andrea Chalupa:
Hey, everyone. Welcome to Gaslit Nation. I am your host, Andrea Chalupa, a journalist and filmmaker and the writer and producer of the journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, about Stalin's genocide famine in Ukraine. Today is June 25th, 2024, George Orwell's birthday. He would have been... Hold on, Nick, I forgot to do the math. George Orwell born 1903, oh my God, 101? I think that's what that means. Hold on. 2000... No. Oh my gosh. He would have been 121 years old today. If the Silicon Valley fascists had invented a way to live forever, he might still be here. We're celebrating with a special Gaslit Nation virtual live interview with Craig Unger, an investigative journalist and international bestselling author of five books on the Republican Party's assault on Democracy, including House of Bush, House of Saud; House of Trump, House of Putin; and American Kompromat.
With us in the audience, the virtual audience are several listeners in the Gaslit Nation Patreon community who support the show. If you would like to join us for future live tapings like the interview with cult expert, Dr. Janja Lalich, that is July 15th, 8:00 PM Eastern, that's our next live taping and Dr. Lalich is going to help us make sense of the MAGA cult rally at the Republican National Convention that week in Milwaukee. Be sure to subscribe this show at the Truth Teller level or higher at patreon.com/gaslit, that's patreon.com/gaslit, and you can join us for our next live taping with a renowned cult expert as we're all witnessing a death cult at the Republican National Convention that week. So come heal, self-care at that week's Gaslit Nation live taping. You know you're going to need it. I'm going to need it. That's why I scheduled a renowned cult expert, Dr. Lalich for that week because I know all of us need to come together and just say, "What the fuck?" Right? And to get access to that, that's patreon.com/gaslit. And to submit questions to our regular Q's and A's, be sure to subscribe at the Democracy Defender level or higher. Thank you to everyone who supports the show. We could not make Gaslit Nation without you.
Before we start our interview with Craig Unger, I want to invite you all to our next phone bank party with our friends at Indivisible calling our fellow citizens in Republican hostage states in the Midwest like Ohio and Missouri, refusing to leave them behind. We are chipping away at Republican authoritarianism in these laboratories of dictatorship in so-called Red states like Ohio and Missouri. One phone call at a time, we are like water eroding their white patriarchy fascism. Our very first phone bank of this season, just last week, made over 14,400 calls for key Senate races in the Midwest.
And every phone bank we're going to reward the caller who makes the most phone calls that night. And in our very first phone bank, a wonderful Gaslit Nation listener named Lisa, she blew it away. Thank you so much, Lisa and everyone who attended that night. I made 50 phone calls. And here's a wonderful thing that we do every big election, tweet at us or Mastadon at us or wherever you are in social media these days, tag Gaslit Nation and let us know what you are doing to get out the vote. We are going to collect the folks' names that are doing that, and select five of you to come on this show for a special Gaslit Nation taping on saving democracy as we all regroup after the election and make sense of what we all went through and find our voice, find our grounding after what's going to mean extremely intense election with many October surprises.
The October surprises will have October surprises. It's going to be a ricochet of October surprises, but we're going to get through it. We're going to ultimately prevail and we're going to stay together and chip away on this MAGA cult's death grip on our democracy to rebuild things and Trump-proof our democracy. We're going to get the legislation passed in the last states that we need it passed in to ensure that the national popular vote, not the electoral college decides our elections. We're going to pass laws on the all-important state level to protect our election monitors, to secure our democracy.
Our work is not done, our work is not done. It continues, even if we defeat Trump on November 5th. Be sure of that. Because as I keep saying, every episode, this election is bigger than Biden. It is about finally bringing balance to our democracy and fairer representation and really correcting the white racist slave owning elitist mechanisms that the founding fathers instilled in order to protect their stolen wealth. We are correcting that now. We are the generation to do it, and the generations that come after us are going to have an easier time and America will finally be free of that oppression and no longer be the threat to the world than it currently is, should we fall into a dictatorship under Trump.
All right, and big news for Gaslit Nation listeners in or around New York City. We're having a special in-person live taping of Gaslit Nation and Friends at the beautiful Ukrainian Institute of America, right around the corner from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. There will be a reception with food and wine, and I'll be there with special guests to celebrate the launch of my new graphic novel, In the Shadow of Stalin: The Story of Mr. Jones, the graphic novel adaptation of the shooting script for my journalistic thriller, Mr. Jones, directed by three-time Academy Award nominee Agnieszka Holland and starring James Norton, Vanessa Kirby and Peter...
And now let's get to it. Here is investigative journalist Craig Unger on the transnational crime syndicate that brought Donald Trump to power in 2016 and poured gasoline on his MAGA cult's forest fire trying to burn down our democracy. Let's get into this. Thank you so much for being here. All right, so tell us about the reporting that went into your book, American Kompromat, especially the verification that you got from inside sources from the KGB that Donald Trump is a Russian asset.
Craig Unger:
Right. Well, one of my primary sources on that was a man named Yuri Shvets, and he was a major in the KGB. And I thought it was a coup to get someone to talk to me openly. And I was able to have dozens of hours of interviews with him and then I had months to start checking up the way it happened. This goes back to, and I'm sort of surprised and somewhat disappointed, this isn't more of an issue, it's just come back now that Trump is running again, but this is the story of how Donald Trump was recruited as an asset for the KGB. And at the time, Yuri Shvets was a major who was stationed in Washington D.C. His cover was that he was a journalist, a reporter, but he was secretly recruiting assets for the Soviet Union, this is back during the Cold War. And he was based in Washington D.C and his colleagues in New York were also recruiting spies for the Soviet Union. And a lot of them were stationed at the United Nations.
And the way this happened began when Trump's first success, and it's one of the few genuine business successes he really had, was when he developed what is now known as the Grand Hyatt Hotel on 42nd Street, New York, right next to Grand Central Station. And at the time, New York was really in the dumps. He got it for a song. He got fabulous tax abatements and he helped develop the hotel. And like any hotel, it needed lots of television sets for all the guest rooms. So where did he buy them? He bought them from a store that serves the Soviet Union. I mean, there are a lot of places to buy TV sets in the United States, but this is where he went. He got him from a guy, the guy selling was Semyon Kislin, who was still around.
Kislin, according to my source, his role was to recruit assets for the Soviet Union. So he came to Trump with an offer Trump could not refuse. That is hundreds of TV sets that were very, very cheap. And that was the beginning of their relationship. And I could trace it from there to a woman named Natalia Dubinina. Natalia Dubinina was the daughter of a man who served both as ambassador to the United Nations and later to the United States. And she was stationed in the UN Library. And if you worked for the Soviet Union back in those days and were stationed in the UN Library, chances are you were spy. And there were hundreds of them. This was later revealed in widespread stories throughout the 1980s. And Trump became very close to them. They said they were thrilled with Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. They wanted one in Moscow as well, and they started to curry favor with him. And it was really the KGB that first sent Trump to the Soviet Union in 1987.
Andrea Chalupa:
Wow. So what is the confirmed date of when the Soviet Union really zeroed in on Donald Trump? How long has the Kremlin been developing him into a Russian asset?
Craig Unger:
Well, this is over 40 years. And then to be clear, an asset is different from an agent. An agent is someone who's on the payroll effectively. He or she is tasked with very specific tasks and they know who they're working for and what they're doing. They're well aware for it. An asset can be a little more subtle and it's just they think of them as a friend who could do favors from time to time and who can deliver information. Going way, way back, most of your listeners are probably too young to remember Armand Hammer who was a big billionaire oil executive. He had huge relationships with the Soviet Union that made him billions of dollars and by this time he was getting on in years. And Trump, in a way, seemed to replace him as someone the Soviets can rely on.
Andrea Chalupa:
Incredible. When your book, American Kompromat came out confirming what the Mueller report and the bipartisan Senate Intelligence report basically said, that the Russians had been developing Trump and they had this whole operation to bring him to power In 2016, your book, American Kompromat built on that. It was such a bombshell book. And I noticed in the media, I witnessed this live happening, that there was a lot of hostility towards your book, like an aggressive censoring of it. I even witnessed the MSNBC anchor, I believe is Alexandra Witt, the very blonde one, saying, I witnessed her saying this about your book, "Oh §and there's even this book out there claiming Trump's a Russian asset, I won't even say the name of the book." I witnessed that and I was like, "How dare they?" So what was that response like and where do you think it's coming from in the mainstream media?
Craig Unger:
Well, it was disappointing. The book did make the New York Times bestseller list, but the New York Times didn't mention it. And also the same in a way with House of Trump, House of Putin, at least there I got a lot of exposure on MSNBC. But by the time it came out, Biden had taken office and there was definitely a sense of, "Oh, we've had enough Trump," and I was getting a lot of that. At the same time, I don't think a single person disputed a single fact that I reported in my book. And my books tend to be... I try to document them very thoroughly. Each of them has roughly a thousand source notes, so you can check up on me and no one has disproven any single element of it.
Andrea Chalupa:
Right, absolutely. That's without question. But here's my theory. Mainstream media, government, whether it's Trump or Biden's government, if they were to truly lay it all out there as you have an American Kompromat, that would force them to actually do something about it, like cleaning up America's laws and also taking to task the CIA and the FBI from allowing it to get this far.
Craig Unger:
Right. Absolutely. I look back, and I'm old enough that I was actually alive during the Eisenhower administration, and his chief of staff Sherman Adams, this is a horrifying scandal, he received an overcoat from someone who had business with the government and it was worth over $500. And it became such a national scandal, of course, that he was hounded out of office and prosecuted. Today we have a situation where Jared Kushner got $2 billion from the Saudis, and it's, "Yawn." Or Donald Trump is laundering money for the Russian Mafia, as I reported in the House of Trump, House of Putin, "Big deal." I don't think either of these facts are anywhere part of the national conversation as Trump runs again.
And it's very hard, you feel this is what is so Orwellian about today, is that you see the end of truth. You see people forgetting things automatically. And no matter how big it is, I can't imagine penetrating the right wing half of the nation. I mean, you're not going to get into Fox News, you're not going to get into Breitbart, you're not going to get into their social media. And that's what's so horrifying about what's happened today to me. I mean, at least when I grew up, it seemed that most of us shared the same set of facts. The mass media certainly wasn't perfect, but for me, what shaped me as a journalist when I was in college and just getting out were stories like the My Lai Massacre or the Pentagon Papers or Watergate. Everyone in the country knew about those back then. Today I think they'd be a blip in the nation's consciousness.
Andrea Chalupa:
Wow. Absolutely correct. And what are some ways Donald Trump was developed over the decades by the Russians? And what are some ways that Donald Trump as president returned the favor?
Craig Unger:
Right. Well, I, when I asked Yuri, "How do you recruit someone?" He said, "You become their friend. You flatter them, you be nice to them. You give them what you want. "Do you think Donald Trump is susceptible to flattery? He loves it. So they were going on and on about how wonderful the Trump Tower is. "Gosh, we wish we could have that in the Soviet Union."' Well, if you believe that thing, this was during the Cold War, they hated us. They were vehemently fighting capitalism. They want a monument to capitalism in the middle of Red Square? It made absolutely no sense. But Trump went ahead with that. When he got there, there were various reports of him being plied with women and so forth. Some of those stories are conflicting. But Yuri Shvets was cultivating a source in Moscow at the same time Trump was being cultivated by someone else. So I got a good sense of how that system works.
And as soon as Trump got back into the United States, he went to the Washington Post, to a lot of people in the press and said that he was a foreign policy expert and that he should be a moderator, he should be negotiating the SALT talks. And he always said, he still saying this, his uncle, his uncle at MIT knew a lot about nuclear power. It's horrible, right? Because his uncle knew it, that meant Trump knew it. And he was never an expert on any of this in any way. And people forget, he actually started an abortive presidential campaign in 1988. This was the end of the Reagan administration. George H. W. Bush, that's Bush Senior was the presumed nominee, and in fact ran and won in 1988. But Trump briefly tried to put his foot in the waters and went to New Hampshire, which is one of the rites of passage if you're going to enter. It wasn't nowhere, of course, but it was in his mind back then and you can see how easily he was manipulated.
Andrea Chalupa:
Absolutely. And so I have a question here from a listener. Julian Assange pled guilty to violating the Espionage Act, has been sentenced to time served and is now being extradited to Australia. Do you think justice has been served? Do you consider him a journalist? How do his actions compare to Ed Snowden, Chelsea Manning or Reality Winner?
Craig Unger:
Right, that's a big question. Initially, I was sort of supportive of him, but I'm not at all convinced. I don't want to go to bat for him at this stage. And sorry I can't answer that more fully.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, I agree completely. I mean, Julian Assange aligned himself with the Kremlin in 2016, and he spread a lot of disinformation, including challenging the reality that was verified that Russian state hackers went into the DNC and other Democratic leaders and stole documents and all sorts of things from the Democrats as well as the Republicans. And we still haven't seen from the Russians, they haven't leaked it through WikiLeaks or any other cutout, what they took from the Republican Party. And likely some of that, I'm sure, Craig, you might agree, must be kompromat holding the Republican Party hostage or else these materials would be released. So Julian Assange was openly a disinformation agent for the Kremlin, actively working to help the Kremlin bring Donald Trump a fascist, racist, son of a Klansman to power in 2016. So if he's a journalist, so is Tucker Carlson.
Craig Unger:
Exactly.
Andrea Chalupa:
And Reality Winner and Chelsea Manning and others, they're real heroes out there that do not belong in the same category as Julian Assange. And I do absolutely believe the rape allegations against him, because from all the reporting on him, the guy's a narcissist and he got a lot of vulnerable people killed due to his insensitive leaks where he didn't practice the care of an actual journalist protecting sources and whistleblowers.
So let's get back to your book, because I am so fascinated by Epstein's horrific pedophile network and all of the foreign actors that are nodes in the operation. Where does that all fit in with Trump, bringing Trump to power? And do you think that's why we haven't seen a lot more people ending up in prison because of that Epstein operation having the goods on them, and as a result we don't see justice served more than it should be?
Craig Unger:
Right. Well, again, there are a lot of unanswered questions. And I don't know the real story about Jeffrey Epstein's death. I mean, one of the more interesting asides from it is that there were people in the Palm Beach Sheriff's Department, including a deputy sheriff there who was very, very widely disliked and absconded, he told me with something like 478 sex tapes from Jeffrey Epstein, this is after the Palm Beach Sheriff's Department had begun investigating Jeffrey Epstein. He went on the lam suddenly and ended up in Moscow, he said, with those 478 pages. And he later posted a photo of himself with a man named Pavel Borodin, who is a very highly placed figure in Putin's government. And the question is, what happened to those sex tapes? Did he really have them as he told me he did? Did he share them with Russia? We don't really know. And I think it's one of the great unanswered questions so far, along with Epstein's death, and I frankly don't know the answer. I went as far as I could with it in American Kompromat.
Andrea Chalupa:
You think Epstein is indeed dead?
Craig Unger:
Well, I honestly don't know. When you see the picture of the orange linens or whatever they are in the jail cell, it didn't look like... They were tied at about three feet off the ground. And I don't know how you can hang yourself from waist high. So I don't know the answer. There just seemed to be a whole lot of coincidences. The cameras went out, the guards were away. I have learned never to discount incompetence, but this seems to be stretching that a bit.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah. So what was Epstein's relationship with Donald Trump and how do you think that played a role in helping bring Trump to power in 2016?
Craig Unger:
Well, they were close, and there're just too many photos of it and too many stories about it to deny that. I mean, Trump said it himself, they were very good friends. I would love to know the backstory on the kompromat there and whether it was used in bringing power. I mean, we did see Leon Black he been paying Epstein something, I think it was over $150 million for tax advice. That's significantly more than I pay my accountant. And it seemed like, no, you don't pay your accountant that much money for tax advice, there had to be more to it. But it's never really been solved. And you had Bill Barr in charge, he was Attorney General during all of this, and he had reasons to hide things. Barr to me, is extremely unreliable and was always doing things for partisan political reasons. So it was shut down. And I don't know if we'll ever know the full truth.
Andrea Chalupa:
And Christopher Wray's FBI isn't coming out with the full names of Epstein's clients and it's left to the victims themselves to bring very dangerous and expensive legal cases to try to out some people and get some justice.
Craig Unger:
Right.
Andrea Chalupa:
So basically our law enforcement is continuing to protect the rich and powerful.
Craig Unger:
I think so. I mean, I don't know if it'll ever be opened up. You know, when I talk to the deputy sheriff from Palm Beach County, he showed me a video, a sex video, and it was very grainy with black and white suggesting media technology from the '90s or something. He said, the man involved was a highly placed media executive. And I was unable to confirm it. It was someone I had not heard of to be honest. But I did Google him and had a nice eight figure salary. But I could not confirm it in any way, and I didn't publish that.
Andrea Chalupa:
Was Jeffrey Epstein's operation a tool of a foreign adversary, maybe even the US deep state? Or was he a tool of a government to try to collect kompromat on people and control people?
Craig Unger:
Well, there's reason to believe there were Russian women involved. A woman named, I believe her name was Masha Drokova, and she was head of, forgive me, I forget the Russian name for it, but it was essentially the Putin Youth Movement and she was head of it and she ended up doing PR for Jeffrey Epstein of all people. So there were links like that that were very, very suspicious. And a man named Jean-Luc Brunel ran a so-called fashion model agency. And in many of these fashion agencies, you had one or two top tier models, supermodels who could make loads and loads of money.
But a few notches below were young women who were really looking for work and couldn't get enough work. And they would be supplied as party favors to oligarchs and billionaires and so forth. And Jean-Luc Brunel was part of that. He ended up allied with Jeffrey Epstein and was apparently supplying women to Epstein as well. And in turn there was, I guess you'd call him a pimp named Peter Listerman, who was sort of the super pimp for Russian oligarchs. So there is a very, very dark history there that has not been fully revealed.
Andrea Chalupa:
I remember watching Melania's face when she met Putin face to face. I don't know if it was the Helsinki trip or another trip, and I remember Melania almost staring down Putin, giving him a very stern look. And it was sort of a flash of game recognized game. And it gave credibility to the speculation that Melania, given her family's own connections with the state security services back in Slovakia, that she may have been part of that larger operation from the KGB from the FSB to develop Trump. What are your thoughts on that?
Craig Unger:
Well, I can't confirm it. I mean, I can certainly understand the speculation. I mean, there's reason, but I've been unable to confirm it. If I could, I would. But I don't think her full story has ever been told. And it's a hell of a story. And I mean, it's sort of amazing that she ended up as First Lady. Just when you even look at her career as a model, which was not exactly as dignified as say, Rosalind Carter or Betty Ford or whomever.
Andrea Chalupa:
Yeah, I mean, I don't mind if there was ever a First Lady that had to do what she needed to do to put food on the table.
Craig Unger:
Right.
Andrea Chalupa:
But in Melania's case, her values just obviously are terrible and it shows in everything she does. Even in the bloodbath decorations in the White House during Christmastime, that all spoke to her character. Who do you think is the new Jeffrey Epstein and Maxwell network? Now that Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison, she's working on a horrible book to try to rehab her reputation and make some money, which I think just shouldn't be allowed, that money should go to her victims. So obviously the market is there. The market is there to supply young girls, young women to disgusting old billionaires. Who's now serving that market, do you think? And how do we spot these people earlier? Because Jeffrey Epstein was allowed to be out in the open for so long doing this.
Craig Unger:
Right. I honestly don't know the answer to that. I mean, Epstein, it is sort of remarkable, because I live here in New York and I worked at Vanity Fair for 15 years really. And I realized in retrospect, some of my friends there knew Epstein and they went to parties with him and so forth. So he was sort of part of the New York scene. He was sort of accepted as part of it. And there were people who went to those parties who I knew. Who's replaced that I don't really know at this point. I don't really travel in those circles, I'm sorry.
Andrea Chalupa:
They kicked you out because of your books. So tell me about William Barr, the cover-up king. What do you think his motivation is? Do you think he also is a Russian asset? Do you think he's been paid off? Or does he have some sort of hard right, hard Christian fascist ideology that he shares with the anti-woke Russians?
Craig Unger:
Yeah, I think it's more the latter. I mean, if you go back to people kind of forget that he was Attorney General first under George Bush Sr. And even there he was a hard right ideologue for the unified executive theory, the unitary executive in which the president would have enormous powers. The only reason he wasn't better known for that is I think Bush Sr. was not really an authoritarian, certainly not to the degree that Trump was. So he wanted to go farther with it. But then Bush Sr. was a one-term president and that was it.
And he started it all again covering up everything for Trump. And suddenly he did break with Trump at the very last minute, as January 11th was about to take shape and things were going a bit too far even for him. But now he's back in Trump's corner. And it's an extremely weird family, by the way. I mean, his father wrote these bizarre scientific sci-fi novels. He started out as a headmaster and I believe it was Dalton who hired as a teacher, Jeffrey Epstein. So you had all these links going way back, and it was for a very elite segment of the Manhattan power elite.
Andrea Chalupa:
So we've been diving into the Reagan Revolution and how the religious right helped bring Reagan to power, and the religious right determined to overthrow our democracy and establish a strong man. And Trump is finally their strong man and they're aligned with the Russians. And now you have this big old MAGA cult to try and once again establish a dictatorship on January 6th, 2021 and now with Project 2025. So that really points to Reagan laying the groundwork that Trump has built off of. What are some ways that the Reagan Revolution has led to the Russians bringing Trump to power in 2016?
Craig Unger:
Well, there are a lot. I mean, one is you do see that coming together of the Evangelicals and the Christian right and the Republican Party. And that really grew directly out of Roe V. Wade, I think it was 1973. And at that point, Jerry Falwell met with Franklin Schaeffer, who was sort of the great theologian for the Christian right. And they said, "It's time to put politics back in the pulpit." And suddenly you had thousands of pastors, each of whom had a fairly large constituency, and they became hardcore Republicans. And it was a very dramatic political moment. It's interesting. It did not happen under Jimmy Carter who was an evangelical, but he was not obviously a right wing Republican. It did happen under Reagan.
You know, another factor in all this, and that goes right through today, I mean, we see it very much happening with Trump, I mean, it's very odd that Trump should be considered a savior for evangelicals. One thing Orwell talked about a lot was how leaders come up that seem to satisfy a need for their constituency. And Trump is their savior, he's their warrior. It's very odd that a guy who goes out with porn stars and is clearly... I mean, has done so many sort of vulgar things, would be such a leader for them. Some of them say, "It's easy to lie down with a lamb. We are lying down with a lion. He's our warrior." And that attitude persists no matter, and it becomes unshakable.
Another thing that very few people see is that the Republicans have done this again and again and again in my lifetime, I'm going back to 1968 really, is they hijack American foreign policy secretly. And to me it's potentially a violation of the Logan Act, which suggests it's treasonous. But in 1968, Lyndon Johnson was actually trying to end the Vietnam War with the Paris Peace Talks. And Richard Nixon was running against Hubert Humphrey. And at the last minute, he used a woman named Anna Chennault to get South Vietnam to pull out of the Paris Peace Talks so it looked like the Democrats were completely inept, and that helped tilt the 1968 election to Richard Nixon.
You had that happen, I'm not going to go into it, again in 1980. One thing, when that happened in '68, Nixon was so scared that the Democrats had tapes about it that he sent out a group known as the White House Plumbers to investigate and break into the Brookings Institute and to a place called the Watergate Hotel. So that came to another scandal. In 1980, and I can't really go into it, but it happened again with Iran. This was the Carter Bush ticket running against Jimmy Carter who was an incumbent. And that happened again in 1980. So we see this again and again and again, and it's something that I think very few voters are really aware of.
Andrea Chalupa:
No, absolutely. I want to jump fast-forward to Robert Hanssen, the willing and eager traitor and Russian spy in the FBI and a hard right Catholic. Your book American Kompromat goes in on him wonderfully. It's just all so damning. And he was entrenched in the New York FBI, and that's where the real war was against the Russian Mafia that was trying to gain ground there. You had the Russian Mafia, the KGB services flooding out of Russia to Brighton Beach to Little Odessa, Brighton Beach and really pushing out the Italian Mafia in a big old turf war there. And Giuliani and Trump were close. And that was one way that Trump really built his easy dirty money tap with the Russians all that time.
So my question to you with this revelation a few years ago confirming what we already knew back in 2016, given how the New York FBI was trying to help get Trump elected, and Giuliani was gloating about that on cable TV in 2016 days before the election, it was no surprise that Charles McGonigal of the FBI who was tasked with protecting us from the Russian Mafia was actually on Russian Mafia payroll. And I asked a retired FBI agent like, "What was the deal with that?" And he's like, "Oh, he just got cocky. He just got too comfortable." And I'm like, "Really? I'm sure there's probably more Charles McGonigals still in the New York FBI, and I think he probably just got caught because the others didn't want to get caught." What are your thoughts on that? Are there more Charles McGonigals out there in the FBI?
Craig Unger:
Yeah, I think there's a book to be done on all of that. I mean, one of the things, again, people haven't seemed to notice it, but two directors of the FBI, William Sessions, who was a director of the FBI and followed by Louis Freeh, ended up working for the Russians. William Sessions, became the attorney of record for Semion Mogilevich, who's one of the most powerful Russian mobsters there is. Louis Freeh ended up becoming an attorney for Prigozhin, and they were the people who tangled with Bill Browder. And-
Andrea Chalupa:
They're in a June, 2016 Trump Tower meeting with Don Jr., Kushner and Paul Manafort making a deal, essentially making sort of a handshake deal in Trump Tower in June, 2016. And then shortly after that, Assange started leaking the stolen, hacked materials from the DNC to inflict maximum damage.
Craig Unger:
Right. And Prigozhin, of course was Magnitsky was killed in trying to get to the bottom of how all the money was ransacked from Prigozhin. So when you have the directors of the FBI representing powerful Russians and the oligarchs like that, what do you think it does to agents who are working in New York? I mean, that's one big question. Another thing if you go to... You were asking about Bill Barr and all that. His chief speech writer back then was a guy named John Paul Wauck, and John Paul Wauck happened to be the brother-in-law of Robert Hanssen, the convicted spy.
Andrea Chalupa:
Wow.
Craig Unger:
And they were all in Opus Dei, which is the far right Catholic movement. Bill Barr seemed to have ties to that, though he says he is not a member himself. And so you have these far right ideologues there and it seemed to have an influence on the FBI.
Andrea Chalupa:
And the FBI and the CIA still hasn't done anything to atone for 2016, right?
Craig Unger:
Not that I can see. And then Trump of course is always complaining that they're out to get him when exactly the opposite is the case.
Andrea Chalupa:
Exactly. Because they want to cash in, they want to join that Russian gravy train. So a final question for me then I'll go through some questions that've been dropped in the chat during our conversation. What would you say to anyone who sees the Democrats, Republicans as both corrupt and the same party, and what's the point of voting?
Craig Unger:
Well, to me, there's no question if Trump wins, democracy is just... It's over. I mean, if you look at Project 2025 and what they intend to do, they're saying that is, they'll fire 50,000 key people from the civil service and replace them with Trump loyalists. You don't need to go any farther than that. And Trump has already done so much that it's over. I mean to me, the Democrats are flawed, but it's no contest and you have to vote for Biden. I mean, I just don't see any other choice.
Andrea Chalupa:
All right, so questions from the listeners. How do you think Christian nationalism will play out for the Jews in the US?
Craig Unger:
Badly. I'm Jewish, I'm very secular. But in 2004, when I was at Vanity Fair, and I wrote about this in The Fall of the House of Bush, I traveled with a Christian right semi undercover, my full name's Roger Craig Unger, and I went as Roger Unger, which is on my passport. And I traveled with them to the Holy Land. And we ended up in Megiddo Israel, which is the site of where Armageddon supposedly will take place. That's the root word of Armageddon. And I asked one of them, they talked about the blood of 2 billion people filling the valley, and I asked one of them, a woman, "When do you think it'll take place?" And she said, "Not soon enough."
And you could see they were adoring Israeli soldiers as warriors for them. It's just they expect all of us to die so they can be caught up in the rapture. I was traveling with Tim LaHaye, who is the author, the best-selling author in American history, by the way, by some accounts, 80 million books sold. And this is the Rapture, there've been movies about it. This is their fantasy. And it's sort of extraordinary that so many Americans believe in it.
Andrea Chalupa:
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