Jane Mayer Quotes

So in a strange way, even though Trump is a billionaire, what he's been saying is, "Everything's rigged, it's all corrupt and I'm not corrupt because I'm my own billionaire." Both [Donald] Trump and Bernie Sanders made a lot of hay by making that argument.

David and Charles Koch are pretty much as far right as you can get on the ideological spectrum without falling off. They are far right libertarians, very anti-government, very pro-business, very anti-tax, anti-regulatory, in favour of free markets ruling the day.

There's a difference between those two [George Soroses and the Tom Steyers] and the Kochs that I think is important.

People I've interviewed say they're terrified there may be boycotts of their [the Kochs] products, which include so many household items that everybody's familiar with, things like Stainmaster Carpet and Dixie Cups and Brawny paper towels and Lycra.

I would argue that there's been a backlash this year [2016]. They [the Kochs] pushed the [Republican] party too far right. The other thing that the backlash is against is the sense that politicians have been bought and sold.

The smaller the office, the more power individuals with big money have.

It's hard for them to run away from their record. The Kochs are businessmen.

What I write about is how much influence it's had in things like state legislatures and governorships and congressional races. The other thing that's even more important in the long run is that very extreme money has affected the ecosystem of ideology in the country.

There's been a 40-year effort on the far right to build up think tanks, academic programs, advocacy groups, to push a particular ideology. That's really where the impact is that people don't see.

One of the oddities of this election is the man that [Donald] Trump chose as his vice-president, Mike Pence, is one of the Kochs' favourite politicians.

Ethically, I think pretty much every code of ethics for doctors suggests that they should not be in an interrogation room, particularly if there's anything coercive or abusive going on.

What these memos do is they make legal acts that were criminal prior to these memos.

The military is trying very hard right now to put a better face on Guantanamo, and I think they actually have tried to rid some of the extreme versions of abuse that we have read about.

The Kochtopus is the nickname that people who've worked for the Kochs came up with because there's so many tentacles and it likes the shadows. I really feel the first step is to provide the information.

And to me, it was interesting, some of the people I had interviewed who knew the insides to this program said that they also, to create anxiety and upset in the soldiers, they take Bibles and they trash them.

The book that I wrote is called Dark Money, and it's about secret spending that is very hard to follow. [George] Soros's whole thing is about government transparency, so he spends very much in the open, and the same with [Tom] Steyer.

The idea is that if we can put our own people through something almost as bad as what they might have to go through if they were taken captive, they will inoculate themselves.

Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. The natural thing would be to suggest money on the right [wing] doesn't really matter that much. The first thing you have to know is that the presidential elections are the ones where it's most difficult for money to hold sway, in that they're the most public elections.

[The Kochs] they hate big government.

Let's face it, the subject of campaign finance is not always scintillating. But it's incredibly important.

The great unknown in this country is where this leaves the Republican Party after this election. Will it be the party of the Kochs or will it be the party of [Donald] Trump?

[Donald] Trump comes along and is singing a different song. He says, "I don't need your money; I'm rich enough on my own to run." And he says, "I think we need these programs." And, lo and behold, a lot of Republican voters liked what he said.

There's not as much big money on the left, but you've got George Soros, who has the Open Society Institute. He's pushing liberal policies.

The possibility exists that the Kochs will walk away with even more power if [Donalds] Trump's defeated.

It was our view of the worst that could befall our people if they were taken captive. So, what was fascinating to me was that somehow it appears the techniques that we have feared most in the world would be used on our people, we are using on people in our custody.

If you have an informed electorate, it makes great choices.

Well, yes, I mean, I think that, you know, my sources suggest that there’s a lot of support for the notion that there is a lot of Koran abuse and that it was very much a systematic design, not just an aberration.

The concern that I have is that, as wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of a few, economic inequality grows, and power also becomes more unequal.

Money has much more power down the ballot.

The Kochs have been activists since the 1970s. You can go back and look at the platform of the Libertarian Party in 1980 and see what they really believe in. They wanted to abolish huge swaths of the U.S. government, including the Internal Revenue Service. They want to get rid of Social Security. They'd like to get rid of Medicare. They'd like to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, which directly affects their business.

Donald Trump actually is a pretty big-government conservative. He doesn't see eye-to-eye with them [the Kochs] on trade.

Torture is illegal, both in the U.S. and abroad. So - and that is true for the Bush administration and for any other administration.

They [the Kochs] want free trade and cheap labour. They own the second-largest private company in America, which is a huge multinational corporation. So they are on a different wavelength.

So you've got these regular, middle-class voters who don't hate the government as much as the Kochs do. They're Republicans, but they still want government programs. They want Social Security, they want Medicare. They need it.

This year [2016] we're seeing a really strange upending [of the party]. The money was coming from these super-wealthy donors who were really on the far, hard right, people like the Kochs. So the party and the candidates moved so far to the right that a lot of people who don't share their point of view were unhappy.

I kept thinking maybe in the future editions [of Dark Money] I should sell it along with, like, some kind of, you know, Pepto Bismol or something. I wanted it to read a little bit like a thriller, so that it truly grabbed people.

Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.

The fear is that we'll move in the direction from being a democracy to an oligarchy.

[Donald] Trump has put forward a list of people he would like to see on the Supreme Court, whom the Kochs would be very happy with too. So it's not all bad for them.

It's hard to look at [Donald] Trump as a hopeful sign because, in his own way, he is offering false solutions to many problems.

It's quite amazingly radical, what their [the Kochs] vision of America would be.

I mean, the people who run Guantanamo, the military, pretty much dismiss complaints by the detainees because they say that they're all created as part of a political process to sort of fake complaints and get public support.

The Kochs are very much involved in this election, not backing [Donald] Trump but backing everything down the ballot from him. They're pouring money into capturing the Senate and the House of Representatives, and state Houses across the country.

In fact, Charles Koch tried to get [Mike] Pence to run for the White House in 2012.

[Tom] Steyer is specifically spending money on candidates who will take action against climate change.

I think the scary thing is that there is in place already a sprawling infrastructure of advocacy groups, think tanks, academics and candidates and politicians funded by the Kochs and other deep-pocketed groups on the far right ready to attack Hillary Clinton.

There have been waves of reform in the past. I see no reason why they wouldn't happen again.

The world's a small place and people are watching; and, you know, somebody disappears, the family knows and their colleagues know, and so eventually, these things do get out.