There are very diminishingly few United States senators who you would like always want to have dinner with. It used to be in the Senate there were an awful lot of them. There are very few of them today that you would just be dying to go out and have dinner with. John McCain is someone I`d have dinner with seven nights a week.

You have two choices, [Plouffe] told Obama. You can stay in the Senate, enjoy your weekends at home, take regular vacations, and have a lovely time with your family. Or you can run for president, have your whole life poked at and pried into, almost never see your family, travel incessantly, bang your tin cup for donations like some street-corner beggar, lead a lonely, miserable life.

[Michael Flynn] become someone who for a lot of his former colleagues, people like Stanley McChrystal who looked at General Flynn and sort of said, this is not the person I thought I knew.

[Michael Flynn is] someone who has advocated for a much tighter ties with Russia and had raised some eyebrows in terms of some of the consorting that he did around Washington.

[Michael Flynn] has just said that the U.S. Justice system is corrupt.

[Michael Flynn is not] the kind of person who is going to be more buttoned-up kind of military figure and that partisan tone.

There are very diminishingly few United States senators who you would like always want to have dinner with. It used to be in the Senate there were an awful lot of them. There are very few of them today that you would just be dying to go out and have dinner with. John McCain is someone I`d have dinner with seven nights a week.