I don`t know who Donald Trump has in mind given that the circle of loyalists around him, the circle of people that he genuinely trusts is very small and getting smaller all the time.

[Michael Flynn has] seen at a dinner party famously sitting next to Vladimir Putin.

In the national security establishment, it is somewhat frowned upon for people to take extremely harsh partisan roles in campaigns.

[Dinner with Vladimir Putin has] raised a lot of eyebrows among national security officials who looked at [Michael Flynn] and thought these kind of behaviors were not what they had thought what he was like previously.

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.

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

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.