To get some of the substance of why [Michael] Flynn [is Defense Adviser] is so controversial.

He is obviously an American hero. John McCain is a vanishing breed. He is an iconoclast, he is in his own mind and often in reality a maverick. And I think, you know, you having spent the time that you spent in the Senate know that this is true.

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

There`s a - kind of an undercurrent of the stories we read during the campaign of, [Michael Flynn] was a guy we thought we knew who seems to have changed in a profound way and become this much more kind of [ controversial] person .

[Michael Flynn] has called President [Barack] Obama a liar.

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.

This is a guy [Michael Flynn] who stood up at the Republican convention and reveled in the chants of "lock her up" about Hillary Clinton.