[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.

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.

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.

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 called President [Barack] Obama a liar.

Donald Trump is now at war with Jeff Sessions. He`s now at war with James Comey. He`s at war with Andrew McCabe, and he`s at war with Robert Mueller. He`s attacked all of those people in this New York Times extraordinary interview. And I`ll just remind people that the last time Donald Trump went to war with an establishment, that was the intelligence establishment, he started that back in December 2016 , that did not work out for him well.