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

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

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.

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.

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 .

[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.