Trump and the Russians

There are so many stories about Donald Trump and Russia flailing around the Internet, you might be forgiven for throwing up your hands and concentrating on something else: mass deportations, perhaps, or the plummeting stock market.

But now the American public is faced with the most unconvincing lie of all, Trump's unwieldy and unconvincing attempt to broker a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. His stance has been so pro-Russian that two weeks ago Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley asked, point blank, if Trump was a Russian asset.

"If he were an asset, we would see exactly what he's doing now," Merkley said.

Well, then. The spy trade is murky and full of interesting subtleties. But as the years rack up, facts do, too, and eventually a picture emerges. Still reeling from the ugly scene in the Oval Office with Trump, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, I sought out investigative reporter Craig Unger. Unger, a veteran of New York magazine and Vanity Fair, is the author of two definitive books on Trump's ties to Russian president Vladimir Putin: House of Trump, House of Putin (2018) and American Kompromat (2021). We had an illuminating conversation. You can see part of it below, or read the transcript. But first, here's a little background.

Note: If you want the short version, you can listen to this 8-second video of Gov. JB Pritzker, who is a real billionaire and has zero fucks to give.

In the 1990s, Trump was more than $4 billion in debt to 70 banks. According to a 2018 article in Foreign Policy, Trump’s former longtime architect, Alan Lapidus, said that based on what he knew from the internal workings of the organization, in the aftermath of Trump’s earlier financial troubles “he could not get anybody in the United States to lend him anything. It was all coming out of Russia. His involvement with Russia was deeper than he’s acknowledged.”

Around that same time, the Soviet Union was disintegrating. Gangsters and oligarchs were looking for places to stash money. Kismet! One of Trump's alleged saviors was the Bayrock Group, which rented offices two floors down from Trump’s in Trump Tower. According to Foreign Policy, Bayrock was run by Tevfik Arif, a Kazakhstan-born former Soviet official who "drew on seemingly bottomless sources of money from the former Soviet republic;" and Felix Sater, a Russian-born businessman who had pleaded guilty in the 1990s to a huge stock-fraud scheme involving the Russian mafia. "With Bayrock’s help, Trump began his broad transformation from a builder to a brander," wrote Michael Hirsch in Foreign Policy.

Former KGB major Yuri Shvetz described the ideal target to investigative reporter Craig Unger: vain, narcissistic, highly susceptible to flattery, intellectually deficient - and greedy.

Do the Russians have evidence to blackmail Trump, called kompromat? Probably. But for Trump, it's fair to say, that last quality is paramount: greed is the ultimate good.

We were excited to interview Craig Unger. House of Trump, House of Putin and American Kompromat offer a landscape-level view of the world of globe-crossing espionage, giving the reader insight into the tabloid-saturated stories of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, and raising questions about Trump Attorney General Bill Barr and his connections to the shadowy right-wing Catholic organization Opus Dei.

But Unger never gets out over his skis, carefully avoiding overstatement yet furnishing the reader with enough information to raise, and often answer, important questions. As far as Trump goes, the jury is not out, according to Unger. Trump, he says, is indubitably a Russian asset.

He's not alone. As far back as 2019, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper warned that Russian President Vladimir Putin appears to "treat President Trump as an asset," pointing to the Kremlin leader's former career as a KGB agent.

Former CIA national intelligence officer Glenn Carle went further: “My assessment is that Trump is actually working directly for the Russians.”

2017. Remember when Trump gave classified material to Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (left) and Russian Ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak in the Oval Office. We thought he just had bad boundaries, I guess.

The links between Trump and Russian intelligence go back as far as 1976, when Trump bought TVs for his first hotel project from Joy-Lud Electronics, a Crazy Eddie-type store in Manhattan run by a Russian believed to be a "spotter" for the KGB. At the time, Trump was likely to have been a mere "person of interest." But that interest grew along with Trump's notoriety.

The first evidence of Trump's involvement with the Russian mafia was in 1984, when a man named David Bogatin bought five condos for $2 million each in Trump Tower before the building was finished. The condominiums were later seized by the government, which claimed they were used to launder money for the Russian mob.

In the ensuring years, buyers linked to the Russian mafia and the KGB, now the FSB, and Vladimir Putin would buy millions of dollars' worth of Trump properties. Unger documented 1,300 transactions with Russian mobsters, cash purchases made by anonymous shell companies that were obviously fronts for criminal money-laundering operations, a huge chunk of Trump’s real estate activity in the United States

At the time that Trump began taking trips to Russia - his first was in 1987 - Russian intelligence had backed off recruiting agents motivated by ideology, like the infamous Cambridge Spies recruited in the 1930s. By the 1980s, and 1990s, Russian targets were influential businessmen, military leaders, and politicians. One of the methods used was kompromat, damaging evidence, often sex tapes, used as blackmail. But Trump's financial disasters made him even more vulnerable. Just a few examples:

In 2006, Trump bought a house in Palm Beach for $41 million which he sold for in 2008, when the real estate market was dropping, to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million. At the time, it was believed to be the highest price ever paid for a residential property.

In 2015, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) imposed a $10 million civil money penalty against Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort for willful and repeated violations of the Bank Secrecy Act. It was the largest penalty FinCEN had ever imposed. The casino, it was charged, had been used for money laundering.

These are just a few of the stories reported from 2018 to 2021. But it was Covid Time and we were distracted. And many aspects of the relationship between Trump and the Russians were complex, involving the subtle taxonomy of Russian espionage and the intricacies of U.S. real estate law, which is notoriously lax and allows the sale of apartments to entities without tracking their identities.

Now that Trump appears to be reciting the Russian playbook at the expense of Ukraine and in the process, reorganizing the post-World War II order in favor of our former enemies, we thought it was worth taking a closer look at Trump's ties to Russia and specifically to Vladimir Putin. So we called the most reliable source: Craig Unger.

Here is a quick excerpt from our longer interview with Unger. You can stream the entire interview on our Substack or read the transcript below.

JOURNAL: Craig, thank you for doing this interview with us. You're the gold standard on Trump and Russia and there's so much information and misinformation flying around right now. I have so many questions.

UNGER: Thank you for having me.

JOURNAL: After reading both of your books, I came away believing that the baseline for understanding the question of Trump’s relationship with Putin is the difference between an agent and an asset.

UNGER: Right. It's important to understand, to differentiate between an agent and an asset in the intelligence world. And it'll take a little of the hocus pocus paranoia conspiracy out of it, because I believe firmly that Trump has been cultivated as an asset, not as an agent. And that that started well over 40 years ago.

JOURNAL: I think you made the case very well in your books.

UNGER: It's 100% true. I grew up in a world where my favorite movie was The Manchurian Candidate. So there is a world of paranoia and conspiracy in and out of that. But it's slightly different than Trump. He's not an agent.

It all began in 1980 when Trump was still in his 30s. One of the very few genuine successes he had in real estate was developing the Hyatt Grand Hotel right near Grand Central Station. And like any new hotel, every hotel room needed TV sets. Where did Donald Trump buy them from? He bought them from a company called Joy Lud Electronics.

If you know New York, it's right opposite the Flatiron Building. If you're a foodie of sorts and know Eataly, that's where it was. He got hundreds of TV sets at a very cheap price. The man who sold them was Semyon Kislin, who is still around and is still a supporter of Trump. I spent dozens of hours with a former major in the KGB, Yuri Shvetz. And according to Yuri, Semyon Kislin was known as a spotter agent for the KGB. That is, his job was to spot potential assets.

The KGB had a history of recruiting rich businessmen. Armand Hammer, younger people probably don't know him, but he was the CEO of Occidental Petroleum. There were others as well, but he was [the best known] a multimillionaire back when that really meant something. He had really lucrative oil concessions from the Soviet Union, thanks to Joseph Stalin. He was aging out. The KGB needed other people to replace him, and Donald Trump was one, and he was young at that point. So I think they reached out to him. That [TV sale] was an opening, and it was the first meeting that clearly took place between Donald Trump and people allegedly tied to the KGB.

It initiated a whole series of events. And I sort of take the reader through that in two books, both American Compromise and House of Trump, House of Putin. You just see dozens and dozens of operations in which the Russians sure are helping Donald Trump. They bail him out again and again. He gets $4 billion in debt. He owes 70 banks. They save his bacon again and again and again. And it goes through very elaborate permutations.

The Russian mafia is involved. You have a guy named David Bogatin. In 1984, he comes to Trump Tower, puts down $6 million in cash, and says, I want five condos. That was a lot of money back then. That's about nearly $18 or $20 million today. They end up sending Trump to Moscow.

JOURNAL: Well, let's talk specifically about the difference between an agent and an asset, because Americans grew up on James Bond. We think of an agent as someone who works for the CIA or a local who gets paid for information. But an asset is different. I thought this was fascinating, actually: there are all these permutations. You called Trump and Armand Hammer “special unofficial contacts” which is a certain type of asset.

Can you describe what an asset is, how they're cultivated? There was certainly money that changed hands and a lot of it, especially when Trump got into debt. But there's a sort of more subtle aspect to it, right?

UNGER: Right. It can be very subtle at first. It can be a chance meeting or it can be a deliberate one. In this case, it certainly appears that Semyon Kislin reached out and made an offer to sell him these TV sets at a low price. And then Trump went to Russia in 1987.

JOURNAL: Right.

UNGER: I asked Yuri Shvetz, who was in the KGB, what do you look for when you're recruiting someone? He said, you look for someone who could be susceptible to flattery. It would be good if they have a low IQ, if they can be vulnerable to attractive women, and if they like money. And the other component, which may not work as well all the time, is ideology. And Donald Trump doesn't care about that. But the other ones certainly fit him to a T.

Trump had been approached by someone I think with some confidence was a KGB agent, an attractive young woman who then introduced him to her father. It was Natalia Dubidina, who worked at the United Nations General Assembly in the library there. And there were a lot of spy scandals in the mid ‘80s because the UN library was a spy nest for the Soviet Union. There were hundreds of Russian spies in New York City at the time, and many of them were based in the library of the UN General Assembly.

Furthermore, her father happened to be the Soviet ambassador, first to the United Nations and later to the United States. So he was a very powerful figure, and they met with Trump, and they flattered him shamelessly. She wrote about it, in fact, in one of the Moscow newspapers at one time.

They told them how much they loved Trump Tower and they would love to have one in Red Square. If you know history, you can't think about that with bursting into laughter. This was at the height of the Cold War. They were communists. They hated capitalism. They're not going to put a monument to conspicuous consumption right on Red Square. It's ridiculous. But they flattered Trump shamelessly.

In 1987, according to Yuri Shvetz, who was in the KGB at that point in Washington [D.C.] Station, his colleagues in New York Station arranged for Donald Trump to fly to the Soviet Union for the first time. And that's where things start to get really interesting. Because when he comes back, he very quickly pays for a full page ad in New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe. It was basically anti-NATO. I mean, absolutely. And people forget this: Trump briefly ran for president in 1988.

He suddenly switched his entire image. He was this playboy who would call up Page Six at the New York Post and make up a phony name for himself, John Barron, saying, yeah, “Donald's now with such and such a hot babe,” right? And suddenly he switches, and he wants to handle the strategic arms limitations talks with Gorbachev. I mean, it's a very wild turnabout. He represents himself in interviews with the Washington Post, Playboy magazine and elsewhere as a brilliant foreign policy maven. And he wants to turn foreign policy on his head.

The ad he took out, and what he said in interviews around that time, is virtually identical to what he's doing with Zelensky last week in the White House in which he's calling for the end of NATO. He says, our allies, we're carrying them in NATO, paying their way. We’ve got to get rid of NATO. We don't get anything out of it.

I know there are a lot of people who don't care about the Western alliance or think about NATO very often. I understand that completely. But if you have a sense of the sweep of history, let's go back 80 years to the end of World War II. The Western alliance built very strong democratic institutions in more than 30 countries, very strong market economies, created very strong trading partners for us, and very strong military allies. Now we want to throw all that away to ally with Russia? It's just insane from anyone who understands what American interests really are.

JOURNAL: Well, here's the question. Trump is a capitalist. We realize that he doesn't seem to have any deep ideological beliefs. And you also mentioned, and I've seen other reporting on it, that other Republicans have gotten campaign contributions from organizations tied to Russia. It's a shocking list. Former Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell, Jeff Sessions, a hard right Republican Alabama senator who later was, briefly, attorney general in the first Trump administration. Why would Trump get in bed with the Russians, apart from his economic desperation and huge ego?

UNGER: It's hard to dismiss his huge ego, and it's really hard to dismiss his economic desperation. Four billion in debt, and he owes 70 banks. How is he going to get out of this mess? And the money comes from Russia, Russia, Russia, again and again and again.

Starting off, I told you about 1984, David Bogatin coming in. That’s when the Russians begin to launder money through Trump real estate. I found at least 13 people who allegedly have ties to the Russian mafia who either lived in or owned properties in Trump Tower and other Trump branded properties. I mean, this whole idea of money laundering is a very interesting thing. What you have to realize is our regulations in real estate regulations are very, very lax.

The truth is, Susan, if some big time sex trafficker comes to you and says he wants to buy your house for $2 billion, you can do that. Just don't ask him where his money's coming from. As soon as you know the money has come from sex trafficking, you're in trouble.

Whatever his IQ, Donald Trump is probably smart enough to know that, and not ask that question. Real estate has become...you know, living in New York, you see these new pencil-thin buildings where the apartments go for $200 million each. The building is empty. No one lives there. What's going on? A lot of that is money laundering. It's a big, big factor in the real estate industry. Because it's so profitable, no one wants it to end. No one's going to support tight regulations that prohibit money laundering. It's happening in London, too. It's been going on in London for a long time.

JOURNAL: Yes, I’ve seen a lot of coverage of that, and clearly, it’s one reason it’s become so expensive for actual New Yorkers or Londoners to live in their cities.

Let’s talk about New York for a minute, just for some background. I grew up in New York, and the Mafia was a fact of life. What really struck me was that Trump and Putin both grew up with the mafia in their lives as young men. They sound almost like doppelgängers. Crime was a normal part of doing business whether it was real estate or, in Putin’s case, politics. Although those two are always intertwined, one way or another.

I think that what most people don't know, and you pointed out so well, is the entry of the Russian mafia in the 1980s to the United States. They actually worked with the Italian mafia. But the difference between the Italian mafia in New York, and the Russian mafia is that the Russian mafia had become an arm of the government. Can you explain that?

UNGER: Absolutely. Anyone who's seen The Godfather or any number of other movies knows the FBI and the Italian mafia in the United States are always at war. The FBI was supposed to shut them down, period.

It's very, very different in both the Soviet Union and now Russia. The mafia there is essentially an enforcement arm of their intelligence services. And it only exists insofar as it can aid the intelligence services. So think about it a little more. We have at least 13 people tied to the Russian mob who are in Trump buildings. What can they know? Is that a good idea if the owner of the building is president of the United States? Does that pose any national security risks?

I think it does. What you see again and again is the failed enforcement by the FBI and other agencies because it's hard to prosecute money laundering in that way. So long as Donald Trump can claim he didn't know anything, they can't prosecute him. He's home free. But we should have had counterintelligence measures because this is such a grave breach of national security.

JOURNAL: Well, that's another question I had for you. You also wrote about the Mueller report. So disappointing for everybody. He did not deal with the counterintelligence aspect of Trump’s behavior. When I looked back at his first administration, he was doing everything he's doing now, firing inspectors general, he was he was supporting Assad in Syria de facto. I think we just didn't pay attention because of Covid. It was so all encompassing. But was there ever a serious counterintelligence effort aimed at discovering what was really going on with Trump and the Russians?

UNGER: Well, the Senate intelligence report was notably better, and there's some good material in that. It did not get nearly the amount of attention that the Mueller report did.

JOURNAL: I remember this now, yeah.

UNGER: There's some really interesting material in there that hasn't been widely publicized. But I don't think a great full counterintelligence investigation has been done. I mean, I'm not, you know, I'm just a journalist... In American Kompromat, I worked pretty closely with Yuri Shvetz, who was very, very helpful. He is a real serious professional intelligence operative of the KGB type. So I did the best I could. And I think part of it is just identifying every time we've been compromised, whether it's President Trump or other people who are close to him.

JOURNAL: This may sound odd. But recently I was struck with Trump talking about Putin in these, for him, kind of emotional, warm tones that, you know, I've known him a long time. And, you know, he's cool. He won't screw us. If there is feeling, I doubt if it's reciprocated but I did get the feeling that Trump regards him as on a par with some of his other cronies like Tom Barrack.

If there’s kompromat on Donald Trump, and there is certainly a good case to be made on many fronts where that could have happened, and Trump is being blackmailed, where is the warm and fuzzy stuff coming from? How did Yuri talk about that? Is it a carrot and a stick? No, it’s OK, we're not going to use this against you, Donald. We understand. How would that have worked?

UNGER: You know, I hate getting into speculation and I do know things that are for which I have one source who seems to be credible, but I still have unanswered questions. But without going into specifics, I think Putin's got him by the balls and he knows it. And his heart and mind follows. I think it's something like that.

Trump was over there a lot and a lot of it hasn't been written about. I don't have the full story for everything he's done over there. I would be surprised if there was not kompromat. But I can't definitively say there was. You know, one of the very interesting things as I was doing American Kompromat, one of the last people I got in touch with was a man named John Mark Dugan.

JOURNAL: Oh, yes.

UNGER: John Mark Dugan was, I believe, deputy sheriff in Palm Beach County, Florida. And he was there at a time when the sheriff's department was investigating a man named Jeffrey Epstein. By all accounts, even his, John Mark Dugan was considered very difficult and was fired from the Palm Beach Sheriff Department. But he maintained friendships with people there, including a man who, according to Dugan, brought him digital files, 478 digital files of sex tapes allegedly from Jeffrey Epstein's mansion. Dugan then took the next plane he could to Canada and then to Moscow. I reached him by phone in Moscow.

JOURNAL: You did?

UNGER: I did. I did. He directed me to his Facebook page, among others, where he had a photo of him with a man named Pavel Borodin, who is very close to Vladimir Putin and is one of the top officials overseeing all government property of the Russian Federation. So this is very interesting. Here you have this guy who allegedly has all these sex tapes and he's with high ranking Russians close to Putin. It just raises a lot of questions.

JOURNAL: It certainly does. I found both books overwhelmingly persuasive. You do a great job of documenting a world that’s usually hidden and showing how it works. But it’s a shadowy world. When it comes to Trump and Russia, people tend to say “Where's the smoking gun?” They want to see a video of Trump taking money from Putin, or hear a tape of a phone call proving that Putin has something on him.

I don't remember if it was in a video or from the books but Yuri Shvetz said something like, if you wait for bulletproof information you can take to the court, you lose this game.

House of Trump, House of Putin came out in 2018. There were other reports around that time. But nothing happened. I feel as though we have lost this game. The idea that somebody like Donald Trump could be wrecking the American economy and reorganizing the world, having this much power to shift the map is phenomenal. Why do you think that Americans have so much trouble taking this in?

UNGER: That's a really good question. I don't have all the answers, but I will say, given my rather advanced age, when I started in journalism, the stories that animated me and got me excited about investigative reporting are ones we still remember today: the Pentagon Papers, the My Lai Massacre, Watergate. When those stories came out, just one reporter, or in the case of Watergate, two, could do stories that took control of the national conversation and changed the course of history in ways that we remember 50 years later. Today, that is impossible. It is impossible. The president's a rapist, so what? 34 felonies? Yawn. Ho-hum. Nothing you can do can move the goddamn needle.

JOURNAL: I don't disagree with that.

UNGER: And so it's very, very hard. And a large part of that is digital. It's the death of print. We don't share facts any longer. When I was younger and we all watched Walter Cronkite, all of America shared pretty much the same set of facts, whether it was about Vietnam or whatever. Today, that is absolutely not the case. And it's very hard to have a discourse with people who have a wildly different set of facts. Now, part of that was obviously Fox News and I blame Rupert Murdoch. You can see Musk is doing it on a much, much bigger scale than Rupert Murdoch ever dreamed.

We have the ascent of digital man and they are seizing parts of our government. I mean, look what Musk is doing now. He wasn't elected. He's got all our Social Security. What the hell is he doing? Shutting down the Department of Education. It's just insane. So that's a big part of it.

I see no accountability, no accountability again and again and again. But it’s not new. My newest book, Den of Spies, is about the 1980 October surprise and a covert op by the Republicans. It's Jimmy Carter against Ronald Reagan and the Reagan campaign secretly makes a deal with Iran saying, we will give you weapons. You've seized American hostages, but don't return the hostages because if you do, Jimmy Carter's going to win. So keep them there and we will send you weapons. They're sending weapons to a hostile foreign power to prolong the incarceration of Americans. This is treasonous to me, I think.

I want to go back even further because this has been going on forever. I think it goes back to when the Civil Rights Act was signed by Lyndon Johnson and the Voting Act of 1965 was signed. After that, the Republicans had what was called the Southern Strategy. If you look at the electoral map, since then, gee, almost all the red states? The red states look a lot like the Confederate States of America.

So we're having a civil war again. Every election, except when there's a Southern Democrat. What you see is these covert operations. In 1968, the candidate Nixon hires a woman named Anna Chennault. The Democrats are trying to end the Vietnam War with the Paris peace talks. And Nixon's operative, Anna Chennault, gets South Vietnam to withdraw from the peace talks. So the war goes on another six years. That happens in 1968.

Nixon is scared that Lyndon Johnson has documents documenting his treachery. He's desperate when he's running for election in ’72. So he puts together a group of thieves called the Plumbers, and he tells them to break in to the Brookings Institution. And if they don't find documents there, try a hotel residential office complex called the Watergate. So you have the Watergate scandal in ’72. In 1980, you have the October surprise. In 2000, you have the Brooks Brothers riots in Florida, and on and on and on.

JOURNAL: But wouldn't you say that this is on a scale we’ve never seen? I was just talking to somebody last night who said, “No, no, I disagree with Tim Snyder. It's not a coup d'etat, it's state capture.” And I said, well, can’t it be both?

The state capture has been going on for quite a while but now it’s as if a dam is breaking. On the contrarian side, today it was reported that Trump is now putting the onus on Putin to to accede to a ceasefire. Have they created a Frankenstein or is this Kabuki? And then I have a question about your sources because I am fascinated by Yuri Shvets, who apparently did better at spy school than Putin, which I love.

UNGER: They were classmates.

JOURNAL: They were classmates. That's great. But yeah, so I mean, is Trump getting a little full of himself here and maybe bucking the influence?

UNGER: Well, it's a wonderful question, and it's a wonderful test case. I would bet on Kabuki theater. And I think part of what's going on is he has to let little Marco have his day and be up there and pretend he's really the Secretary of State and doing all that. I would be thrilled if Russia capitulated to Ukraine, but I sure as hell wouldn't bet on it.

JOURNAL: So this may be a sort of inside baseball question for journalists, but I thought, having seen Yuri on video with you when the book came out, what an incredible source. As someone who's outside this world, but follows it slightly, the conventional wisdom is once you're in the CIA, you're always in the CIA. Both Yuri and this, I'm sorry, I don't remember the general’s name...

UNGER: Oleg Kalugan.

JOURNAL: Yes. They both left. They live in the US. They have not fallen off a terrace. How is this possible?

UNGER: Well, this goes back to the Soviet Union. They've been, I forget exactly when Kalugin came over. I think Yuri came over in the early 90s, just after the fall of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union folded, the FSB replaced it in the Russian Federation. Sometime in the mid-‘90s, Yuri defected and came to the United States and it wasn't even a big deal back then. We had relatively friendly relations with the Russian Federation in the early ‘90s. He came over here. He's an American citizen. He has a YouTube channel. He's written books that I believe were published by major publishers, and so there's a certain amount of legitimacy there. He testified before Congress. He's done things that were good for the country, and he's very knowledgeable. I always double-checked everything he gave me, and I never found him to be less than credible. He would tell me what he knew, but also what he didn't know, and he wasn't really exaggerating the truth.

General Kalugan, similarly, was kind of famous. This goes back 40 or 50 years ago. He had been head of counterintelligence for the KGB back when the Soviet Union was really the Soviet Union. It was under his guidance that the KGB devised, famously, an umbrella that shot poison darts and they assassinated the Bulgarian novelist Gregory Markov. I mean, it was a very famous thing because it was sort of exotic in a James Bond kind of way. I remember someone suggested I call him and I suddenly said, how am I ever going to reach this guy? Well, you go to Google machine and you write his name and his number pops up and you call him. That's how you get in touch with him. It's amazing how that works.

I remember it was Christmas Eve and I felt a little…I didn't want to intrude on his privacy. And you realize this is a man in his eighties who's been on the world stage. He's been there with Gorbachev, every major leader you can imagine. And now he's lonely and he wants to tell you all about it. So a lot of times those are the best people to interview. People can judge for themselves if they think this is hoax, but I don't think so at all.

JOURNAL: I got the sense, and I can't remember which of the two men gave me this impression, that they felt ideals had been betrayed in Russia. We had a certain way of doing things and now all bets are off.

The question that emerges from that is whether we are living in a post-ideological age. And that's why these Republicans can say, oh, Russia, it's geopolitics, I can take their money. They’re not really communists anymore.

Yuri, as I recall, was in a very elite part of the KGB and very well educated, very smart.

UNGER: Yes, they felt betrayed. It was just a mess and they didn't want any part of it anymore. They were not protecting the great ideals of the Soviet Socialist Republic. They felt that those ideals had been betrayed by the Kremlin. That was definitely the case. As for the others, I mean, we are also entering an age that seems post-ideological. Even nation states are in danger when you have people, especially in the tech world, who have $500 billion and suddenly seize huge amounts of control over the government. Our privacy, for example, has been stolen from us by Silicon Valley is the way I look at it. Americans don't quite realize how how monumental that is. And we are just starting to find that out.

You know, as someone who was on Twitter and developed a following, I see the conversation just totally distorted in a way that makes me feel that freedom of the press is a sort of antiquated notion these days. There are no viable financial models for print today. And that's all the First Amendment talks about. It doesn't even have broadcast radio or TV or cable TV or the internet. And now social media is so easily manipulated. It's kind of horrifying when you see what Musk is doing and so forth.

JOURNAL: I think that's one of the real failures of the journalistic community, being First Amendment absolutists, when clearly not just the scale, but the nature of, quote, media, if you want to include Twitter and Facebook, it had changed. It had all changed. The ability to weaponize it was so profound that you just could not apply that the old rules.

One of the things that drives me crazy is the whole idea of freedom of expression, freedom of speech has been hijacked by these tech bros and now it just means Russian propaganda.

What do you know about Elon Musk? And then we should probably wind up, but I'm glad this came up, the tech broligarchy and Peter Thiel with his floating islands of libertarianism. And no more nation states. I mean, I don't want to be on that Peter Thiel island. Have you discovered anything about Musk and Russia?

UNGER: I've been following him for the last few months with great, great interest. I think it's very scary. I do think there's going to be a collision course within MAGA world between Musk and the rest of them, especially if the economy starts plummeting thanks to Musk's, in part, what Musk is doing. A lot of it obviously has to do with tariffs.

JOURNAL: I'm not sure how it's in Trump's interest to crush the economy.

UNGER: I’ve not figured that one out, except he is a master of distraction. And I mean, it was sort of interesting during the campaign that for four days, the only issue people seemed to care about was the size of Arnold Palmer's penis.

JOURNAL: He won the good taste is timeless award. I just wanted to mention that in terms of your take on the media, during that Zelensky debacle in the White House, the AP was not there, right? And TASS, the Russian news service, was?

UNGER: It's just ridiculous.

JOURNAL: A TASS photographer was there way back when Trump met privately with Putin in the White House during his first term. Only a TASS person was there. We didn't have any White House officials to take notes or anything.

UNGER: Yes, that was the first real flare, I think, for people who were watching without necessarily all the background. Initially that kind of thing is dismissed as an oversight, but when you see it again and again and again, you start to realize who is in charge here. Who is the puppet master pulling the strings?

JOURNAL: On that grim note, we are checking our passports to make sure they're up to date. Thank you so much.

UNGER: Thank you. I enjoyed it.

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