John Heilemann Quotes

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.

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.

I think we should always listen to Bill Clinton about everything. And so, if that's his view then that should be the rule of law.

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.

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.

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.

I think Donald Trump now thinks it`s time for Jeff Sessions to resign. There was a reporting that suggested that when Trump first voiced his exasperation with Sessions, that Sessions made it clear to Trump that if Trump wanted his resignation, he would offer it. It seems to me now Trump is sending a pretty clear signal that what he wants is Jeff Sessions to resign, and it`s also pretty clear to me he`s now at war with everyone in the world of justice and law enforcement in the administration.

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

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.

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

[Michael Flynn is] someone who has advocated for a much tighter ties with Russia and had raised some eyebrows in terms of some of the consorting that he did around Washington.

[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.

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

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

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

[Michael Flynn is not] the kind of person who is going to be more buttoned-up kind of military figure and that partisan tone.

Asked who attacked America on 9/11, [Sarah Palin] suggested several times that it was Saddam Hussein.