1. “We all knew he wasn’t right in the head. But I stayed in the administration to steer him in the right direction. To keep a hand on the tiller. And I think we achieved that. I think we were able to head off some of his most extreme impulses. Yes, there were times I considered resigning. But someone had to stay there and restrain him. I saw it as my duty. So I didn’t resign. I stayed.”
2. “Well sure, I might have said some things that maybe I could have phrased a little different. But it was what the president wanted to hear, so, you know, these things had to be said, and they had to be said in the right style. If I hadn’t played along, well, I would have been fired, and there would have been someone else in there, in my place, saying just what I did. So yeah, I called her a terrorist after they shot her. I said that. But the fact it was specifically me who said those things made no difference. It was inevitable that they would have been said by someone, and that someone just happened to be me. So really, I was just conveying a message. They weren’t actually my views.”
3. “It was a good documentary. I was pleased with the nice filming and good lighting. Yes I was paid much money for this film, but all films are paid. You think movie stars work for free?”
4. “Yes, certain people in the White House did take advantage of the prediction markets… no, I cannot give you any names on that… but the president liked being surrounded by winners, people who took the opportunities that came their way, and so to miss an opportunity to win big-time would have been against the culture. Certain people decided to take advantage, because the president expected it. He considered it their duty. And so it was part of fulfilling their role.”
5. “The war was inevitable. The president may have actioned the strikes, but we had been on a collision course with them for so long that it was bound to happen some day. It just so happened the whole thing blew up when we were in office. So we did not start the war. They started it. They were the ones who could have changed course and stopped sponsoring terrorism. But they didn’t and so the war became inevitable. And yes, our strategy was very direct, but when a war comes along, you got to win it, and win quickly. It’s the most humane way.”
6. “It was a great jet. A beautiful jet. They said, ‘it’s the most beautiful jet we’ve ever had, and we want you to have it’. And I said ‘ok, I will have it’. And when it arrived everyone said, ‘it’s the most beautiful jet we’ve ever seen and we’ve seen some of the best in our time, let me tell you. Beautiful jets. You deserve it’. And I didn’t want to, but they said ‘you should take it because Mr President you’ve done so much good for the world’. The peace prize – did I tell you about that? And I saw this jet and I said ‘ok’ and I took it. Do I know where it is now? No, I don’t.”
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7. “It wasn’t corruption. There’s nothing in the constitution that says a president can’t be a successful businessman. He made billions of dollars before he went into politics and he continued that same success during the administration. The American people voted for a president with a distinct business-oriented personality: did they think he was going to become a completely different person in office? [Laughs]. They knew who they were electing. It was a democratic decision to put a businessman in the White House. And so it would have been un-democratic for him not to have behaved like a businessman during his time in office.”
8. “I would accept that the actions of some ICE agents were at times excessive, but the president was very clear in his instructions about how ICE should be run, and we obeyed those orders.”
9. “Yes, there was awareness that some revenues from Venezuelan oil sales were being held in certain off-shore vehicles, but the Venezuela operation was highly classified, and the precise nature of those funds was not at all clear, certainly not to me, at the time. There was awareness in my department that those funds existed, but – you know – the view was that we saved their country, so an energy arrangement of some kind was the obvious next step. It was their way of saying thank you.”
10. “Well, everybody knew about the Russia thing. It wasn’t a secret, was it? I mean, come on. What, you think you’re breaking some new story here? But whatever went down – and I’m not saying anything illegal was going on – but whatever happened, Russia was not the enemy. The real enemy’s China. So yeah, we were trying to get Putin away from China, and that meant we had to speak his language from time to time. You follow me? But everything, all of it, was in the national interest.”
11. “Ukraine? That was never our war. That was a European war. Sure, a lot of them died. But we didn’t get involved and we saved a lot of American lives that way. It was a European war. And we didn’t want to give Putin an excuse to go nuclear. So by not helping Ukraine, we stopped a nuclear war. We saved the world.”
12. “Gaza wasn’t anything to do with us. That was Israel’s war. There may have been some ideas about property development from our side, and we were happy to share those ideas with the Israeli government, in the spirit of constructive dialogue, about how certain parts of the region could be renovated. But the idea that we could have stopped Israel? It’s not America’s job to end other people’s wars.”
13. “Sure, we all knew the Epstein files were going to be an issue. But you can’t have the leader of the free world implicated in something like that. It would have been too damaging. So there were some details that were kept private at the time. You can’t implicate the president of the United States in something like that, because if you do, you undermine the country – you undermine the west. And why would we just sit back and let that happen? So yeah sure, we kept his name out of it. But we did it for the country – for the free world. I have no regrets about that. No regrets at all.”
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