I'm John Batchew with Craig Unger, the investigative reporter and author of American

Compromat and the House of Trump

House of Putin, two books that Craig has successfully published over these last years,

and now that he's taking pieces of them on his substack page and telling the story again,

because what happened before Crimea, before Ukraine invasion, was Russia struggling to overcome its

Soviet origins. Russia struggling in a world of large states that were ignoring Russia. Russia

was a gas station with nuclear weapons. That's how it was, it was disregarded before Crimea. Since Crimea,

it's become, it became a threat to Europe and then with the invasion of Ukraine, it became

a threat to the planet Earth, where it remains. We're going to the year 2013, 2012,

2013, as Donald Trump, who has been successful as a franchising his name with men who

are associated with Russian organized crime, sometimes known as Russian state security,

sometimes not, but in any event, they've been laundering the profits from nationalizing

and then privatizing and then renationalizing

Russian industry, chiefly the energy business, but there's lots of mining. There are lots of

fortunes, and we call them the oligarchs. Everybody knows about that. It's not a problem. The

U.S. has relations with Russia as a troubled state. Donald Trump, however, has a dream, which is he wants

to build a Trump tower in red square or near two. He has another dream because he owns the

Miss Universe page. What was the thinking, Craig? Why take Miss Universe to Moscow? What did Mr. Trump want

to accomplish? Well, he was wooing Vladimir Putin, and in fact,

he explicitly invited Vladimir Putin in a very funny letter that was very weird, because after he

signed it, you know, best wishes Donald Trump, he said, I'm told Russia had some very beautiful

girls, and I'd like to see them as well,

...