American Kompromat: A Sweeping Conversation with Craig Unger
New York Times best-selling author Craig Unger joined Bette’s Founder’s Day for an epic conversation on Russian hybrid warfare, Epstein’s Russian ties, and US traitors committing genocide on reality
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Author’s note: The following transcripts are from a conversation with Craig Unger that took place on October 12, 2025, at a Bette Dangerous Founder’s Day event. The transcripts have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.—hsc
American Kompromat: A Q&A with Craig Unger
Heidi: I promised the group that I want to continue getting everybody very used to the political technologists that are driving the modern version of propaganda — the theater craft, the fog of unknowability — what I’ve been writing about for the last decade. I’ve been really emphasizing their work a lot in the last year, because I think it’s at the core of everything harming the democratic world right now.
Both Craig and I draw from Peter Pomerantsev’s work. And as you guys know, I interviewed him recently, and I’ve done multiple reports on his book, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible, as well as This Is Not Propaganda. And I think it’s really important to go back to Craig’s House of Trump, House of Putin and reiterate this quote from Craig where he writes:
“Vladislav Surkov was the brilliant puppet master who merged theatrical techniques with PR to alter the way reality is perceived in Putin’s Russia as one of the architects of hybrid warfare. On behalf of Putin, he set out to destroy the very idea of reality, to undermine the whole notion of truth, in order to create a never ending conflict about perception that helped the ability of Putin’s regime to control and manage Russia. The result of Surkov’s work was that it completely befuddled the opposition, because this ceaseless flood of contradictory stories meant that no one knew what the enemy was up to, or even who they really were or what was going on.”
Why I isolate that quote, and why I wanted to reiterate it for you, is every time you see Kristi Noem, that’s what’s occurring. Every time you see Pete Hegseth, that’s what’s occurring. Every time you see Trump in front of a camera — JD, Vance, Kash Patel, that type of Russian-style theatrics, what I call Reality TV fascism — that is what’s occurring. It’s designed to wear down your ability to discern facts.
Craig wrote about this phenomenon almost a decade ago. So Craig, can you please help draw from this, give us a bridge between what you wrote about in House of Trump, House of Putin to what you’re seeing now on a daily basis, and how it goes back to what was created by political technologists. I just think until we actually figure out what we’re actually seeing, how are we going to figure out a way to attack back, right?
Craig Unger: Well, I must admit, when I wrote that nearly a decade ago, I was a little confused myself, and I had not really seen it in action in the United States. And you always wondered, how, with the internet, could Russians be so stupid or so poorly informed or or just dumbed down that they were pacified, and now we’ve seen it come to us. And I think that in addition to Vladislav Surkov, there was another major figure in Russia who helped promote this hybrid warfare, and that was General Valery Gerasimov.
I think it was around 2013, he went to Putin and said, “Look, our military is in terrible shape. We have old machinery that’s dysfunctional. We don’t have a fully equipped army, but I have some good news for you. We can do hybrid warfare, which can be much more effective.” And Russia started to do that in Ukraine. And one of the principal people who implemented it there was a man named Paul Manafort, who, of course, became Trump’s campaign manager in 2016. Manafort and his company got $75 million from the Russian Federation to do their actions. He was accompanied by Konstantin Kilimnik, a kind of “Mini Me.” Manafort is fairly tall — he’s over six feet. Kilimnik is about five-feet tall, and they dressed almost identically, which I kind of got a kick out of.
But Kilimnik was a Russian spy and together they helped install President Yanukovych, who was a pro-Putin oligarch, as President of Ukraine. (Author’s note: he was to voters at the time what Marci Shore calls, “the gangster you know.”—hsc)
Now, eventually, the Ukrainians rebelled against him in the Euromaidan rebellion. In 2014, they ousted him and he ran. He scurried out of the presidential palace and back to Russia, where he belonged.
Now we see Russia — a decade later — as General Gerasimov predicted, their military stinks. They really aren’t doing very well against a much, much smaller country, who is ill-equipped to begin with. So you know, this is where we are, and they’ve exported the hybrid warfare to the United States through Donald Trump. And as my books show, Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset going back to 1980, and that’s a long story that I write about in two books on Donald Trump.
Heidi: It’s so weird, in a way, to revisit your archives, because it’s all been out there. You have published multiple books on this topic, the people, and the guests that we bring in, like Peter, have published books on hybrid warfare, but it still seems like — I know this community is really trying to get it, and I’m sure you’re sharing the information with your networks — but what is this block in America that they’re still not quite putting it together, that Paul Manafort did this in Ukraine, and everything we saw there was exported to America... Is it just that we think that maybe it’s oceans away? Why do you think it is that there’s this block of acceptance that America was hit?
Craig: I think there are several reasons, and it’s something that goes right to the heart of what I do. When I started out in journalism, what hooked me on journalism, was when I graduated from college in 1971, the stories that excited me were My Lei massacre, the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, obviously. Just one or two reporters could do stories that we remember 50 years later, that really dominated the national conversation and that actually led to social change and were very important. And that happened regularly in the press when I grew up.
And today, it is virtually impossible, and there are a lot of reasons for that. One, I think, is the media has atomized. It’s fragmented again and again and again. Over the last 50 years, when I got out of college, there were three channels, ABC, NBC and CBS. Later, with cable, there were 600 channels. Then with the internet, there were millions of channels. And now with social media, there are hundreds and hundreds of millions of channels, and people are siloed into their little networks with their friends, and they never get out of them. They are like enclosed bubbles, and into those silos, we have disinformation and misinformation that is deliberately pumped in and can be done in a very sophisticated way thanks to AI.
So people sort of don’t know what’s going on. It’s very easy to confuse them. I think most of us have probably seen a tweet somewhere or other that you kind of believe because it satisfied your confirmation bias, and then you said, “Oops, maybe it’s not true,” and sometimes it’s not, and you have to be very, very careful that way.
So in broad strokes, I think that’s what’s going on and the bad guy, the Republicans, are taking advantage of it at every step of the way. It’s hard to believe when you see in the last week, people like Kristi Noem or Kash Patel going before Congress. Pam Bondi. They go there knowing they can lie and get away with it and they are just pleased as punch. And some of the Democrats have been tough and questioning them, but they get nothing out of it.
And you have to wonder, why aren’t American people exploding when they see that? Maybe they are quietly and that will show up in the next election, assuming there is one.
Heidi: Yes, we talked about that on this week’s RadPod & Chill, how Pam Bondi just sat there as Adam Schiff rattled off everything that she wouldn’t answer and wouldn’t respond to, and she just had an arrogance to her, like she was above the law, like nothing would stick because she had the backing of Trump.
And there’s something on a million different levels completely wrong about that. And I go back to the Mike Duncan History of Rome podcasts, how the Senate would be neutered by various emperors, where they just would find a way to make it irrelevant until it wasn’t.
And that’s the whole thing. I always remind people all the main emperors that we know of all had terrible endings, and usually quicker than people are aware of. So it’s not like these regimes last forever. They can last a long time, but something’s going to give.
And I always remind people that they’re not powerless. There are many examples in different authoritarian countries how things can change in the blink of an eye. When people stand up. But it’s this obeying in advance that I find terrifying.
I want to read one more quote. This is not actually from Craig, but it dovetails with what he was saying about Manafort, because he’s such a key player in all of this. There was a podcast in Australia called Russia, If You’re Listening that my Twitter friend Matt Bevan hosted, and if you go back and listen to the series and you go through Craig’s archives, it’s pretty much TrumpRussia 101. It’s what you need to get your sea legs if you are coming into this anew.
Bevan is quoted as saying:
“Yanukovych is a giant six-foot-four inches guy with resting murder face, he looks more like a mobster’s bodyguard than a president. So Manafort got to work. He switched out his undertaker aesthetic for Italian suits and got him elocution lessons. But winning wasn’t enough. Manafort took millions of dollars… He failed to report himself as a foreign agent. He failed to pay taxes on that money, and he hid it through different offshore accounts. It’s absolutely cut and dry. At the 2016 RNC convention, the Trump campaign asked for just one policy change, just one: don’t sell weapons to Ukraine to fight the Russians.”
And Craig, I read that again because we’ve talked about this a lot on this show. What good propaganda that Russia, Russia, Russia was. Just a few weeks ago, Pete Hegseth answered a question with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax line.
Clearly, it was never a hoax. And you know exactly what Manafort did to groom this gangster, what the author of this calls a mobster’s bodyguard. And where is Yanukovich now? Well, he was forced to flee to Russia. You know what did? He took billions of dollars out of Ukraine, absolutely plundered it. And so what did the Ukrainians do? They convicted him for being a traitor, and convicted him of treason.
And I just feel like, again, I get so frustrated at the disconnect. I always say this but the immigrants aren’t the problem. This boogeyman of Antifa, which doesn’t even exist in America, isn’t the problem. It’s the Russian assets in the White House that are the problem. And Craig, if you have any words of wisdom on that, I know that you’ve done volumes of work connecting all these dots.
We Let Trump Go
Craig: Well, as you say, Ukraine convicted Yanukovych as a traitor. On the other hand, we let Trump go. And that’s one of the horrifying things, You would have thought during this interregnum between the two Trump administrations that we really should have had a national commission to get to the bottom of exactly what was going on. And instead, there’s sort of mass confusion.
And as you pointed out, people talk about the Russia hoax, the Russia hoax, the Russia hoax, and it ain’t a hoax. And on my substack, and in my two books, I relay this bit by bit by bit. In the substack, I have something called the Trump-Russia timeline, and I have about 30 posts now, one by one.
This is all prior to 2016 — how Trump was cultivated by Russian intelligence and the Russian mafia, how they bailed him out, how and why they own him. And they’re very sophisticated methods, and one of the things people don’t understand about intelligence operations, and the way Trump was cultivated, is that good intelligence operatives design their operations to work within the law.
So here you have Donald Trump, who had a lot of potential in terms of being a Russian asset. How do you woo him? What is he like? Is he interested in money? Well, bit by bit, they designed all the cleverest things — they needed to launder hundreds of millions, billions of dollars, and one of the best ways to do that is through real estate. Our real estate regulations are incredibly lax. It’s criminal how lax our regulations are. Because if you want to launder money, all you have to do is create a limited liability company, which many people can do. I think it’s under $100 or something. You can call it the XYZ Corporation, or some anonymous name, and hide your name as the beneficial owner.
And if you want to buy real estate, you can do it through all-cash transactions, which eliminates the need for a bank to be involved and bam, once you’ve done that, you’ve laundered your money. And that is what the Russian mafia started to do with Trump, and they were part of Russian intelligence. So that’s how it began. And Trump laundered at least one and a half billion dollars through Trump Real Estate.
Heidi: I remember an investigation that Buzzfeed News led about how Trump was only one of two real estate people in New York who actually allowed anonymous shell company purchases and there were about 1300 of these transactions by Trump, and it was overwhelmingly to Russians. He didn’t want that reported — I’m sure you’d know this, and you probably reported on it, Craig, that when he sold one of his properties to a Russian in Florida, he didn’t want it reported he was Russian. Didn’t want that bit to get out. Because people paying attention saw it for what it was, right?
Craig: Absolutely. And if you look at it, I found a total of 13 people in Trump Tower alone who were linked to the Russian mafia. And when you understand that the Russian mafia is very different from the American mafia, because it is an enforcement arm of Russian intelligence. Our mafia used to be at war with the FBI, and if anyone’s seen The Godfather, they know that.
But the Russian mafia was very different. They were sort of working for Vladimir Putin, and here you had 13 people who own property in Trump Tower. And just think about that for a moment, that is a breach of national security that is just enormous.
It’s What’s Legal
Heidi: I was just going back over these files again, and I’m always haunted by things that you taught me, and one of them was that it’s what was legal that got us.
Craig: Right? That’s one of the problems with the Mueller report. It was limited — it was a criminal investigation. That’s not what we needed. We needed a counter-intelligence operation. What were the Russians doing to win over Trump? And they left that out. And to me, that’s criminal.
Heidi: Yes, absolutely. One thing before we segue over to Epstein, which is completely related to what we’ve been talking about — the report coming out of the UK about the former Reform UK leader from Wales with ties to Nigel Farage — Nathan Gill — who pleaded guilty to taking bribes to promote Russian propaganda as a member of EU Parliament — I was hoping that the story would have some legs, and I just got back from the UK, and I believe it does have legs, and it could potentially be the dynamite that can blow up the career of a populist Russian asset. Do you have hope that the Trump-Epstein scandal can ultimately blow up his regime?
Craig: My biggest hope right now lies with the Epstein stuff. And if you can open that up and if that can divide MAGA, that’s really one of the big questions that I’d like to see answered.
Epstein and Espionage
Heidi: Let’s review our recent Q&A where you had already documented in your work Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Russia. I had documented in my work Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Russia through the fines that banks like Deutsche Bank had to pay because he was paying Eastern European women in nefarious ways.
And so there was all kinds of problematic stuff there, but you’ve done such an incredible job of documenting how Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset.
But the story that still gets buried is Epstein’s Russian ties and how he had what essentially anybody would look at as potential red sparrows right in his fold. Can you refresh us on that? Because it amazingly ties back to the first part of this interview, where one of these women, who was very close to Epstein, goes back to Surkov, the political technologist who is responsible for this war on truth that we’re all enduring.
Craig: Well, everyone knows about the sex trafficking. I mean, that’s been reported on an awful lot. I want to put that aside for a moment and look at Epstein. And what was his operation? He had a big operation. How did he make hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars? What was really going on there? And if you start to examine it, you will find intelligence operatives, or people who appear to be intelligence operatives from Russia, from Israel and from the CIA.
And I’m trying to figure out exactly what was going on, and I have done considerable work on Robert Maxwell, who, of course, was the father of Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein’s sometimes partner. And he was also involved with both Russian Intelligence and Israeli Intelligence, and he had a lot of money laundering going on.
Now, Epstein didn’t really appear on the scene publicly until he was escorting Ghislaine Maxwell at a memorial service for her father just after he died. I believe it was in 1991, and I talked to a former Israeli spy, who was working with Robert Maxwell, who said Jeffrey Epstein was in London working with Robert Maxwell.
We still have unanswered questions about that, but I want to know, were he and Ghislaine really part of Robert Maxwell’s operation, which included a lot of nefarious activities.
It included working as assets for Russian Intelligence and Israeli Intelligence, and occasionally going to war against Israeli Intelligence. In any case, when you start to look at Epstein’s operation, you do find, as you put it, perhaps red sparrows. And I’m not talking about the 16-year-old girls who were trafficked. I’m talking about older young women who were, say, 28 or 30 years old, roughly, and some of them like Svetlana “Lana” Pozhidaeva had dazzling academic records. And they end up giving that all up. Lana was headed to be foreign minister of the Russian Federation. And suddenly, she started working with Jean Luc Brunel, who was a sex trafficker.
He was in the modeling industry, but he was basically a sex trafficker who helped bring girls to Jeffrey Epstein.
You have another woman named Masha Drokova, who was head of Nashi. Now there’s no evidence showing these young women continued to be spies — I can’t say that — but I am certain there were national security risks. I mean, Nashi, which was a Putin youth movement, has been compared to Hitler Youth. Can you imagine the head of Hitler Youth, no matter how nice a guy he was, no matter how much he said, “I don’t like Hitler anymore.” Would you let him work on the Manhattan Project? I mean, you would never do that in a million years.
Heidi: It’s bananas, and especially when Craig continues and tells you what she’s doing now. It’s absolutely bonkers.
Craig: Now, at least one of these women is a player in artificial intelligence in Silicon Valley, working with Sam Altman and Open AI, and Vladimir Putin has said again and again, whoever controls AI, controls the world. So that’s what I mean. When I talk to intelligence operatives, they say this is really equivalent to stealing the secrets of the nuclear bomb. If you’re stealing the secrets of artificial intelligence or getting your hands in there in a way that allows you to tweak the algorithms.
Red Sparrows?
Heidi: So the thing is, these women were working with Jeffrey Epstein — one of them was with him all the time and in his meetings and the other was doing PR for him, right? We’re talking about Russian nationals who had access to high level, influential power brokers in America, and like Craig mentioned, one of them is still around as a Silicon Valley investor.
And all you have to do is go back to 2014 and read some FBI files, one in Boston in particular, that warns about Russian infiltration into Silicon Valley and academia and how this could be a security risk for our sovereign future. And fast forward, a decade later, and unfortunately, again, it’s what’s legal that harmed us. Nothing was done. And that is our failing.
Craig, is there anything else you want to leave us with.
Big Historical Context
Craig: I want to give a big historical context to this and for that I want to go back to the 1960s after we had the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 1965 and Lyndon Johnson was president, and he knew how to twist arms in Congress, and at the time, all the Southern Democrats were known as Dixiecrats, and that meant they were almost holdovers from the Civil War. They were racist right-wingers, but they were part of the Democratic Party, and Johnson knew in pushing through the Voting Rights Act, he would lose those Senators, forever, those Congressmen, forever, that the southern Democratic Party would turn against him.
And what happened after that was known — the Republican Strategy became known as a Southern Strategy. They wanted the South. If you look at the electoral maps from 1968 to the present, with only a couple of anomalies, the red states, they sure look a lot like the Confederate States of America.
So what I’m suggesting is this — it’s the Confederacy 2.0, that’s what we’re experiencing. And if you look at each of the elections, it happens again and again and again that the Republicans have done something scandalous or traitorous. And that starts out in ‘68. The Democrat Johnson was trying to end the Vietnam War. We had peace talks going on in Paris. The South Vietnamese were supposed to arrive to negotiate the peace talks. And Richard Nixon secretly got a message to the president of South Vietnam saying, “don’t go to the peace talks. I want you to boycott the peace talks, because if you go, the Democrats will win. And let me win, I’ll give you a much better deal than the Democrats will.” And that’s what happened. The South Vietnamese boycotted the peace talks. The Democrats looked idiotic, because they couldn’t even get their own ally to the peace table, and Nixon won in a squeaker.
Nixon knew that Lyndon Johnson had documented that, and when he was running for re-election in ‘72 he said, “I gotta get those documents.” And he put together a team of burglars to break into the Brookings Institution and a building known as the Watergate, and he was trying to get those documents. That’s why the Watergate scandal happened. This is often overlooked, but that’s why there was that scandal that led to Nixon finally being ousted. So you have ‘68, ‘72, and in 1980, it happened all over again, and at the time Jimmy Carter was President, running for re-election. Iran had captured 52 American hostages. If Carter could get them released before the election, he was a shoe in, if not, he’d lose.
And as I write in Den of Spies, I prove, once and for all, exactly how that happened. So that’s 1980, and in 2000, you have Gore v Bush. And you had the Brooks Brothers riots in which the Republicans invaded the vote counting spaces in Florida and disrupted them so much the votes really couldn’t be counted for the recount, and that sent the election to the United States Supreme Court, which was dominated by Republicans and Bush won.
And then, of course, we go on to 2016 when Russia was helping Donald Trump win. And this is all part of a hidden history that most Americans don’t know about. So this has been going on for a while, and the Democrats have got to fight back. They absolutely have to do it.
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Read more about the Trump-Russia Timeline and Jeffrey Epstein’s Russian ties on Craig Unger’s substack here:
Craig Unger is the New York Times bestselling author of six books on the Republican Party’s assault on democracy, including House of Bush, House of Saud; House of Trump, House of Putin, and now Den of Spies, a real life political thriller about how master spy William Casey put together a treasonous covert operation in 1980 that hijacked American foreign policy and stole the election for Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush.
A graduate of Harvard University, Craig began his career in journalism as an undergraduate editor of The Harvard Crimson. In 1976, he moved to France as co-owner/editor of The Paris Metro, a celebrated biweekly English-language city magazine in the French capital. In the Eighties, as senior editor at New York Magazine, Craig wrote and edited major features on subjects ranging from medicine to pop culture, architecture, and politics. Over the years, his work has appeared in The New Republic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Yorker, The New York Times, Esquire, The Independent, and many other publications. He also served as a contributing editor for Vanity Fair where he covered national security and foreign affairs for more than 15 years.
You can check out his collection of investigative reporting on Trump-Russia and the Republican party’s war on democracy here by ordering his books here:
And here is a link to the recent interview with him by me that ran in my Hot Type column in Byline Supplement on Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Russia:
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A question for Craig Unger:
You've suggested that LBJ's personal account of how Nixon got reelected by telling the South Vietnamese not to attend the peace negotiations was in the DNC's office at The Watergate Hotel, and that's why The Plumbers broke into it. It sounds plausible to me, but I've also read that Nixon set up The Plumbers because a Kremlin-loyal triple agent at the FBI's NYC field office by the name of Aleksei Kulak (J. Edgar Hoover's shielded-from-CIA FEDORA) told him that the Kremlin had a complete copy of the Pentagon Papers (it didn't), and that was why they broke into the offices of the DNC and Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist.