Michael Morell Quotes
Look at it from [Vladimir] Putin's perspective, right. He's a trained intelligence officer, worked for the KGB, very talented, manipulated people much smarter than Donald Trump. He played this perfectly, right. He saw that Donald Trump wanted to be complimented.
Morell, Michael. Interview with George Stephanopoulos. This Week, ABC News, 7 Aug. 2016.
Both Hitler and Stalin were gross egomaniacs who each thought that they had gotten the better of things. The result was that 22 million Russians were killed and the industrial base if Russia Was destroyed. On the German side, the German military was virtually destroyed, many civilians were killed, the nation reduced to rubble and starvation, German leaders were killed, jailed or committed suicide including Hitler, and the country was occupied for years. Neither leader appeared very smart if one judges by the results.
Although Reagan is reported to have said this on numerous occasions, no definitive citation has yet been found. The earliest reference to a similar quote is found in “The Consent of the Governed, and Other Deceits” (1971) by New York Times political analyst Arthur Krock in the chapter titled "The Second Oldest Profession.”
Michael Joseph Morell is an American former career intelligence analyst. He served as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2010 to 2013 and twice as its acting director, first in 2011 and then from 2012 to 2013. As a CIA analyst he served as presidential daily briefer to George W. Bush, including on the morning of September 11, 2001. In his book, The Great War of Our Time, Morell defends the use of drones by both the Bush and Obama Administrations against suspected terrorists and he explains the CIA's use of Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (what many call torture) by the Bush Administration. He is now Senior Counselor and the Global Chairman of the Geo-Political Risk Practice at Beacon Global Strategies LLC, a consulting firm in Washington, D.C.
