Robert Pape

I've been offered trips to go to Iran multiple times and I just won't go.

And and the reason is because I'm not here to become a look, if I'm not willing to be a pawn of Republicans or Democrats in my own country, why am I going to be a pawn of somebody else?

And also, Patrick, there's lots of money here.

So when I make arguments in books, this does help certain groups.

And you wouldn't believe the amount of money that I've turned down because they throw money at you thinking, well, you'll just do things.

You're kind of going in that certain direction.

And I'll tell you a case with 2014.

What really broke the back here –

And the CIA knows this and the FBI knows this, but I'll just tell the case publicly here, which is I got an email in soon around the time that Putin took Russia took Crimea.

And it was from a New York firm, New York law firm.

And they wanted to have a conversation because they had some clients and they knew I thought economic sanctions were bad here.

That's true.

I think they don't work very well.

And they wanted to talk to me about what I might be able to do.

So I got on the phone and here it was a set of lawyers in New York.

And I won't say who the firm was, but it was a set of lawyers in New York and they wanted to pay me and they were willing to pay me a lot of money.

to do Freedom of Information Act requests they wanted me to do to get information about the economic sanctions on Russia.

I said, wow, okay, so but who's your client?

And they said, well, okay, it's Rosneft.

Now, Rosneft, if your listeners will go, is the conglomerate of Putin, the croniest of crony Putin conglomerates of oil and gas in Russia.