Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I would say to Senator Blumenthal, absolutely, yes, and to Senator Graham, also yes, and thank you. Let me just give a quick overview of my part of this colloquy as to where we are. This began with the Munich Security Conference, which Senator Graham and I led this year, the so-called McCain codel. When we heard about the imminent invasion, we both became very ardent that we needed to get after Russia's oligarchs; first, because it was turning the oligarchs against Yanukovych, which freed up Ukraine, and, second, because these oligarchs in Russia are part and parcel of the way in which Putin has manipulated his country and acceded enormous hidden wealth to himself. So we knew that the oligarchs needed to be a target. We talked about it so relentlessly that whenever Secretary of State Blinken saw us coming, he would say: I know. I know. Oligarchs, I get it. Afterward, the President came back and he took the Treasury's Asset Forfeiture Section and the State Department's Asset Forfeiture Section and the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture Section and pulled them together into what he is calling the Kleptocratic Initiative. That is a good thing the President did. In this bill, there is money for it. We give $67 million to that enterprise and another $30 million to FinCEN, which is the group within Treasury that tracks dirty money. So that is about $100 million to support the KleptoCapture operation.…”