out of the sanctions placed on putin s inner circle and now placed on putin himself. do you think the oligarchs will be able to put or have the incentive to put pressure on putin that may change things on the ground? it might be able to. we think putin has a lot of control over these people but it s important to remember that oligarchs aren t just your everyday tax people evading the law. they are instruments of the russian state. the assets that they own and hold in the western jurisdiction, we estimate that could be as much as $1 trillion worth could be recouped to help pursue these foreign escapades we try to stop in other arena. so it s very hard to do this stuff. money laundering is an art and it took us a while to realize these individuals and their activities in the west were actually not just a problem for law enforcement but actually a national security threat to ourselves.
you look at the people around him, he had his oligarchs, he had his intel people that he has jailed. he realizes his military people have been stealing billions of dollars, they re a third-rate military. oligarchs aren t going to be pleased. i will say this. again, people it is kind of like talking about dick cheney, it is a different dick cheney than i knew before the heart attack. no, it wasn t! he had 9/11 after the heart attack, and dick cheney said i m not going to let this happen again. it wasn t a heart attack that changed dick cheney. it was 9/11 that changed dick cheney. here vladimir putin wasn t if you look at his decisionmaking process, to him in a cold blooded way he s very rational. you get to go into georgia. you don t really pay consequences. you get to go into crimea. you don t pay consequences. you go in ukraine, you shoot down a commercial airliner, no