president trump has repeatedly said there s no collusion and labelled the investigation a witch hunt. so now the uncomfortable position, katelyn owens is in. she s a reporter for axios. reporters don t give up their background sources. we don t know and can t say whether these are the same person. a little complicated, isn t it? it is. let s talk about this in two different things. so we have our report of mueller and the subpoena and who he is discussing shepard: that was the interesting part of that. who he wanted to know details about. right. shepard: tell me about that. shep, i think first of all, if mueller is investigating russia and the trump campaign s role in that, this list of people is not surprising. all the white house aides or campaign aides. i think what this shows is that since march, we heard that this the white house saying
court of public opinion thinking there is bias against him and therefore questions of credibility of the whole russia investigation. then you have the fisa issue, there s lots of different titles in the fisa bill. we talked about this the other day, where you have foreign terrorist calling into americans and you get a warrantless wiretaps, that s one part of the fisa program. when i understand is that the concerns about possible abuses or inappropriateness is in a different title, title i, which is about basically going after a warrant for an american. that s where the abuses apparently weren t really valuable to clarify it. before he came to air, reporting on background sources on axios that some people are fearful it s not all it s cracked up to be and maybe it s been overhyped. when speaker ryan says pelosi and schumer are calling for distraction by saying nunes
to change the work that reporters are doing, which is using whatever access and research tools they have to get the best sourcing they can possibly use to bring important information to the people. i mean if we didn t have background sources, we would just be reporting on the record statements, we would be living in a world of spin and that would not serve the american people. we would be a state sponsored media. exactly. it would be like, you know, the very the very like russia. the credibility that we question here. yesterday there was this moment of unity. i m looking at pictures of nancy pelosi sitting next to paul ryan and you saw, you know, republicans and smiling. in the dugout. smiling, touching one another. there was a moment of unity in the congressional baseball game. the president stood before the cameras and sounded presidential and talked about unity and then revealed his true obsession with russia and the and hillary clinton again via twitter. you
difficult to respond to you are shooting at almost a ghost. i think we, we try to minimize the use of and i would say anonymous sources, but background sources to make sure people see the individuals, they re there, reading stuff. i think for a lot of folks in government they re there to work hard to work on a particular issue. they don t necessarily want to have their name and the family particularly exposed to some of the but i ve we heard the complaint coming generically from the white house from people in the white house complaining about the over use of anonymous sources of the media and the media is rolling their eyes, some of the people making stamths wanting to be anonymous. again, i think there is a big difference. we get hit with a lot of this there s 18 people that said the following, we won t tell you who any of them are. we have no idea who again a lot of time things happening, i know someone who knows someone
ghost. i think we we try to minimize the use of and i wouldn t say anonymous sources, but background sources, to make sure people can see the individuals and know that they re real. but for a lot of folks in government, they re there to serve the american people, to work really hard, to work on a particular issue and don t necessarily want to have their name and their family particular low exposed to some of the i ve heard the complaint coming generically from the white house, from people in the white house complaining about the overuse of anonymous sources by the media and then i see members of the media rolling their eyes thinking that some of the people that are saying this are the very people making statements wanting to be anonymous. i think there s a big difference. we get hit with a lot of this you know, there s 18 people that said the following and we won t tell you who any of them are so we have no idea if they re and again, what i think a lot of times happen is