and a great slate podcast on water watergate and it is called low burn and it is tracking the ark of the story as it unfurled in realtime. it is not until july of 73 after the break in that they learn of the taping system. the taping system is sitting there for the entirety of the first years of the administration, and it is not a secret there are people who know this and they don t get to it. investigators on the committee don t get it until a year after the break-in and i herd that and i heard that and thought there might be a lot we don t know. what is striking how much we ve learned since a year ago. you go back to early january, i have nothing to do with russia. that was trump s line. and then we learn about the kislyak and flynn conversations, we learn about the trump tower meeting. we learn about papadapoulos and jeff sessions meetings. how much we ve learned and how little we really know.
so part of the reason why that happened when we published on september 19th, those five flights that we first wrote about in the span of really less than a week, that was what we knew we could prove at that time. and part of that is we could probably discuss is the airport stakeout that we did at dulles where we saw with our own eyes then secretary price going to philadelphia and back. and so really once the first story published, it didn t shake loose new sources of information that allowed us to keep going with different angles. so let me ask you about the dulles stakeout, dan. because the craziest detail of all of the flights is he chartered a flight from philadelphia to washington, d.c. which i never heard of a person commercial or not, flying from washington to philadelphia. i ve literally never heard of a person doing that. they are two hours away, you could drive or walk if you have enough time.
information all at once. right. app so part of the reason and so part of the reason why that happened when we published on september 19th, those five flights that we first wrote about in the span of really less than a week, that was what we knew we could prove at that time. and part of that is we could probably discuss is the airport stakeout that we did at dulles where we saw with our own eyes then secretary price going to philadelphia and back. and so really once the first story published, it didn t shake loose new sources of information that allowed us to keep going with different angles. so let me ask you about the dulles stakeout, dan. because the craziest detail of all of the flights is he chartered a flight from philadelphia to washington, d.c. which i never heard of a person commercial or not, flying from washington to philadelphia. i ve literally never heard of a person doing that. they are two hours away, you
sources that say we ve talked to 30 sources inside of the white house that corroborated that, i this is that is much. i don t need to know that you talked to 30 people, just i need to know as best you can, who you were talking to. i would say one source is a really big i think generally one source is a big risk. unless it is one one impeachable source and that is kind of where in this sort of reporting. but if jack kelly tells you something off the record, who is then you got reason to run with that. that is considered very impeccable source. but the other thing is you have to think about people s agenda. not even how many sources you have or how good your sources are, but what their agenda is. why they are telling you this, what me might have to gain and how they are spinning it and that is a challenge in this story and increasingly becoming a challenge becauser seeing instances where there are people who want to set reporters up to
corrections of which there have been some. a lot of things have born out, for instance david ignatius s column and we know months later michael flynn pleaded to that. how would you character what we know about this story at this point. i think we know a sliver of this story at this point. art mueller runs a tight ship. nothing suggests that leaks are coming out of his operation. and if if we need any evidence that we know so little, point to the george papadopoulos that exactly the example. because no one knew who he was. and everyone was caught by surprise on that. and so i just think our job is to when we see facts, we follow the facts and report the facts, we report what we know and say what we don t know. but i think that is a useful guide for people that are consuming the news. but it is part it is hard to know how much of the picture are we getting in any one moment and