led to deaths, but also led to the killing of at least one senior al-qaeda figure. martha: yeah. you know you always wonder about the timing on these things. and as you say, this happened back in january. the president is ready to speak about it now and we expect him to step in front of that podium any moment but any thoughts on timing bret? well, you know, i don t know the inner workings of why it comes out today. obviously, there are a lot of big stories that are circulating today. but, you know the administration will likely say that they needed to wait for confirmation and they wanted to make sure all the is or were dotted and the ts crossed with all of the information they re putting out here and declassifying. as you take a look at the white house briefing room. i ll say that the statement by the press secretary is pretty detailed in its sorrow for the loss of the american held, the american held and then the italian hostage held, and it does not lay out exactly how
what they are calling a soft launch go to iowa new hampshire, reintroduce herself and when the book comes out stops your momentum seems like a bad idea. more for my own reporting based on talking to people behind the scenes they believe this would be a speed bump they were going to get hacks. they believe when they launch that this would be part of what hillary clinton said a couple days ago. distraction i am focused on voters of new hampshire. it worked for her husband many times. will it work for her this time? is that how they tick your hand or have they suggested otherwise? absolutely, look at the memo we spoke about yesterday, three page memo from the campaign spokesman brett talked about a moment ago worked for the attorney general, went through a lot of fires that basically that memo mostly went after the author, shot the messenger, didn t add to the card charges. that is their playbook. good to have you in sydney a.
but the fact that they re out saying he didn t order the specific strike is kind of interesting. we ll continue to dig on that. but the bottom line here is that it was a mistake, according to the government. and that that s why they re coming out to express grief for those families, that it does happen. martha: all right. bret, thank you. we ll be back in a moment. bill: going to bring in jonah goldberg, fox news contributor. good morning to you. adam gadahn we ve been after him for more than a decade, and if he s been dead for four months why did we not know that? you can certainly understand why you want to buy time for the families of the innocent to be notified, but this is a bit confusing. it is. and we may just have to wait for some better dig-in reporting about all of this. it does lend itself to the sort of convenient political timing accusation, but we don t know that that s true either. certainly, i was originally supposed to come on this morning and talk about the clinton
families have been notified and thoughts and prayers are with all of them today. reports from the pentagon at fox news moments ago saying the strike was part of normal policy, not ordered by the president specifically. some more on this as we work through that story today from the white house. bombshell rocking the clinton campaign, new details about foreign money flowing into the clinton foundation. major news outlets including fox news reviewing all of the fact that our being revealed in this upcoming book clinton cash. bret baier has been digging deeper into the details and connections that are brought forward in these contentions. he will be anchoreding a fox news special tomorrow night but he joins us back on a busy morning across the board. good to have you here. good morning. let s stipulate that these stories don t fit on bumper stickers. they take time to explain and
with his reaction to what we saw here this morning. good morning again, bret. hi, martha. the president expressing grief for these families. it s interesting to hear about this operation as we re just getting bits and pieces. a producer over at the pentagon saying the senior defense official says this strike was conducted by an armed drone under the operation of the cia and that the u.s. government, the intelligence community, had no reason to believe that the two hostages were there. the american the italian. they had no reason to believe on these other on this other strike that these al-qaeda figures were there. apparently, according to the senior defense official they had near certainty that the u.s. hostage and the italian hostage were not present at the al-qaeda location. they didn t know that adam gadahn or ahmed farouq were also there. so it goes to the point of sketchy intelligence on some of these operations as they move forward. the fact that it s taken this