In august. It was released last week. What do you make of the whistleblowers complaint . What did he tell you and what struck you . Guest whats so extraordinary about this is we have now in black and white and in the president s own words evidence of the fact that when he is conducting business supposedly on the half of the United States with foreign leaders whose only conducting his own personal business, in this case his own personal political business and maybe Something Else financially or what have you. The truth is the transcript of the phonecall not once but president of the United States raise anything of National Significance of United States come nothing about the sovereignty of ukraine and how its been violated by russia to nothing about sanctions in our efforts to continue to hold russias feet to the fire nothing for the need to provide security support for the ukrainians as a matter of use policy. It was just a bizarre conversation. Although president as for is the president of ukraine to trump a political favor by giving up on his adversary. In the case of biden he looked into bogus allegations that have been debunked that allegedly biden did something wrong as Vice President of theres no evidence to that effect he wants that information to try to use it against biden politically and he also asked more debunked information that suggests ukraine rather than russia was some home involved in meddling in the 2016 election. Its incredible and what is most disturbing about it in addition to a clear case the president putting his own personal interests above the National Interest is that he can read the whistleblower report and learns not only did the president do this but he tried to hide the fact that he did it by putting the transcript of this conversation on supersecret server and let me explain that for just a second to the audience. When you have a president ial phonecall there are no takers who sit in the situation room. Usually two or three of them take verbatim notes but policy staffers including the National Security adviser or another senior representative and the expert staff are also in the room taking notes and advising the president if theres anything that needs to happen. None of that seemed to happen in terms of the experts. There were no takers however doing their normal job. Those notes would have normally been stored on the classified secure server and that is isaac hayes but then theres the separate server that is only for the most sensitive highly compartmentalized information that the white house has but ive never myself see no server pic ive seen reports that were handcarried to meet in an envelope and had to be handcarried back. Thats how sensitive the information on my computer isnt yet somehow somebody in the white house decided even though the conversation which we can now read was not classified they did it allegedly on that server to prevent anybody to having access to that knowledge. Thats deeply disturbing. As for why were there no tape recordings for those who werent alive in 1974. Guest in 1974 when nixon and a water gate case and all of that stuff after that a decision somehow by someone was taken not to actually record president ial phonecalls but they are meticulously recorded in real time by multiple notetakers who then make sure the final transcript represents their best, and take. Host who actually gets the transcript of these conversations . Do they go to the state department, the Intelligence Community and how widely are they distributed . Normally and speaking from my experience in prior administrations which i think on the bipartisan basis handled things the same way. I can speak to whats happening in the Trump Administration but normally what would happen is a small group of policy staffers at the nsc in addition to the National Security adviser and deputy National Security adviser and the Vice President s office would receive this transcript on a need to know basis. Not everybody gets it. Not everybody has access to it but if you have a policy in need to know for example with ukraine if you worked in the European Office and were responsible for ukraine or russia or if you worked in the military Defense Office and you needed to know about something related to the Security System you would in all likelihood receive that transcript. Then cabinet level principles secretary of state secretary of defense cia director of National Intelligence etc. They too and all likelihood would receive a personal copy the transcript but it would not yield widely disseminated. Host lets talk about the number. You said a few and theres a sense there were enough people who witnessed or participated or so the transcript of that conversation to inform the whistleblower who got the information second hand according to his account. How many people will see something that is considered sensitive . Guest i cant be certain how things operate in this white house. Host but traditionally. Guest traditionally there would be two to five staffers listening on the call, policy staffers plus two, three or four notetakers in the situation plus or minus on either side that the max 10 in the immediate having immediate access to the call and then there might be a slightly larger circle that would receive a rough transcript of the call once it was produced and as i describe people who had in need to know. So we are not talking about a lot of people. My guest 10 to 15 under normal call max. Host did the whistleblower do the right thing . Should he or she testified . Guest i dont know his or her personal circumstances but this has such gravity. Just to recall where we are, this is a case where the president of the United States with the leverage of appropriated congressional funds , money that congress had approved for a National Security purpose to protect ukraine from russian aggression, 400 million of badly needed assistance that the president of the United States held up to use as leverage to squeeze the ukrainian president to do him a favor that was political in nature. Host thats a very serious thing and im not a lawyer so im not going to characterize the legality of its deeply concerning and it raises the prospect that we have a president who has not joined the nations business but doing his own business. Host the administration will come back and say look we are eliminating corruption in ukraine which is rampant for longstanding bad policy something that has concerned a lot of the administration and the administration claims an interest in finding out whether Vice President biden and his son were engaged in some kind of manipulation of reality or facts for financial gain for hunter biden. You were at the white house at the time. What is your response . Deescalate may take a few minutes to explain. This is completely false. Theres no aces to the president s claim that jill biden was mixing his interactions with the ukrainians to benefit his son. The fact of the matter is every time Vice President biden engaged with the ukrainians including on corruption he was doing so in transparent and clearly defined u. S. Policy and at the request of president obama. When Vice President biden was pressing for the removal of the prosecutor general that prosecutor general himself was corrupt. He was failing to conduct an appropriate investigation. This wasnt just the United States either. This wasnt just the Obama Administration. It was shared in congress and shared by the International Monetary fund which lycos and the europeans were providing economic assistance to ukraine and widely shared by the european union. They were all working together to try to help rid ukraine of the successive manifestation of corruption because you are right its an endemic problem. When Vice President biden was making his push to have that prosecutor general removed he was doing so transparently and openly in support of the defined u. S. Policy. He wasnt doing it for personal gain. In fact the prosecutor general was not even at the time investigating the company that hunter biden became a board member of. There was no ask of the prosecutor general two spec step off of the investigating hunter biden. He wasnt investigating hunter biden so this was a classic case of we see so often unfortunately out of this administration where they tried to deceive the American People in order to create a story that doesnt exist. There was nothing improper that i am aware of and i think its been demonstrated anywhere the Vice President biden did anything improper. He carried out the policy of the United States needed openly and transparently. Talk about publicly and the records of his conversation by phone i can assure you are not hiding on the secret server that nobody can access. Host its true that hunter biden did profit financially off of the ukrainian company. Guest i understand what was in the Public Domain and it was in the Public Domain at the time that he began to serve on the board he became a board member. Host to your book it is a very interesting personal and professional tale. What i noticed in the beginning is your heritage. You have on your mothers side, they were jamaican immigrants. Your grandfather was a janitor. Your grandmother unmade and yet they produced five children who all went to college. One son became a doctor and one the president of the university and your mother went to radcliffe. Thats quite an extraordinary tale and on your fathers side they were descendents of and your father became a renowned economist adviser to the world bank and on the board of the federal reserves. You it came from unusual circumstances. Your life in many ways is the american dream. Im interested in your title, tough love which reflects and all the good things in your life and your extraordinary upbringing. There were tough moments as well. What were they . Guest first of all im deeply indebted to my family and my parents on both sides and my grandparents on both sides. They literally came from nothing and made something quite extraordinary for themselves and their children of excellence in serving in giving back to community however much or however little you have. You have to give back. That was the mantra for which i was raised and whether it was the immigrant side of my family as you mentioned jake and jamaican took aim with nothing and managed to send all their kids to college and succeed and though my fathers side interestingly enough descendents of but my greatgrandfather fought in the union army during the civil war and after the civil war was able to go on and achieve a College Education and to start a school in new jersey that lasted for 70 years and educated generations of africanamericans both to have manual and Technical Skills and to be able to be employed but also to go to college. It was at college prep as well. There was a commitment on both sides of excellence but tough love the title i collected is about how i was raised. Howard tried to raise my kids and how ive tried to serve my country. I knew every step of the way that my parents loved me fiercely. They would give it to me straight in when ive screwed up they would tell me when i was falling short they would tell me. There was no sugar coating or blowing smoke to pump up my ego. They taught me i could do whatever i could do. If i didnt do my best if i were slacking off or in some other way not taking my responsibility seriously they would give me a hard time. I also esight described in the book and toured with my younger brother of very difficult and bitter divorce which includes the violence in the public custody battle and very painful challenges for me and my brother from the time i was seven until the time i was 15. And throughout that i knew my parents loved me and my brother very much. They were committed in devoted parents and my view they had no business being married. When they split up in the manner they split up we had no choice but to decide we were going to persevere and get back up despite having been knocked down by their experience or stay down and that wasnt in our culture upbringing. To get back up. There was another aspect of tough love. I havent now 22yearold son and his 16yearold daughter who were great kids and couldnt be more different from one another and they know to when mom is around there going to get that fierce committed love and there is no playing games are getting away with murder. Host we will get back to your son later. Something that struck me is you are as tall as i am and i am 51. You played point guard in basketball in high school. Guest point guard is often the shortest person on the team. Theres an exception in the nba but typically somebody it handles the ball sets up the plays passes and occasionally drops in the bucket that most of the time a playmaker. That was the position i played in high school and later in graduate school and i must say rather mediocre player. Host what is really striking is later on in the book you bring point guard back. Explain how point card he came your name. Guess who my secret service codename. Host and also in the philosophy of what you were doing, something he resonated with. Guest i use point guard is a role analogous to that. The National Security adviser is not the person who is taking the goalies shots and necessarily the star player whos getting all the media. The point guard is the person and the National Security adviser is a person who is behind the scenes more often helping to lead a team to produce as a whole and passing the ball off to the star player such as the secretary of the state or the president or the Vice President or the secretary of defense. It makes the public impression to negotiate the deal to do the public signing whatever it is that the National Security adviser is behindthescenes leading that Principles Committee, the cabinet Level Committee that makes recommendations to the president and to proceed on the toughest issue. So aycher that analogy because its an apt one. Its an Important Role but its not the glory position and it involves making a team performed together optimally. Host lets go through the position you had in the government crises you faced in the first one under president clinton and the National Security. In somalia the famous case of lack off down in 1993 and then between a crisis nearby and rawanda were 800,000 people were killed in the country the size of vermont. Thats staggering. Im interested first of all and what you learned about the crises in what you learned about issues of one do you engage in under what circumstances when there is slaughter of humankind and why president clinton in the end said. Guest the context was i was 20 years old that was my first job in government. My title was director for international organization. Basically i was on the nsc staff. I got oversight and insight into issues in africa, issues in asia, issues and europe so in addition to somalia and rwanda going on and i focus on it in the book were also doing with bosnia and haiti and cambodia a whole series of challenges in which the United Nations and peacekeepers were involved. Somalia and rwanda were particularly the crises in my professional development. Somalia blackout down blackhawk down was the combination of the administrations decision to try to go after the warlords who had killed many somalis and was preventing us from completing a mission of humanitarian assistance. People were starving. I was the initial mission that president bush got us into and president clinton carried on. After those helicopters and the loss of those 18 servicemembers including you may recall our servicemen being dragged through the streets of mogadishu congress reacted very swiftly and put enormous pressure on the president and the involvement in somali. In fact prematurely before arguably they were to do so. What i learned from that experience is first of all the decisionmaking process at the Principles Committee which many years later i ended up cheering needs to be bore handson in the case we have american servicemembers deployed in you cant leave that two lowerlevel deputies for a daytoday interagency process and that was one thing that was a challenge. The other thing i learned is when you engage in humanitarian intervention in president bush made the decision to go to somalia for all the right reasons. You have to be very mindful that you are going into a complex society where you may or may not be welcome where there are political dynamics that we may not fully understand and where its very hard to separate a purely humanitarian mission. Somalia was the case of us underestimating the complexity and the risk. For once, the actual start of the genocide in rawanda happened seven days a the last american servicemember was required by congress to leave somalia. The last thing on anybodys mind in washington or congress or on the editorial pages went the United States would send forces right back into Central Africa to a country that people have heard less than somalia. What i learned from rawanda which was this really horrific genocide that i some months later saw firsthand that i went to