Transcripts For CSPAN Discussion Focuses On The Pentagon Pap

I am delighted to welcome you here or welcome you back. Those who were with us last evening for my conversation. Unger and delight to welcome you here or welcome you back for those with us for my conversation with daniel el elseburg for the publication of the pg papers 46 years later. I think dan will be with us again today and with us in the audience and making his presence known as we go on. He is the person who made it possible for us to be here. We are live on cspan. I think its cspan3. It will be rebroadcast at a later date or dates as well. My only role right now is to introduce jean meserve, our moderator, who is a veteran of National Security coverage and reporting on abc and cspan. Im sorry, on cnn. Youve seen one, youve seen them all, you know. I wont do what im tempted to do. Which is to channel the president , i wont do that. Jeanne has moderated panels all over the world. Im grateful for her taking the time to be with us today. She will introduce hur distinguished panelists. Thank you, sandy. What could be more timely than a discussion about leaks. We have a President Trump calling these leaks lowlife, unamerican and criminal, then we have daniel ellsberg, did any of you hear him last night calling for more leaks to keep the constitution and the country secure. We have a Superstar Panel to talk about balancing the leaks and next to me is a man im sure you are all familiar with, bob woodward, the investigative journalist with the Washington Post, deeply involved, as you all know, with watergate coverage and much more. Next to him is benjamin powell, now a part mer at will mer hale. He was council and National Intelligence officer under republican and democratic administrati administrations. At the end, another familiar name, david sanger. Thanks for joining us. The National Security correspondent interior New York Times. Id like to talk about the here and now. Leaks seems the inappropriate word. It seems like a deluge of information coming out of this administration right now and if we put aside for a minute the massive dumps of information, the pentagon papers, snowden, chelsea manning, im wondering, bob and david, if you have ever seen this volume of leaks coming out in the administration . Is it unprecedented or not, bob . I wouldnt use the word leaks. I think its aggressive reporting and its the transfer of administrations that has created the environment and a good deal coming from former people, but i agree with ellsburg, more leaks. And i think david would agree on this, theres this sense that reporters just sit around waiting for somebody to bring in a grocery cart of documents like ellsburg did or to call and i think the best sources are not volunteers. Somebody who comes to us, but people we recruit and go to and say, we want to understand whats going on. Sounds like spycraft. No, its reporting. And its quite basic. So i also, i mean, there was a lot that seems to be coming out, as is always the case, so much more that we dont know about the whole general flynn issue where he came and now is departed. I think you could probably spend part of your life figuring out whats going on there. So many issues we dont know and we dont know the answers to a lot of the key questions. Do you think well get those answers eventually . You know, as ben bradley, the former editor at the post used to say, the truth emerges. Sometimes it takes decades. , have you seen anything like this, and what do you think is behind it . What is it . It is highlyll, unusual to see this early in the administration, i mean, usually, you have to assume whenever there is a transition, the people who come into an administration have come out of the campaign, they believe that their candidate, the new president , walks on water. Iyalty is at its highest, so have not covered as many administrations as bob has. I did not mean that in a [laughter] [indiscernible] one of them said, what was Calvin Coolidge like . [laughter] the kind that coolidge met you in a parking garage. [indiscernible] not sure they had cars. [laughter] but, it has been my experience since i got back from a happy life as a Foreign Correspondent and entered into a threeyear assignment to washington that has now 23, that to 22 or usually, the administrations begin leaking after the first crew is gone, and a group has come in true sort of undo whatever damage the initial crew youand wants to explain to how much more brilliant they are than the people they replaced, and that process usually takes about three years into an administration. We have gotten this starting in 3, and i think that reflect the different phenomenon under way. First, the executive orders, which were really the first things to leak, they were put together by a a very small group of people, who did not consult made a lot ofey early mistakes, so we saw in the immigration executive order that about greenhought holders, interpreters in iraq, and so forth, and then, there was an order which we still have not seen on detention that calls for reopening the black site interrogation centers, as if there are countries around the world that are yearning to get our backside Detention Centers reopened. And i think those leaks were intended to go act as a warning sign to other members of the Trump Administration who may not have seen the early drafts to say, you are about to go walk off a cliff and you better read when second, and and third versions of them leaked, they were missing the blacks identical forth, so i think part of this was to create a new circulatory system because the old circulatory system was not working. That is group one. The second set of leaks i think you have seen have been just withinhe inner turmoil the administration. And i think that is in part because you were watching a group of professional people who have been through the transitions before, who know what things are supposed to be operating like at this point in time. And recognize that that process has fallen apart. You know, if you want to look at the prime example of this right now, look at the National Security council. Having just gotten rid of general flynn, and i agree completely with bob that there is a lot we do not understand yet about that, the nfc is basically going back to day one at this point. Before day one. They are going to have to create themselves as if you were starting the transition. Ok of we runld be on autopilot, as long as nothing goes wrong between now and a time they all come together. What are the chances of that, just given the pace of events around the world . I think the second set of leaks is sort of a warning that things have got to get together. You keep saying leaks, they will. Youre right, bob is right. These are not coming to us. The executive orders might be slightly different. I think those go out. Everything else we are discussing is coming out of hard reporting. Are you concerned at all about this as someone from the National Security summit . It is a bit of a vicious cycle because what is the reaction when you see draft s public, when you see them leaked, it is not ok, let us make sure we are sharing these to get input off of the reaction. It is let us jobless circle even tighter, which then has the negative affective course of not being able to consult more broadly. Consult more broadly. Its not as if it is good because often the reaction is, of course, people go further and further into the bunker and say, you know, everyones going to leak every draft that im going to put out there so well only do it among us three people here and well dribble it out and i saw that in 2009 with some of the executive orders that were happening then where there was kind of last, last, last minute coordination and those of us in the Intelligence Community called up and said, i know youre going to sign this in an hour, but let me tell you what the impacts will be if you sign this and then theres always the scramble to fix things. It is not as if the reaction, having observe fd this many times, to do this more broadly. Oftentimes, it causes people to go further into the bunker. If you go through the whole process and theres this feeling then in the white house that everything that we give to the inner agency is going to go straight to the press, it just makes it more difficult and gives you more of that bunker mentality sometimes. But this whats going on is not about executive orders. At bottom, it is, the power of the presidency and is it functioning . There is now, this first month into the Trump Administration, people are mostly opinion columnists writing its kind of over if you cant put it back together and i suspect when the history of the Trump Administration is written, this first month is not going to be that important. The president has extraordinary powers and david and ben know this so well. A president can do all kinds of things and is going to be measured by what they do and in the National Security area, the president can do, really start a war, as we i mean, legally. I remember talking to a group of academics some time ago in the george w. Bush administration and they said, well, no, the constitution says congress will declare war. The last declared war was when . World war ii. And i think weve had a few since then that are undeclared and just kind of literally reading the constitution, and i said, look, george bush can invade mexico tomorrow if he wants. Somebody stood up in the back and said, dont give him any ideas. But the president can employ the force as he sees fit. The only thing congress can do is take away the money. And once the troops are out there and if it is a reasonable military excursion, congress is not going to take away the money. So im interested in what trump is going to do as president. Thats going to be the measure and all of this hand wringing, i mean, the first month is not been great, but what are those key decisions in the areas that are real serious National Security, not things on paper. David, you want to jump in . First of all, i think bob is right that the first month will not seen as terribly important unless it portends a continued sort of level of chaos. If he gets it together in the next six months, everybody will sort of forgive a first month of chaos or forget about it. If he doesnt, it will end up looking like they got off on a wrong foot and didnt get back on. What strikes me as interesting is it has not been a straight line. There has been nothing linear in covering these folks. There are some things they have done spectacularly badly and we have just run through a list and every once in a while, executed something in the traditional way. Supreme court nomination. Supreme court nomination, no matter what you think of the nominee, hes eminently qualified. They rolled it out well. Coordinated. Coordinated with the hill. Coordinated with everybody. It was sort of the model of how you used to go do this. And it was actually george bush, who was usually pretty orderly about these things that when he tried to nominate his own inhouse White House Council for the Supreme Court without any of that, that it collapsed on him. So i think it is worth, considering the fact that we have seen moments where they could put it together. What strikes me in the Foreign Policy arena is that we have gone from what then candidate trump said to me and maggie during our two Foreign Policy interviews with him about japan, about south korea, about china to what were much more traditional encounters where right off after saying he would negotiate on the one china policy, he gave that because he recognized that nothing else was going to happen with china if he didnt reaffirm the one china policy. His meeting with the japanese Prime Minister was as boring and uneventful as every other past meeting with japanese Prime Ministers and you wouldnt have bet on that based on what you except for the little meeting out on the patio at maralago. That came out of a north korean launch and the fact they were trying to figure out, was this an intermediate range launch they didnt have to worry about or was this the icbm weve all been waiting for . And once they came to the conclusion it was the intermediate launch, they went back to having dinner with everybody else at maralago. So i think what they will be measured by is their first big test. When you think back to the bush administration, the days when i was a white house correspondent, the first nine months of george bushs administration was about sort of everything and nothing and then 9 11 happened and it became the sort of clarifying moment that defined what kind of president he would be. And defined this whole century, almost everything thats happened is connected to 9 11. Absolutely. Including the movement of counterterrorism to the center of american Foreign Policy which it was in the bush administration. We saw barack obama try to move away from that and i think he did so, somewhat successfully and we are seeing President Trump try to move it back to the center again. Do you think its going to be tougher and tougher to get information out of this administration, both because of the tightening circle that ben mentioned and also, perhaps, because some of the professional class that you mentioned, david, will be leading this leaving this administration, perhaps of their own choice, perhaps not of their choice . You know, i think it depends on whether or not the president figures out how to make good use of the professionals and the bureaucracy around him. Word this morning that a lot of the professionals at the state department, for instance, have just been told to pack their bags. Right. I read the ones on the seventh floor who do the coordination. But the fact of the matter is any president discovers over time that the United States government is a huge enterprise and cannot be run like a small family business. And you have a president who has run a business, you can argue about how successful or not its been, but very small and very tight. I think hes discovering that the techniques that work so well with the Trump Organization dont work here. There was no vast bureaucracy or Intelligence Community that could go work out another agenda. But in the real world of reporting, what the headline from the press conference that trump had yesterday really is where he said, he called the Justice Department and said, lets look at these leaks. And the again, back to the power of the president and the Justice Department, if they want to go look at leaks, they can really do this with an aggressiveness that we there was much criticism of obama, and david got caught up in this, their effort to try to prosecute and stop leaking. But the power of the fbi to come in and really examine that, if those are the orders and trump is right technically, some of this is illegal and we would argue its transparency and its desirable and i think generally, the press is pretty careful about going through something that may be sensitive, but that may come down on our heads in a real serious way. I think thats absolutely true. I think while weve all noted that the Obama Administration did more leak investigations than all previous presidencies by three times come bined. By three times. Right. They did by and large say with one exception to investigating suspected sources and they didnt come after the reporters. And in the case that bob referenced which was my reporting on the cyberattacks on the Iranian Nuclear Program Operation Olympic Games, they did a vast set of interviews with more than 100 people who they thought were potential sources. But they never did come after the New York Times and its notes, so forth. Which they could do. Which they could certainly do. And you could fight it and maybe you win, maybe you lose. But we dont know what the Trump Administration will adhere by the same rules. Exactly. And ben knows this so well. The power to do that is awesome. No . Well, yeah. I mean, there will be of course, there were rules put in. Theres rules governing. The issues with some subpoenas to reporters and those could be changed by the department of justice. Those are largely, you know, internal guidelines and its not a statute. Its not in the constitution. It could be changed overnight. It could be changed. And there are people that would probably favor that, particularly in the realm of communications intelligence. That is the one place where there are federal criminal laws that say the leak of communication and intelligence properly classified is a crime. That is different not just the publication. Exactly. Exactly. I know one of the subsequent panels will get into the leg legali legalities. I dont want to delve too deep into there. It leads me to my next question has to do with anonymity. The Washington Post at least is using secure drop. Is the times using secure drop as well . Weve got a portal within the time site. You can all find it advertised on our home page. In case you have documents you want to pass along. Into which people can drop things in a secure way. Ive never seen anything like that. Because im in the same school that bob is in, which is that these things happen by getting out and trying to understand policy and getting people to explain what theyre doing or understanding their objections to what is happening. And thats usually how we find these things. When the times came up with this idea of putting in this secure drop which i think the wall street journal has now also done and so forth, i thought, well, you know, 99 of the stuff you get in there is going to be crazy. And may