We will hear from senator, harris followed by a critical and timely conversation about russia with senator murphy and congressman adam schiff. First there is a woman who has not given up the fight. A smart and thoughtful leader thepion the vital role women play in our country. And will help to make it happen. Who knows how to get things done. Who helped lead the effort to repeal dont ask dont tell. She hails from my home state, the great state of new york. Please join me in welcoming senator kirsten gillibrand. [applause] thank you, winnie. I want to thank nira for her years of vision and leadership. You have done an extraordinary thing. The amount of people that are here to hear what c. A. P. Has to offer shows how hard you have worked and how important your leadership has been. Thank you, nira. [applause] so this is a terrific opportunity for so Many Democrats to talk about some of the work we need to do. I feel very fortunate to be working with my colleagues and sharing a stage with so many of the men and women that i work in the senate every day. I was originally going to talk a little bit about how President Trump is routinely betraying the working class voters that he pledged to fight for from his harmful budget to his cynical tax plan to his horrific Health Care Plan and more but last nights reporting has taken us to a whole new level of abnormal. This is not business as usual. The president is truly creating chaos and hasnt created a single job or made us safer. Every single week, it is a different thing. According to news reports, and the lacking response by the white house, it appears that the president divulged highly classified information to an adversarial Foreign Government that was provided by an ally with the agreement it would not be shared. If this is true, President Trumps actions are not only irresponsible but have put lives at risk and undermined our National Security. I believe it is incumbent upon all of us regardless of party to stand up and fight back harder than ever. On these ties to russia, we must not stop until we have full transparency and accountability. That means not voting for an fbi director until a special prosecutor is named. We also cannot let donald trump distract us from or everyday work of fighting for working families. Since this is an ideas conference, i brought one idea i would like to challenge the president on to step up. I want to challenge the president to join us in fighting for a national pay leave program. Mr. President , if you are really standing up for working americans, if you are really fighting for them, then there is no excuse not to have america join every industrialized nation in the world that already guarantees National Paid leave. It is not just a womans issue. It is a middle class issue that creates Economic Growth and rewards work. Year after year, we are short changing our workforce and economy. That should not be acceptable to any of us as democrats. This is important. If we are going to pass a paid leave plan, it has to be a real paid leave plan. Let me explain what that is. It has to be gender neutral. It has to allow you to care for not just a newborn infant but a sick, or dying family member. It should be a test of whether or not it is real paid leave. Remember, on the campaign trail, candidate trump broke away from most of his party. He announced he supported paid leave. It made sense, right . Paid leave shouldnt be a democratic or republican idea. It rewards work. It helps us care for our families. Because it gross the economy. Ws the economy. It is something we should all agree on. This was another one of Donald Trumps empty promises. Real paid leave works like this. First, it has to be national. A state like north dakota or nevada doesnt have to worry about not having enough population. We have enough population in new york. Thats why new york was able to pass paid leave. We have 20 million people. Second, paid leave must be gender neutral. It has to cover women and men. It has to cover husbands who want to care for their wives when they are sick. It has to cover son whose want to care for a dying parent. Third, paid leave has to be comprehensive. That means it is not just about maternity leave. It is not just about babies. It is not enough. You have to cover all illnesses. No one should ever have to choose between a paycheck and being able to sit with their dying mother who has been diagnosed with cancer or alzheimers. We have to make sure you can be with a child if they are sick or in a wheelchair or needs the care of their parent. It also has to be 12 weeks long. Thats long enough to be with that infant, be with that sick parent, that dying family member. Four, it has to be sustainable. A National Paid leave plan can only be sustainable if every worker in the entire country is part of it. If it is going to survive, everyone who would benefit needs to chip in. So it actually needs to be a universal earned benefit. Fifth, paid leave has to be affordable and manageable for workers and businesses alike, particularly small businesses. Now, we have great data in from california, a statewide program, up and running for ten years. What we know from california, 90 of businesses said it had no negative impact or a positive impact on its bottom plin. Line. 99 of businesses said it had a positive impact on morale and retention. Small businesses around the country, 70 of them, want a plan for paid leave because they have to level the playing field. How are they going to compete with the googles and facebook of the world and have that cash flow. They just dont. If you dont have National Insurance plan and paid leave, they can never compete. Businesses also have seen the numbers. They know that this is good for the economy. If we had a National Paid leave plan, it would potentially put into the economy 21 billion annually. It makes sense, because a woman in her lifetime loses about 320,000 because we dont have paid leave. A man loses about 280,000, because we dont have paid leave. To do a real paid leave plan, it shouldnt just be a tax cut for the good corporations that are already doing this. This is not about giveaways for successful companies. So we need a bill. We have a bill. Its called the family act. Let me tell you what it does. It is a common sense bill that passes a National Paid leave plan. Its nationwide. It is gender neutral. It is comprehensive, sustainable, affects all businesses alike and it is affordable. Let me explain to you what it costs. It is the cost of a cup of coffee a week. On average, it is 2 a week. Just imagine this, you are asking every employer to say, would you buy one cup of coffee for each employee a week. They overwhelming say yes. I would do that. I do that anyway. For a worker, would you put 2 a week into a savings plan to know that when your mother is dying, you could be by her side. So that when you become pregnant, you can be with your infant. Workers will say yes. It is not a lot of money. It is 2 a week, 104 per year per employee. Thats the amount of money any business can afford. I think this is something that makes sense. I want to talk about how we are actually going to get passed. This is what matters the most for the people in this room. We have been stuck in a madmen era where our policies do not reflect the face of the workforce. 7 out of 10 moms are working, 4 to 10 are primary or sole wage earners. Time has shifted. We need this plan. It will help the economy grow. Some things are happening in america that i have never seen. It is about you. It is about the grassroots, the reason why so many of you showed up today. How many people here marched for the womens march. How many . Nearly all of us. We marched in new york, washington, worldwide. It was a moment in our history where people believed their voice actually mattered. After seeing donald trump get elected, they said, this is not my country. I did not sign up for this. I dont agree with this person. What did they do . People across america made a sign that talked about the issue that they cared most about. They talked about the issue that made them angry and they had passion for. They were not going to stand President Trump unwinding. Whether you were marching for black lives matter or reproductive rights or lgbtq or clean air, clean water, it didnt matter. It was your issue, what you cared about. If we are going to pass a National Paid leave act plan, it is only if every one of you stand up and demand it. It is about us. If we arent willing to fight for it, it will never happen. This is about the mock zation of democracy. It is about each individual having a voice. A 17yearold girl that tweets something that goes viral that makes a difference. The creative person that creates a meme that is really funny that says it like it is. Thats happening today. We will win and defeat donald trump and his horrific policies and do good things like pass a National Paid leave plan. Thank you all. [cheers and applause] host please welcome senator chris murphy, rep adam schiff and david sanger. Thanks, very much. Im david sanger from the New York Times and delighted to be here with senator murphy and congressman shif andchiff and have a discussion about russia and other issues in the news. I wanted to start, though, just with what we had on the front pages today. Somewhat remarkable situation where the president had his meeting with foreign minister lavrov and kislyak last week. We learned about the details in large part from photos that were issued by task, because we didnt actually get in for any of those. That apart we have now red a set of descriptions of the conversation which seems to suggest that the president didnt issue any didnt reveal any sources and methods but described a fairly sensitive intelligence around a program that concerns the isis ability to put laptops on computers that could be loaded up with explosives and seemed to suggest the city in which some of this was learned and so forth. So you sit on intelligence and are familiar with the difference between revealing sources and methods, which nobody is alleged here happened and describing the program in some detail. Tell me what part of this we should be concerned about and what part isnt all that concerning. What we should be concerned about and again i have not yet been briefed on it. I can only go on the basis of whats been alleged publicly. The allegation is that the president discussed a threat to the country from isis with sufficient detail that the russians could determine what the source or method of gathering that intelligence was. The denials by the administration as i read them and i am reading admittedly between the lines are really a form of nondenial denial, that is stating that the president did not discuss war plans is a bit of a nonsec qui nonsequiter. Saying that the president didnt comment on sources an methods is also a bit of a ruse if, in fact, what the president did was reveal sufficient detail that the russians could therefore conclude, reverse engineer in a way, what the actual source was. Whats the implication of that . It could compromise the source of information. That source could dry up or go away. If the source is a sister Intelligence Agency of a friendly country, that country could decide it cant trust the United States with information or worse that it cant trust the president of the United States with information. That obviously has very serious repercussions. Particularly, if we are talking about information about a threat to americans posed by isis. Again, i cant say whether these allegations are accurate but if they are, and certainly the president s tweets suggest that he talked about something of concern here, we immediately have to go into damage mitigation mode, find out what steps can we take to minimize any risk to our sources and if the damages to our allies, what steps we can take to reassure our allies that we treasure the relationship, treasure the information and we are going to work much harder to protect it in the future. I have to hope that someone will counsel the president about just what it means to protect closely held information and why this is so dangerous ultimately to our National Security. Senator murphy, well start with you on this. The president made an argument in his tweet basically he was trying to bring the russians over to be more active against isis. We have certainly seen cases where president s of both parties, president obama, president bush, revealed some intelligence information without the source in order to go motivate another country to help along. You might put it in another context. Tell the chinese more about the north Korean Missile program if you are trying to give some urgency to the sense that they have to back him up on sanctions. Could you argue that this is the kind of thing that president s sometimes just have to do . You could argue that if you were under the belief that this [laughter] this white house was operating in a way that was anything other than Foreign Policy by improvisation. You are right, in previous times, other president s have decided to share classified information with socalled adversaries but they only did so after consulting with the intelligence agencies and having a whole of government approach to declassifying that information. It was strategic. This clearly, as far as we understand, was not strategic. The idea that russia is going to be a responsible partner in the future of syria is belied by years and years of facts on the ground. We have been trying to get them to be a meaningful partner inside of syria. They end up doing more damage than good and conducting themselves in a way that kills, hurts, and maplesmes people on the ground so they are pushed into the counts. There is a reasonable way to use classified information to win new friends or influence adversaries but thats not what happened here. This was a president who was trying to show off how much he knew in the context of that meeting and potentially did serious jeopardy to immediate u. S. National security concerns as we are finding out today that some of our allies are already rethinking whether or not they should share information or rethinking what kind of information to share with the United States. Chris is exactly right. The point he is make is also far broader than this context. If you look at many of the president s statements or tweets that have an impact on Foreign Policy, they all have an improvisational character. Some have an erratic character for them. We try to look for a method in this when there may be none. If you look at some of the comments he has made about north korea and you ask, is this some part of a clever art of the deal strategy of sabre rattling or whatnot . You might conclude it was true if it was done in concert with others in the administration in a cohesive fashion. Too often, it is not. It looks like the president has one Foreign Policy and the secretary of state has another and the u. N. Ambassador has a third. No one is quite sure who to believe. As much as we may try to rationize itration looiz it and explain it, the reality is that we have created not a strategic ambiguity but a very nonstrategic and dangerous ambiguity about where we are, what we stand for, what we want to see happen, what our policy is. We mentioned north korea briefly. I wanted to turn to that before we get back into the russia investigation. The other fascinating intelligence leakage story thats going on right now is that it appears that the day that it has been released by a group that calls itself the shadow brokers, which outside experts widely believe are tools that were developed by the nsa. I realize neither of you can comment on that. Lets take that for a moment as the working assumption of the questions if that turns out to be the case, have leaked out and now may have been exploited by the North Koreans to be used for greater havoc. What should american tax payers think about the fact that cyberweapons that are being developed by the United States are showing up in black markets and being exploited by our adversaries. Ill start with you since i am sure you have heard a bit within the committee. I think what this incident points up, you are right, we cant confirm or comment on what the shadowbrokers disclose did or did not come from the u. S. , we do know that the director of the nsa has said publicly from time to time, we will discover vulnerabilities in software, including that of u. S. Technology companies. That can be ex employed in times for very legitimate foreign gathering purposes. That also poses a great vulnerability and there is a process within the administration or at least there was within the last admin stwrags to determine whether the importance of that potential access outweighs the risks that those vulnerabilities get out into the wild and can be manipulated by bad actors. According to director rogers, in 90 of the cases, the Intelligence Committee reveals, hey, you need to patch this vulnerability in your operating system or whatever the problem may be. I do think that one of the implications here is if, indeed, this came from the United States, i cant confirm or deny whether it did. That will insurance that process more heavily infavor of disclosing to the Technology Companies a vulnerability because we have seen very graphically the risks of not disclosing the Technology Companies or having a quicker fix. It is possible that it was disclosed to Technology Companies. It was only disclosed to microsoft by their accounting relatively recently before they patched it in march. It does raise the question, do we have the system under control . This is a question i think the committee will need to continue to examine and explore and decide whether there are changes that have to be made. It is difficult to comment on in the abstract without being able to say, this is the case here. It will have a demonstrable impact on one of the debates we hav