Papers and how that changed news Media Coverage of National Security. Well hear from several washington journalists and bob woodward whose reporting on the watergate breakin helped lead to the resignation of president nixon. Good morning. Delighted to welcome you here and welcome you back those who were with us last evening with my conversation with daniel else burg. To our symposium to the legacies of the pentagon papers 46 years. Daniel will be with us again today and will be in the awed yns and im sure making his presence known as we go on. He is the person who made it possible for us to be here. I do want to mention that we are live on cspan this morning and we appreciate that very much and it will be shown again on cspan 3 and will be rebroadcast at a later date or dates as well. My only role right now is to interviews our moderator, who is a veteran of National Security coverage and reporting on abc and on cspan. Im sorry on cnn. Seen one, seen them all. Wont do what im tempted to do, which is to channel the president i wont do that. Jean has moderated panels of this sort all over the world and as a professional moderator as we could get. And i thank her for taking the time and will introduce our distinguished panelists. As many people observed, what could be more timely than a conversation about leaks. We have a President Trump who is calling these leaks lowlife, unamerican and criminal, and many we had daniel, calling for more leaks saying we need to keep the country and constitution secure. We have a Superstar Panel here to talk about the issues of balancing National Security with a free press and how that balance is changing and then argue whether there is a balance at all. Let me introduce who is next to me, a man who you are familiar, bob woodward who is the investigative journalist for the Washington Post, deeply involved with watergate coverage and much more. Section to him is benjamin powell. He was general counsel as the director of National Intelligence office under both republican and democratic administrations and on the end, another very familiar name, david sanger. He is the National Security correspondent for the New York Times. I would like to talk about the here and now. Leaks seems to be the inappropriate word. There is 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 manning, havelsea you ever ever seen this volume of leaks coming out in an administration . Is it unprecedented or not . I wouldnt use the word leaks. Its aggressive reporting. And its the transfer of administrations that has created the enretirement and a good deal of this is coming from former people. But i agree, more leaks. And i think david would agree on this, there is this sense that reporters just sit around waiting for someone to bring in a grocery cart of documents like aniel 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. Spy craft . No. Its reporting. Nd its quite basic. Theres a lot that seems to be coming out as is always the case, there is so much more that dont know about, the whole general flynn issue that he came and now is departed. I think you could spend part of your life to untangle what is going on there. So many of the issues we dont know. And we dont know the answers to a whole lot of questions. Will we get the answers to those questions . As ben bradley used to say, the truth emerges. Sometimes it takes decades and sometimes it comes out rather quickly, but i think there should be patience in all of this. Have you ever seen anything like this . And what do you think is behind this . Is it politics, fear . It is highly unusual to see it this early in an administration. 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 and loyalty is at its highest. I mbt covered as many dministrations as bob has. Someone said what was Calvin Coolidge like. [laughter] there was a time that coolidge met you in that parking garage. [laughter] but its been my experience since i got that as a happy life a a Foreign Correspondent and threeyear correspondent that has stretched to 22 or 23. Administrations begin leaking after the first crew is kind of gone. A group that has come in to sort of undo whatever damage the initial crew did and how much more brilliant they are than the people they replaced. That takes about three years into an administration. Which saw this starting in week one, two and three, and that reflects a different phenomenon thats under way. First, the executive orders which were the first things to leak were put together by a very small group of people who did not consult broadly and because they didnt consult broadly, they made a lot of mistakes. We saw in the immigration executive order that nobody thought about green card holders or longtime visa holders and the promises we made to interpretters in iraq and so forth. There was an order that we still havent seen on detention that called for opening the Interrogation Centers if there are countries around the world that are trying to get our black site Detention Centers open. And those leaks were intended to act as a warning sign to other members of the Trump Administration who may not seen the early graphs that says you are about to walk off a cliff. When second and third versions leaked, they were missing the black sites. I think part of this was to create a new system because the old system wasnt working. The second set of leaks that you have seen has been just about the inner turmoil in the administration and i think that is in part because you are watching a group of professional people who have been through these transitions before who know when things are supposed to be operating like and recognize that that process is falling apart. If you want to look at the prime example of this right now, look at the National Security just gotten rid of flynn, the n. S. C. Is going back to day one. Before day one. They have to create themselves as if you were starting the transition. Now that may be ok if we run on auto pilot as long as nothing goes wrong between now and the time they all come together. What are the chances of that given the pace of events around the world. The second set of leaks is sort of a warning that you have to keep getting together. You keep saying leaks. These are not coming to us the executive orders might be different. They flowed out. Everything we are discussing is coming out of hide reporting. Are you concerned about this . Its a bit of a vicious cycle because what is the reaction when you see drafts published, when you see them leaked. The reaction is not necessarily, ok, make sure we are consulting broadly and widely to get the input. The reaction is lets draw the circle tighter which has the negative effect of not being able to consult more broadly. So it does not exist. Often the reaction is people go further and further into the bunker and say every draft that im going to put out there and do it amongst 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 coordination and those of us who were in the Intelligence Community, called up and said, i know you are going to sign it in an hour but let me tell you the impacts and there is always that scramble to fix things. It is not as if the reaction having observed this many times is ok, lets do this more broadly. Oftentimes it causes people to go further into the bunker. Because if you do it go through the whole process and feeling in the white house that everything that we give to the interagency is going to go straight to the press, it makes it more difficult and gives you more of that bunker mentality. Whats going on is not about executive orders. What at bottom it is is about the power of the presidency and is it functioning. There is this now, the first month into the Trump Administration, people, mostly opinion columnists are writing, its kind of over and you cant put it back together. And i suspect when the Trump Administration is written, his 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 going to be measured by what they do. And in the National Security area, the president can do really start a war i remember talking to a group of academics sometime ago in the George Bush Administration and said, well, know, the constitution says congress will declare a war. The last declared war was world war ii and i think we have had a few since then that are undeclared. And kind of literally reading the constitution. And i said, look, george bush can invade mexico tomorrow if he wants. And somebody stood up in the back and said, dont give him any ideas. [laughter] but the president can employ the force as he sees fit. The only thing that congress can do is take away the money. And once the troops are out there and its a reasonable military excursion, congress is not going to take away the money. Trump interested in what is going to do as president. Thats going to be the measure. And all of this hand draining sm the first month has not been great. But what are those key decisions in the areas that are that real serious National Security, not things on paper. I think bobs right that the first month will not be seen asterbly important unless it portends a continued certain level of chaos. If he gets it together in the next six months, everybody will forgive a first month of chaos. F he doesnt, it will end up looking like they got off on the right foot. What is interesting in covering this administration, it has not been a straight line. There is nothing linear about covering this house. There are some things that they badly ne spectacularly and every once in a while they executed something in the traditional way. The Supreme Court nomination. No matter what you think of the nominee, he is eminently qualified. They rolled it out well. They coordinated with everybody. It was sort of a model of how you used to 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 Counsel for the Supreme Court without that, it collapsed on him. 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 we have gone saidwhat then canada trump during our Foreign Policy interviews about japan, south korea and china, to what were more traditional encounters where right off after he said he would negotiate on the onechina policy. And he recognized that nothing else was going to happen with china if he didnt reaffirm the onechina policy. Meeting with the japanese Prime Minister and boring and you wouldnt have based . Except for that meeting on the patio. It came out of the north korean launch and they were trying to figure out was this an intermediate launch or the icbm we have been waiting for. And once they realized it was he intermediate launch, they went back to dinner with everyone else. I think what they will be measured by is the first big test. When you think back to the Bush Administration back when i was a white house correspondent, the first nine months of george bushs administration was about everything and nothing. And then 9 11 happened and it became the clarifying moment that defined what kind of president he would be. And defined, in fact, 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 successively. And we are seeing President Trump trying to move it back to the center again. Host do you think it will be tougher and tougher to get information out of this administration both because of the tightening circle that ben mentioned and also because some of that professional grasp that you mentioned will be leaving this administration, perhaps of their own choice, perhaps not of their choice . I think it depends on whether or not the president figures out how to make good use of the professionals in the bureaucracy around him. Host words this morning professionals at the state department have been told to pack their bags. I read one from the seventh floor, the coordination between the 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 a president who has run a business and argue how successful it has been, but it is small and tight. The techniques that worked so well at the Trump Organization do not work here. There was no vast bureaucracy or Intelligence Community that could go work out another agenda. 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 looks like at these leaks. And 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 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 f. B. I. 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 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. While we all noted that the Obama Administration did more leak investigations than all previous presidency. Host by three times. To hey did it do it investigating suspected sources and didnt come after the reporters. And in the case that bob referenced, which was my reporting on the cyberattacks on he Iranian NuclearProgram Operation at the 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, its notes. Which they could do. Which they could certainly do. And maybe you win or maybe you lose. We dont what the Trump Administration is going to adhere by the same rules. Exactly. Ben knows this so well, the power to do that is awesome, no . There were rules put in. There are rules governing the issuance of subpoenas to reporters. Those could be changed by the department of justice. Those are largely internal guidelines. Its not a statute, its not in the constitution and 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 intelligence properly classified is a crime. Bob not just the publication. Exactly. Host i want to delve too deeply in there but the question of anonity. The Washington Post at least if you can say is using secure drop as well . We have a portal within the times site and find it advertised on our home page. Into which people can drop things in a secure way. It runs im in the same school that bob is in, which is that these things happen by getting out and trying to understand policy and get people to explain what theyre doing or understanding their objections to what is happening. And that is usually how we find these things. So when the times came up with the idea of putting in this secure drop and i think the wall street journal has now done. 99 of the stuff you get in there is going to be crazy and 90 of what is in there is crazy. But some of it is interesting. And there is a bad bureaucracy out there who feels a threat. Bob could i ask ben a question . Im somebody in the government and i come to you, a private lawyer and i come to you and i say i have documents and information im going to give the New York Times and the Washington Post, how would you recommend that i do it . We have to do a conflicts check to see if i can represent you or not. Let me make sure we are differentiating between two things. There is a big difference. There is the drop of things about policy in the environmental area or the vastness of what the federal government does where for whatever reason you are giving things to the press. That is unclassified government information. We arent going to get into the legalities or appropriateness of that. I dont think it comes into that drop. What we are talking about here is lets talk about National Security information. And are you dropping classified