So i think those are really key as well, the research and the length of the research to service delivery. You can watch all of this online at cspan. Org. Well leave here and take you live to a discussion hosted by Georgetown University looking at how journalism has changed since the pentagon papers of 1971 and what the implications are for National Security leaks. The Washington Post bob woodward participate in his first panel and later, Martin Barron. Live on cspan 3. President trump is calling these leaks low life, unamerican and criminal and then we have daniel ellsburg. Did many of you hear him last night in his speech . Calling for more leaks to keep the constitution and the country secure. We have a Super Star Panel here to talk about the issues of balancing National Security with a free press and how that balance is changing or ben might argue whether theres a balance at all at this point. Well find out. Let me introduce you. Next to me, a man who im sure you are all familiar with, bob woodward, which is the investigative journalist with the Washington Post, deeply involved with watergate coverage and much more. Next to him is benjamin powell. He was general counsel at the director of National Intelligence officer at both democratic and republican administrations and another very familiar name at the end, david sanger, the National Security correspondent for the New York Times. Id like to talk about 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 a lot of answers to the key questions zb do you think well get those answers eventually . You know, as ben bradley, the former editor at the post used to stay, the truth emerges. Sometimes it takes decades. Sometimes it comes out rather quickly. But i think there should be a kind of patience with all of th this. Its highly unusual to see this early in the administration. Usually, when leaking, you have to assume whenever theres a transition, the people who come into the administration have come out of the campaign. They believe that their candidate, the new president , walks on water, and loyalty is sort of at its highest. So i havent covered as many administrations as bob has. I didnt mean that as an issue, but. You said, one said, what was calv calv Calvin Coolidge like . Even had parking garages. Not sure they had cars. So, but, its been my experience since i got back from a happy life as a Foreign Correspondent and entered into a three year assignment to washington that has now stretched to 22 or 23 that usually administrations begin leaking after the first crew is gone and a group has come in to undo whatever damage the initial crew did and wants to explain to you how much more brilliant they are than the people replaced. That process usual takes three years into an administration. Weve got this starting in week one, two, and lthree. I think that reflects a different phenomenon under way. First, the executive orders, the first things to leak, the first big things, were put together by a small group of people who did not consult broadly and because they didnt consult broadly, they had a lot of early mistakes. So we saw in the immigration executive order that nobody had hou thought about the green card holders and longterm visa holders and the promises we made to interpreters in iraq, so forth. And then there was an order which we still havent seen on detention that called for reopening the black site Interrogation Centers as if there are countries around the world yearning to get our black site Detention Centers reopened. I think those leaks were intended to go as a warning sign to other members of the Trump Administration who may not have seen the early crafts to say, hey, youre about to go walk off a cliff and you better read these drafts and once second and third versions laek leaked, the missing the black sites. The old circulatory system wasnt working. Thats group one. The second set of leaks, i think, you have seen have been just about the inner turmoil within 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 in our career who know what things are supposed to be operating like at this point in time and recognize that that process has fallen apart. And 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, theres a lot that we dont understand yet about that. The nfc is basically going back to day one at this point. Youve got to, before day one. They have to go create themselves as if you were starting the transition. That may be okay if we run on auto pilot as long as nothing goes wrong. What are the chances of that given the pace of echvents arou the world . I think the second set of leak cen s is a warning. You keep saying leaks. Bob is right. These are not coming to us. Executive orders might be slightly different. Everything else is coming out of hard reporting. Are you concerned at all about this, ben . As someone from the National Security . Its a bit of a vicious cycle because what is the reaction when you see drafts published or leaked . The reaction is not necessarily, okay, well, lets make sure were consulting broadly and widely and sharing to get input. Often the reaction is lets draw the circle even tighter which then has the negative effect, of course, of not being able to 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 said, i know youre going to sign 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 is 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 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, i mean, legally. I remember talking to a group of antidemmics some time ago in the george w. Bush administration and they said, well, no. The constitution says congress will declare war. 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 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. 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 great, but what are those key decisions in the areas that are real National Security . Not things on paper. David, you want to jump in . First of all, i think bob is right that the first month is 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 cay why is or forghaos chaos. Otherwise, it will look like a wrong foot and didnt get back on. What strikes me as interesting in covering this administration is, it has not been a Straight Line in any way. Theres been nothing linear about covering this, folks. There are sop thime things they 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 everybody. It was sort of the model of how you used to go do this and it was 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. 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 or 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 zbl a 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 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 been told to pack their bags. I read the ones on the seventh floor sort of a dual 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 and i think hes discovering 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. 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, 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 combined, 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 NuclearProgram OperationOlympic 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 have the leak of communication and intelligence is a crime. That is different. Not just the publication. Exactly. Exactly. I know one of the subsequent panel wills get into the legalities. I dont want to dump too deep in there but 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. Never seen anything like that because im in the same pool bob is in, that things happen by 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 but so when the times came up with the 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 maybe 90 of what you get there turns out to be crazy. But some is pretty interesting and when you discover is that there is a vast bureaucracy out there that feels. Can i ask ben a question . Im somebody in the government and i come to you and say, i have documents and information. I want to give the New York Times or the Washington Post. How would you recommend that i do it . First, do a conflicts check to see if i can represent you or not but getting past that, so the, lets make sure