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Ten Questions with James Rosen, Fox News Chief Washington Correspondent

Ten Questions

Taylor Griffin

April 5, 2017

Ten Questions with James Rosen, Fox News Chief Washington Correspondent

In nearly two decades covering Washington, James Rosen has interviewed Presidents, broken important stories and at times been at the center of the story himself. The Obama administration targeted Rosen as a “co-conspirator” in a 2010 leak investigation stemming from his exclusive reporting on North Korea, prompting outrage among First Amendment advocates that resulted in major reforms. As one of Washington’s smartest and most insightful journalists, Rosen has chronicled history in the making. But he’s also an accomplished writer and historian with three books and numerous essays to his credit. Roughly Explained talked with Rosen about Trump, Russia, the state of journalism, and — of course — the Beatles for this week’s Ten Questions. The story of Russian influence in a U.S. election was bound to stir political passions. As a serious journalist, how do you separate the reality from the nonsense?

The task is more complicated for today’s journalist than it was for his predecessors only by virtue of the proliferation of sources, outlets, assertions and allegations, and the accompanying growth in the output of sheer nonsense. But the same basic precept as has always prevailed prevails here and now: Caveat emptor. Check stuff out. The good news is that the same Information Age that contributed to this unwelcome proliferation has also made it easier than ever before to access data and do due diligence.

There’s a lot of controversy over unnamed sources, yet especially in national security reporting, it’s difficult to do your job without them. How do journalists evaluate the credibility of anonymous sources when they use them?

The good reporter will ask, silently or otherwise, a series of questions of his anonymous source: How well do I know this person? How reliable has he been in the past? Is he in a position to know the information he is claiming to know? Does he tend to present claims that are susceptible to substantiation via other means? And lastly – of some importance but not always dispositive or even relevant: What is his motive in providing information to me?

You’ve got a new book out, A Torch Kept Lit: Great Lives of the Twentieth Century, which is a collection of obituaries of the late conservative icon William F. Buckley. You knew Buckley and interviewed him over the years. In 2000, you asked Buckley what responsible historians would write about Bill Clinton’s presidency. I’ll ask you the same question, what should responsible historians write about our current political moment?

Naturally, the good reporter will be more reluctant than Bill Buckley, the peerless commentator, to engage in the inherently dangerous business of prognostication; rather, the good reporter will comfortably confine himself to recounting that which has recently transpired. But in broad terms, I suspect future historians will aptly pay attention to the structural forces grinding away, features of globalism and digitalization, that conspire to make our politics less civil and less efficacious.

You’re also a historian of the Watergate scandal. It’s tempting to view the Russia controversy through the same lens. Is that a fair comparison? What are the similarities and differences between the two?

The American people have become inured to the brandishing, on a near daily basis, of the word “Watergate” to describe this or that. It strikes me that too little is yet known about the current situation to merit comparisons to the great scandal of 1972-75. The closest analogue to the Nixon era is the persistent allegation – and it remains only that, at this point – that individuals connected to the Trump campaign somehow colluded with the Russian government in the Kremlin’s effort to meddle in the 2016 election. In general terms, this mirrors the allegations that the 1968 Nixon campaign used a backchannel to the South Vietnamese government to prevent the Johnson White House from using a bombing halt, in the weeks before the election, to bring about a peace deal that could sway the contest to Vice President Humphrey: the so-called October surprise. I wrote about these intrigues in my book The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.

Watergate has been popularly viewed as a triumph of the Washington Press Corps. In Strong Man, your biography of Nixon Attorney General James Mitchell, you show that the press got a lot wrong about. What are they getting wrong now?

Only thanks to the unusually thorough record-keeping of the Nixon administration – including, above all, the president’s own taping system – and the increasing access to those records over the passage of several decades’ time did it become possible to provide a thorough corrective to some of the worst, most inflated, sensationally wrong news media coverage of the Nixon era. It is by definition too soon to draft such a corrective for today’s coverage, but the reality is that no administration will ever again preserve the history of its internal deliberations with the same thoroughness that Nixon and his aides exhibited, and so we will likely never be able to correct the record of our times with the same accuracy. This is also true by dint of the proliferation of sources, outlets, assertions, allegations, and sheer nonsense averred to earlier: There simply isn’t enough time or bandwidth to correct it all nowadays. It forces us, I think, to redefine our conceptions of the scope of what we used to call media criticism.

On the flip side, there’s been resistance among Trump supporters to take the Russia investigation seriously. You hear a lot about the “deep state” — a cabal of intelligence operatives and bureaucrats loyal to Obama seeking to damage Trump as an explanation. What do you make of that charge?

In an interview for Fox News last month, I asked Vice President Pence whether the Deep State exists, and if so, of whom it consists and what its aims are. He said he himself hasn’t used the term, but added that he believes President Trump “has rightly been concerned about leaks that have been happening out of this administration.” I’m not sure that what some today call the Deep State is all that different from what used to be called the Shadow Government or the permanent bureaucracy. Sidney Blumenthal, the longtime Clinton adviser who played a critical role in the scandal over Secretary Clinton’s private server, actually published a book in 1976 along these lines, entitled Government by Gunplay. One could also point, by way of precursors, to the Moorer-Radford scandal, wherein the Joint Chiefs of Staff were discovered to have been stealing documents from the Nixon-Kissinger NSC and leaking the contents to syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, thereby helping him to win the 1972 Pulitzer Prize. I also wrote extensively about this in The Strong Man.

https://youtu.be/JZy-MCJtLaU What are the legitimate questions raised by the Russia investigation that we need answered to understand what really happened?

We must be careful to avoid the inclination to consider as legitimate the posing of any question that can be made to sound legitimate. For now, we are obliged to take the FBI Director at face value when he testified before Congress last month that the FBI saw a legitimate need to investigate “the nature of any links between individuals associated with the Trump campaign and the Russian government and whether there was any coordination between the campaign and Russia’s efforts” to meddle in the election. Comey was, somewhat unfairly, unwilling to acknowledge in that same highly publicized setting whether the FBI is also investigating the unmasking of Trump-related names from intelligence reports, an action we now know to have been ordered by Susan Rice; and who leaked such data to the news media. Those would also seem to be very relevant questions.

Trump’s tweeted charge that Obama tapped his phone has been widely disparaged. You actually were subjected to a court order in a leaking that allowed Federal investigators to rifle through your email. This has been offered as evidence that Trump was on to something. Do you think that’s right?

The relevance of my case in relation to the current situation is simply that it established the proclivity of the Obama administration to exceed the bounds of lawfulness in its use of surveillance against improper targets, and its development of tenuous legal theories as a predicate for doing so. President Trump’s specific claim, that President Obama “wire tapped” him, remains unproved and is likely false, as the chairs and ranking members of both intelligence committees, and other relevant officials and former officials, have pointed out.

You were at the center of several controversies during the Obama administration from leak investigations to the selective editing of a State Department press briefing. Some would say that now Trump is taking it to a new level. How does the Trump administration’s approach compare to Obama’s?

Nothing the Trump administration had yet done to, or in connection with, the news media approaches in nature or severity what the Obama administration did in the same realm; the actions there were not merely distasteful but criminal. That said, the Trump White House, and the president himself, while no doubt correct in many of their complaints about biased and dishonest news coverage, have said and done things to specific members of the news media, and to specific news media organizations, that make me uncomfortable and discouraged about the future trajectory of the relationship. Ultimately, the top officials in this White House need to recognize that the American people they were elected to serve care less about Jake Tapper and Katy Tur than about the Chinese and the Russians, and about the pressing problems created by things like automation and runaway entitlement spending.

Trump’s battle against the media has made your profession a pariah among Trump supporters. What would you say to a Trump supporter who distrusts journalism about how they should view the media today?

I would only presume to speak for myself and for the program on which I most frequently appear, “Special Report with Bret Baier,” which airs weeknights at 6p ET. Watch that show for a week and tell me if you think we aren’t living up to our motto of “fair and balanced” reporting, wherein “we report, you decide.” It’s the best, most comprehensive political news show on television today, and even the most fervent Trump supporter would be obliged, I should think, to agree.

Finally, what Beatles song do you think would be most apt as a soundtrack to our present political moment?

Ha! First, allow me to say how grateful I am that you didn’t pose some variation of the Inevitable Question that true Beatles freaks like me receive all the time from non-freaks, and regard as heretical and offensive: namely, Which is your favorite song/album/Beatle? (Which of my children should be rescued from the burning building? How to compare the genius of “It Won’t Be Long” with that of “Hey Jude”?) As for which Beatles track best suits our current moment, one could do worse than to remember the lyrics of “Within You, Without You,” George Harrison’s Indian-flavored classic on the Sgt. Pepper album, released fifty years ago June 1:

Try to realize it’s all within yourself, no-one else can make you change And to see you’re really only very small And life flows on within you and without you

Follow James Rosen on Twitter: @JamesRosenFNC

Books by James Rosen

What Susan Rice Unmasking Trump Names in Intel Reports Means

Russia Connection

Taylor Griffin

April 4, 2017

What Susan Rice Unmasking Trump Names in Intel Reports Means

Bloomberg National security columnist Eli Lake reported on Monday that former National Security Advisor to President Barack Obama Susan Rice requested that names of Trump associates mentioned in intercepted communications between foreigners, and in some cases communications between Russian officials and members of the Trump team, be “unmasked” in classified intelligence reports. Such requests aren’t improper, but it’s not routine. Normally, a U.S. person’s name would be obscured from intelligence reports derived from foreign surveillance. For example, an American might be referred to as “U.S. Person A.” In some cases, when the identity of the U.S. person is critical for understanding of the foreign intelligence, an official will request that it be “unmasked.” Unmasking does not authorize the leaking of information. It also does not mean that Trump officials were targeted for surveillance as the President claimed in a tweet last month. But, it does raise questions about whether the “unmasking” broke rules intended to protect the privacy of Americans incidentally picked up in the process of spying on foreigners. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the names of U.S. persons are supposed to be obscured “unless such person’s identity is necessary to understand foreign intelligence information or assess its importance.” Such U.S. person information can also be revealed for law enforcement purposes if it involves evidence that a crime has been committed or will be in the future. A counter-intelligence investigation of Russia’s election interference would obviously create a situation in which knowing the names of U.S. persons involved was important. Nothing would make much sense if you didn’t know whether it was about at least one U.S. person, Donald Trump. Most of the intercepted communications were reportedly between foreigners. To the extent they discussed Trump campaign officials, assessing the conversation requires knowing who they are talking about. If there turned out to be an intercepted conversation between a Russian intelligence officer and a Trump associate about Moscow’s efforts to sway the election in Trump’s favor, a name would obviously be relevant there too. Some “unmasking” is to be expected. But, Lake’s column says that at least some of the unmasked names appeared in reports that do not pertain to Russia. Some also reportedly contain politically useful information about the Trump campaign and transition.

“One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.”

One reason you cannot unmask a person is to gain useful information for political reasons. We don’t know what the information actually was and whether it was important in some other way for foreign intelligence purposes. But, if names of Trump associates were unmasked for political reasons that are not pertinent to understanding foreign intelligence information, then we’ve got two scandals on our hands.

“If names of Trump associates were included for political reasons that are not pertinent to understanding foreign intelligence information, then we’ve got two scandals on our hands.”

Abuse of foreign surveillance for political purposes seems far-fetched. But, Rice is already a lightning rod. Her claim that the 2012 Benghazi attacks were protests, rather than the work of terrorists, put her at the center of a heated controversy. Last month, Rice said in a PBS interview that she was unaware of any such incidental surveillance on Trump associates. If Lake’s report is accurate, Rice apparently was not telling the truth. Whatever the case, Congress needs to get to the bottom of it.

The American Health Care Act: An Autopsy

Publius Valerius

March 30, 2017

The American Health Care Act: An Autopsy

Autopsy, a noun: a postmortem examination to discover the cause of death or the extent of disease. After President Trump and Speaker Ryan declared the American Health Care Act dead, it is time to conduct an autopsy on it. The primary cause of death was bad floor management by congressional leaders. Contributing factors were: Speaker Paul Ryan’s preference for policy over legislative details; the process used to draft the AHCA; disengagement at the White House; President Trump’s lack of knowledge of both the subject matter; the Freedom Caucus’s intransigence; and former Speaker Boehner. Bad Floor Management A simple political axiom states: Never schedule a vote on legislation before you know you have the votes to pass it. Speaker Ryan and his leadership team violated that simple truth. Ryan and Trump said they were close. They never were. Congressional observers and staff knew the AHCA would fall between 25-30 votes. Trump “ordered” Ryan to hold an AHCA vote, but that was one day after Ryan postponed a vote – which meant Ryan didn’t have a majority of Republicans. Trump, or any President, has zero direct say in what happens at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. If you don’t believe that, reread the Constitution, specifically Article I, Section 5: “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings . . .” Ryan, Majority Leader McCarthy, Whip Scalise, and Deputy Whip McHenry control the floor. They decide which legislation is voted on, when, in what order, whether amendments are allowed, and the debate time. Ryan: A Policy Wonk, Not a Legislative Tactician In order to understand why Ryan made what Minority Leader Pelosi called a “rookie error,” you first need to know that, while Ryan is a brilliant policy wonk, he is not a legislative tactician. The AHCA is an example of this lack of legislative finesse. Ryan apparently believed he could obtain the 20-some-odd votes needed through a deal with the Freedom Caucus. But, the compromises required to bring them on board would cause GOP moderates would jump off. Ryan did not want to be Speaker, but took the position because he was the consensus choice. He would be happier in a lengthy discussion with Bill Clinton over methods to improve educational outcomes than in legislative strategy. After the 2012 presidential campaign, Ryan quietly toured anti-poverty programs. He wrote a more than 200-page policy manifesto based on those visits. Before last year’s elections, Ryan created a document called “A Better Way” that laid out his vision of solutions to America’s problems. As the Washington Post, noted, the AHCA “was sketched out” in Ryan’s agenda. The drafting of the AHCA is an example of Ryan’s lack of legislative tactics. His policy staff largely drafted the bill behind closed doors, incorporating some language from bills introduced in the 114^th Congress by Tom Price (then the Budget Committee chairman), and the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. The Ryan draft was presented to the chairmen of the Energy & Commerce and the Ways and Means committees. That effectively cut Members out of the process. Members like to be involved in the process. When the legislation was shown to Members, they reviewed copies of the bill in an office guarded by armed U.S. Capitol Police. No staff were allowed into the room, and Members were not allowed to take copies with them. Lawmakers were furious at the process. One said Members have easier access to classified information. Lack of Staff at HHS While Ryan and his leadership team had a major role in the AHCA debacle, the White House also bears some of the blame. There is not a deputy secretary in place at the Department of Health and Human Services. Two people are in charge of legislative affairs at HHS, but neither has formally been nominated. For those outside the Beltway, the legislative affairs shops at federal agencies are responsible for getting the President’s agenda through Congress. Trump tried to enact a major overhaul of healthcare with Tom Price in charge of HHS and no one to help him. Price served in the House for 12 years. But he cannot run a major agency and guide major legislation through the process. No one could. The administration’s point man on the AHCA was Reince Priebus. He was chosen because he is from Wisconsin and is a personally and politically close to Speaker Ryan. However, Priebus has never held elective office at any level. He cannot possibly understand bill drafting, process, and legislative coalition building. To use an analogy Trump would understand: It was like hiring someone with no drafting experience to be the architect for your first major skyscraper. Trump Shares Blame Then there is the President himself. Members and lobbyists who spoke with Trump say it was obvious that he did not understand the intricacies of the AHCA and its possible effects on both the marketplace and voters. Trump ran on a mantra of repeal and replace. In order to achieve such a lofty goal, he had to propose legislation. The President allowed Ryan to take AHCA and run, with little input from the White House. Trump only became involved in the process of selling the bill when it already too late. He tried to get lawmakers to support the AHCA through pep talks and rides on Air Force One. That will never work when Member are faced with the choice of an airplane flight with the President or winning re-election. Guess which one politicians will take. …And the Freedom Caucus As the President and numerous commentators have pointed out, the Freedom Caucus also played a role in the death of the AHCA, through its insistence that the bill be amended numerous times to meet their belief in a limited federal government. No one should doubt that tenet, just as no one should doubt the liberals want a more expansive federal government. This argument has been ongoing since before the Constitution was adopted. A major criticism of the Freedom Caucus has been that its members still act as if they are insurgents, rather than incumbents. The caucus has a tendency to oppose legislation, rather than to come up with solutions. A majority of the Freedom Caucus members opposed the AHCA. In an effort to get the votes need for passage, Ryan agreed to some of the caucus’ demands. In so doing, he lost moderates. In the end, the numbers were not there, and the AHCA was pulled. The Freedom Caucus succeeded in its efforts to kill a measure it saw as too expansive. Ironically, the end result was that a huge expansion of the federal government was left in place. …And Former Speaker Boehner Six years ago, the Freedom Caucus – which at the time largely was composed of members elected in 2010 – nearly shutdown the government when it refused to support a budget that included money for Planned Parenthood. That budget fight emboldened the Freedom Caucus. The fault for that lies squarely with John Boehner. Imagine what Sam Rayburn or Tom DeLay would have done if Members who had not been in office for a full year threatened them. Rayburn and DeLay would have put the lawmakers on little-known committees, never recognized them in the well, spiked any bill they sponsored or co-sponsored, taken their parking spots, and moved their offices to the fifth floor of the Cannon House Office Building – the House equivalent of Siberia. But Boehner caved. He agreed to allow a stand-alone measure to defund Planned Parenthood come to the floor. As a result, the caucus became emboldened. Otto Von Bismarck supposedly said, “Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made.” When it comes to the AHCA, Bismarck was wrong. It was like being at the abattoir watching the cow be slaughtered. The author is a former congressional staffer.

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What We Can Take from the GOP Obamacare Repeal Debacle

Politics

Taylor Griffin

March 25, 2017

What We Can Take from the GOP Obamacare Repeal Debacle

President Donald Trump sounded weary when he stepped in front of the press to announce that the GOP’s Obamacare repeal had failed to rally enough votes to clear the House Friday. It was the President’s first real lesson in the hard realities of governing. On social media, Trump’s extensive back catalog of bravado about his dealmaking prowess fueled a merciless Twitter at its snarky worst. The truth is that the GOP Obamacare repeal bill was doomed from the start. The demise of the American Health Care Act (AHCA) was as much a failure of vision as a failure of dealmaking. It took a year to pass Obamacare. The idea that the AHCA was going to get through in a month was dubious. It led House Speaker Paul Ryan, eager to score a quick win, to design a bill mostly to meet the demands of a fast-track legislative procedure called budget reconciliation. This would allow it to pass the Senate with a simple majority rather than the 60 votes normally required to break a filibuster. But, there is a catch. Reconciliation is limited to budget-related matters. This severely limiting the scope of what the bill could actually do. In the end, it was crippling. By design, AHCA was a half measure — neither full repeal nor sweeping reform. It was a bill with a few things to like and something in it for everyone to hate. Conservatives saw it as little more than a defanged version of Obamacare. It replaced Obamacare’s premium subsidies with tax credits — which are essentially the same thing, just smaller and called by a different name. More modest premium subsidies, which were based on age rather than income, would hit older, poorer people hardest, turning off moderates. It gave new flexibility to governors in running state Medicaid programs, but reduced federal funding. Flexibility is nice, but governors would rather have the money. It also ended the individual mandate, a win for the free market that came at the expense of an unhelpful Congressional Budget Office estimate that 24 million people would choose to drop health care coverage when AHCA gave them the option to do so. No House member relished the idea of facing reelection amid headlines of an explosion in uninsured. President Trump threw himself into selling the bill, but never mastered its tedious details. He cajoled some, threatened others. But, ultimately the art of this deal eluded him. AHCA was to be the first in a three stage process. Its passage was to be followed by regulatory modifications and then a second bill that would perform the remaining heavy lifting of reform. Few believed that second bill would ever happen. Judging from the ignominious fate of this one, they believed so with good reason. Without the broader market-based reforms planned in the second bill, it is hard to see how AHCA would have been much better than what it replaced. Trump was like a car salesman pitching a model that he was never quite sure would actually run, reluctant especially at first, to fully embrace it. He resisted the moniker “Trumpcare.” Trump withheld his name. Members of Congress withheld their vote. Republicans have ideas about health care. Good ideas. Ideas that would actually work. Yes, a more full-throated reform might not qualify for the budget reconciliation process, but it might have the virtue of actually improving the health care of Americans. While it would surely face opposition in the Senate, at least Republicans would have the opportunity to lay out a complete vision for health care reform that could form the basis for a public debate — and in some parallel universe — perhaps even bipartisan consensus. In the current environment of partisan animosity and warring Republican factions, a more substantial reform probably would have died in the Senate too. But, it would have been an honorable death at least. AHCA couldn’t even pass the House. Governing is not as easy as it looks. Our elected leaders are sent to Washington to govern on behalf of the American people and enact policy solutions that improve their lives. The AHCA is a stark example of the extent to which our Representative democracy has instead become about putting political points on the board. In their zeal to score an easy win, Speaker Ryan and the President seemed to forget altogether that governing was actually their job. Rather that propose a meaningful, comprehensive and workable replacement for Obamacare, they chose to settle for what they thought would be an easy layup. They missed. Before we sneer in disgust, we should look in the mirror too. We’ve cheered political blood sport and yawned at serious policy for years. We should not be surprised when the leaders we elected do the same. They learned it by watching us. When we don’t put our time in as citizens to understand the issues our nation faces and to vote thoughtfully, we get the government we deserve. This is that government. Politicians have promised Obamacare repeal for years. They said it was simple. It isn’t. The lesson here is that there is no such thing as a free lunch — and reforming health care is hard. The only thing harder than health care might be tax reform. Word is, that’s up next. Oh boy.

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Trump’s Syria Airstrike Explained

Tensions with Russia

Trial by Reality

Ten Questions with James Rosen, Fox News Chief Washington Correspondent

Books by James Rosen

What Susan Rice Unmasking Trump Names in Intel Reports Means

The American Health Care Act: An Autopsy

READ MORE

What We Can Take from the GOP Obamacare Repeal Debacle

House Intel Chair: Trump Team Surveilled — Was Trump Right After All?

KEY POINTS

Three Big Questions:

Were FISA minimization procedures for “unmasking” properly followed?

Was the dissemination of the information beyond what was required for national security purposes?

Did anyone break the law by leaking classified information?

Read More:

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Why CBO’s Estimate of GOP Obamacare Replacement May Overstate Negative Effects

Here’s what the CBO estimate found:

Nothing Unusual About Trump Asking U.S. Attorneys to Resign

In their first two years in office: