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Center for Strategic and International Studies Bob Schieffer’s “About the News” with H. Andrew Schwartz Podcast Subject: “Jake Tapper and Trump’s First Press Conference” Speaker: Jake Tapper, Chief Washington Correspondent, CNN Hosts: H. Andrew Schwartz, Senior Vice President for External Relations, CSIS Bob Schieffer, CBS Political News Contributor; Former Host, “Face the Nation,” CBS News Date: Friday January 13, 2017 Transcript By Superior Transcriptions LLC www.superiortranscriptions.com (Music plays.) BOB SCHIEFFER: I’m Bob Schieffer. H. ANDREW SCHWARTZ: And I’m Andrew Schwartz. MR. SCHIEFFER: And these are conversations about the news. We are in the midst of a communications revolution. We have access to more information than any people in history. But are we more informed, or just overwhelmed by so much information we can’t process it? MR. SCHWARTZ: These conversations are a year-long collaboration of the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. (Music plays.) MR. SCHIEFFER: Jake Tapper is our guest this time. He’s one of the lead anchors at CNN, moderator of their Sunday talk show. He’s won many, many awards over the years, worked at ABC before coming to CNN. He’s reported from Iraq, Afghanistan, and has covered big stories domestically, including Hurricane Katrina, as well as the work he’s done from Washington. Jake, welcome. Let’s start with your latest big one. You were a part of the CNN team that broke the story about the intelligence agency’s briefing President-elect Trump on Russian hacking – a briefing that included this information from non-intelligence sources that claimed the Russians had information that could possibly be used to blackmail Donald Trump. This obviously set off a whirlwind of discussion. And when the website BuzzFeed then published the document itself, it really stirred up a controversy – not the least of which came at Mr. Trump’s recent new conference when he denounced CNN and refused to take questions from CNN reporter Jim Acosta. So what’s the latest news here on all this? JAKE TAPPER: The latest news – first of all, let me just say, it’s great to see you, Bob. And as a fan, we miss you on Sunday, even though I don’t miss you beating me every Sunday. MR. SCHIEFFER: (Laughs.) Well, you’re nice to say that. MR. TAPPER: But the latest news is, when we reported this on Tuesday night it was a team – a real team effort – me, Jim Sciutto, Evan Perez, and Carl Bernstein – first time I ever shared a byline with Carl Bernstein, which was always, of course, fun. MR. SCHIEFFER: Not a bad thing. MR. TAPPER: Yeah. And the thing that we weren’t sure about when we reported this was we knew that this was in the briefing materials, this two-page synopsis of these charges and allegations that came from a source not from intelligence – from U.S. intelligence. The one thing we didn’t know was did they present this verbally? We knew that it was in the materials. We thought that they had presented it verbally, but we were not sure about it on Tuesday night. So we said that in the story. We said this is in the materials and, you know, we weren’t sure if it had been presented verbally. We now know that it was presented verbally. And we reported yesterday, Thursday, that it was in a pull-aside. FBI Director Comey – after all four of the briefers met with President-elect Trump and his team – Comey, Brennan, Clapper, and Admiral Mike Rogers – there was a separate moment with Comey – FBI Director Comey and President-elect Trump in which they talked about this synopsis. I had been told that. And I had one source on that before we broke our story Tuesday, but we didn’t get a second source or a third source until yesterday. So that is the latest. So he was actually given the material verbally. MR. SCHIEFFER: Why did you not publish the document itself? You obviously had it. MR. TAPPER: We thought about what to say and how to say it and what to say. And we decided that what was most important was stick to the facts, stick to what we know. We couldn’t corroborate any of the allegations in that – in those series of memos by the former MI6 agent – not one of them. And some of the stuff was pretty out there. And, you know, a lot of organizations had seen those memos, including CNN. But what made this news was that the intelligence community – the leaders of the intelligence community had presented this to President Obama and to President-elect Trump. So we felt like it was unfair and incendiary to put the uncorroborated allegations out there. And we should point out that the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper issued a statement after our story saying that this was not the work of the intelligence community – the U.S. intelligence community. And they had made no judgement on how reliable the information was. They didn’t say it was wrong. They didn’t say it was right. They said they had not been able to ascertain it. But that wasn’t – you know, that’s not good enough for us. We knew that – we knew that that’s what their opinion was of the information. And so we decided to stick with what we knew and to – and to basically report on the synopsis that they included in their presentation to President-elect Trump and President Obama, and not the underlying document because that underlying document was full of uncorroborated raw – you can call it raw intelligence – raw information, some of it gossip. And, you know, people who are familiar with the situation say, you know, there are things in there that are true – I mean, benign things, that this person talked to this person. But then there are things in there that nobody knows if it’s true or not. MR. SCHIEFFER: Shortly after you broke this story, BuzzFeed published the document. And the editor, Ben Smith, said he did so in the interest of transparency. He thought that the American people needed to know what people were talking about. And so they published the document. What was your reaction to that? MR. TAPPER: I was upset about that. I was upset that they published the document. And let me just say, first of all, I’ve known Ben Smith for a long time. I like him a lot. I think that BuzzFeed does a lot of really good journalism. They have really – you know, they have excellent reporters there who do sourced stories. This decision really upset me. And I don’t think I’m talking out of school because I’ve said this on air. I thought it was irresponsible. I conveyed privately to Ben that I thought it was a bad decision. I thought it was a bad decision for a few reasons. One of them is this idea that, like, well we have this information so we’re just going to let the public decide, that’s not what we do. That’s not our job. We’re journalists. We are supposed to suss out what is true, what is not true. And if something – if we can’t ascertain that something is true, then we don’t go with it. It doesn’t matter if that would be clicks or viewers or whatever. We don’t. And there are any number of mistakes that media organizations have made throughout the years – CBS, CNN, ABC, NBC – in which that happened and it was scandalous, and it was inappropriate, and it turn the news organization. So that’s one. I thought that it was just – that’s not what journalists do. Two, I knew that this was going to be able to be used as a way to dodge our, CNN’s, solid reporting on this, that there was going to be – that any politician would conflate the two. Look at all this crazy stuff. And then, you know, say: Look at all this crazy stuff, and then not answer any questions about any of it, such as did the intelligence officials present you with this information, what was your response, is there anything in there that has you concerned, et cetera. I mean, James Clapper said in his statement that part of their job is to also provide information, even stuff they didn’t produce, that might have national security implications. That’s when he basically confirmed our report, this two-page synopsis. What national security implications are there? I mean, that’s from the director of national intelligence. So I suspected that President-elect Trump and his team would use this as an effort to conflate bad journalism with good journalism. I was unfortunately right. And so, I mean, those were the – and the larger theme – and, Bob, you and I’ve talked about this – is bad journalism undermines good journalism. People lose faith in us. When there’s one bad decision by a journalistic enterprise we all get lumped in with that. You know, I’m getting accused of doing things in my report that I never did, of making charges that I never made, of providing information I never did. Some of that is, you know, people doing it for a political reason. I think there are probably a lot of people out there who actually think I did those things and that CNN did those things.