<p> The President and the Press: The First Amendment in the First 100 Days April 12, 2017, at the Newseum’s Walter and Leonore Annenberg Theater</p><p>Session 1: The Press as a Watchdog</p><p>David Thank you. Thanks, everybody, for coming. I'm so glad to be here at the start of what Fahrenthold: should be a really, really interesting morning. First, I should say, for those of you who have not been following, The Washington Post has a new pretty gothic motto, "Democracy dies in darkness." In accordance with the new company policy, that's the new [inaudible 00:00:21] staff to set the mood. We'll turn down the lights, turn on the fog machine, and I brought a CD of haunted house sound effects. We're just going to have two minutes of organ music and screams to get everybody ready. I guess that's not possible. Thank you. Well, just imagine. I want to say this right at the beginning, this is a time of extraordinary power for the media in Washington. I mean that, power. Although there are a number of people, some of who may come on this stage later today who've called us fake news or the enemy of the people, we ... The truth is that we live in a time when the folks in power, the folks with power in Washington often lack the cohesion, the ability, the organization to shape the narrative about themselves.</p><p>Usually, one of the dynamics that we deal with in Washington is that a presidential administration is acting as a unit to shape the way the public sees them. We don't have that now, for better or for worse. The public, more than ever, depends on us, on the news media, to make sense of what's going on in Washington. We've even seen times where the people who have power depend on us to make sense of what just happened to them. Remember why did Mike Pence ... or how did Mike Pence, the vice president, learn that the national security advisor, Mike Flynn, had mislead him about his contacts with the Russian ambassador? He read about it in The Washington Post. How did house republicans find out a couple of weeks ago that this healthcare bill, this Obamacare bill, they've been talking about for months had been pulled without a vote? The read about it from The Washington Post and The New York Times, who the president himself had called to spread the news, apparently trusting that Robert Costa, my colleague, and Maggie Haberman from The Times would get it right.</p><p>One of the dynamics that we dealt with last year in the transition period before President Trump took over was this ... the power of his Twitter feed. His ability to use Twitter to get around us or to ... actually, more often to command us to cover whatever he wanted. We've now seen, even in a few weeks, that President Trump has diluted the power of that weapon, diluted the power of that account by repeatedly use it to hint that he would do things that he would not do, or to make claims that he had no evidence to back up. Just to pick one example, "If Chicago doesn't fix the horrible carnage, I will send in the feds." He did not send in the feds. Three million people didn't vote illegally, he wasn't wire tapped in Trump tower, as far as we could tell. Those actions, those tweets have taken away what was this ability to act as America's national news assignment editor from his bath robe, or from his bed, from his bath robe, from his kitchen table. That ability that no president had ever had, to sort of command the media, like we saw in January. It doesn't exist anymore.</p><p>We come back to the idea that people now rely on us more than ever to make sense of what's going on here. What's our responsibility now, as the news media, at this moment of unaccustomed influence? Well, beyond the age old requirements that we be right, </p><p>Page 1 of 5 The President and the Press: The First Amendment in the First 100 Days April 12, 2017, at the Newseum’s Walter and Leonore Annenberg Theater</p><p>Session 1: The Press as a Watchdog</p><p> and we be fair, and we be fast, I would say there's a requirement now to be more transparent than ever. We have all these people who normally tuned into Washington political coverage in the last month of a presidential election and then tuned out again, those people are now engaged. They're reading, they're excited, or they're encouraged, or they're terrified. Whatever it is, they're reading the details of house intelligence committee meetings and [inaudible 00:03:43] intelligence investigations and appeals court decisions in Maryland and Hawaii. All of these things that used to be things that we covered for a Washington audience and some audience beyond, now have this enormous national audience.</p><p>Those people coming to us for the first time, or acting as a sustained audience for the first time, we must show them why we're better. We have to show them. If they don't know it form our name, they don't come to us and know from the name The Washington Post that we're going to be better, we have to show it to them in our work. Last year, in the course of reporting this stories about Donald Trump's charitable giving or promises to give to charity, I tried to use social media as a means of that kind of transparency. I used it to try to show readers what I knew, what I was trying to learn, what I still didn't know, and how I knew what I knew. This kind of began not by any plan, but by necessity. Last year, in May, I had this reporting problem, a problem I'd never had to deal with before. I'd been writing for months about this promise that Donald Trump had made to give money to charity, to give $6 million that he'd gathered from the public, including a million dollars out of his own pocket, he said he would give to veterans.</p><p>I couldn't figure out where the money had gone. Bulk of the money, I couldn't account for, especially the million dollar that came out of Trump's pocket. I couldn't figure out where he'd given it. Then, Corey Lewandowski, Trump's campaign manager at the time, called me. He said Donald Trump had given the million dollars away, this was in May, four months after the original promise. "Donald Trump has given the money away to a veterans group," or, "to veterans groups," but he couldn't tell me when or how or what amount, anything else. "He's not going to share that information," Lewandowski said. We just had to take his word for it, but I don't want to take his word for it because this is a hugely important promise. Donald Trump had made his concern for veterans and his ability to make veterans lives better a huge part of his ... huge selling point of his presidential campaign. If he's going to say he'd give a million dollars to his own veterans ... his own money to veterans, I want proof. How do you get it? You can't call every veterans group in America, it would take forever. You wouldn't be able to prove a negative. You couldn't prove that he gave no money away.</p><p>I tried to prove a positive. I tried to find some evidence that Donald Trump had given some of that money ... I tried to find one dollar of this million dollars, and I did it on Twitter. Here's one example. I tweeted at veterans organizations, veterans advocates, journalists who covers veterans, celebrities who advocate for veterans, anybody who was active in the world of veterans on Twitter. I asked them have you ... Have you gotten any ... even one dollar of this money Trump gave away, this million dollars? Do </p><p>Page 2 of 5 The President and the Press: The First Amendment in the First 100 Days April 12, 2017, at the Newseum’s Walter and Leonore Annenberg Theater</p><p>Session 1: The Press as a Watchdog</p><p> you know anybody who did? I included Trump's handle, as you can see, @realDonaldTrump, so Trump himself would see. The idea being either a veterans group would see that I was looking for it and say, "Hey, you didn't ask me, but I got a ... I got $100,000 from Trump and here's the proof," or Trump himself might see and then come forward and tell me what he gave.</p><p>I spent a day searching this way on Twitter and I found no money. I didn't find a dollar. Turned out that was because the money did not exist. When Donald Trump ... When Corey Lewandowski told me Trump had given the million dollars away, he had not. It was only until that night, May 23rd, the night of May 23rd, after I had done this long public search that Trump actually gave the million dollars away. He gave it away to ... In one fell swoop, all million dollars to a group called The Marine Corps. Law Enforcement Foundation, whose leaders he knew. There we go. Trump called me the next day to say that he'd given the money away. I asked Trump, did you just give this money away now because I was asking about it? Then he called me a nasty guy, as you can see here. This is the last time we've talked. Later, the scope of my reporting widened and we said, "If Donald Trump had been willing to try to wiggle out of a promise to give a million dollars under the brightest spotlight we have in journalism, which is a American presidential campaign, what had he been trying to do when nobody was looking, back before when he was just a private citizen?"</p><p>We found evidence that he'd been promising to give away millions of dollars over the years, and again, set out to prove him right. I started calling charities. I asked the Trump campaign for help in identifying charities he'd given money to, they didn't respond. I set out on my own identifying charities that I thought were the most likely to have gotten money from Donald Trump. If he gave money to anybody, he would have given money to them. I made a list on a piece of notebook paper and I took pictures of it and posted it on Twitter. I eventually got to 450 charities. Again, these are charities that Trump had praised in public, that had rented out ballrooms from him at Mar-a-Lago, charities that he had given money to from his foundation, which was not his money. Anybody that I thought if he'd given a dollar of his own money, they would have gotten it. I also thought maybe he would call again and tell me the truth of what he'd given. This time he did not call. My search turned up between 2008 and 2015, a period in which Trump had said he was giving millions of dollars away. It turned up one gift out of his own pocket out of those 450 charities that was for less than $10,000.</p><p>In this process, I used social media to ask Trump supporters, Donald Trump, anybody who might know where Donald Trump had given away his money to come forward and make a suggestion, I'd add it to the list, call them and see if they'd gotten his money. The same time, I was using social media to try to solve another problem, which was the Donald J. Trump foundation, this charity that Trump ran but it wasn't really his money, it was other people's money. He'd been using it to buy things that you really shouldn't use your money to buy if you run a charity, like giant portraits of yourself. In one case, Trump had bought, with money from his charity, he paid $10,000 to buy a large portrait of himself. I needed to know where that portrait was because if he bought it with the </p><p>Page 3 of 5 The President and the Press: The First Amendment in the First 100 Days April 12, 2017, at the Newseum’s Walter and Leonore Annenberg Theater</p><p>Session 1: The Press as a Watchdog</p><p> charity's money, it has to be used for charitable purposes. Whatever Trump had done with this giant portrait of himself, it had to be a charitable purpose. I need to know where it was.</p><p>This is one of a number of times in which I asked my readers for help, I asked Twitter followers for help, and they amazed me with their ingenuity. They found things that I would never have thought to find on my own. In this example, there's a reader of mine named Allison Aguilar, who's a ... she's a stay at home mother and a short story writer in Atlanta. She had the idea to look on the TripAdvisor page for Trump's golf course at Doral, where people had posted pictures of the 18th green or their hotel buffet or their hotel bathroom. 350 photos in, she finds, at the very bottom there, a picture of Donald Trump, the portrait that I had been searching for. This missing portrait was shown on a TripAdvisor page hanging on the wall of the sports bar at Trump's golf resort in Doral. That's a huge break, but the portrait in the picture that she found was dated February 2016. It's now, as you can see, September. I need to know where is it now.</p><p>That same night, a guy named Enrique [Asevedo 00:10:29], who's an anchor at Univision in Miami, he does this Spanish language national broadcast from 11:30 to midnight. He sees that I have retweeted Allison, and we know where the painting was, at least in February. He realizes Doral was four blocks away from his studio. He makes a reservation for that night, using points, he doesn't want to give Donald Trump any of his money. He uses points. He goes over to the ... He goes to Doral, he checks in. It's late, it's like 12:30 at night. He asks the cleaning crew to let him into the sports bar and there it is, in the flesh. In 14 hours, we went from not knowing where in the world this portrait was, it could have been anywhere, it could have been thrown away, it could have been anywhere to having it on the wall, in the flesh. In the case, apparently breaking the law.</p><p>Just as a post script, one of the funniest parts of this story was the explanation for how this portrait ... From the Trump campaign of how this portrait came to be hanging on the wall of his sports bar. They said, "Well, it ... it a- it may appear that the charity did the ... the sports bar a favor by buying art that now hangs on this sports bar's wall, but really the sports bar is doing the charity a favor by storing their charitable portrait on the wall of the sports bar." This got me one of my favorite quotes of this whole story was ... a legal expert said, "It's hard to make an IRS auditor laugh, but this would do it." Since President Trump's inauguration, I've seen a number of other news outlets using social ... using transparency, sort of embracing transparency in other ways beyond social media. Other people have done a great job of that as well.</p><p>One example is the great things that The New York Times and the FT have done recently where they post the full transcript of their interview with Donald Trump. They sit down and talk to Trump, they want to give people ... Instead of just their write up, their summary, they want to give people every word so that people can dig through it and find things that they think are interesting and just see the whole picture, see what questions were asked, see how Trump responded. You also see it in a raft of really incredible stories recently from us at The Post, The Times, The New York Times, The </p><p>Page 4 of 5 The President and the Press: The First Amendment in the First 100 Days April 12, 2017, at the Newseum’s Walter and Leonore Annenberg Theater</p><p>Session 1: The Press as a Watchdog</p><p>Wall Street Journal, Politico, where they talk about how they ... They're writing about west-wing [inaudible 00:12:38] fighting and they tell you exactly how many people leak to them from within the west-wing and often, if you're somebody like me who doesn't cover The White House, it's more people than you thought worked in the west-wing that are being quoted ...</p><p>There's a Politico story that I really admired recently where they talked about a rebranding effort in the west-wing where 20 ... I think 20 people had been gathered together to talk about the messaging of President Trump's first 100 days. Their story said that six of those 20 people had leaked. It's a very ... an incredible rate, but I talked earlier about how we want to show people why what we do is better. If you read that story and you see that six out of the 20 attendees leaked to this story, you have a lot of confidence that story is right. Being that transparent helps readers understand that we're not fake news. It helps them trust more what we do. It also helps us by forcing us to focus on what we know, and to be more explicit in our writing and our thinking about how we know what we know.</p><p>If you want to call a 20th source just because you think it would be better to have 20 leakers rather than 19 in your story, that 20th person might tell you something you didn't know, might tell you something that the other 19 people didn't say. It might tell you that the first 19 people were wrong. The story gets better. I think being more explicit about how we know what we know and exactly who we've talked to only makes our reporting better and only increases that trust.</p><p>In closing, for the news media, our new power should come with a profound sense of humility. An openness to criticism about what we ignore, what we don't think is worthy of an explanation. We have to be ... as we become more transparent, we have to listen to what comes back in from people who think that we're not doing it right or that we're missing the story. I hope that with greater transparency, we can show readers why we deserve their time and their trust. I hope it makes it more likely that we question ourselves in the process of explaining our work to others. I look forward to hearing more from a lot of people today, this should be so fascinating. Thank you for letting me start it off.</p><p>Page 5 of 5</p>