"You were really shouting at him.... Your shouting, though, was really loud.... You want to get more information from him, not... telling him what he needs to do. You kind of sounded like you were telling him what to do.... You don’t want to do that."

Said Bob Woodward's wife — Elsa Walsh, also a reporter — after she heard him talking on the phone to then-President Trump.

Quoted in "The Trump Tapes: 20 interviews that show why he is an unparalleled danger" (WaPo).

Woodward's response was "Okay. But we’re in a different world now, sweetie."

You can hear Bob Woodward yelling at Trump at the link. WaPo and Woodward are making a big thing out of sharing the tapes. Shades of Nixon, perhaps, or so they hope. But Trump wasn't speaking to his insiders in secret. He was doing an interview with Bob Woodward. Yet Woodward and WaPo present this disclosure of the "tapes" as if they are stretching the limits of their professional methods in order to warn the public about... what they've been warning the public about throughout the Trump era:

"Much has already been said, tweeted and complained about The Washington Post’s tagline, 'Democracy Dies in Darkness'.... It’s harsh, foreboding and alarming."

"But it’s also true. When people don’t know the facts, a government of the people is impossible. So then why do the Post and many other legacy news publishers leave so many Americans in the dark? See, if you want to read a Post article, including this one about how they came up with the tagline back in 2017, you might be blocked by a paywall.... I often refer to people who don’t pay for news as 'passive' news consumers.... [T]hey’re... consuming the news that comes to them through their daily scrolling of social media feeds, email inboxes and conversations with people they trust.... Passive consumers may have faith that good, accurate news about the world and their own communities will somehow find them. But with few exceptions, they’re wrong about that. Increasingly, the fact-based news that’s necessary for a pro-democracy citizenry is behind a paywall. On social media, passive consumers are more likely to see propaganda that capitalizes on the ways information is distributed there. Biased algorithms reward salacious and emotionally charged content — often favoring right-leaning messaging that is outright false....With a major political party upholding the Big Lie and sowing mistrust in our incredibly secure elections, we have no more time to waste on out-of-touch debates. News organizations must instead seize the opportunity before us to once again serve as the bulwark of our democracy and get factual information to the people...."

Writes Tara McGowan in "Democracy dies behind a paywall/Paywalls bolster news organizations’ bottom lines, but leave Americans in the dark. As a public service, let everyone read election stories for free" (Poynter).

There are more kinds of passivity — and propaganda — than McGowan acknowledges, and she's — ironically — doing propaganda of her own. But, yeah, paywalls are gumming up the works.

In case you're wondering what was in that 2017 WaPo article about its ominous slogan, I crossed the paywall for you:

"Leaks can serve a really important role in helping to correct government malfeasance, to encourage government to be careful about what it does in secret and to preserve democratic processes."

Said Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, author of "Power and Constraint: The Accountable Presidency After 9/11," quoted in The Washington Post on December 6, 2012, in a column titled "Why we don’t need another law against intelligence leaks" (by Leonard Downie Jr.).

And here's a CNN piece by Princeton history professor Julian Zelizer, "Why Washington is leaking like a sieve," published May 31, 2017:

"The lack of an official White House notation of any calls placed to or by Trump for 457 minutes on Jan. 6, 2021 – from 11:17 a.m. to 6:54 p.m. – means the committee has no record of his phone conversations as his supporters descended on the Capitol..."

"... battled overwhelmed police and forcibly entered the building, prompting lawmakers and Vice President Mike Pence to flee for safety.... The House panel is now investigating whether Trump communicated that day through backchannels, phones of aides or personal disposable phones, known as 'burner phones,' according to two people with knowledge of the probe, who, like others interviewed for this report, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive information."

From "Jan. 6 White House logs given to House show 7-hour gap in Trump calls/The House select committee is now investigating whether it has the full record and whether Trump communicated that day through backchannels, phones of aides or personal disposable phones, according to people familiar with the probe" by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (Washington Post). 

Bob Woodward — his name on the article evokes the Watergate scandal and its famous gap — the 18-and-a-half gap in the Nixon tapes. Who did it?!

One indelible image sums up the lameness of the official explanation:

The morning shows "say whatever comes to their mind, like writing a fictional novel" and books "are made up stories and should only be sold as fiction."

According to a "Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America" that went up yesterday.

Here's the full text (which is, I assume, someone's tightly edited transcription of what Trump is saying these days):

Not even possible to believe the lies, exaggerations, and outright fraud committed by very poorly rated Morning "News" Shows about the January 6th protest. They say whatever comes to their mind, like writing a fictional novel. The press has lost its way at a level that is not even believable. Books, likewise, are made up stories and should only be sold as fiction. These are terrible human beings that do this to our Country. The 2020 Election was a fraud rife with errors, irregularities, and scandal. The Radical Left knows it, the media knows it, and the Patriots of our Country know it, and now the U.S.A. is paying a big price—it is very sadly going to hell!

I try to remember to check Trump's website every day, so I can get the equivalent of what once were his tweets. I see that today he sent us to the Newsweek article: "Bob Woodward Says He's Never Seen a Former President With as Much Political Strength as Trump". 

Here's the full quote from Woodward (who does not put this "strength" in a positive light):

"If The New Yorker is going to make gaffes like 'deadbeat,' I'm going to have a lot more trouble going along with things like 'lambent.'"

I'm quoting something I just wrote because I want to let you know there's a big new addition to this post from yesterday.

Also: "There's a part of me that wants to admire the writer's way with words and a part of me that's about to blurt — to paraphrase George W. Bush — What the fuck are you talking about, lambent?"

That link about Bush goes back to a post I wrote in May 2004, when this blog was 4 months old and William Safire was still writing "On Language" columns in the NYT.  Oddly enough, Safire was talking about a passage in the new Bob Woodward book. 

Some things pass away and some things stay the same. From Safire:

"The Homeland Security bill was being blocked in the Senate by a filibuster,'' writes Woodward. ''Calio told the president that they were about to 'vitiate' the filibuster."

George Bush's reaction —"What the f**k are you talking about, vitiate?" — was the first time I'd written "fuck" on this blog, albeit with asterisks. I was puritanical about it, saying it was a word "which I ordinarily never write, but consider importantly quotable in this context." Ha ha.

IN THE COMMENTS: 

Deevs said:

Lambent. A word I learned from playing the Gears of War video game over ten years ago. Maybe that's also where the New Yorker writer learned the word, and his pretentiousness is actually a demonstration of his own low-brow hobbies, past or present.

Aha! 

"The Lambent are mutated Locusts who have been infected by Immulsion. A yellow liquid-based parasite used as a fuel source by the Human population of Sera..."

You can watch the sunset of news stories at Mememorandum River.

Memeorandum is my favorite place to find news stories to blog. It displays them according to some mysterious automatic process that reflects what people are talking about. You get the headline with a link, then the names of places that are discussing it — including Althouse, sometimes — all linked.

For example, right now, the top of the page is dominated by the story that Michael Bloomberg is going to spend $100 million to benefit Joe Biden. (Rich people have a right to spend their own money to say whatever they want to say. It's not a contribution, so there is and can be no limit on the amount spent.) That story pushed down what was dominating a little earlier today, the headline "Roger Stone calls for Trump to seize total power if he loses the election."

I don't know if Stone really said that, but I also don't care what Roger Stone says. I'm satisfied to see that story sink, and it made me wonder: What about Woodward? Is he still getting talked about, what with that new book of his and something he heard Trump say last winter, something about Trump knowing Covid-19 was going to be terrible but wanting also to inspire optimism. I searched the Memeorandum front page. Woodward was gone.

Now, a nice thing about Memeorandum is that you can click to reformat it as Memeorandum River. In the River format, the stories that appear on the main page are simply in chronological order. So you see the date and time that a much-discussed article first appeared on Memeorandum. There were lots of stories about the new Woodward book. It was a big deal last week. Has it slipped out of active discussion already? With Memeorandum River, I can see the last time there was anything new. It was 12:10 p.m. on September 11th: "Senate Republicans scramble to contain fallout from Woodward bombshell" (The Hill). Well! I guess the "fallout" is contained. The Hill had collected some bland statements by Republicans. Stuff like: "I just wonder whose vote will be changed by a Bob Woodward book."

In the a.m. of September 11th, there were 3 stories:

9:25 AM Wall Street Journal: Woodward's Non-Revelation — There's no need for the tell-all books. Trump tells us every day...
9:07 AM Howard Kurtz / Fox News: Why Trump talked, though he feared an ‘atrocious’ book from Woodward...
7:25 AM CNN: Vulnerable Republicans avoid criticizing Trump after admission to Woodward about downplaying virus

I won't bother to make links. You can see the story dying in those headlines.

When did the Woodward story begin?, you may wonder. The River answers that question: September 9th. Last Wednesday. Such a bombshell that day! Remember? It lasted 3 days. You can see it rise and fall over at the River.

When Trump said "I wanted to always play it down" and not "create a panic," did he believe that 11 million Americans were going to die?

11 million is what I believed, when I did my own math in early March. Multiply the U.S. population — 330 million — times the predicted death rate — 5% — and imagine an infection rate of 70%. You get 11.5 million!

Now, I'm looking at the transcript of Trump talking to Bob Woodward on February 7th, and Trump — comparing the coronavirus to the flu — says: "This is more deadly. This is 5% versus 1%, and less than 1%. So this is deadly stuff."

He believed the death rate was 5%! Fortunately, that turned out to be wrong, but Trump had to speak and act using the imperfect information he had, and — if he spoke truthfully to Woodward — he believed 5% of those who get infected would die. He envisioned a far worse dying off of Americans! I don't know what percent of Americans he thought would become infected, but he was using the same 5% death rate that I'd used to get to 11 million. Even if you go down to 30%, you still end up with a shocking number: 5 million!

Here we are today, thinking that approaching 200,000 is horrible, but back when Trump was talking to Woodward, I believe he was thinking that millions of Americans would die. The health care services would be overrun, and we would be dying without access to any care. Would health workers even continue to show up for work? How could the food supply chain continue? We would starve and, before that, panic about the prospect of starving. Americans would soon be at war with each other. There would be civil disorder — far beyond the Black Lives Matter riots — and the disease would spread even more quickly, with nothing to stop it.

In that light, consider what Trump said to Woodward on March 19th (in the same transcript), "Well, I think Bob, really, to be honest with you... I wanted to always play it down. I still like playing it down because I don’t want to create a panic."

If the real prediction of death — 5 to 11 million — had been stressed in early February, how would we have behaved? Would we have flattened the curve and preserved access to medical care the way we did? There's a lot of trashing of Trump right now over how he handled the crisis, but the criticism of his effort to suppress panic is — in my view — completely wrong.

"The fact Bob Woodward has written another book about the current occupant of the White House should be greeted with roughly the level of enthusiasm reserved for..."

"... such annual or semi-annual non-events as the Biennial Conference of the American Hippotherapy Association or the Pro Bowl. I would be tempted to suggest that the latest affectless, indifferently written Woodward volume is a matter of at most seasonal interest, like the early September appearance of Halloween candy in supermarkets, except that unlike the former, Rage is unlikely to bring pleasure to any living American.... Why do presidents talk to Woodward? Is it some kind of tradition, cloying but innocuous like the White House Turkey Pardon? His modus operandi is by now fairly well established: Speak to him because if you do not he will publish hundreds of pages of decontextualized gossip from disgruntled agenda-driven current or ex-employees. He will in fact probably do so regardless of what you say to him and when, but why spoil the fun? What Woodward does is not journalism. It is, as Joan Didion memorably put it, 'political pornography.'"

From "There's nothing shocking about Bob Woodward's new book" by Matthew Walther (The Week).

ADDED: On that question "Why do presidents talk to Woodward?," here's Politico, "Behind Woodward’s September surprise: White House aides saw a train wreck coming, then jumped aboard":

"You meet a woman. In one second, you know whether or not it’s going to happen. It doesn’t take you 10 minutes and it doesn’t take you six weeks. It’s like, whoa. OK. You know? It takes somewhat less than a second."

Said Trump to Bob Woodward, using an analogy to explain how he felt about Kim Jong-Un, quoted in "Trump Attacked Generals as Weak and Too Focused on Allies, Woodward’s Book Says/The journalist Bob Woodward’s 'Rage,' which will be released next week, recounts tense conflicts between the president and his senior leaders" (NYT).

Any actual bombshells in Bob's new book? Well, we hear that according to his trade adviser, Peter Navarro, Trump said "My fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals." And he "called the United States military 'suckers' for paying extensive costs to protect South Korea."

And former Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis said: "When I was basically directed to do something that I thought went beyond stupid to felony stupid, strategically jeopardizing our place in the world and everything else, that’s when I quit."

And Woodward talked to Trump and tried to get him to say something about race other than that a good economy is good for black people:

When Mr. Woodward pointed out that both he and Mr. Trump were “white, privileged,” and asked if Mr. Trump could see that they both have to “work our way out of it to understand the anger and the pain, particularly, Black people feel in this country,” Mr. Trump replied, “No,” and added, “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”

The NYT characterizes that as a failure to be "reflective."

"Under pressure over his possible impeachment, President Richard M. Nixon supposedly talked to the paintings in the White House. President Bill Clinton..."

"... absently toyed with his old campaign buttons. President Trump punches out Twitter messages in the lonely midnight hour. Long after his staff has gone home, long after the lights have gone out elsewhere around the capital, the besieged 45th president hunkers down in the upstairs residential portion of the Executive Mansion venting his frustration and cheering on his defenders through social media blasts."

Big news. The President tweets. A lot. When he's getting impeached and when he's not getting impeached.

But this is the NYT, assuring its readers that "For Trump, Impeachment May Be a Political Plus, but Also a Personal Humiliation." The anti-Trumpers know they're losing — he won't be removed and he's even benefiting politically — but damn it, at least they're humiliating him. The desire to humiliate — such a lowly emotion. And yet, the NYT is using it to pump up its despondent readers.

Subheadline: "As the House moves toward what even he says is an inevitable vote to impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors, President Trump toggles between self-pity and combativeness." Toggles! How do they get this detail on the inside of his head?

The fact is he's not doing anything special to impeachment — nothing like talking to paintings or fingering old buttons. It sounds like Trump continues to Trump, same as ever. In which case, he's not losing it. He's carrying on — bold and tough, fighting and seeming to enjoy and get energy from the fight.

By the way, is it true that Nixon talked to the paintings? The NYT avoids responsibility for fact checking with the word "supposedly." It's a story. They say he got to talking to paintings.

I did my own brief research on the topic and stopped when I came to a Frank Rich column in the NYT, titled "Has He Started Talking to the Walls?" The date is December 3, 2006. 2006 — it is not about Trump. The question that the NYT would like to aim at Trump was aimed, back then, at George W. Bush:

It turns out we’ve been reading the wrong Bob Woodward book to understand what’s going on with President Bush. The text we should be consulting instead is “The Final Days,” the Woodward-Bernstein account of Richard Nixon talking to the portraits on the White House walls while Watergate demolished his presidency. As Mr. Bush has ricocheted from Vietnam to Latvia to Jordan in recent weeks, we’ve witnessed the troubling behavior of a president who isn’t merely in a state of denial but is completely untethered from reality. It’s not that he can’t handle the truth about Iraq. He doesn’t know what the truth is....

So let's not forget: George Bush got the same treatment from the NYT.

Talking to paintings is a favorite way to say the President has gone mad. But Trump has tweeted all along. Nothing has changed. He hasn't gone anywhere. The tweeting is right there, a direct line from the President's brain to us, and we can see whether it's changed or not. Talking to paintings is something that a President does in isolation, withdrawing, and becoming abstracted — "untethered from reality." Tweeting is the opposite. It's totally connected and out in the open. It's something the President does with us — leaping over the press.

We don't have to wait for Bob Woodward to find out what happened behind the scenes. It's all already on the public stage. If the tweets are any crazier than before, we could see that — unless we've all gone crazy together and have grown accustomed to the weirdness — and we wouldn't need the NYT to tell us about it.

I just bought the Kindle version of "The Final Days" so I could see exactly what it said about Nixon talking to paintings. I think this is the only passage:

“The President . . . ” [Nixon's son-in-law Ed] Cox began. His voice rose momentarily. “The President was up walking the halls last night, talking to pictures of former Presidents—giving speeches and talking to the pictures on the wall.”

ADDED: Proofreading this post, I saw the answer to my question "How do they get this detail on the inside of his head?" It's: They're reading the same tweets that we are. They don't have special access to sources. They're simply interpreting the same tweets we get.

As I said, Trump has leaped over the press. It must be so annoying for them. Maybe they're talking to paintings. Maybe to a painting of George W. Bush: Oh, George! How I miss you now! How good you were to let us trash you for 8 years and never to stoop to attacking us, like your miserable successor!

"Audience members in a Washington, DC, synagogue hurled boos and heckles at journalist Bob Woodward..."

"... when he repeatedly interrupted two New York Times reporters during a discussion about their new Harvey Weinstein book Wednesday evening. Woodward was speaking to reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at the Sixth and I synagogue about their book 'She Said' when audience members began walking out, booing and tweeting criticisms of the questions posed by Woodward.... 'Let her finish!' one audience member shouted from a balcony.... [A]nother shouted, 'All women deserve to be heard!' when Woodward asked the authors about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.... 'When @mega2e explained she built trust w sources by talking abt how the harm can’t be undone but together they can build constructive power from pain, Woodward interrupted, giddily, "that was your standard line?"'.... 'Twohey and Kantor told Woodward repeatedly that they believed Weinstein’s assaults were about "power," but he didn’t seem satisfied'.... 'So it’s about power?' she said he asked. 'It’s about sex also though, isn’t it?'"

From "Bob Woodward booed, heckled during #MeToo book conversation" (NY Post).

Show me the video. I'm assuming Woodward did a fine job and the NYT reporters benefited from his keeping it lively. But maybe it was one of these mythic examples of a sexist man controlling women's speech.

If I didn't maintain rudimentary trust in the basic integrity of The New York Times...

... I would think that there is no real person behind the famous anonymous op-ed. I'd think it was a concocted composite based on the Woodward book and motivated by the Woodward book. Look how that little thrown together collection of paragraphs is now drawing more attention than the book Woodward labored over, which dominated headlines on Tuesday. Wednesday, this column comes out. What is in the column that couldn't have been extracted from the book and worked up into an op-ed purporting to be from a senior official in the White House?

That's just a conspiracy theory. I couldn't help thinking it, but I don't believe it's true, because I think the NYT has too much of a stake in at least the appearance of journalistic integrity. I do think that the real senior official who wrote the op-ed felt stimulated by the Woodward book, maybe thinks it's a good idea to add momentum to the various stop-Trump efforts, and is perhaps close to resigning and hoping to depart into the open arms of the Trump-hating elite.

"Woodward describes 'an administrative coup d’etat' and a 'nervous breakdown' of the executive branch..."

"... with senior aides conspiring to pluck official papers from the president’s desk so he couldn’t see or sign them. Again and again, Woodward recounts at length how Trump’s national security team was shaken by his lack of curiosity and knowledge about world affairs and his contempt for the mainstream perspectives of military and intelligence leaders. At a National Security Council meeting on Jan. 19, Trump disregarded the significance of the massive U.S. military presence on the Korean Peninsula, including a special intelligence operation that allows the United States to detect a North Korean missile launch in seven seconds vs. 15 minutes from Alaska, according to Woodward. Trump questioned why the government was spending resources in the region at all. 'We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,' Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told him.... 'Mattis was particularly exasperated and alarmed, telling close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — "a fifth- or sixth-grader."'... White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly frequently lost his temper and told colleagues that he thought the president was 'unhinged,' Woodward writes. In one small group meeting, Kelly said of Trump: 'He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown. I don’t even know why any of us are here. This is the worst job I’ve ever had.'"

From "Bob Woodward’s new book reveals a ‘nervous breakdown’ of Trump’s presidency" (WaPo).

"In a new book, Bob Woodward plans to reveal the ‘harrowing life’ inside Donald Trump’s White House."

WaPo reports.

[“Fear: Trump in the White House”]... derives its title from an offhand remark that then-candidate Trump made in an interview with Woodward and Post political reporter Robert Costa in April 2016. Costa asked Trump whether he agreed with a statement by then-President Barack Obama, who had said in an Atlantic magazine interview that “real power means you can get what you want without having to exert violence.”

At first Trump seemed to agree, saying: “Well, I think there’s a certain truth to that. . . . Real power is through respect.” But then he added a personal twist: “Real power is, I don’t even want to use the word: ‘Fear.’ ”

Woodward, who declined to be quoted for this article, has privately described the remark as “an almost Shakespearean aside.”...

This Washington Post article — "How a dubious Russian document influenced the FBI’s handling of the Clinton probe" — is extremely hard to read.

I needed to read it out loud with Meade and discuss it sentence-by-sentence and almost word-by-word. It took me at least 10 minutes to get past the first 2 sentences.

So I don't have the time or patience to parse through this entire thing, and I encourage you to read it carefully and try to figure out what the Washington Post is trying to pump up or minimize, who's lying or stretching the truth, and whether the underlying story in the document has any element of truth to it. Why did 3 of the 4 key characters named in the document flatly deny everything and one refused to speak?*

If everyone always thought the document was unreliable,** why is it being held up now as having had an effect on Comey's decision to go public in July? There's an idea that he was afraid that the Russians would be able to dump this story after Lynch took a position, undercutting her authority. But why did it help for Comey to go public first? The story could still have been dumped on him, undercutting his authority (though it wasn't).

It seems that Comey just knew about a (fake?) story that the Russians could dump if and when they wanted. What exactly was he afraid of and why are we hearing about it now? And how do I know the story wasn't true? It sounds like something that could have happened... in which case, why tell us about it? What's the motivation to leak a story about a fake story if everyone always thought it was fake? Is it that the story is true and they're trying to get out ahead of it with some sort of reason why we should perceive it as fake?

We're told that several of the "people familiar with the Russian document" — anonymous people who aren't supposed to talk about it — are — in the words of the Washington Post — "concerned that revealing details now about the document could be perceived as an effort to justify Trump’s decision to fire Comey." So, there's a document that might help Trump, but they want to make sure that it's only used to — to what? — help Comey? Why are they revealing it when they're not supposed to? We're told these people support Comey, but then shouldn't it be clear how this document explains why Comey did what he did last July? It's certainly not clear. It seems to have had more to do with protecting Loretta Lynch and helping the Clinton campaign, and I don't know who it helps now. If it doesn't help the people you want to help, why are you leaking?

The more labyrinthine it feels, the more I lean toward accepting the story that Debbie Wasserman Shultz really did write that email. And in the current manner of doing political analysis — when it's aimed against Trump — I could say let Wasserman Shultz prove she didn't do that.

And this really puzzled me:

While it was conducting the Clinton email investigation, the FBI did not interview anyone mentioned in the Russian document about its claims. 

Why not?! We're supposed to believe that the document had a big effect and 3 of the 4 people named in it would flatly deny what it said, but they were never asked? Why not? Either it's just a crap document that no one ever believed or it needed to be checked out. The only other option seems to be that they didn't want to know whether it was true. Why not?

I feel as though I have to try to unravel the WaPo report because I cannot trust WaPo to do anything other than to try to hurt Donald Trump.*** I have to take it apart and put it back together in some guess at what might be a straight story.
_____________________

* The document says that there is email from Debbie Wasserman Schultz (then DNC chair) to Leonard Benardo (of George Soros's Open Society Foundations) saying that Loretta Lynch had assured Amanda Renteria (a senior Clinton campaign staffer) that — as WaPo puts it — "the email investigation would not push too deeply into the matter." Wasserman Schultz, Leonard Benardo, Amanda Renteria all deny, and Loretta Lynch won't talk about it. And yet we are told that Lynch did meet with FBI officials, and that she told them — in what was not a formal interview — "I don’t know this person [Renteria] and have never communicated with her." If that is correct, why wouldn't she acknowledge as much when WaPo tried to talk to her for this article?

** I'm assuming that there is a document and that it's from the Russians, but that's just what the Washington Post tells me its unnamed sources are telling them.

*** I'm thinking about what I heard Bob Woodward say this morning on C-SPAN:

“There is this kind of sense of too many people writing things like—when is the impeachment coming, how long will it last, will he make it through the summer, and so forth. No, there may be stuff that comes out, but it has to be hard evidence. I worry for the business and I worry for the perception of the business by people, not to just Trump supporters, but people that see that kind of smugness that they are talking about.”

"The Washington Post's Bob Woodward warned... that there are people from the Obama administration who could be facing criminal charges for unmasking the names of Trump transition team members from surveillance of foreign officials."

"During an interview on Fox News, Woodward said that if that information about the unmasking is true, 'it is a gross violation.'"

He said it isn't Trump's assertion, without proof, that his predecessor wiretapped Trump Tower that is of concern, but rather that intelligence officials named the Americans being discussed in intercepted
communications....

"[T]he idea that there was intelligence value here is really thin," Woodward said. "It's, again, down the middle, it is not what Trump said, but this could be criminal on the part of people who decided, oh, let's name these people."

He drove the point home, adding that "under the rules, that name is supposed to be blanked out, and so you've got a real serious problem potentially of people in the Obama administration passing around this highly classified gossip."

An excellent discussion of the latest Hillary Clinton email problem on "Fox News Sunday."

This is a bit long and starts slow, but the different commentators bring different perspectives that I'll try to highlight, so stick with me:

CHRIS WALLACE:   In 2011, when an aide was having trouble sending her material by a secure fax, she sent these instructions: "If they can't, turn into nonpaper with no identifying heading, and send nonsecure." Bob Woodward, why is this important? 

Bob Woodward: Bush did not lie about WMD in Iraq.

Today, on Fox News Sunday, Chris Wallace asked Bob Woodward about the questions the GOP candidates have been getting about Iraq: Was the 2003 invasion a mistake? Woodward answered:

[Y]ou certainly can make a persuasive argument it was a mistake. But there is a time that line going along that Bush and the other people lied about this. I spent 18 months looking at how Bush decided to invade Iraq. And lots of mistakes, but it was Bush telling George Tenet, the CIA director, don't let anyone stretch the case on WMD. And he was the one who was skeptical. And if you try to summarize why we went into Iraq, it was momentum. The war plan kept getting better and easier, and finally at the end, people were saying, hey, look, it will only take a week or two. And early on it looked like it was going to take a year or 18 months. And so Bush pulled the trigger. A mistake certainly can be argued, and there is an abundance of evidence. But there was no lying in this that I could find.

Woodward was also asked if it was a mistake to withdraw in 2011. Wallace points out that Obama has said that he tried to negotiate a status of forces agreement but did not succeed, but "A lot of people think he really didn't want to keep any troops there." Woodward agrees that Obama didn't want to keep troops there and elaborates:

What's on bin Laden's bookshelf?

Noam Chomsky, Bob Woodward....