tv Reliable Sources with Brian Stelter CNN June 13, 2021 8:00am-9:00am PDT
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i'm brian stelter live in new york and this is "reliable sources" where we examine the story behind the story and figure out what is reliable. right now a live look at windsor castle where in the coming hour, president biden will meet with the queen. it is expected around noon eastern time. we're watching for his landing at heathrow airport and we'll take you there live when' rives. ahead of the arrival this hour, arrest fauci. that is a real headline that ran on the fox news home page. how did dr. fauci of all people become a right wing boogeyman. we'll show you coming up. plus the destruction from israel's air attack on that building housing the ap office
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in gaza. what was the evidence behind israel's claims that hamas was in the building. we have new information and we're going to take you inside of the meeting between the a.p. and the israeli ambassador to the u.s. with reps from both sides coming up. plus propublica bombshell about the taxes of american billionaires, but what about the course of the information. we're going to get into the ethic debate with a top editor from propublica, coming up. but first gagging the news media. there is a big meeting coming you on monday at the justice department and it effects all of us because it is about the first amendment. for several weeks we've learned how the trump era doj spied on the press and pursued leakers to do so. first we learned about the secret seizing of phone records from reporters and then the gag orders against "the new york times" and cnn. and now there are still so many questions out there. recenttories have also shown how
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democrats on capitol hill were also targeted by trump's doj so it is obviously why he set the tone from the top by blasting leakers for four years. >> i'd like to find out who leaked to the papers. >> i biggest leakers. >> i can't believe it didn't get leakers. >> it is leakers and liars. >> we're going to find the leakers. they're going to pay a big price for leaking. >> so now what? how is the biden era doj going to right these wrongs considering the gag order for "the new york times" remains in place well after biden took office. this affects everybody. as because charlie savage wrote in the new york times this weekend, the seizure of journalist communications data jeopardizes particular sources but could frighten others with newsworthy information into staying silent.
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so you may know less about your government and that brings us to monday. merrick garland responding the to the high level meeting. he's going to citizen down with some of the people on the screen, "the new york times" and washington post and cnn. one of the attendees will be sam feist. the washington bureau chief and he is here with me now. sam, thanks for coming on. it is always a special occasion when you're here with me. >> morning, brian. thank you for having me. >> we've learned a few days ago, well let's go back to last sunday, i was blowing up your phone saying were we under a gag order and low and behold a few days later we learned that the top lawyer was indeed under a gag order into the barbara starr case where her email records were obtained by the government. what do we know about that situation with cnn? >> so, what we know and what you and i weren't in a position to talk about last sunday is that
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cnn was under a gag order, our general council for 11 months. the government was seeking an extraordinary trove of records, phone records, email records, personal email of our pentagon correspondent barbara starr and david knew it but he couldn't tell us, he couldn't tell me. he couldn't even tell barbara starr because of the unprecedented department of justice gag order that they had imposed on him. so he had to litigate this with the government in the dark without being able to share with frankly his clients and we never [ no audio ] >> they were calling for a meeting with the doj even before we learned about the gag orders. so what is on agenda on monday with the attorney general? >> so, it is a simple goal. it is to protect the freedom of the press now and in the future. i don't think it is -- i think it is interesting today, this very day is the 50th anniversary
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of the "new york times" publication of the pentagon papers, june 13th, 1971. what our goal is tomorrow is to make sure that the pentagon papers and other stories of extraordinary public interest could be published in the future. so our job is to protect that and to protect journalists. >> do you expect garland to be forthcoming? for example, we don't know why the trump doj was going after barbara starrs or what leak they were pursuing. do you expect the doj now to tell us is that. >> we don't know the story. we know that in the summer of 2017, the period that the records cover, barbara starr was reporting on afghanistan, and iran and syria and north korea. but we have no idea what story they were even looking at in this investigation. so we're hoping that they're going to give us more. we're hoping they're going to tell us more. we do know that in an inspector
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general investigation has been opened and we welcome that. but of course we want to learn more about what they were looking for and of course the most important goal tomorrow is to prevent this from happening in the future not just by the biden administration, but by future administrations. >> let's get to that in a second. but did trump weaponize the doj to targetia enemies. it loo it looks that way to me. it is not like garland has the answer to that. >> but not an accident that the three news organizations targeted by trump's justice department were cnn, "the new york times," and "the washington post." these are the organizations where -- that were at the top of his list of enemies of the american people. so for him -- for him, his administration to target the three of us and only the three of us, i think that is unlikely an accident. whether merrick garland knows the details of how that came
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about, we don't know, but we're certainly going to ask. >> and a few weeks ago when this started to come out and kaitlan collins asked the president about, it biden vowed this could stop. it seems like this was a impromptu matter that led the doj to address this matter for fully. so now we have this vow from biden and from garland but will they constitutionalize that. >> and merrick garland and the president has stated that those in the biden administration are not going to do what the trump administration did and that is great and we appreciate that and that will cover up until the end of the biden administration. but what can -- what we're asking the attorney general tomorrow is to try to bind future administrations. don't just send a memo. change policy. change the u.s. attorney's manual. update justice department policies so that future u.s.
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attorneys, assistant u.s. attorneys and justice department lawyers and attorney generals will have to follow those guidelines and that we're asking for and we want a regulation that will make it more difficult. >> and more broadly, the question on screen, what could we have done to secure media phone and email logs. reporters are careful when dealing with anonymous stories and we know the case. are newsrooms changing the way they operate because of this concern about logs being swept up by the government? >> so, newsrooms have already changed the way they operate. reporters are more careful than ever, using reporting techniques that they didn't use before. but this is a reminder that the government has vast awesome powers to scoop up not just their work email, but their phone records and personal phone records and in the case of barbara starr, her personal email account which is frankly unprecedented. but reporters are aware of this. they know that the government has these powers and reporters
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are and hopefully even more so in the future are being extraordinarily careful not to -- not to communicate with confidential sources using those more traditional methods. >> sam, thank you so much for previewing the meeting. >> thanks, brian. coming up here, new hope for u.s. journalist austin tice missing in syria for almost a decade. could the biden administration broker a deal? that is coming up. but first following the murdoch money, the stunning divide between father and son right after that.
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[sfx: thunder rumbles] [sfx: rainstorm] ♪ comfort in the extreme. ♪ the lincoln family of luxury suvs. in one america, dr. fauci is trusting and even immoralized. in the other america,ez tarnished and distrusted. don't believe me? take a look. >> the fauci era is officially over. >> right wing tv has cast dr. fauci is the role of villain.
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>> grouchy fauci. >> dr. doom and gloom, dr. flip-flop fauci. >> gop lawmakers are echoing at tack showing the feedback loop in full effect. >> an activist scientist, an if arm of the china propaganda machine. >> it is as if president biden is a weak target of the anti-democrat media so they are assailing fauci instead. >> dr. fauci has been more politician than physician. >> fauci's voter registration shows he's affiliated with no party. he's worked for democratic and republican presidents. but now he's become a republican boogeyman. his emails are a new excuse. sean hannitiy claiming that fauci said one thing about the lab leak theory in public and another in private. >> these emails providing growing evidence fouch auci was warned and downplayed it repeatedly. >> emails portrayed as scandalous. where have we seen this trick
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before? axios calling fauci trump's new hillary clinton. a free dpom of information request revealed march from april of 2020 show that an executive ties to china wuhan institute of virology thanks fauci for supporting a natural origin of the virus. the origin is still being probed by the biden administration and fauci is saying that bad faith actors are taking his words way out of comments. >> i said the most likely origin is a jumping of species. i still do think it is at the same time as i'm keeping an open mind that it might be a lab leak. >> keeping an open mind, what an original concept. these gop lawmakers minds are made up. as they call for fauci's resignation, thereby providing more content for gop.
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>> he should be fired. >> he should go. >> dr. fauci has blood on his hands. >> but fauci is not taking it all in silence. fauci is asserting that the hits against him are attacks on science. >> because all of the things that i have spoken about consistently from the very beginning have been fundamentally based on science. sometimes those things were inconvenient truths for people and there was push back against me. >> and that garnered more scorn. >> he could speak for him s selves, he'll find a place on nicole wallace's show. >> are they trying to redeem donald trump excusing the pandemic failures, is it bigger than that. with me from the bulwark and amanda carp enter and what is going on. >> some of these attacks are certainly over heats but there
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is a vibrant and legitimate discussion about what happened during the pandemic and dr. fauci is the face of the pandemic. people have questions, about the way things were closed down, vaccines, even the lab leak theory, and i think it is good that dr. fauci has been a public messenger, but he has had some missteps that made people on the right upset. misleading people about masks because he wanted to preserve them for first responders and the people that could have herd immunity and there are some questions and there should be some criticism and when he comes before the camera, he adopts the posture your into the criticizing me, you're criticizing science. i think when he takes that defensive posture, that just invites all of the more attacks. >> criticism fair, but oliver, saying arrest fauci and that is shows how --
quote
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>> totally. and it is one thing to criticize someone and have a debate that is fair and it is another thing to say like you just played, he has brood on his hands and that is sort of what you're seeing saturating right wing media these days. >> and then you're in a fantasy land because that is not going to happen and it is a fantasy. is the bigger picture that when attacks don't stick, the fox world finds new targets. because you wrote in our newsletter that week, the critical race theory is an obsession of maga media and obsession of fox, it is talked about constantly in right wing tv. so that is an example of moving on to a new target. >> i think that is right. if you do watch fox and pay attention to the right wing media landscape, you see more looking at other targets. it is not biden, it is going after critical race and fauci and like amanda said, it should be debated in good faith. in critical race theory could be one of those aspects.
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it is get something traction. we'll see how long it works. first it is dr. seuss, mr. potato head, critical race theory and transgender bathrooms, these things could have a flash in the pan quality. >> i hear people saying don't talk about race. don't talk about race. and talking about narratives in right wing media and vice president harris, the narrative was why won't she go to the border and that week that narrative moves over to nbc, moved over into the rest of the media during her trip to mexico and guatemala, didn't it? >> it did. another area where kamala harris did not perform well in the interview with lester holt. but the focus on fox has been to again demonize her. she doesn't care about you or the americans on border and not even going to the border. and this is every hour they're looking to really demonize her. not biden but her. but that you the media story
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here. again, it is fair to criticize her on this thing but it is really just saturated right wing media in a way that it places a lot of -- too many emphasize on this media misstep than to the issues. >> this is from a source at the end of the book of "hoax" and this is what i was hearing from a liberal voice inside of fox. she said the biden teams that no idea what they are up against. and i wondered amanda, how would you react to that. that z that sound true or fair. the biden administration, the approval rating is strong, do they know what they're up against with the right wing media narratives. >> it is not just fox. through the trump years there is a huge glut of right wing trumped focus media in desperate need of content and that is why they latch on to crt or kamala
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and they push fox further to the right and it is just -- it is sort of interesting to watch. >> now here is most interesting story that i read this week in the media business world. cnbc reports that while lock lan murdoch has been running fox, james murdoch has been donating money to democratic causes, we're talking tens of millions of dollars. $100 million from james murdoch going to fund political causes and there even is more spending than that, that is just what is showing up in tax records. it is impossible to hear this and not hear the music from succession, that the liberal son trying to undermine the conservative brother and the conservative father. is that what this story is about? >> it is. and he's using the money made through the fox money to undo it. that is the most remarkable part. use using the fox money to try to undo some of what fox has put
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in place, which is astounding. >> exactly. and we're going to see more and more of that from james murdoch. and this is from axios, before the father, rupert, and what he's doing lobbying congress because he wants republicans to back these tech anti-trust bills. he wants big tech taken down. but oliver, isn't that just in his business interests? >> it is. and so any time you see fox attacking big tech, not there aren't legitimate criticisms, but it is difficult to ignore that this does place into his own business interest in demonizing big tech and getting them broken up. and so when you see that on fox or the "wall street journal," it is difficult. >> think about what is going on there. but amanda, at the same time there is a bipartisan consensus growing about big tech. it is remarkable and rupert murdoch is pushing a lot of the
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same things that the progressives are. >> and they have different ideas about what to do about it. and in the right you see the push for a preferal treatment and on the left there is agreement on the problem they're on completely different planets when it comes to the solution. >> thank you both for breaking it down for us. after the break, remember this video of a.p. reporters evacuated and we'll about to go into the follow-up meeting with a.p. officials. two people who were in the room will join me next. from unitedhealthcare. medicare supplement plans help by paying some of what medicare doesn't... and let you see any doctor. any specialist. anywhere in the u.s. who accepts medicare patients. so if you have this... consider adding this. call unitedhealthcare today for your free decision guide. ♪
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of mind for at associated press. a month after the israeli attack housing the a.n. news bureau in gaza, what is israel's evidence. they visited the a.p. new york office to discuss the destruction and said for the first time that hamas terrorists were in the building trying to jam the iron dome. the critical israeli defense system. so israel is said why it took out the building. the a.p. still has questions and i'll speak with a top editor there? a couple of minutes. but first ruth eglash, thank you so much for coming on program. >> good morning and thank you for having me. >> i hear both sides say the meeting was constructive but why couldn't israel disclose this information earlier. they they were using the building to disrupt the iron dome, why not say that on the day of the air strike. >> it works at its own time
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line. it shares with the relative authorities in the united states. it took its time to work through what it needed to work through so it could share this information with a.p. and the ambassador make a special point of meeting with the a.p. and meeting with the president and ceo and sharing with them the knowledge that he had that hamas terrorists were in that building trying to jam the iron dome. >> there a journalist lesson here that you have sources and m methods that you can't reveal, a source on the ground in gaza and you don't want to jeopardize, and is that what happens here, is it a lesson nor journalist in some way. >> journalists who are covering more situations, rules are different for -- different than in regular times. and like you said, the israeli
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army works according to its own schedule. it has itso own way of working through the information that it has. it doesn't have too reveal sources to journalists and israel values press freedom and values you know the safety of journalists and that was the message that the ambassador conveyed to the a.p. this week and that is why it was so important for him to go there and share that information and share that good will with a.p. >> the a.p. said it wants tangible evidence. will he be providing that? >> i think the evidence has been provided to the relevant authorities in the united states. they work very closely with the israeli and the u.s. intelligence. i -- you know, maybe as things progress we'll see what happens, the army beats to its own drum. it is a military, it is fighting a war, it is not there to -- to,
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you know broadcast its actions or get -- be in good graces with journalists. it is there to protect israeli si citizens. >> and al jazeera was working out of the building and there is a conflict. a reporter was recently arrested by israeli authorities. does israel consider al jazeera to be on the other side of the war you're describing? >> i mean, i don't think israel considers any journalist to be on the opposite side but there are those that are manipulated by certain special interest groups and al jazeera is one of them. it is funded by the qatari government. so it is not journalist as we know it. it is not necessarily these, you know, not all of the impartial media outlets that everyone talks about. different outlets have different
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special interests and different ideology that they adhere to. >> ruth, thank you very much for coming on program, i appreciate it. >> you're welcome. >> now let's hear from the a.p. ian phillips is also at the meeting between the officials. are you satisfied about what you're hearing from runl and from israeli officials. >> a.p. position hasn't changed. we continue to ask for all evidence to be made public and shared with us. we're applying the same principles of scrutiny and transparent to our daily journalist to this actual case. we listened to the ambassador, it was a forward-looking meeting and he did tell us how hamas may have infiltrated the building but until we see evidence, that is our public and private opinion. >> you're taking a journalist approach, show us the evidence.
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that is what journalists expected what was lost last month when the building went down, what was lost in the gaza bureau. >> it is chilling to look at the bui building coming down. it wasn't just bricks and mortar. this is a place that was considered a safe haven and a very, very dangerous part of the world. we worked there. we slept there. during wars when it was safe tore be the in the building and we also lost an archive. we thoughts of photographs of negatives dating back decades and thousands of videos that captured conflict in daily life. we had filmed israel firing at gaza, this is a huge loss to a.p., it is a huge loss to journalism and society and historians looking back at this phase in middle east history. >> how are your teams operating in gaza now? do you have temporary facilities? how does that work. >> we have a temporary makeshift
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situation at the moment. we're looking for a new office going forward with the a.p., we dust ourselves off and we get up on our feet and we keep going and we have some of the most reyent journalists on earth. they have suffered a lot of personal loss. personal injury, material loss over the years but they are incredible and resilience ant they get going and continue working. as we speak right now, they're on the streets talking to people. i can't disclose too much obviously, but we are doing a lot of aftermath stories about society in gaza, about the way forward and the toll on people of all ages. >> and looking ahead, do you expect further meetings with israeli officials? i believe the ambassador offers to help finance or rebuild the israel's presence in gaza. are you going to take them up on this offer. >> just to be clear, there are no finances here. we do not look to take finances from governments. we cover governments, we to keep a safe distance it you like and anything that comes close to a
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conflict of interest, we steer clear of. we are the a.p. we are an extremely unbiased new organization, fact-based and careful about what we do but we do look forward to more meetings. i spoke to a senior israeli official who overseas logistics at border and gave us his contact details because we need to rebuild and that is not as straightforward as it might seem. we are a text and photo operation but also a giant in video news gathering and that involves having a state-of-the-art office with all of the high-end electronics that tv studios require. so we need to get equipment into gaza and that is very complicated and i asked for assistance this morning in getting all of this equipment in. we're talking about robotic cameras, we're talking network processing gear, video processing gear, all sorts of equipment, lights, cables that would normally get stopped at the border in recent times we
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try to get one router into gaza and it took about six months and a lot of bureaucracy and phone calls because israelis feel this could be dual purpose equipment, if it fell into the wrong hands could be used against israel. so we're fully aware of all of those concerns, we understand that. but what we're trying to achieve is a streamline process so we could get our gear in quickly, go through all of the necessary checks and balances, but get up on our feet again and continue covering the news as we do. >> and you're helping us understand the infrastructure. all of the aspects of news gathering that people usually take for granted, that are very difficult in some parts of the world. ian, thank you very much for coming out for us. >> thank you for having me in. coming up here on "reliable sources," a crucial update on the missing of austin tice. and propublica bombshell has sparked debate over the sources. stephen engelberg is here with answers to those questions,
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moments ago president biden landing at heathrow on the way to meet the queen. he's about to become the 12th sitting president to meet the queen during her reign. as kevin wrote for cnn.com, he's about to join a legacy of american leaders by paying respects to a growing icon and living piece of history. you see the president and first lady disembarking. they both have a formal audience scheduled with the queen in just the next few minutes. this is the queen's first one on one engagement with a world leader since the pandemic began. and it is one of among her first public engagements since prince philip died at 99 earlier this year. so we see the president and the first lady on way to windsor. they will be there in a few minutes. wee expect to see pomp and circumstance when they arrive
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and we'll bring that to you live or as soon as we can here on cnn. when propublica dubs the secret irs files, the publication president called it the most important story they've ever published. how the 25 richest people in the u.s. pay little or no income taxes calling to mind the old adage is the real expandal is what is legal. the farout has been making news and propublica has more reporting to do thanks to a dp document dump. someone handed over secret tax reports, doesn't know who or the identity of the source or the motive and all of that make this is a unique situation with some critics claiming that the leak was intended to, quote, serve the left's agenda. now here is the thing, when sources are anonymous, the government says it all of the time, when sources are anonymous, reporters and editors
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know who they are and agree to conceal their identities. but when sources are unknown, even to the reporters and editors, how could the information be vetted. that is one of the questions for steven engleberg, the editor and chief and kind enough to join me now. it is a heck of a school and you're rolling it out on your website. but could you tell us when obtained these documents and how you knew if they were legitimate. >> we don't want to talk about too much about timing or chronology or interactions but let me say even when you know the source, unless you have magic powers of mind reading, you don't really know their motives. you might have some sense of what their thinking. i've been a reporter for almost more than 40 years and covered the intelligence community and i could assure you i did not know in any way shape or form the full motives of people i was talking to back in the day.
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as for something like this, there is a number of ways to check this. you could look at public documents and make sure the numbers match numbers that were filed to the irs which we did. you could have confidential conversations with people who may be in your acquaintance who are very wealth whether line 27-a said what it says and when we wrote about people in the piece, we contacted people with the numbers, people chose not engage and warren buffett said, yes, the numbers are correct and by the way i think we should change the tax code. there are a number of ways that you could check the accuracy of something like this and the completeness of it and we have got to extraordinary lengths to do that. >> we know a famous whistleblower, daniel houseberg and daniel snowden, but this might be a whistleblower but we didn't know the identity. do you think about not
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publishing because you didn't know the source's identity? >> we considered a lot of different questions on this. i don't think i spent a lot of time, we spent a lot of time on that. i think the bigger question was how can we be certain, as certain as you possibly could be, that the information is complete and accurate and that perhaps somebody hasn't tried to slip in here, you know, some false piece of information to embarrass somebody. so that is our main concern. i think this is come up before in the history, we know some of these whistleblower through happenstance, and chelsea manning didn't want to know but she wouldn't have been but there are been situations where news organizations dealt with this and i think the crucial question is what is the news value of it, how do you handle that, how do you be fair and accurate to everybody on all sides of it. >> and i appreciate that you all spell out your reasoning in an editors note that is on
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propublica and one of the issues is that this is a possibility that was a hacking, probably a state actor, to china or russia break into the irs and steal all of the tax documents to sow discord in the u.s.? because the more that the rest of us know about the billionaires, the more class conflict there is. so that is a possibility, is it not? we don't know, that could have happened, right? >> it certainly could have happened. and let's remind your viewers, it has happened in the past. as we point out in the note, the north koreans didn't like particularly movie that made fun of kim jong-un and soo they hacked into sony studios and posted a whole bunch of material. and a number of news organizations read through that material and found some of it news worthy including us and then went out and verified it and wrote stories about it. and i can understand when people would say aren't you being manipulated and certainly that is a fair and i think the answer
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to that is to do journalistically fair stories and be sure that whatever information you treat it in a way that is -- that weighs fairness and appropriately gives everybody a chance to speak up. >> i've heard your out there recruiting folks to go through these documents, that you have a lot more to come. that we've only seen the tip of the iceberg, is that true. >> i don't know about recruiting but we have a staff that is hard at work. we have not recruited anybody outside of the our staff to do this. but you could imagine the number of people at propublica eager to put the time on this material is quite high. we're certainly going to continue to work on it. >> but you have a lot more to come based on what we've seen so far, is that fair? >> that is fair. this is very complex and you have to educate yourself before you say anything about it. >> and the attorney general general garland, we talked about him in the hour with the meeting
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coming up with the times and post and season and how did this get out. how do you feel about the government pursuing leakers including in the case of the secret irs files? >> it is hard to argue that they don't have the right to ask themselves what went wrong here but the attorney general justice department is very clear in recent days that they don't intend to use official processes to bring whole reporters in to reveal sources. so we take a good deal of comfort from that. i think it is really important that the administration has said that and i think it is kind of a game-changer. >> and in this case, you don't know who the source was anyway. so grabbing your records won't help them, i guess. >> nonetheless we would prefer they not grab our records. >> right. not even try. steven, thank you very much. it is up on propublica and there
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is more to come. what could president biden do to broker the release of austin tice captured in syria for nearly ten years. there is an idea of what biden could do and i have a guest coming up with answers. it comes from within. it drives you. and it guides you. to shine your brightest. as you charge ahead. illuminating the way forward. a light maker. recognizing that the impact you make, comes from the energy you create. introducing the all-electric lyriq. lighting the way. ♪ ♪
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so that's why it's important to make a plan with your parents. here are a few tips to stay safe. know how to get in touch with your family. write down phone numbers for your parents, siblings and neighbors. pick a place to meet your family if you are not together and can't go home. remind your parents to pack an emergency supply kit. making a plan might feel like homework, but it will help you and your family stay safe during an emergency.
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. here are two facts that may be able to link up in a really important way. number one, the biden administration believes that austin tice is still alive. tice is the journalist who went missing in syria nine years ago. so they believe he's still alive. and number two, the biden administration has yet to set its syria policy. so could these two facts taken together create the conditions to get tice back home to the u.s.? that is certainly what the tice family is hoping. they have not seen austin since 2012 when he disappeared while
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covering the war in syria. the trump administration tried to get him out, but did not succeed. now this is on biden's plate. here is the question. should bashar al assad offer up tice as a gees tour to set a new course for the u.s. in syria? is that even possible? let's bring in mike holzman, serves as managing public at sect new gate public relations. he previously served as an adviser in the u.s. department of state -- i almost promoted you -- specializing in middle east affairs. he also has experience gaining the release of journalists held captive overseas. mike, thanks for coming on. >> thank you for having me and keeping a spotlight on this cause. >> is it your belief that tice is alive in syria? if so, why hasn't there been proof of life? >> first let me say that austin
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tice was an eagle scout born in texas, an officer in the u.s. marine corps and award winning journalist working in syria to bring news to the american people of a very complicated conflict in a very dangerous place when he disappeared. proof of life came in 2012, as you know. there was the release of a 47-second video that -- in which austin was blindfolded, held at gunpoint, but was clearly alive, and there is obviously been three successful presidential administrations in the united states that have affirmed their belief that austin is alive. that is why we should be doing everything in our power to determine his whereabouts and get his safe return home to his family. >> if you had a message for assad live here on cnn around the woshlgsd what would it be? >> it would be that the biden administration has dedicated
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itself to a values-based foreign policy, and what could be more demonstrative of values than returning americans home? assad has a moment where he can establish confidence with the united states by connecting with the american people in a very direct and personal way, by returning one of our missing children to their family. i think that is the essence of dipl diplomacy. i think politics and diplomacy fail when they do not protect their people. by returning a missing american home, the syrian president can demonstrate that good will to the american people that's so necessary as the basis of diplomacy. >> i hope someone is listening. mike holzman, thank you for coming on. we'll continue to stay on the case of austin tice. live to the u.k., president biden arrivetion at windsor castle ahead of his meeting with
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the quarantine. cnn's max foster is on the scene to help set up what's about to happen. president biden about to meet the queen i believe only for the second time in his life? >> it's actually the third time now. he met her as a senator back in the 1980s. we don't know much about that meeting except his mother said do not bow to her. then they met on friday in cornwall. this is their formal one-on-one as it were. you may remember when donald trump visited in 2018. he went to windsor castle, bit of a faux pas, walked in front of the queen. the media made quite a lot of that. he'll be taken down to the quadrangle here at windsor castle where the queen has private apartments. you'll see a guard of honor there. they'll play national anthems. the president will be invited to inspect the guard there. then they'll go inside.
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you see the guards lined up, and the queen will be in the dais you see in the far corner. after the formalities, they'll go to tea. we won't hear about what's discussed in that tea. that's strictly off limits. much has been made about how biden isn't an anglo file as perhaps trump or obama or reagan before him. what they do have in common is irish peace. he identifies as an irish american. the key is credited with paying a clear part in reconciliation between ireland and the united kingdom. so there's some speculation that that might be some common ground that they can discuss in their tea together. >> it's also notable, it's the queen's first meeting with a world leader since the pandemic. it is with the u.s. president. >> reporter: yes. as you said, he's the 12th
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sitting u.s. president that the queen has met during her reign. she did actually meet truman, that was before her reign even though he was in power when her reign began. she met 13 presidents and also met president hoover after he left office. >> amazing. all smiles and fist bumps at windsor. cnn's coverage continues with dana bash and "state of the union." hello, i'm dana bash in washington where the state of our union is poised for royal pomp and circumstance. prs and the first laid day are about to participate in a time-honored tradition, private meeting with the queen, with queen elizabeth at windsor castle. you'll see live pictures there of the bidens who just arrived. he's the 1
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