REPORT-WI-01
Clinton Continue Campaigning; White House Policy on Iraq and Syria
Examined - Part 2>
Herridge, James Rosen, Doug McKelway, Peter Barnes>
Miller>
Hillary Clinton; White House; Policies; Iraq; Syria; Accidents;
Infrastructure; Politics; Elections; Telecommunications; Government; World
Affairs; Military; Insurance; Internet; Technology>
In March 2014 the Department of Commerce announced its intention to transfer authority of the domain name registration to this group, ICANN. It is, as I said, scheduled to happen Saturday. The purpose of the transfer is to privatize and internationalize authority over domain names.
And critics of this transfer they believe it gives too much control away to authoritarian governments like China, Iran and Russia. One of the biggest critics -- Senator Ted Cruz from Texas.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. TED CRUZ (R), TEXAS: The country faces a threat to the Internet as we know it. If Congress fails to act, the Obama administration intends to give away control of the Internet to an international body like the United Nations.
I rise today to discuss the significant irreparable damage this proposed Internet giveaway could wreak not only in our nation but on free speech across the world.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: Senator Coons, why is Senator Cruz wrong.
COONS: Well, Senator Cruz is almost exactly wrong on this because he described ICANN as an international organization like the U.N. And it's striking to me -- it's almost ironic that Senator Cruz, who is so often a champion of the private sector and of individual initiative and individual liberty instead of federal government control, is in this case arguing for the retention of a federal government role rather than privatization.
Senator Cruz chairs the sub committee of judiciary where I'm the ranking Democrat. We sat through a two and a half hour hearing two weeks ago where seven different witnesses thoroughly examined this issue in detail. I'm more convinced than ever now that the American private sector -- the companies that have helped to build and strengthen the Internet who have advocated for this transition -- are right. And that what Senator Cruz is saying is wrong.
That the transition to ICANN doesn't strengthen to role of Russia and China and Iran in any central function of the Internet. In fact making this transition to a private entity is the best way to prevent Russia and others from being successful in their argument that it should instead be transitioned to the U.N.
BAIER: Senator -- why now? Why do it? I mean what's the upside now?
COONS: Right. Great question -- Bret. Back to 1998 the international community has been pressing the United States to make a transition away from having the U.S. Department of Commerce effectively run the phonebook of the Internet. And every two to four years we've said yes, yes, we'll do that eventually. Yes, there will be a transition eventually.
And the world community has gotten, frankly, skeptical that we are ever going to do it. So we've developed a reputation with critics like Russia and China that we will never allow a transition from the NTI, a U.S. government entity within the Department of Commerce, to a nonprofit, privatized international body. And so they have begun to suggest an alternative path where a U.N. body called the ITU would have their own sort of separate phonebook of the Internet. It is time to relinquish this very minor clerical role so that we retain our international credibility and the U.N. doesn't step into the role.
BAIER: You know what critics say, beyond Senator Cruz, that this is the camel's nose under the tent and that it starts here and that it evolves and the international organization really can't keep up and it's in somebody else's hands, some other government's hands essentially. We don't have a say as much as we do now. This is Senator Grassley talking about the organization's transparency.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
SEN. CHUCK GRASSLEY, (R) IOWA: In ICANN we see an organization that was blasted just this last July by an independent review panel for its inability to carry out basic duties of self-governance. They reveiw panel found that ICANN board governance committee has, quote, "failed several transparency obligations."
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: I guess there is just concern that it is ready to go somewhere.
COONS: I respect Senator Grassley and his concerns. The entire hearing examined that specific issue in great detail. There have been revisions made both to the transition and to the governance structure of ICANN to address the concerns that were raised now more than a year ago. And I have been persuaded that the voices of the American private sector from the U.S. chamber of commerce to CISCO and Dell, to Google, Intel, and Microsoft are in unison arguing in favor of this privatization. If we were to delay it any further I frankly thought we would lose our credibility.
BAIER: Senator I do want to ask you one very quick election question. Oftentimes Republicans are bombarded with having to answer for what someone else has said somewhere in the Republican universe. I would like to ask you about Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman who tweeted out after the debate "Notice Trump sniffing all of the time -- coke user." Any thoughts on that?
COONS: Bret, you know, sometimes folks in public life make intemperate and unguarded comments. I'm not sure why former governor Dean tweeted that out. This is a political season where far too many of us have made ad hominem attacks and I just don't think that adds constructively to the general tenor of the debate.
BAIER: Senator Coons, we appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on.
COONS: Thank you, Bret.
BAIER: Donald Trump on weight-gate, more bad news for Hillary Clinton about emails -- we'll talk about all of it with the panel when we come back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, (R) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: The American people have had it with years and decades of Clinton corruption and scandals. Impeachment for lying, remember that? The Clintons are a distorted past. We will be the very bright and clean future.
HILLARY CLINTON, (D) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: He can say whatever he wants to say as we well know. We have seen it in real time over the last many months. And I'm going to keep running my campaign talking about what I think the American people are interesting in.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump today, as we get a look at this race. The SPECIAL REPORT average of the recent five polls that we trust looking at this average right now you have Hillary Clinton plus 2.9 -- I'm sorry, 2.2 in this average of polls. If you look at the places they were today, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, first of all in Iowa, there you see Donald Trump up five points in this four way race with the Libertarian and the Green Party candidate. And in New Hampshire you see Clinton up 5.4. That's the state of this race at this moment.
Let's bring in our panel, Jonah Goldberg, senior editor of "National Review," Lisa Boothe, columnist with the "Washington Examiner," Zeke Miller, political reporter for "TIME," and syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer. OK, Jonah, state of the race?
JONAH GOLDBERG, SENIOR EDITOR, "NATIONAL REVIEW": I think the state of the race is that Hillary Clinton has a very narrow lead and the polls are very tight, and if you look state by state they're very right. I think that coming out of the debate which I thought Trump lost narrowly, technically, not very consequentially, the post-debate spin war he has been losing by epic proportions. Three days in he is still arguing about whether he called Miss Universe fat. It is a very weird lack of discipline and message control coming out.
BAIER: Why is that? What happens there, Lisa?
LISA BOOTHE, COLUMNIST, "WASHINGTON EXAMINER": I don't understand. I mean, he absolutely took the bait with Hillary Clinton. They had an ad cut and ready to go. And when you're not doing so great with women and also Hispanics, why are you attacking a Hispanic woman? It's certainly not going to help his case. And we saw Donald Trump actually start doing much better in the polls after the conventions when he finally stuck to the issues, when he finally started giving some of these more substantive, nuanced speeches about the issues that Americans actually care about. So it is puzzling why he would sort of go back to what we saw with the Khans in this unnecessary war that he is now waging.
BAIER: On the stump he didn't today. He talked a lot about the email investigation and --
BOOTHE: Which is what he should be talking about, absolutely.
BAIER: And the economy and the Clinton problems of the past. So it seems like in interviews he gets drawn out and he answers fully and completely.
BOOTHE: I think it demonstrates sort of the lack of discipline which is what Jonah had mentioned. And that is a problem for Donald Trump because he does well when he commands the narrative, when he is in charge of the narrative, when he is driving the narrative. And that is how he puts Hillary Clinton on her heels. I mean, he was able to do that most recently leading up to the debate. So that's where he needs to keep his focus, staying that message disciplined, so that he can keep Hillary Clinton on her heels and he can talk about issues that Americans actually care about.
BAIER: Zeke?
ZEKE MILLER, POLITICAL REPORTER, "TIME": Donald Trump is somebody who has made his entire career about winning. And here he was in the debate night in this sort of widely panned performance, probably lost some points, I think to Jonah's point. It wasn't a blowout, but he lost. And so now 80 plus million people --
BAIER: If we looked at the first 30 minutes and you were a Trump supporter you were probably pretty happy.
MILLER: Yes, he won the first 30.
BAIER: But it was a 90 minute debate.
MILLER: He took the bait. And he had to make peace with that. We saw him struggle to make excuses about the microphone, the bum microphone. He praised Lester Holt in the spin room, the first candidate to go into the spin room that we can remember, at least, and then now today saying that Lester Holt was rigging the debate in Hillary Clinton's favor. He's coming up with excuses. And then also claiming that he won. It is kind of bizarre. A lot of it is playing out in the most important real estate on the campaign which is that one square foot above the candidate's shoulders.
BAIER: Right. So Charles, the next debate, not next week we have vice presidential debate, and then the following week. He's still very close in a lot of these states. We don't know the true impact probably for another couple of days. We have new polls out, by the way, tomorrow, so you want to tune in for that on a SPECIAL REPORT. Your thoughts?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: I don't understand why everybody is surprised at his lack of discipline. He has been out there for 15 months. He is completely undisciplined. Yes, for about a month he has been lead around, shackled, handcuffed by his staff, made to read from the teleprompter. But the minute you let him loose, meaning on the debate stage where there is no prompter, and then immediately after when he is reacting, what immerges is his central weakness, vanity. You have seen this all along.
BAIER: It doesn't affect his basic orders. But when he is trying to reach out to independents and people who have not decided, and we should point out there are not that many of them, that's the issue you're saying?
KRAUTHAMMER: I don't know whether his strategy was to go after target audience. I suspect that's what his staff was hoping. Trump's strategy is to express himself. He did extremely well in doing that in the primaries. He came out of nowhere. He won. Nobody, there weren't a lot of people who thought he could, and he trusted himself. Anybody surprised he is continuing the feud with Miss Universe? The worst part was that little interjection about not paying taxes which he has to defend as well because this is a man who when he is personally attacked has to reflexively respond to defend his self-image. That's what drives him, and that explains all of the things that appear to be puzzling my colleagues over there.
(LAUGHTER)
BAIER: Let me play another little exchange that really didn't get a lot of focus because of all of the post-debate focus on Miss Machado. So let's play the Trump-Clinton on implicit bias.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
HILLARY CLINTON, (D) PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I think implicit bias is a problem for everyone, not just police. I think unfortunately too many of us in our great country jump to conclusions about each other.
TRUMP: She accuses the entire country, including all of law enforcement, of implicit bias, essentially suggesting that everyone, including our police, are basically racist and prejudice. How can she lead this country when she thinks America is full of racists, deplorables and irredeemables?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: We should point out that was Trump today at his event, but the implicit bias, Jonah?
GOLDBERG: Yes. I think in a normal race this would be a real vulnerability for Hillary Clinton. It is sort of warmed over cultural Marxist hogwash. I'm sure it plays well to her Democratic base. But the problem with this, with the now increasing war about Bill Clinton's infidelities and the Clinton Foundation and the Trump Foundation, it reminds me of that scene in "The Sopranos" where Chris Moltisanti has a drug intervention for his drug habit, and he starts lashing out and saying, oh, yeah, well, I partied with you and I partied with you. These guys are so -- such mirror images of all of these charges. This is a guy who said a Mexican judge couldn't be fair because he was Mexican, and he wasn't even Mexican. These kinds of things, it's very hard to score them because they are such tattered brands and tattered candidates.
BAIER: So what about this issue about bringing up the Clintons past and Monica Lewinski and the possibility that that is going to happen at this next debate as we take this if it happens down to a different level of this election?
BOOTHE: I do think that it is fair to an extent, not for Donald Trump. I don't think Donald Trump should be a messenger. But to bring it up I think is fair to an extent, because Hillary Clinton can't stay there and say that every victim deserves to be heard, deserves to be believed, but then we know it has been widely reported that she went after these women, that she dragged their names through the mud. So I do think there is hypocrisy there that should be addressed from the Trump campaign, but I don't think that Donald Trump should be the messenger because I think it diminishes him and his candidacy.
BAIER: And Rush Limbaugh talked excessively about that point all day today.
I want to bring up one more thing, and that is this report that the FEC is considering changing its rules. Top Democrat on the evenly split FEC proposed the Thursday meeting of the commission begin with the process to prohibit companies with foreign ownership as small as five percent from funding expenditures, independent expenditures, or electioneering communications. Several media giants have at least five percent foreign ownership, some with as much as 25 percent. Included is News Corp, which owns FOX News, "The New York Post," "The Wall Street Journal," the "New York Times" also has foreign ownership as do many politically active firms like Ben and Jerry's. What about this move, Charles?
KRAUTHAMMER: Gratuitous, partisan, completely unnecessary. Is there a threat to the independence of the media or intervention so called in our electoral process by nefarious foreign elements? You know, a news organization owned by an Australian, "New York Times" heavily invested by a Mexican tycoon? Is there any evidence of a problem? This is a solution in search of a problem, and anything that curtails open political activity I think necessarily is negative and should be opposed unless there is overwhelming reason that one should do it, and there is none.
BAIER: Next up, is the U.S. giving the cold shoulder to Russia, and what does it mean about Syria?
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BARACK OBAMA, (D) PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Unless we were willing to sustain a large presence there, and escalate, if and when Russia or Iran got involved, then we were going to be in a situation where at some point the situation would collapse, except we would have a bunch of folks on the ground and be very much overextended.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: President Obama in a town hall on CNN last night talking about Syria. This as his secretary of state says essentially diplomacy has failed with the Russians. And it's a nasty situation as it has been. We're back with the panel. Zeke, this does not look good for any kind of progress, and there was a hearing today in which Obama administration officials said, really there is no plan b.
MILLER: Yes, that's something we have heard throughout the political spectrum, the political race specifically, but from the president he said in an interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin a couple weeks ago that this is what keeps him up at night, what wakes him up. And it should, because for the president this has been his most glaring failure on the international stage. You know, this is an area -- something that he didn't anticipate being such a big problem. He decided to take a cautious approach and it in a lot of ways came back to bite him. Here he is having to deal with an unanswerable problem, and that's going to hang over his legacy all the way through until somebody solves the problem, if it can be solved.
BAIER: Lisa?
BOOTHE: Look, I think it's silly to think that Russia is going to be a good actor here or Assad is ever going to be a good actor here. I mean, President Obama essentially opened the door for Russia's insertion into Syria by failing to draw -- drawing a red line and failing to following through with it. He created a vacuum for Russia. Russia has more invested interest in propping Assad with a naval base there and also an opportunity. to be involved with the Middle East for the first time in quite some time.
You also look at Assad. we made a deal with Assad in 2013 both with Russia and other international players as well. And Assad also joined the chemical weapons convention as well but then proceeded to use chemical weapons after that happened as well. So why in the world would we think that Russia or Assad are ever going to be truthful or honest players here?
BAIER: Because they wanted some out to that situation at that time, and it's just panning out to not be the case. The president was also asked by a gold star mom, lost her son, about the use of a certain phrase.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Why do you still refuse to use the term "Islamic terrorist"?
OBAMA: The truth of the matter is that this is an issue that has been sort of manufactured. And that's a slippery slope. And the way we're going to win this battle is not by betraying our ideals.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: Jonah?
GOLDBERG: This is a broken record. This has been a point one form or another, 1,000 panel discussions around here, about Barack Obama is obsessed with shaping a narrative more than he is actually obsessed with shaping facts on the ground. And so whenever there is a terrorist attack, he slow-walks the acknowledgment of every piece of terrorist attack. He always rushes to the lone wolf explanations when he has to. It's always self-radicalized. It's violent extremists. It's states of concern. It's kinetic overseas operations. It's an Orwellian attempt to euphemize things. And he passionately believes in the power of words to transform things, and they're just not that powerful.
BAIER: So this is also a broken record, I think, on the panel, and that is the troops in Iraq and finding new little pieces of sound that paint a different picture. Take a listen to this.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBAMA: So now we have a little over 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, around 300 or so in Syria.
CLINTON: The only way that American troops could have stayed in Iraq is to get an agreement from the then Iraqi government that would have protected our troops. And the Iraqi government would not give that.
OBAMA: What I would not have done is left 10,000 troops in Iraq that would tie us down and that certainly would not help us in the Middle East.
Now, you just gave a speech a few weeks ago in which you said we should still have troops in Iraq. That is not a recipe for making sure that we are taking advantage of the opportunities and meeting the challenge of the Middle East.
GEN. DAVID PETRAEUS, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: The irony is that we have now what is now approaching 6,000 troops in Iraq on the ground without a status of forces agreement. So perhaps we could have taken that risk.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: Charles?
KRAUTHAMMER: So much error, so little time. All of them, except for General Petraeus, are wrong. Her statement that without the protection, the immunity that would come from a status of forces agreement, we couldn't have left anybody on the ground. As Petraeus said we have 6,000 Americans on the ground now with no immunity, no protection. But they are there because we need them there.
As for Obama, he is still delusional. He thinks there would have had to have been a sort of the renewal of the grand war that we had in the last deck decade. The answer is. We needed a minimal number of troops that would have maintained the stability of the government and prevented the Maliki government from doing what it ended up doing, which is to alienate the Sunnis and to undo the whole Anbar awakening.
And one point on Syria. This is really the epitome of the Obama ideology and strategy. He and Kerry have this idea that diplomacy exists in the abstract and we have to be the ones to deploy it, unlike the Bush administration. Without force behind it, and there is none, has never been, it's useless. And that's what we are seeing today.
Obama was saying earlier we don't want to have troops on the ground early in the conflict. We could have destroyed the Syrian air force, knocked out the air fields, and there would have been a far different outcome of the war.
BAIER: Much more to follow on these developments. That's it for the panel, and it won't be a broken record. I promise. Next up, a couple taking wedding photos in New York gets a surprise.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
BAIER: Finally tonight, a New York couple posing for wedding pictures in Central Park, you know where they do it, they ran into a special guest. Take a look.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh my God!
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Can we pay get a picture?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: By all means. What's your name?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Brian.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Brian, you're a lucky man. You have done well for yourself.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
BAIER: Tom Hanks. He said if they didn't have a preacher, he is a registered minister.
Thanks for inviting us into your home tonight. That's it for SPECIAL REPORT, fair, balanced and unafraid. Brit Hume is ON THE RECORD.
END
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