Panel Plus: 6/10

June 10, 2012

Watch the ‘FOX News Sunday' panel, Bill Kristol, Charles Lane, Liz Cheney and Mara Liasson, as they discuss the Wisconsin recall and California ballot initiatives, in our web exclusive Panel Plus

WALLACE: Up next, our Sunday panel and those national security leaks. Is someone in the White House revealing top secrets to boost President Obama's reelection?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM, R-S.C.: Somebody in the White House is orchestrating an effort to leak classified information and programs to make the president look good.
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The notion that my White House would purposely release classified national security information is offensive.

WALLACE: A growing furor in Washington over controversial leaks about how President Obama is conducting the war on terror. It is time for our Sunday group. Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard. Charles Lane from the Washington Post. Fox News analyst Liz Cheney and Mara Liasson of National Public Radio.
One thing all sides agree on is that this long series of leaks is serious. And let's review some of the worst of them. That the U.S. had an operation to identify bin Laden's DNA, which led to the arrest of a Pakistan doctor who was helping us. The U.S. had a double agent who penetrated Al Qaeda in Yemen and foiled a plot to bomb an airliner. President Obama personally approves a kill list of terrorist suspects for drone strikes. And the U.S. and Israel were behind the Stuxnet computer virus that sabotaged Iran's nuclear program. Bill, how damaging do you think these leaks are to our national security?

BILL KRISTOL, WEEKLY STANDARD: Senator Feinstein is the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a Democrat, and has been on the Intelligence Committee for 11 years, thinks they are very damaging, and she knows a lot more than I do about what our enemy should know or did know before these leaks, and now maybe can know and can put two and two together and find out things they did not know otherwise.
So again, the bipartisan outrage on the Hill. Senator Feinstein, from the Democratic ranking member on the House side too, Dutch Ruppersberger, is really startling. They want President Obama to be reelected, so for them this goes beyond politics. And I think they are really alarmed. Dianne Feinstein said she's been on the Intelligence Committee 11 years and quote, "I have never seen it worse."

WALLACE: I have to say I don't know that I've ever seen it worse in the sense of just -- the New York Times two weeks in a row had a huge, incredibly I think two full-page detailed story about the drone operation, and then the next week, about the cyber warfare. And you know, I guess everybody kind of suspected the U.S. and Israel were behind it. This was name, chapter, verse, operation name, the name of the Israeli secret unit. It is pretty extraordinary.

CHARLES LANE, WASHINGTON POST: It is extraordinary. I have to say, I am a journalist, and I always am of two minds about these things. I think especially on the drone strike story, there is a lot of information in there, albeit classified, that is important I think to the public to know about. And so there is a tradeoff there between national security and informing the public.
One thing, though, I really want to know is whether the Obama administration pushed back prior to publication. When they were asked for comment or they knew these stories were coming, because in past cases, I know from the Washington Post, other newspapers, administrations have said to newspapers, look, this is really serious national security stuff. We are asking you not to publish. And sometimes newspapers will do that. So as this investigation goes forward, I think that is going to be one of the really important questions, what if anything did the Obama administration try to do by way of moral persuasion.

WALLACE: I think the New York Times said that in the case of Stuxnet, that the computer virus that was used to try to sabotage the Iranian centrifuges, that they pulled back some of the information under request from the administration. But it's a good question, which raises the big political issue, Liz. We heard Senator Graham in the clip at the beginning of this segment, charge, make the charge someone in the White House is doing this to show that Obama is tough and therefore help him win reelection. But is there any evidence of that?

LIZ CHENEY, FOX NEWS ANALYST: I think in terms for sort of the motive there, that supposition, I think it's clearly suspicious, given the timing of these two stories coming within days of each other, as you said in the New York Times. I was amazed in the Stuxnet story by the attributions that went on. You go through the story, you have got members of the president's national security team. Those are David Sanger's words, who he is quoting in terms of what happened in these meetings. President Obama's aides. And I think in addition to Charles's question about did they push back, you know, I would like to know, did the president of the United States authorize his aides to talk to the New York Times about this program? The American people have a right to know whether or not people who are sitting in the Situation Room, in these meetings, leave the Situation Room and call David Sanger of their own accord, or whether the president acquiesced, or whether the president in fact told them to do it. I think that's a key question. And if he did, why did he do it?

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: You know, and Lindsay Graham states as a fact that it was an orchestrated campaign from the White House. We don't know that yet. The president in the past has been pretty tough on leaks. They've gone after leaks. He said the other day whoever did this is going to suffer the consequences. And he said that the New York Times has stated that the leaks didn't come from the White House. Now--

WALLACE: I don't think that is true.

LIASSON: That's what he said. But look, David Sanger knows where the information came from. He is certainly going to be talked to, whether he's going to, you know, decide that he'd rather go to jail than disclose this -- but I do think this is really serious. And the thing that is amazing is if the New York Times did hold back information about Stuxnet -- the stuff that they published was so breathtaking and so detailed, I can't even imagine what they could have possibly held back.

WALLACE: You know, on Friday, Bill, Attorney General Holder announced the appointment of two U.S. attorneys, one for D.C., and one for Maryland to conduct separate -- separate instigations of the leaks, and those are on top of another probe by the FBI. Is that going to be enough, or will the Republican critics -- and we have heard this from people like Graham and McCain and others -- will they be able to force the administration to appoint an independent counsel?

KRISTOL: I think these U.S. attorneys may be enough as a legal and criminal matter, but it does not answer the question of public interest here, which would be nice to know more about before the inquiry is completed, which is what Liz said, what did the president authorize, when did he authorize it? That story about Bob Gates, which is also in David Sanger -- reported by David Sanger, has not been contradicted by the White House. Bob Gates, the week after the bin Laden raid, when the stuff started to come out about these very delicate Navy SEAL preparations and the operation itself, that Bob Gates, the secretary of defense, walks into the national security adviser's office, Tom Donilon's office --
WALLACE: I hope you are going to clean this up.

KRISTOL: And says, "shut the blank up." Now, I know, and maybe -- I worked with Bob Gates in the White House before, 20 years ago. Unless he changed a lot in the last 20 years, that's not a normal thing for Bob Gates to do and it's not a normal thing for the secretary of defense to walk into the national security adviser's office and say that. It shows how alarmed he was as part of the Obama administration about what was going on, and it shows who he blamed. Think about this a minute. If you walk into someone's office and say, shut the blank up, you think he, the national security adviser, or his deputies were responsible for these leaks.

WALLACE: Chuck, are these probes enough that Holder has authorized, or do we need an independent counsel?

LANE: I think they are going to have to be enough, because there is no way the Democrats in the Senate are going to agree to anything more. There is no way the White House is going to agree to anything more. Both of these--

WALLACE: Why not, just because politically?

LANE: Politically. And I think that furthermore, it's, you know, these U.S. attorneys who have been appointed are both outstanding U.S. attorneys with good reputations.

WALLACE: But they are working within the structure of the Justice Department.

LANE: That's true. But don't forget also that the law is not particularly strong that they have to work with here. It is not a crime, look at that, to release classified information. So I am not sure, we have not had the greatest experience with Patrick Fitzgerald and the special counsel. That was not satisfactory for other reasons. So let's give this some time to play out and give it a chance

WALLACE: Let me ask you, Liz, because, your father, obviously, the whole investigation about Valerie Plame and the outing of the CIA agent, I think they felt that Patrick Fitzgerald was disrobed. Would you like to see an independent counsel again?

CHENEY: I'd like to see an independent investigation. I'd like to see an investigation -- in fact, if you have got members of the president's national security team, which is what we know from reading David Sanger's piece, that's what he says. Giving him chapter and verse of what went on in these National Security Council meetings, then somebody's got to be held accountable for what is a betrayal to the nation. When you are briefed into these programs, you are left with no doubt about what the impact will be if in fact you talk to people who are not cleared.

WALLACE: Real quickly because we've got to go to the next segment. Independent counsel, or when you say independent investigation--

CHENEY: I don't think it has to be an independent counsel. I think you could in fact have independent review of it. But I do think it is important, as Mike Rogers, the chairman of the House Intel Committee, has said that whoever is looking at this needs to be outside of the chain of command, so that you can be absolutely sure that it is followed to its conclusion, and that may well be the president of the United States.

WALLACE: All right. Really?

CHENEY: If the president of the United States has been authorizing people on his national security team to brief the New York Times about one of our most highly classified programs, American people have a right to know.

WALLACE: But you -- I mean--

CHENEY: It is a question.

WALLACE: It is a question.

CHENEY: It is a question.

WALLACE: All right. We have to take a break here, but when we come back, after weeks of Obama surrogates going off message, the president makes a gaffe of his own.

OBAMA: We created 4.3 million jobs over the last 27 months, over 800,000 just this year alone. The private sector is doing fine.

OBAMA: The economy is not doing fine. There are too many people out of work. The housing market is still weak and too many homes under water.

WALLACE: That was President Obama making a politically charged blunder and then having to walk it back less than four hours later. And we are back now with the panel. So, Mara, on the scale of one to 10, 10 being political annihilation, how big a blunder was this?

LIASSON: Six.

WALLACE: That's serious.

LIASSON: But you know what? These blunders are not what's going to determine the outcome of this election. We are now in the Twitter war era of politics. You know, Romney made a ton of these during the primary. I like to fire people. You know, my friends are NASCAR team owners. But the point is that this gaffe -- and it was a real gaffe and a hurtful gaffe for him -- came at a bad time.
Look at what just happened in the last week. We've got the loss in Wisconsin, Mitt Romney raising more money than the Obama campaign did. You have the terrible job numbers last week. You have all of these surrogates who can't seem to keep on their talking points, including now the president. So I think that is a real problem. And this is going to be repeated again and again in ads, just the way that every Romney misstep, misspeak is going to be repeated.
But what is interesting is because the fundamentals of this election are so strong against the president, and some of the structural things are also now strong against him, meaning the money, the Romney misstatements don't seem to matter right now. He almost seems like the Teflon candidate.
So I do think this is a problem.

WALLACE: How big a deal, Bill?

KRISTOL: It's a pretty big deal, because gaffes matter when they are not gaffes but they are revelatory somehow of what someone thinks. The Romney gaffes that mattered, that hurt him, were ones that did suggest he was out of touch with middle class Americans. He is a guy who fired a lot of people and never had to worry about being fired himself, et cetera. And this gaffe is revealing about President Obama. And it's his policy. He wants more public sector jobs. That is -- in his address to the -- in his radio address this past weekend was about how we needed, as you pointed out in discussions with Mitch Daniels, how we need to -- Congress needs to spend more money on public sector jobs. That will get the economy going again. So it is a fundamental difference here. The Republicans believe that the private sector is the engine of economic growth, and President Obama believes the private sector is doing fine and that the problem with the economy is that we're -- the government isn't big enough.

WALLACE: I want to pick up on that with you, Charles, because the point that the president was making is that the real problem with the economy are all the government layoffs because the stimulus has run out. So I went back and looked at the disappointing jobs numbers in May. And let's put them up on the screen. Yes, government lost 13,000 jobs in May. But putting that aside, the private sector created only 82,000 jobs. So if there had been no government layoffs at all, it still would have been a lousy month for job creation.

LANE: And you know, on this point about government layoffs, in your previous discussion with the union folks about Wisconsin, you noted correctly there have been no layoffs in Wisconsin due to the reforms that Scott Walker brought in, which raises the question, if you can trim the benefits and the power of unions and not have layoffs, why do you need the money from Washington to avoid layoffs? That's the part of the argument that I'm really surprised the president is pressing in a week like this when voters, including in Democratic bastions like California, seem to be signaling that the way they want to avoid layoffs in the public sector is by tightening the belts of the public workers.

WALLACE: Let's talk, and I want to pick up on what Bill said, in the president's news conference, he said that his prescription for the economy was that Republicans stop blocking his jobs plan, and he called for more spending for infrastructure, for government jobs, and also tax cuts to small businesses that hire.
Is that, I ask you this, I know what your answer is going to be, is that the answer for either the economy or even for his own campaign, bigger government?

CHENEY: One prominent economist said this week, Chris, that if more government spending were the answer, then Greece would now be experiencing a new golden age. So obviously more government spending is not the answer. I think Bill is right. I actually don't think this was a gaffe. This is what President Obama believes. And I think it is interesting if you look at what's happened, which is that you've got responsible governors like Mitch Daniels, Chris Christie, even to some extent Governor Cuomo, a Democrat in New York, who are tightening their own budgets, who are going through a process of fiscal responsibility, who are reducing their state deficits, who are reducing unemployment, but as a result, they have had to in fact cut the government rolls. And the president's prescription now is to use federal tax dollars to come in and essentially undo that. You know, the president ought to be in a situation where he is saying what is working at the state level, let's put that in play here, let's make this a better place for the private sector to invest, let's cut taxes and let's reduce government. Instead he's actually trying to undo even the good that is being done at the state level.

WALLACE: You know, Mara, forget the policy side of it, let's talk about the political side, because clearly one of the things that the president was saying in his news conference is it is the Republicans' fault -- and he's clearly going to try to tie Romney to the Republicans. They are blocking my program that would fix it. Do you think voters, if he goes to the polls with this in November, are willing to buy, I don't even know what it is, stimulus two, stimulus three, stimulus four?

LIASSON: You know, stimulus two, whatever we want to call this, sounds pretty minor. I don't think that the voters are going to buy that there is something that the president could have done if only Congress had passed this bill, the economy would be doing better. There is very little the president can do right now. That is the truth. Europe has a huge drag on the economy, potential to be even bigger. The fact that the first stimulus was poorly designed and that there couldn't be any more of it is a problem. He is not going to get Congress to do anything between now and the election.

WALLACE: And you don't see that the voters are going to--

LIASSON: I don't think voters will -- now, if the president can turn the debate to what are the plans for the future, mine against Mitt Romney's, maybe he can prevail there, because polls do show people prefer his basic approach to deficit reduction, which is a balanced approach, to Romney's. But I don't know whether we will ever get to that debate.
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WALLACE: I hope we do.

LIASSON: Well, I hope so too, but at the rate we're going--

WALLACE: I want to pick up on the Europe aspect of it, because, Bill, the president also said that we are in trouble because of Europe's debt crisis, and just yesterday Spain announced that it is going to agree to accept a $125 billion bailout. Its banks are in terrible trouble, and it didn't want to accept the bailout. It understands that that kind of looks like a black mark against its economy. How much of a drag is all of this that's going on in Europe on the U.S. economy, and how much can the president can really affect it? How much clout does he have in Europe? Does he have any more than the German chancellor would have on U.S. politicians here?

KRISTOL: No, he doesn't have much clout in Europe. And it has not been a drag on the U.S. economy. There is zero, zero empirical evidence that anything that's happened in Europe over the last six months has affected the U.S. economy. If anything, capital has flowed to the U.S., which has kept interest rates down here. Obviously if there is a financial meltdown a la Lehman Brothers, that would affect U.S. banks to some degree, but using Europe as an excuse right now -- I'd like to know, again, from someone in the Obama administration, what exactly has happened over the last six months in Europe that has damaged the U.S. economy.

WALLACE: Thank you, panel. See you all next week. And don't forget to check out panel plus, where our group picks right up with a discussion on our website, foxnewssunday.com, and we'll post the video before noon Eastern time. And make sure to follow us on Twitter @foxnewssunday.
Up next, our Power Players of the Week.

WALLACE: It has become an annual tradition here to sample some of the words of wisdom college graduates are getting at their commencements. This year, the speakers include politicians, a general, and two television stars, and they are all our power players of the week.
 

Words of wisdom for the class of 2012

June 10, 2012

Highlights from commencement season

COLIN POWELL: It brought it up to 2.0. And they said, good enough for government work, get him out of there. Now I'm considered one of the greatest suns the City College of New York has ever had. So those of you who are not graduating with a 3.76 like Emily Batt (ph), have faith, my young friends, have faith. It ain't where you start in a life, it's where you end up and what you did along the way.
OPRAH WINFREY: Be excellent. People notice. Think of how you notice. You go to Taco Bell, somebody gives you extra napkin and some sauce. You notice. You want to go back to that person, because even at Taco Bell, excellence shows itself.
ROBERT GATES: There are children to be taught, veterans to be healed, roads to build, communities to strengthen, especially in these challenging times. In building a good business and staying involved in your community, you render public service in many ways.
BARACK OBAMA: Whether it is starting a business or running for office or raising an amazing family, remember that making your mark on the world is hard. It takes patience. It takes commitment. It comes with plenty of setbacks and it comes with plenty of failures.
ROMNEY: There are some people here who are even more pleased than the graduates. That would be their parents. Their years of prayers and devotion and investment have added up to this joyful achievement. And with credit to Congressman Dick Armey, the American dream is not owning your own home, it is getting your kids out of the home you own.
CONDOLEEZZA RICE: There is nothing with holding an opinion and holding it passionately. But it's those times when you are absolutely sure that you are right, talk with someone who disagrees. And if you constantly find yourself in the company of those who say amen to everything that you say, find other company.
JANE LYNCH: Let life surprise you, don't have a plan. Plans are for wusses. You know, if my life went according to my plan, I would never have the life I have today. Now, you are obviously very good planners or you wouldn't be here, so stop it. Stop it now.

WALLACE: And we wish the best to the class of 2012, including our last student to go to college, Remick. Congratulations to all.
And now a final reminder to check out my wife Lorraine's new cook book, "Mr. Sunday's Saturday Night Chicken." You can find more information at our website, FoxNewsSunday.com, and you will also see the recipe for skewers of sage chicken with sweet Italian sausage. Yum.
I can tell you from happy experience it is a great treat for Father's Day.
That's it for today. Have a great week. We'll see you next "Fox News Sunday."
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