predisposition against firearms. why did you change your mind? also, the other side of the ledger is party. you have granted more come mutations and fewer pardons that any two term president since john adams. why is that? is the focus on commutations taking energy away? finally, just one other thing on pardons. many of your pled predecessors reserve that for their more politically sensitive pardons. do we expect you to do that or would you rule that out? >> i appreciate the question gregory, because i haven't had a chance to talk about this this much. this is an effort i'm really proud of. it is my view shared by democrats and republicans alike in many quarters that as

successful as we have been in reducing crime in this country, the extraordinary rate of incarceration of nonviolent offenders has created its own set of problems that are devastating. entire communities have been ravaged where largely men but some women are taken out of those communities, kids are now growing up without parents, it per p perpetuate as cycle of poverty in their lives. it is disproportionately young men of color that are being arrested at higher rates, charged and convicted at higher rates and imprisoned for longer sentences.

so ultimately the physician fix criminal justice reform. i still hold out hope that the bipartisan taking place in congress can finish the job and we can have a criminal justice system at least at the federal level that is both smart on crime effective on crime but recognizes the need for proportionality and the need to rehabilitate for those who commit crimes. even as that slow process of criminal justice reform goes forward what i wanted to see is if we can reinvigorate the pardon process that had become stalled. over the course of several years partly because it's politically risky. you commute somebody and they commit a crime and the politics of it are tough and everybody

remembers the willie horton case. the bias of my predecessors and frankly a number of my advisers early in my presidency is be careful about that. but i thought it was very important for us to send a clear message that we believe in the principals behind criminal justice reform even if ultimately we need legislation. so we have focused more on commutations than on pardons. i would argue by the time i leave office the number of pardons we grant would be roughly in line with what other presidents have done but standing up this commutations process has required a lot of effort and energy and it's not like we got a slug of money to

do it. you have got limited resources. the primary job of the justice department is to prevent crime and to convict those who have committed crimes and to keep the american people safe and that means that you have had this extraordinary effort by a lot of people inside the justice department to go above and beyond what they're doing to also review these petitions that have been taking place and we have been able to get organizations around the country to participate to kind of screen and help people apply and what we have -- the main criteria i've tried to set is if under today's laws because there have been changes in how we charge nonviolent drug offenses, if under today's charges their

senses would be substantially lower than the charges they received if they got a life sentence but a u.s. attorney or if the justice department indicates today they would be likely to get 20 years and they already served 25, then what we try to do is to screen through and find those individuals who ha have, you know, paid their debt to society that have behaved themselves and tried to reform themselves while incarcerated and we think have a good chance of being able to use that second chance well. on the firearms issue, what i've done is to try to screen out folks who seem to have a propensity for violence. there may be a situation where a kid at 18 was a member of a gang, had a firearm, did not use

it in the offense that he was charged in, there's no evidence that he used it in any violent offense. it's still a firearms charge. he didn't use it. he's now 38, 20 years later and has an unblemished prison record, has gone back to school, gotten his ged, gone through drug treatment, has the support of the original judge that presided, the support of the u.s. attorney that charged him, support of the warden, has a family that loves him. and in that situation, the fact that he had 20 years earlier on enhancement because he had a firearm is different than a situation where somebody is engaged in armed robbery and shot somebody. in those cases that is still

something that i'm concerned about. our focus really has been on people who we think were overcharged and people who we do not believe have a propensity towards violence. and in terms of your last question about sort of last minute pardons granted, the process that i've put in place is not going to vary depending on how close i get to the election. so it's going to be reviewed by the pardon attorney. it will be reviewed by my white house counsel and, you know, i'm going to as best as i can make these decisions based on the merits as opposed to political

considerations. okay. and finally, jim mel chefsky is retiring after 30 years at nbc. he's done an outstanding job mostly covering the department of defense. this may be my last press conference here. so i just wanted to thank jim for the extraordinary career he's had and the great job he's done and he gets the last question. >> thank you very much, mr. president. first back to isis and iraq. and syria. your very own national counterterrorism operation has found that despite all the devicisive defeats the coalitio have dealt to isis on the battlefield that they expanded their threat worldwide to include as many as 18 operational bases. in the six years you have been dealing do you feel any personal disappointment there hasn't been more progress and in any

discussions you have had with the u.s. military and your intelligence agencies, have you come up with any new ideas on how to deal or defeat isis? >> every time there's a terrorist attack i feel disappointment because i would like to prevent all of them. and that's true not just when the attacks are in europe or in the united states. when you read stories about attacks in lebanon or iraq or afghanistan or distant parts of the world that don't get as much attention, they get my attention. because that's somebody's kid and that's somebody's mom and that's somebody who was just going about his business and

mindlessly, senselessly this person was murdered. so i haven't gotten number to it. it bugs me whenever it happens. and wherever it happens. and we are constantly pushing ourselves to see are there additional ideas that we can deploy to defeat this threat. now, it is important that we recognize terrorism as a tactic has been around for a long time. and if you look at the '70s or the '80s or the '90s there was some terrorist activity somewhere in the world that was brutal and, you know, as much as i would like to say that during my eight-year presidency we could have eliminated terrorism

completely, it's not surprising that that hasn't happened and i don't expect that will happen under the watch of my success s successors. i do think that because of our extraordinary efforts, the homeland is significantly safer than it otherwise would be. in some ways there's arguing the counter factuals but the attacks we prevent i take great satisfaction in and i am grateful for the extraordinary work our teams do. i don't think there's any doubt had we not destroyed al qaeda in the fata that more americans would have been killed and we might have seen more attacks like we saw on 9/11 and we have maintained vigilance,

recognizing that those threats still remain, those aspirations in the minds of these folks still remain, but it is much harder for them to carry out large scale attacks like that than it used to be. what we have seen is that these lower level attacks carried out by fewer operatives or an individual with less sophisticated and less expensive weapons can do real damage and that i think points to the need for us to not just have a military strategy, not just have a traditional counterterrorism strategy designed to bust up networks and catch folks before they carry out their attacks although those still are necessary and we have to be more and more sophisticated about how we carry those out, it still requires us to have much greater

cooperation with our partners around the world. but it points to the fact that we're going to have to do a better job in draining the ideology that is behind these attacks. that right now is emanating largely out of the middle east and a very small fraction of the muslim world, a perversion of islam that has taken root and been turbocharged over the internet and that is appealing to even folks who don't necessarily know anything about islam and aren't even practicing islam in any serious way but have all kinds of psychosis and latch on to this as some way of being important in managnifying

themselves. that's tougher because that involves both changes in geo politics in places like syria. it requires cultural changes in regions like the middle east and north africa that are going through generational changes and shifts as the old order collapses. it requires psychology and thinking about how do these messages of hate reach individuals and are there ways in which we can intervene ahead of time and all that work is being done and we have got the very best people at it and each day they're making a difference in saving lives not just here but around the world. by it's a challenge precisely

because if you're successful 99% of the time, that 1% can still mean heartbreak for families. and it's difficult because in a country let's say of 300 million people here in the united states, if 99.9% of people are immune from this hateful ideology but 1/10 of 1% are susceptible to it, that's a lot of dangerous people running around. and we can't always anticipate them ahead of time. because they may not have criminal records. so this is going to be a challenge. i just want to end on the point that i made earlier. how we react to this is as important as the efforts we take to destroy isil, prevent these networks from penetrating.

you can't separate those two things out. the reason it's called terrorism as opposed to just a standard war is that these are weak enemies that can't match us in conventional power, but what they can do is make us scared and when societies get scared, they can react in ways that undermine the fabric of our society. it makes us weaker. and makes us more vulnerable and creates politics that divide us in ways that hurt us over the long term. so if we remain steady and steadfast and vigilant but also take the long view and maintain perspective and remind ourselves

of who we are and what we care about most deeply and what we cherish and what's good about this country and what's good about the international order and civilization that was built in in part because of the sacrifices of our men and women after a 20th century world war, if we remember that, then we're going to be okay. but we're still going to see ep sod cli these kinds of tragedies and we're going to keep working on it until we make things better. >> president -- >> only because you're retiring. but i hope it's not too long because -- >> no. no. >> i'm going to be late for my birthday dinner. >> happy birthday. >> thank you. >> you eluded to the negotiations between the u.s. and russia over some military to military cooperation in in syria

against some of the militant forces there presumably in exchange for whatever russian influence could be imposed on this regime for a variety of reasons. i'm sure you're not surprised that some in the military are not supportive of that deal. some european allies think it would be a deal with the devil. what makes you so confident that you can trust the russians and vladimir putin? >> i'm not confident we can trust the russians and a vladimir putin which is why we have to test whether or not we can get an actual cessation of hostilities. that includes an end to the kinds of aerial bombing and civilian death and destruction that we have seen carried out by the assad regime. russia may not be able to get there either because they don't want to or don't have sufficient influence over assad. and that's what we're going to test.

so we go into this without any blinders on. we're very clear that russia has been willing to support a murderous regime that has -- and an individual, assad, who has destroyed his country just to cling on to power. what started with peaceful protests has led to a shattering of an entire, pretty advanced society. so whenever you're trying to broker any kind of deal with an individual like that or a country like that, you got to go in there with some skepticism. on the other hand, if we are able to get a genuine cessation of hostilities that prevents

indiscriminate bombing, that protects civilians, that allows humanitarian access and creates some sort of pathway to begin the hard work of political negotiations inside of syria, then we have to try because the alternative is a perpetuation of civil war. i have been wrestling with this thing now for a lot of years. i am pretty confident that a big chunk of my gray hair comes out of my syria meetings and there is not a meeting that i don't end by saying is there something else we could be doing that we haven't thought of? is there a plan f, g, h that we think would lead to a resolution of this issue so that the syrian

people can put their lives back together again and we can bring peace and relieve the refugee crisis that's taking place. and the options are limited when you have a civil war like that. when you have a ruler who doesn't care about his people. when you have got terrorist organizations that are brutal and would impose their own kind of dictatorship on people and you have moderate opposition and ordinary civilians who are often outgunned and outmanned. that's a very difficult situation to deal with. but we have got to give it a

chance. there's going to be some bottom lines that we expect for us to cooperate with russia beyond the deconfliction that we're currently doing and that means restraint on the part of the regime that so far has not been forthcoming. early on in this version of the cessation of hostilities we probably saw some lives saved and some lessening of violence. the violations of the cessation have grown to where it just barely exists particularly up in the northwestern part of the country. so we're going to test and see if we can get something that sticks. and if not, then russia will have shown itself very clearly to be an irresponsible actor on the world stage supporting a murderous regime and we'll have

to be -- we'll have to answer to that on the international stage. all right. thank you very much everybody. >> president obama in a news conference at the pentagon vowing to continue what he called an aggressive campaign against isis as he recounted a number of military successes. on another subject, mr. obama denied $400 million air-lifted to iran on the day hostages were released by tehran was a ransom. he insisted the timing was tied to nuclear talks, just a coincidence but unrelated to the hostages and he said it was actually paid in cash because the united states didn't have a banking relationship with iran eliminating the use of wire transfers or checks. finally, the president weighed in on the political campaign, said americans should decide for themselves whether they're comfortable having donald trump in charge of the nation's nuclear weapons. of course, earlier this week mr.

obama declared trump is unfit to serve in the white house and with that, the president is off to martha's vineyard for summer vacation with his family. coverage continues now on fox news channel on cable and satellite any time on foxnews.com. thanks for being with us. i'm greg jared, fox news new york. >> this has been a fox news special report. your stomach is full of

acidthatacidthat is dangerous if it gets out. cutest swim lesson ever.

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[captioning made possible by warner bros. domestic television distribution] harvey: welcome to "tmz live." harvey levin here. charles: charles here. harvey: so the jenners have an issue in malibu and malibu adjacent. you obviously know what happened to bruce jenner on pacific coast highway in that terrible accident. kris jenner was involved in her own car wreck yesterday and it may have been a bad one. looked like she could have broke a wrist. a week old rolls-royce. charles: that hurts as much as a broken risk. harvey: no, it isn't. health is more important than a stupid car, charles. anyway, what happened was she was driving along and this is in the calabasas area. you know that's where a lot of celebrities live now. she's in the calabasas area now and a