the fact that he was he had a relatively ambivalent idea about interventionism in a war i mean he would have been perfectly fine with withdrawing from syria and it was planning on doing so as recently as two weeks ago and yet he was encouraged in exactly the opposite direction by members of both parties which again makes absolutely no sense to me on any level it really doesn't it just blows my mind seeing like these people who tell us that we have to be so afraid of this man that he's going to do you know run us off the edge of the cliff and that he's evil incarnate that but yet oh no it's ok when he bombs people you know and one of the interesting things too is is. is our good buddy james komi recently you covered him you know you talked about wrote about his his new book a former f.b.i. director james going to book a higher loyalty truth lies and leadership so let me ask you matt just where does james komi as higher loyalties lie i was afraid i didn't read the book and i don't know if i'm going to read it over the summer i'm on the fence well i'm going to

have to i mean not not not to be crude about it but i'm going to guess it's first loyalty is probably to the two million dollars advance that he got for the book. but now that's probably not fair but honestly it's a very strange book. it it is. it is not a book that feels. open and it feels like it is its intent was to disclose a lot about either the sort of pre-election controversies that he was involved with or the trump white house in his interactions with it he mostly stuck to information that had already been disclosed that was already out there in the press with a few minor and glaring exceptions in the book felt very calculated in that respect that he only wanted to have a few big talking points and everything else was going to sort of remain secret very very strange he sort of offhandedly mentions and. the f.b.i.

received classified material suggesting that there was an improper relationship between. turning general loretta lynch and the clinton campaign during during the campaign which seemed like a big bombshell revolution that is sort of skims over but it's very oddly written the whole the whole book is very strange yeah it was almost as strange as donna brazil as bug and i wonder have komi is going to end up the same place that donna brazil sort of ended up which is does anyone know where donna brazil is now i think is work over the years probably going to end up which leads me to all these people sort of writing books and everybody gets a break you know million dollar advances but your sort of doing something that a little bit different direction on april twenty fourth you began publishing on what's called substract dot com a new serialized novel titled the business secrets of drug dealing adventures of the identified blackmail tell us a little about the book and why you chose to publish it on sub stock in this way.

so some time ago i ran into someone who had known for a long time who sort of came out in the that he had a double life. and had been a high level drug dealer in his past and he wanted to sort of tell the story of what it's like to live on the other side of the law and it was a fascinating story and my anonymous co-author who is still anonymous has a really distinct and interesting voice. and we sort of came up with a fictionalized version of a lot of the adventures that he had experienced. and it's a fascinating story about sort of the inanity of our drug laws the racism that he went through and the extraordinary measures that we that we our government goes to to keep people from trading in a drug that is now illegal in

a lot of states so it was it's a really fun bizarre interesting suspense filled story that i couldn't figure out how to tell except this fiction which is sort of a new thing for me as we're going to break our quarters don't forget to let us know what you think of the topics we've covered on facebook and twitter and see our poll shows that are dot com coming up we intercept the intercept handling of whistleblowers with former cia analyst john kiriakou and then journalist maxim woman vol dissects the journalism of cnn's jake tapper so you better stay tuned to watching the whole. goal make this many a factor to send to the public will. when the ruling classes

protect themselves. the family. lives and be the one person. in the middle of the room sick. really. really really. that's a very rough terrain you so it's rough climates and you have to fight to be able to misled. it was gunshots on top of them and so many friends they would have been going there and they have been eating up all my don't let me go back up. you know i don't want to see it but a body in this room is ready to participate in the good. old to me

a good meeting. you don't think about this leave the soldier on no you got straight like and you know there's another patient. and now here is former cia analyst and torture was a lower john kerry and our own tyro ventura discussing the intercept stories and failures to properly protect not one but two whistleblowers from government persecution after leaking information to the famed news organisation and. i think that the intercept probably means well i do but they go about it in a very amateurish and ham handed way they encourage people on their website to send

them classified documents they. have in christian keys posted so you can you can encrypt your data and send it to the the problem is once they receive that data they handle it in a way that is really irresponsible for example what they do is in the case of of all barry the f.b.i. agent in minneapolis they took the documents that he allegedly sent and then wrote a freedom of information act request asking for exactly those same documents and actually and actually listing the titles of those documents so all the f.b.i. had to do was to go through its databases to see who had printed all of those documents they identified him and maybe two other people then they went back to their own internal surveillance video and they saw him taking a photograph of his computer screen and they got him and he immediately confessed and apparently has already taken a deal let me say something before i move on to the next example say something

about his case the information that he is alleged to have given to the intercept just a few years ago was not classified or interest rate this was unclassified information that just recently the f.b.i. has decided to retroactively classify so i would say that had he been willing to fight this thing he may have had a case where about a case that's interesting that no one what qualities are barkers whether it be you know something like the intercept or an individual reporter what markers should a whistleblower look for in a journalist or organization the ok i know i can trust these people i know. dot their i's and cross their t.'s and i know i'm i'm i'm safe first with them what what should they look for. the technology has gotten so good that the government has weapons that they didn't have even two years ago and so really the only safe way to do it is to send it to wiki leaks well now if you if you want to. to give it

to a specific journalist here in the united states you're taking a risk in a couple of different ways we know for example that reality when or when she allegedly sent a document to the intercept what the intercept did was they made a copy of the document sent it back to n.s.a. and said is this a real n.s.a. document not realizing that when you print a document and you're an intelligence community employee there's identifying information embedded in the document it may be in the dot of an eye or in a period but it's got your name and your employee number well if you're a national security journalist or you profess to be a national security journalist you want to know those things so reality winner was arrested only two hours after the intercept had published the story based on her documents so it's just not safe anymore and you either have to use no documents at

all and the journalist frankly is going to have to take your word for it or you go to wiki leaks well you know it's interesting when you look at the culture in d.c. because i've always seen it's feels like there's an unspoken numbers or understanding in government that there are good leaders and bad leaders sure you know and you know. further you explain the difference between them because you and i get to see it in a lot of people might not understand that but it's like when i see newspapers and stories all the time was the anonymous source told me or this person told me no one ever seems to get prosecuted for that and you know that is rushing a certain agenda but reality winner other people like yourself suddenly all were going to go full bore at this but what's the difference between a good leader and a bad leader in d.c. there there is one kind of good leaker and two kinds of bad leakers the good leaker is a whistle blower and there's actually a legal definition of whistle blowing it's bringing to light any evidence of waste fraud abuse illegality or threats to the public health or public safety the

american people own. that information even if it's classified the american people own it and if it reveals a crime or waste fraud and abuse then the american people have a right to see it that's a whistleblower now there are two other kinds of leakers there's the official leaker that's the anonymous source that we're always seeing in the washington post in the new york times and elsewhere oftentimes that is what's euphemistically called an official leak and what what the white house will do or the pentagon they're really the two most prolific leakers is the leaks some information that sensitive just to see how the public reacts and if there's no reaction or a positive reaction they'll an act that policy if there's a negative reaction then they'll withdraw the policy that's sort of how they gauge public opinion now the other badly is when somebody leaks just for their own benefit or because it's exciting to them or they like to see the excitement of the

new story and know that they were the source or they like to impress a journalist which happens more often than you might suspect and finally today let us bring you an added bonus to this up a sold author journalist and documentary filmmaker max blumenthal discussing the corporate access journalism trainwreck that is. tapper i watched a lot more tapper than any human being should be subjected i'm sorry about that but i mean it's like if it had been inside the chamber and bob graham it would have been appropriate but you know i why i've been watching tapper ever since the trump era began and he's really ramped up kind of a narrative of regime change but this actually started maybe towards the end of the obama era and i just noticed that even rarely misses a show without promoting regime change against one of the non-compliant nations you know venezuela iran north korea there's the russian interference narrative and syria is

a special place for jake tapper is real. cheer lead for war and i wrote about his strange shady sources which have not been scrutinized by c.n.n. editors. but you know i also went back into jake tapper's past you know this is someone who has crafted for himself an image as the consummate centrist in the beltway and it's almost like he's planned his path to the top of cable news he used to write at salon dot com which is sort of a progressive magazine one of the first online publications that had a progressive brand i also wrote for them and so i worked with david talbot who was the founder of salon and i went back to david talbot and said what do you think of what jake tapper is doing and he said you know it's absolutely abominable but it's it's exactly what i expected not only was he a centrist he was a john mccain groupie and so i looked at some of the things mccain tapper was saying back in two thousand when mccain was running for president he compared himself a verbally to mccain's hostage he said i'm patty hearst and you know there's no way that you won't come under mccain's spell in fact he likes to call me tanya this was

when he was a white house correspondent who was covering mccain and he's continued to be mccain's groupie to the president if we remember last week john mccain went on jake tapper and said you know north korea needs to be extinguished it needs to be we need to see the extinction of that regime and jake tapper just not it along and then he said you know how's your family doing how cindy house. you know. how many amazing how it gets thrown out there there's what kind of you know allusions to death and destruction just kind of thrown out there on the show and other shows on c.n.n. and other moves and it's kind of like oh cool how are you doing you know is everything ok all right and there's something about it being with jake tapper especially. i remember the first time i ever experienced his work was when he wrote an article years and years and years ago about going on a date with monica lewinsky. and i was at it you know pretty horrified and as a as

a young woman. the age of eighteen that this was like it was horrifying to me that someone would do that and it calls back when i was unemployed for a while and sat and watched c.n.n. all day and i know and looked at jake tapper as being this like well you see he's fighting for the middle ok that's what kind of people thought and that's that's what i ask because that praise is that jake tapper is even handed he is neutral he's all of that but one of the things you talk about and one of the things that's really important to look at is how that even handedness that guy is of neutrality is actually pretty morally dishonest can you kind of walk us through that idea yeah i mean first of all could do goes on a date with one woman and then writes a whole article about it like that's bizarre like you just ok that's just weird i don't even know what else to say and it's not exactly true. yes really.