we talked to condi rice, george w bush's national security adviser. you could find out a lot of information that way. history of meetings and conversations and teleconferences, etc. . the classification process takes decades. sometimes documents are never declassified, depending on what we're talking about. you think another ten, 20 years we might have the full documentary record or close to it when it comes to iraq? no, no, i don't think so. i myself submitted many mandatory declassification requests in order to get notes of various meetings of the national security council principal adviser is like powell and rumsfeld and and rice and the deputy national security advisers almost all my mdr mandatory declassification request notes were either denied in full or redacted or i still not have gotten the results of them. if in the future, i'm sure that the formal transcripts of the national security council meetings will be declassified over time, maybe ten, 15 years from now. you write a sequel, but most, most importantly, leigh, in terms of understandin

i remember so clearly traveling to the region with condi rice and what a tough time that was after 9/11 and how much she was urging those leaders to recognize what was happening in their countries, to recognize the yearning of their people but also how they had to shut down terrorist financing, they had to recognize the extremist elements within their populations, and those were pretty tough conversations. you fast forward 20 or so years, and i was in riyadh at that summit. 54 arab and muslim leaders hosted by king salman and actually hearing deputy crown prince saying, then deputy crown prince saying we need to return to a more moderate form of islam . that was a pretty stunning development and if you think about the horror of 9/11 and to finally have a partner in the region of not a perfect partner none of these allies are perfect . >> how imperfect or perfect is mohammad bin salman? >> he's obviously made some major mistakes but he's also reforming saudi arabia and so maybe the way to ask the question is what is in the interest of the united states . and so it is undeniable that th

so the good news about going into the administration was that i knew both condi rice by then secretary of state and hadley, steve hadley, national security adviser. very well. condi i'd worked together on the bush 41 nsc when i was deputy security adviser and and i had, as i said, i had known steve since 1974. so i was going in to work with a couple of people that i really knew well and knew. there be any backstabbing, knew that we would work together productively as a team. one of the things that i was committed to that would be easy with condi was. i, i had observed over much of my career, most of my career, the secretaries of state, secretaries of defense, not didn't get along mostly, didn't like other and sometimes really hated each other and and often were not even on speaking terms and and so i was determined and. i've always felt that poorly served the president. so i was the term and condy and i would have a positive working relationship i also had the other my other approach to it was you when you're the secretary of defense you never have elbow your way to the table. you got

condi rice, former sec, former national security advisor and secretary of state. so but but now if we project forward right and now everything that's happened and russia is where it is and we have this criminal aggression against ukraine and we have the essentially destruction of russia's business reputation and not just the decline of it, not just the let's see, scandalizing of it here and there, but really the self-destruction of it. so do you see some possible way forward, some elements in russia that you previously saw that we might focus on for a different russia or a russia that more resemble the hopeful russia that you saw in the nineties. that's a that's a tough question. it's not easy to see that, because what what you need in a place like russia is you need most of the people to obey the law and to do things the right way and to not use bribes and to not use threats of visit physical violence. and if you have 15 or 20% of the the business people that are behaving that way, then then the rest of the business people incentivized to to behave that way. and