YouSaid · the spoken record

Andrea Mitchell

lines on the record: 89
first: 2018-03-29
most recent: 2018-03-29
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“For more episodes of the Axe files, visit cnn.com/slash podcast and subscribe on iTunes, Stitcher, or your favorite app. And for more programming from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics, visit politics.uChicago.edu.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I certainly have more stories I want to cover, more summits. I want to watch Iran and North Korea and all of these other things evolve. More campaigns. 2020 is going to be fascinating. 2018 already is. So I've got a lot more that I want to say, do and write. And no one knows what the future holds. But I think all of us... In the world of social media and with sort of the dark aspects of journalism that none of us had ever anticipated having to cover have a lot more we want to experience. We're just getting started”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's more likely to happen. Certainly, China has now shown that it, out of nervousness as well as other motivations, wanted to show off that it had the first and primary relationship with Kim Jong-un and was not going to be sidelined by either South Korea or the United States.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, right before the midnight deadline, Tillerson had difficulty recovering from that. So that relationship went off the rails really because of Iran more than anything else at the beginning. Hard to see that the president's going to go along with this, but he's made, it's hard to predict that he was going to welcome a summit with Kim Jong-un. Whether or not that's a smart idea to have done it without preparation is another old question.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and it's one of the reasons why he was so angry at Tillerson for so many months. He felt from the very first renewal, which didn't happen till a quarter of 12 at night because there were so many arguments back and forth between the NSC and the State Department over the language of the letter that was going to go to Congress.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems that it's doomed. One doesn't know again whether the president can be talked into renewing the waivers in May. He seems to be”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to predict Except if you look back at history of this administration alone and how mercurial it is and the president and where Mattis has been in the past, he's reaffirmed recently that he's going to be there for the long haul and that he's going to get along well with John Bolton. I think we don't know”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if Pompeo is going to be on an airplane around the world, and inevitably you have to do some of that, maybe not as much of it as John Kerry did, but a lot of it, you're not going to be eyeballing the president and being the last person he speaks to every day. And Bolton is really smart. Really knows the bureaucracy, has navigated it brilliantly in the past.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have Pompeo at the State Department assuming he's confirmed, who is a man who comes up through politics, was in Congress, so no matter what his view is certainly more hawkish than Tillerson's, the State Department from the veterans I have spoken to, those who are left, are welcoming the fact that he understands politics in Washington and has the year of the president from his daily presidential daily briefings to him, which have been unusual but verbal because this president doesn't like to read the brief. So he has a much better relationship with the president. So finally, he will better understand where the president's coming from. And so the State Department may not be as exiled. Bolton, though, could run circles around him because of geography. He's right down the hall.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That wasn't good. And in fact, that was the fatal mistake, and that was our story on October 4th that he had actually said that on July 20th. After a meeting in the tank at the Pentagon. And when we reported that, it was an unforgivable. He could never recover from that as far as the president was concerned. To his credit, he didn't lie about it. He didn't deny it. He just said, I'm not going to answer that question or I'm not going to talk about such things. But he said it”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bring the press corps with you. So I spent four months trying to keep up on commercial planes with a military jet killing myself flying around the world and then he would decide, well, he was only going to call on people at a news conference, not two interviews and only call on people at a news conference who had happened to be with him on the plane, which was a wire service reporter.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was certainly a major problem. Another problem was the son-in-law, Jared Kushner, doing foreign policy. If you have a Riyadh summit that you have not decided upon and all of a sudden you're dealing with the Saudis before you're dealing with Canada or Mexico, which is unlike any other administration, when you have a president who's campaigned against NATO and you have to reel him back into multilateralism initially, so Rex Tillers had a big... Job just to try to preserve our relationships with allies. But in doing that, you really are helped if you have a press corps, if you understand that you don't go to China and not talk about human rights and a free press. And if you don't go to Moscow and not, you know,”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Political wars with the White House personnel office over appointees and nominees. He had lost the ability to have the person he wanted, Elliot Abrams, for his deputy, which was vetoed by the White House, and he decided from the get-go that he was not going to engage with the media. I think that was, I don't say this to be self-serving, even if it is self-serving. It's a classic mistake, an unprecedented. Everyone from Henry Kissinger on down knew that you had to work with the news media, the State Department Press Corps primarily, to project your views and the administration's views on foreign policy. How do you project?”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some of them, including Steve Hadley, Gates, and Rice, knew him because they had worked with ExxonMobil. So that was their connection to him. But he had no experience in public diplomacy, and in the value system of the State Department, and the value of veteran diplomats, he began to absorb that, but by then it was too late because he had come up against”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He knows the substance or not. I mean, when you announce the firing of your Secretary of State on Twitter, what about that? Because he's another guy.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other countries, exactly. And this veteran diplomat said, I am just exhausted trying to cover this White House. And that's the way every reporter I know feels because of a president who tweets on substance, not just proclamations, but a president who actually makes”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very, very hard for everybody. Everyone's exhausted. A meeting with a veteran diplomat who is basically what they do in Washington, they are reporters, they're trying to find out what is going to happen on their tariff exemption and report it back and what is this cabinet officer saying to that cabinet officer and who's going to be up and who's going to be the next secretary?”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at Johnson and Johnson and Tylenol, and the contrast that with Facebook. How long it's taken for Facebook to deal with their problems. I mean, I think it's the same thing whether you're in the corporate world or you're in politics. And so I think waiting so long. And the media, I think, then also focusing. So much on the email controversy. In terms of not what we were covering, but what was getting on the air. So, I think that I've said this a lot on my own show. So this is no secret that I feel that we did not in 2016, 2015 and 2016 cover enough of the policy issues on either side. We just didn't. The shiny objects were too shiny.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it should have been, she waited eight days after the New York Times broke that story. If she'd come right out and said, you know, My bad. I keep thinking back to Lloyd Benson, great Texas. Senator Finance Chairman, Treasury Secretary, and when he was accused of an ethical lapse by having breakfast with some lobbyists when he was, I think, running the finance committee, and he said, yeah, you know, that was, you know, when I make a mistake, it's Something like that. Well, the essence of Christ.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think looking back that if she had taken the advice or had the advice to, yeah, I did it instead of that very defensive first news conference. I've written about this and spoken about it, that first news conference at the UN Security Council.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The press was hard. And certainly that first primary where she was coming out of being First Lady of Arkansas, a relatively small state, and going into those first primaries, New Hampshire, was devastating Jennifer Flowers and all the rest. And then she lost the controversy with... Web Hubble and Vince Foster's suicide. She lost her father. She had a really hard time, and then, of course, Lewinsky scandal. By then, I was at the State Department, so mercifully I didn't have to cover that. I just think it made her very self protective, and you can do that as a Secretary of State. It's less successful to do that as a candidate in retail politics.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think In looking back, you can't Overestimate the influence of the 92 campaign and all of the scandals that followed. Some unfairly In terms of their First year in office, which ended very successfully for them with the budget deal and then the economic success that followed that. But there was a lot of turmoil in the initial cabinet choices. They got beat up. They got beat up a lot.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think she was risk averse, knowing that she had a political future ahead of her. I had covered In the 08 campaign, of course, for that whole primary season. and then covered the Democratic race.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stood up against the State Department and the National Security Council and gone her own way. I'd gone to Bosnia and Tuzla with And turkey and other places around the world. When she was first lady, but as Secretary of State, she inhabited that role. I think a mixed record Because she never really dug into the Middle East, for instance.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I knew her very well from the 92 campaign and then from covering the White House for a couple of years. And so later on I covered the 2000 Senate race. Knew her from that role. Of course, from covering foreign policy with her as Secretary of State She had the advantage of. Knowing a lot of the world leaders and knowing the world. I'd been with her as First Lady. We had gone to Beijing famously for the women's conference.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to get over, I mean, you don't get over this. I had worked so closely with him for so many years. We had wonderful leadership. NBC at every level who came down and eventually Tom for a year took over, meet the press and was the great. Leader who put us together on that program. But I learned so much from him the ninety two campaign was so informed by Tim and the bus was so Oh my gosh, the bus trips all across America, the greatest campaign I've ever covered. Simply because it was so retail politics and you weren't on an airplane and it was so spontaneous with Bill Clinton jumping off the bus at all hours of the day and night to speak to crowds large and small.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, all of us were, and all of our colleagues and friends in the other networks as we were spreading, we were keeping everything secret until we could reach them, until our anchor, then Brian Williams was in Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan on a reporting trip. We had to reach him. We had to get Tom Broca into the studio. They put me in the anchor chair to wait until Tom could get in, and then Tom and I had to keep everything going until we were ready to go on the air. And we just were on the air for hours and hours talking about Tim.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had my parents for a very long time and there was no shock in losing them. Thank goodness never had the experience of losing someone that close to me. And I was there when he died. I was right there in the building. When he was being carried out on the stretcher. And then because his wonderful wife, Maureen and his son, Luke, were in Italy on a holiday, he had come back a day or two early to hook up Luke's cable, TV, go to his apartment, come and do meet the press. He was recording his meet the press open and introduction on that Friday. We then had to reach them.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was the greatest loss I've ever experienced because when my parents died, my father was 102. My mother was well into her 90s.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On a budget negotiation from the Hills standpoint, and my colleague at the White House, John Cochran, covering the Bush White House 41, would talk about what he knew coming from their end of Pennsylvania Avenue, and we would compare notes. It was completely collegial, not internally competitive. It was just to put the best story on the air that night.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Through Buffalo back when, I guess, in the 60s campaign, he was just a little boy. Tim just was such a great newsman and he would start every day, and often we'd both be in for the Today show, so we'd both be in the newsroom at 6.30 in the morning, and he'd say, hey, Mitch, what do you got today? And that's how my day started with that big, wonderful grinning face. And he would also run the morning call for the network in terms of what we would do for nightly news and where the story was. And he would start each day calling me or if I were on the hill in the White House correspondent and say, okay, who's got the action? And I'd say what I knew from the...”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Baker Institute, Jim Baker had delayed any debate. Being the manager for the incumbent vice president, he didn't want to give the challenger Dukakis a big leg up to be on the big stage. And so there were only two debates and of course that was the Famous debate, and we were planning our questions, and the format was prescribed for us. And of course, and Timmy was trying to get me to ask a couple of other questions I wanted to ask about the budget deficit and the nuclear triad, which is my wonky best self. My inner self, and he wanted me to go into edgier questions, which is why he was so great on Meet the Press.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He started working, as you know, for Cuomo and Moynihan in New York politics. He just, by the time he came to Washington, though he'd already become senior vice president at NBC, and I remember when I was thrown at the last minute into the 1988 second and last Dukakis-Bush debate, he was figuring out debate strategy. We only had 24 hours to prepare because Jim Baker, someone, you know, that...”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Full of life, smart as could be. I always Thought it was his Jesuit education that made him such a good interviewer. He was a lawyer. He knew how to ask questions. He always got to the bottom of things quickly. He was a great reporter, a great newsman, and”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fading somewhat. Yeah, I remember. James Reston Jr., a famous name, of course. His father of the New York Times. Longtime bureau chief in Washington and He wrote a book about it. He was one of the reporters there. And years later, I ran into him and his wife at a book party in Washington. She said something to me about how when I was talking about the shock and not wearing off after Jonestown, she said, well, didn't you get some help? Because everyone else did. All the guys did who had been down there because it was so horrific, and it never had occurred to me.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I didn't really know, I didn't have my bearings, so I didn't do a very good job. It was only when I got back a couple of weeks later to my little house in Washington. Vividly remember being dropped by the yellow cab on my doorstep and I just started uncontrollably sobbing. Because we had been taken Guyanese Defense Force helicopters into Jonestown to see the island. And to see where everyone had died and just What had happened there Was devastating, but I hadn't really taken it in. You know, you put one foot in front of the other and you're trying to get your story out. Coming back to my little house On a tree line street in Washington, DC. Somehow made it all so real and so awful.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wasn't, and that's what's so really strange I think I was following the same instinct that gets you to follow airplanes. When you see something awry, it was what's taken me to war zones and other places where rational people don't go. What was so strange about that experience, partly I was having professional issues because the producers who had worked with our correspondent were in a state of shock. Some of them were less willing to go out and aggressively cover the story. They were still these squads out there. Understandably. Understandably.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Congressman Ryan was killed Our correspondent and cameraman was killed. Jackie Spear was shot and severely wounded. So was Steve Sung, our sound man on the target.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People from San Francisco, most of the minorities who had followed this cult leader, Jim Jones, from San Francisco to the jungles of Guyana and in a mass suicide drank, the phrase drank drinking the Kool-Aid comes from that. And several of them of his hitmen escaped and they followed the NBC camera crew and Jackie Spear, Congressman Paul Ryan Age who was shy”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On so many levels, David, because I had just come to NBC in July of 1978, and this was Thanksgiving. And I had never worked overseas for NBC, so I'd never gone through any of the technical challenges that that involves. And they were much more complicated back then. The trauma of going to Jonestown, I was called A holiday, weekend, or whatever the Thanksgiving holiday was, as I recall, and with no preparation because our correspondent had been murdered there by... We should just”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just a lack of responsibility to the greater good, which is what they have sworn to uphold, which is defending the Constitution of the United States.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I mean, Russia and Russia's role Should have been something that was a no brainer for Republicans and hardliners on foreign policy. And so many of them have waffled on that issue.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he really never recused himself because he still controls subpoena power and never really handed off to Michael Conaway.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am. I covered the House Intelligence Committee for years. And the Senate Intelligence Committee, when even when there were disagreements like over the torture report, they were done in a bipartisan way. And I think the Senate leaders are trying to preserve that on their side. The House has devolved into something that does not resemble what the intelligence committee, which is supposed to be equal in numbers and equal in relationships. And you have to fought. Going back to the original sin, I have to fault the midnight run of Devon Units.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Intrusive then, and now it's much worse. We had McCain Fingold and other laws that didn't. All of the Supreme Court challenges to campaign financing. And now our campaigns are so infected with secret money, campaign loopholes, and now in 2016, we didn't even know what was coming at us with subterranean. Efforts on social media and other hidden financial sources, and it's going to take an investigation far beyond the ability of any single journalist to discover what really was going on with Russia and other foreign.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are so many reasons. I think back to an interview I did, I was subbing for Tim Russert as host of Meet the Press, and it was the year David Borren was deciding not to seek re-election. And he said it was the money chase. It was and by far less.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Bob Dole and George Mitchell, and we would start the day when Mitchell and Dole were majority leader and Republican leader, we'd start the day with a pen and pencil on the floor of the Senate with them standing together and telling us what they'd agreed on and what was coming up that day and what had unanimous consent and what I started covering the Senate, we didn't have C Span. We had C-SPAN for the House by then, but not the Senate. And John Glan, whom I adored. Course, you had Al Gore and others who had come up in the house when I was covering, you know. Hearings as well before he was in the Senate. Ed Markey and others who came from the House into the Senate. And it just Marky came much later into the Senate, but you had real leaders in the House side as well in both parties.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am, I covered the Senate and loved it, it was my favourite beat, in fact, not the White House, not the Stage Department, but covering the hill was great in those days. And you had access, and there were so many great figures. Sam Nunn and David Borren and Pat Moynihan and John Chafey and Danforth and Chris John McCain. Great big controversies, big issues”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. You'll recall that he was either the chairman or Joe Biden was the chairman. He was the ranking Republican. And they worked in such a bipartisan fashion that it was hard to tell who was chair and who was vice chair. And they had the only real hearings into the Iraq war that were held in the fall of 2002.”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said things that would now be considered outrageous. 1972, he was the only big city Democratic mayor certainly who endorsed Richard Nixon for re-election. Nixon, in fact, came in 1972 to Philadelphia. There was an injunction to stop the city and the police from barring all protesters from not only his route into the city, but anywhere around Independence Hall where he was speaking. There was the signing of the revenue sharing bill, I think there as well. A mayor from Indiana was the head of the. Of the National Council of Mayors or the League of Cities named Richard Lug”
2018-03-29 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 229 - Andrea Mitchell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source