YouSaid · the spoken record

Barton Gellman

lines on the record

60

first

2022-01-13

most recent

2022-01-13

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

1. “Thank you for a remarkably good set of podcasts that I think that you're in the very tip top handful of interviewers on the planet. Even guests of yours who I've heard many times elsewhere always shed some new light when they talk to you. So keep up yours.”

   2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

2. “I have no book plans, but I am going to stay with this theme, with the threat to democracy. And I would imagine that there will be a number of individual stories and quite likely a part three, if you conceive of the September 2020 piece and the December 2021 piece as sort of parts one and two, there'll be another big picture look at that probably around the time of the midterm elections.”

   2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

3. “Bowers' response was that it is unacceptable to allow so many grave crimes to go unpunished that it promotes the idea that the president actually is above the law and that we can't afford as a country to let him get away with it.”

   2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

4. “Exactly. They did a book together. The Goldsworth argument was don't indict Trump because, first of all, the way he operates, like on Mafia Don, the evidence is always going to be indirect and circumstantial and the cases are going to be relatively hard to prove. The political turmoil it would create is too great. It would overwhelm the entire Biden presidency. It would suck all the oxygen out of everything else that Biden wants to do.”

   2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

5. “There was a really interesting debate before Button took office between two very smart people, Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer. About whether it was a good idea or not a good idea to hold Trump accountable for his crimes with an indictment. And Goldsmith's argument, although he believes Trump, he was in the”

   2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

6. “Well, that's a huge question that would be. You could look at this 40% as dry kindling. They are angry. They are convinced. And this is, by the way, in counterpoint to the bulk of Republican elected officials who know perfectly well that Biden won the election. But their supporters don't. The people I was talking to were the true believers who would bet their lives that the election had been stolen. And they're waiting for a spark, this massive dry kindling, and they will know what to do the next time Trump summons them. And if he's indicted. That's kind of a blow-to-time.”

   2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

7. “Before Congress, and that could be cured by giving them immunity. And normally the Justice Department, if it was doing an investigation, would have strong views about whether to give somebody immunity or not. We're not hearing of that kind of conflict. And I fear that Merrick Garland has not taken accountability for what happened in the last election seriously enough on a criminal basis.”

   2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

8. “At the very top of the American government conspire to prevent the lawfully elected president from taking power. And as far as we know from any public hint, the Justice Department is not doing anything about that. Now, there may be some secret grand jury and an exceptionally well-kept secret investigation of Trump and his top lieutenants for the attempt to overthrow the results of an election. But I tend to think we would have heard something about it. And in fact, that there would have been, for example, conflicts erupting between the Justice Department investigation and the congressional investigation because there are people who want to take the fifth.”

   2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

9. “Well, this reminds me of the point that Jamie Raskin made that the gravest danger sign of a successful coup is prior failed coup. And that is especially true if the failed coup goes unpunished. If all we get out of January 6th, and not just January 6th, I mean, January 6th was a catastrophe and was a singular event of violent sacking of the capital and an attempt by forts to prevent the certification of a presidential election, but it was part of and an integral part of a systematic campaign to overthrow the vote. And no one has been held accountable for that. It can't be that no crime is committed when a group of people”

   2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

10. “To take over this machinery. And right now, Democrats are standing by and watching it with sort of jaws hanging open and not by and large doing very much about it. But I do know that any president has experienced as Biden knows what it looks like when a president has decided to marshal his resources and his administration in service of a grave threat to democracy, the gravest since the Civil War, they will know how to find other things to do about it if that's in fact the way they're treating it.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

11. “So it's a huge question, and it's a legitimate question, and it's the logical question to ask a guy who has written that there's a profound threat to democracy in this country. And it's not really my role. I mean, thank God for the country that I'm not in charge of problem solving because no one elected me to that. And I wouldn't be any better at that. Anyone else you picked off the street, I do think. That small Democrats have to pay as much attention to the levers of power in election administration as the Republicans are now paying. They are making it a driving organizing force.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

12. “Well, one thing it would look like would be the president using the bully pulpit consistently to show that his first priority right now and into the months ahead is going to be addressing this threat to democracy. He said in July in Philadelphia that the Republican efforts to subvert election machinery was the greatest threat to democracy since the Civil War. That's very strong words, but he then went silent on the subject for the next four or five, six months. And he came back yesterday with a very strong speech. He's given 60 Speeches solely about COVID. He's given 40 about Build Back Better and the infrastructure bill. He's given two so far on democracy.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

13. “Around the country and are systematically pulling them out by their roots. And they are driving them out of office or they are running big lie candidates to defeat them at the next election, or they are changing the law so that those people no longer have the power to certify an election. They are trying to fix the counting of the votes next time so that if voter suppression doesn't work and if accusations of cheating don't work, that the people in charge of doing the actual counting in enough swing states will be loyal to Trump and prepared to put their thumb on the scale.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

14. “Well, that's right. There's no single referee in an American presidential election, which surprises people when they find out. I mean, normally you would think there's a winner and a loser, somebody gets to declare that, and the loser goes home. But our system is complicated and decentralized. And so there are a lot of people who have a say in who won and who lost as part of their authority. The Trump operation and those who sympathize with him have gone around systematically and looked at every place in the system that thwarted Trump in his first attempt to overthrow an election. Every Brad Raftenberger or Effensburger in Georgia, every Michigan appointed commission member who said, no, we're not changing the results. Yes, Biden won.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

15. “It's a pape found. He tried to ask the question more and more sharply as time went on to try to. Discount for people who were just big talkers or who thought it might one day be acceptable to use violence. And he finally found that there were the equivalent of 21 million Americans who believed both that Biden was an illegitimate president and that the use of force right now is justified to restore Trump to power. That's a lot of people”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

16. “And disproved every scrap of so called evidence that Trump and his people put forward for this proposition has been disproved, but the volume of propaganda and the closed world of propaganda that is informing these Republican voters has turned them against their own constitutional political system.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

17. “Completely out of sync with precedent. They are middle class, employed, educated, white-collar, and many of them are business owners. Some of them have been government officials, some of them have been members of the military. Only one in seven are affiliated with an extremist group like the proud boys or the oath keepers or the three percenters, but they sympathize and the catastrophe of Trump is that he has persuaded for real two-thirds to three quarters of all Republicans that an American election was stolen, that there is a man who is in the White House by fraud he's an imposter, he is not the person who the American people voted for, and that is, of course, entirely made up and nonsense.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

18. “That's exactly right. And they did not look like domestic extremists of years past. I mean, for many years, and this pattern holds true all around the world. It holds true in East Timor and the Mideast as well as in the United States. Political violence is conducted by young men in their 20s of low education and high unemployment. That's the typical profile. And it's been true for a long time all around the world. And if you look at the January 6th insurgents and those now more than 700 people who have been arrested for those crimes, their median age is 42, which is crazy.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

19. “in close swing states that Biden wins and that those legislatures are controlled by Republicans. He could try to persuade those state houses to appoint electors for Trump even though Biden had won the votes in that state. And I found people, I found senior Republicans in Pennsylvania who were even willing to talk to me about that scenario as something that they'd considered. And so it was basically starting with a known proposition that Trump is not going to concede and drawing out what were the implications.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

20. “If Biden won. And then I decided to do a lot of reporting around what would it mean to have a president who refuses to concede defeat in an election? What could he do if he pulled out all the snops? And I walked through those scenarios, having done a lot of digging with constitutional scholars and political experts who could tell me, well, he could try to cause the state legislatures in”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

21. “Because it's not empirical. There's no way to know for sure. But what I saw was potential, what we all saw openly from Trump was the clear statement before the election, even at the nominating convention for the Republican Party, that there is no way that I could lose the election unless there's cheating. The only outcome is that I win. The American people will choose me if they don't, it means the election was rigged. That's an extraordinary thing for any politician to say, let alone a sitting president. And I came to believe that under no circumstances, literally,”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

22. “Yeah, there were people who thought that I was spinning out doomsday scenarios that weren't justified. And I hoped that they were right. I didn't think so. But this was really unusual work for me. Nothing in my career prepared me to write about the future as much as I did in that piece forecasting.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

23. “For voter suppression and hijinks in the rules of elections. And it just became clear to me that the threat to our democracy was the much bigger story right now and one that I was positioned to work on. And I had conversations with Jeff Goldberg, the editor of the Atlantic, in which we agreed I was going to shift gears and focus full-time on the threat to democracy.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

24. “I came with the full intention of delving into the pandemic and delving into the national and global policymaking around the pandemic, which was a mess. And I don't know. I had one of these instincts that I was missing the bigger story. In fact, I remember noticing that COVID was going to play a role in the election that there would have to be changes made in the manner of conducting the presidential election because of the pandemic. And I came to see that that was going to be used as an excuse for”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

25. “What the lawyers told me was that no journalist had ever been prosecuted up until that time for finding out a national security secret and publishing it, and that there was a relatively low probability but not zero probability risk of criminal prosecution. What was much more likely was that in the course of prosecuting Snowden that the government would demand that I testify and turn over documents and that if I did not cooperate and I had made the decision I would not cooperate, then I could be held in contempt of court and put in jail until I complied. That we thought was much more probable and I worried a lot about that.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

26. “This was by far the most stressful time in my career as a journalist. I questioned myself all the time. I did worry a lot that I would accidentally expose some secret that had contacted me. There clearly were lives at stake in some cases. I mean, I had the identities and photographs of clandestine agents who were doing very dangerous work for the NSA around the world, positioning listening devices. And I would never have considered publishing those. And yet at the same time, the U.S. government was tracking the telephone calls of every single American local, national, and international calls and drawing a gigantic social network of all of our connections with one another. And that was simply unacceptable. That was simply... completely out of balance as I understood any theory of democracy to do that without telling us.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

27. “Sometimes very angry conversations where in some of these stories the government would say, I'm not going to confirm or deny that this is true. If it is true and you publish it, we're going to report that as a... Potential crime to the Justice Department and go to hell. It was emotional on both sides”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

28. “You know, they varied from civil adult conversations in which there would be some senior member of the government who would say, we understand why you think this is newsworthy, and we understand that we can't stop you from publishing any of it. But we especially care about this and this and this. blowing those secrets would be enormously damaging for these reasons. And even there were times when a government official, and this is not unique in my career, there were times when an official would tell me something that I did not know off the record to explain why I should not publish something that I did know. And there were times when that was very persuasive. When I said, oh, well, if those are the stakes, then I understand perfectly why that should not be published.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

29. “They weren't telling us. And I believed that it was simply not tolerable in a democracy to have the government spying on the people without informed consent. And so I thought there were a great many things in the Snowden documents, and he gave me tens of thousands of documents. There were many things in there that the American people had to know, had to be told. I also thought there were many things in there that should not be disclosed, and I did not disclose them. And I took enormous precautions so that the documents would not leak. But I have no doubt there was some damage done. I think in a democracy, JFK did not say we will make no sacrifice and bear no cost in defensive liberty. He said the opposite. Sometimes you You have to accept trade offs between security and self government, and this was one of those times.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

30. “This was like my graduate thesis come to life. This was a direct conflict between national security secrecy with legitimate secrets in some cases and the ability of a self-governing people in democracy to hold their own government to account. The question is, can the government hold secrets from the people about the way it's spying on them? Can the government spy on its citizens without telling them that this is something they regard as essential for security? The National Security Agency, I thought, were sincere in their belief that they needed all these programs in order to safeguard the American people.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

31. “I think it was all of a piece. I mean, he was a Republican partisan as much as anyone and played hardball, absolutely played hardball, you know, as much or more than Mitch McConnell. But he does have certain principles, certain core beliefs, and he loathed Trump and all the Trumpism stands for. And although he didn't say much about that during the Trump years in power, he let it be known that he was not on that team. And when Push came to shove and we had January 6th and we had an actual attempt by an American president to overthrow an election and prevent the peaceful transfer of power, Cheney knew where he stood and was willing to say so.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

32. “And he was a zealot on those things. And when Trump came along and took control of the Republican Party and All of the Republican establishment wound up bowing down before him, the Cheneys did not because they are true believers. And fortunately for us, one of their true beliefs is that the American constitutional system of alternating in power and peaceful transfer of power and honoring elections was part of their worldview.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

33. “And he's surrounded by Nancy Pelosi and others. You must have had some complicated feelings about that. It was quite a sight. It was remarkable to see the embrace of the Democratic establishment for a guy who had been truly the villain in their narrative of the world for so many years. A guy who was just clearly responsible for some of the Morally most damaging policies, including torture, and who had been principal driver of the greatest strategic mistake of Arguably any president in a long time, which was the Iraq War. But one of the themes of my book on Dick Cheney is that he was a true believer. He was prepared to lie. If necessary, as he thought it to get his way to the world, but he believed in the worldview that he espoused, and he believed in the Constitution as he read it.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

34. “At first I thought it might be too hard to get. And Len Downey, the executive editor of the Washington Post at the time, sat me down one day and said, we really need you to do this. This is in your wheelhouse. This guy's important. We aren't penetrating. You're our best shot at this. We're going to team you up with Joe Becker. And you're going to set off in earnest. And I said, okay, boss. What were your thoughts when Dick Cheney walked out on the floor of the house with his daughter, Liz, who's leading the charge in many ways against Trump's incursions on democracy? And there's Dick Cheney, who is the Bet Noir of Democrats throughout his 10 years vice president, Darth Vader.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

35. “About including a book. Why did you focus so intensely on Cheney? Because I care about power and accountability for those in power. And Cheney was this irresistible target because everyone understood that he was a very powerful vice president, probably the most powerful vice president we've ever had in terms of influence on policy. And yet he was by far the most secretive person in government, the most secretive vice president we'd ever had. He would like to working behind the scenes. He liked working so you don't even see what he's doing. And that was an irresistible target. And it was also a little bit of a daunting target because everything was so well hidden with Cheney and it was so hard to penetrate what was happening in that office. So I actually resisted doing a long-term project.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

36. “Emotional impact, the idea of a mushroom cloud became the Bush administration's big selling point for a war against Iraq. They claimed completely falsely that there was evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. And this was driven primarily by Dick Cheney. Who you wrote extensively”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

37. “On a false premise? I think the answer is mixed on that one. As for biological and chemical weapons, it was almost consensus in the intelligence community and among many of America's allies that Iraq still had explaining to do, that it probably still had undeclared stocks of things like mustard and possibly even the advanced nerve agent VX. There were legitimate suspicions about that. The nuclear program, however, had been completely dismantled after the first Gulf War. And there was almost no evidence that Iraq had an ongoing nuclear weapons program or nuclear enrichment of uranium. It had no plutonium program. And there was good evidence, which I turned off that was all classified, that the Iraqi program was dead. And because nuclear weapons have such a fearsome”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

38. “Then known as Unscom, was convinced that Iraq had undeclared stocks of chemical and biological weapons and missile programs. So when the momentum began toward war with Iraq, I believed it was likely that Iraq did in fact still have weapons of mass destruction. What I credit myself with is doing the reporting and the observations and the hard journalistic work of convincing myself and finding out that those suspicions were not true. Do you think the administration knew that the suspicions were Untrue, I mean, did we go to war on a false?”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

39. “Were you suspicious of that claim? And what did you learn about sort of how did your understanding of secrecy in national security? How was that burnished by your experience in examining that issue and in covering the war itself? Well, the biggest lesson for me was that empirical facts really matter in journalism. And it's fine to have instincts, but it's really important to be open to evidence and find out that your instincts aren't true. Because I had... covered the weapons of mass destruction debate about Iraq long before 9-11, back in the 90s around the time of the First Gulf War, when the UN commission”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

40. “administration. And so I was looking at what was the war a couple of years before 9-11 and in the first eight or nine months of the Bush presidency. What was Bush doing then and what were his people doing? And it turned out a lot of evidence that they had not done enough. Going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the AX files. And now, back to the show. And then came the war in Iraq, first Afghanistan, but then Iraq that was predicated on The allegation that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction in that it was essential to get them.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

41. “Well, you know, I'd been in the middle of a long project on bail bondsmen and bounty hunters, which was interesting and I never came back to it. I never wrote this series. I moved immediately to covering what George W. Bush had just declared as a war on terrorism. And my first question that I worked out with my editors was if there's a war on terrorism, what did it look like before 9-11? What did it look like before the planes hit the Pentagon and went down in Pennsylvania and hit the World Trade Center? And it turned out there had been a behind-the-scenes quiet war that was little known, primarily taking place in secret spaces and in the intelligence world and the world of special operations that had been going on all the way through the clinical”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

42. “Oh, yeah. As soon as I saw that was both buildings, that's no coincidence. And I had been. Covering national security, I was well aware of Al Qaeda, which three years before had done coordinated attacks against American embassies in Africa. And I assumed as most U.S. government intelligence analysts assumed right away that it was an al-Qaeda operation.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

43. “I held out my press card as though that somehow gave me authority. And I asked this great big, huge, bearded guy, would you take me down that way if you're going that way, would you take me down there? And he was going because he was a tourist and he wanted to go snap pictures. And that was fine with me. So I finally made my way down to the scene. By that time, one of the towers was gone. And my mind, I hadn't heard the news while I was driving down. My mind couldn't cope with the idea that one of the towers was gone. I saw a burning tower and I thought the other one must be from my perspective behind it. I didn't understand what was going on, and I finally got within a few blocks. And while I watched the second tower,”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

44. “Well, how do I want to move in the city right now? I'm, I don't know, seven or eight miles uptown of where the thing just happened. I decided I did not want to get on the subway because I was afraid I'd get caught down there and stuck. I I grabbed a cab and Cab said, I'm not driving down to a plane crash. But I said, just go down as far as you're willing to go. Then I got out and literally just took all the bills out of my wallet and started waving them at driver's to see who would drive me a little further. And when that stopped working, I'm still too far away. I stood in the middle of the street and I flagged down a motorcycle.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

45. “It was momentous for me as it was for so many millions of others. I was sitting in my New York apartment and I had to find out that a plane had hit the World Trade Center from my editor who called me up and said, you know, a plane's just hit the World Trade Center. You better go find out what's going on down there. And at first it was going to be a terrible plane crash story. I grabbed a notebook and a water bottle and Camera, I think, and this had become rushing toward disaster had become a familiar instinct in the Jerusalem job where I'd covered so many terrorist attacks. And I started trying to head down town, and I thought to myself,”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

46. “During some of the earlier uprisings, you know, you've got to break their arms, break their legs, show them who's boss. And now he was the one who was ready to make peace. And he was carrying the Israeli people along with him. He had a clear majority and a very strong and passionate minority that thought he was selling out the country. And if he had lived, I think there was a real chance that there could have been by now a side by side states sharing that space in the Middle East.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

47. “It's so hard to know these counterfactuals, but I think that although the great man theory of history is often criticized, the loss of one man here did profoundly shift the course of events. There was a moment in history when both the Israelis and Palestinians were prepared by slim majorities to accept half a loaf. They were prepared finally to reach a political settlement with the Oslo Accords and the progress toward peace. And they had this very strong, tough leader. Had been associated all his career with military prowess and with crackdowns against terrorists and had famously said”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

48. “He talked to me about how the government was filled with traitors and had to be stopped. And again, I just saw this all as just as sort of empty rhetoric. And my spider sense didn't tingle at all. I didn't know that this guy already, when we were talking, had been stalking Rabin, had twice gone to places where he hoped to find a shot at him and had not yet succeeded. But I found the notebook afterward on the night of the assassination and was chillery those words.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

49. “I'd been there for a year and the right wing settlers who were opposed to the peace process were talking all the time about how there was going to be blood in the streets and civil war. And everything's, there's an expression in Hebrew, revolution earthquake. And it's all so overwrought that I started thinking of it all as not meaningful. It was just symbolic. And then someone comes along and sneaks up behind the fire minister and shoots three shots into his back and you realize, oh, they really meant it. In fact, I had interviewed the assassin Yagalamir before the assassination. I had found him at a settlement in the West Bank.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

50. “Well, it's so interesting. It shows the danger of life as a foreign correspondent. I mean, the danger of screwing up your journalistic instincts. When you first get to a place, you're overwhelmed by how little you know and how you're trying to explain a foreign world to your readers while you're still trying to make some sense out of it. And after about a year, you start to think, oh, I get this place. I understand. And that's the most dangerous moment because you don't fully get it yet. And the assassination came if I'm not mistaken from memory actually in 95.”

    2022-01-13 · The Axe Files with David Axelrod · Ep. 473 — Barton Gellman · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source