Rob Reiner is an unabashed Hollywood liberal and actor and activist who's used very harsh rhetoric about Donald Trump and has to sail the coverage of the president. We sat down here in Washington to talk about that and the new film he directs and stars in shock and awe about the media's failures, except for one news outlet in the buildup to the Iraq war. Rob Reiner, welcome. Thanks for having me. You're a fierce critic of President Trump. You hosted a fundraiser for Hillary. I get it. Robert DeNiro goes on the Tony Awards stage and says, F. Trump, it's a standing ovation. Can you see how that would be offensive to the 45% of the country that supports this president? Well, yes. And I can also see how it could be offensive to some of the people who don't support the president. Yeah, listen, everybody's entitled to free speech. I can say whatever they want, but I don't think that is particularly helpful for those of us who don't want to see Trump in office and don't want to seem to continue to be an office. Let me ask you about some of your own words. You tweeted the other day when an American president attacks our closest allies and embraces a hostile enemy power. You say he's in the conspiracy to commit treason. Now, so because you disagree with Trump's foreign policy, would you have every right to do? Yeah, I don't, I don't, I don't say he is. I said one can only conclude. And there's a big dad's to find distinction. It is a find distinction, but I don't know whether or not he committed treason. And that will be something that we either discover or don't discover as the invest, as Mueller's investigates, because unfortunately, the House and Senate investigations are not moving along. So we have to see what happens. You don't see that as an overly inflammatory word to use about a president? It is a very inflammatory word, but if it turns out to be, let's put it this way. Yeah, that's it. But let's put it this way. From what I see right now, we have, though, there's a lot of blanks that need to be filled in for sure. After the election, you call the outcome the greatest attack on this democracy since 1941. I was kind of stunned by that because you're comparing the lawful election of a candidate to one of the electoral college should the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. Now that you're older and wiser, was that going a little too far? No. And you're feeling overrard at the time? No, actually, I feel a little bit more. I think I not only agree with that, but I would go even further because we're not talking about when we start looking at what happened to America. People have to really understand this. And this is one of the most difficult parts of understanding the Russia. Wow, we had an election. No, no, I understand that. You're comparing it to the 2000 Americans being killed at Pearl Harbor. I'm not talking about the election that we have and electing Donald Trump. I'm not talking about that. What I'm talking about, and it's really important to understand this because this is the key to it here. We're talking about a foreign enemy power influencing an election. In the world of cyber warfare, it is insidious and we don't necessarily feel it. We do know the capacity. We have learning the capacity, not just from a disinformation campaign or active measures, but Soviets and the Russians now have been doing it forever. Just to clarify, your comments are a more Russia and the meddling in the United Nations. Yes, absolutely. I'm glad we clarified that. Absolutely. Let's talk about the press for a moment. You recently lumped in Fox News with Alex Jones and some others in what you call state-run media. Right. Essentially state-run media that backs up the President. I presume you know that Fox has a thriving news division with Chris Wallace and Brett Bear and Shep Smith and a whole bunch of reporters. So I think your label was too broad. Well, I do always. And I also tweeted out about Shepard Smith. And by the way, I've met Shepard Smith. He's a great guy. And he is reporting the news. There's no question about it. He is telling the truth. And so is Chris Wallace. And I haven't seen as much of Brett Bear, but I believe he probably is too. So you just mentioned that. And I do know there's a difference between a news reporting and opinion and editorial and all of that. But what I'm saying is the editorial part of Fox News, which is, you know, Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Laura Lawrence shows. Those shows are not just, they're really in support of Trump. And that is, Fox News has a good rating. It has a very strong rating. So there is a chunk of media that is, that is verbally and overtly in support of Donald Trump. That's just true. Well, there was a chunk of media that was overtly in support of Barack Obama, including places like MSNBC. But let's turn to the press conduct and the run up to the Iraq War, which is a subject of shock and illness. I covered intensively. You're playing John Walcott. He was the Washington, Beard Chief Knight, Reader newspapers, right now, McClauchy, I'm the whole colleague of mine. In terms of name ID, would you concede that Tom Hanks and Easier Time paying bread, Bradley, and you're playing John Walcott? Well, here's the funny thing about that. I wasn't supposed to play that part. That would, Alec Baldwin was set to play that part. And we had been shooting for a week with Woody Harrelson and Tommy Lee Jones. And on the Saturday before he was supposed to shoot on Monday, he calls and said he's not doing. He dropped out. He dropped out. I'm saying, oh my God, what do I do? My wife, Michelle, who's one of the producers with me, she suggested I play the part. And I thought, oh my God, I don't know. I don't like directing and acting. And then I realized I'm playing, you know, I said, I'm available, so I'll do it. And then she says to me, the one bit of direction I got, because I'm playing John Walcott. She said, try to be less Jewish. And I thought, I don't know, I'm from the Bronx. I'll see what I can do. All right, well, that was the work in progress. Before now with Rob Reiner, as we turned to his new film about the press, The Bush Administration and Iraq. So you say the media weren't tough enough in the Ronald Therese Iraq War. They would not just not tough enough, they were nonexistent. Right. Now there were some exceptions. There were stories of the Washington Post that were skeptical, but tended to get buried on page 817. Right. In one scene, you playing Walcott, called the Philadelphia Inquirer at a night reader newspaper at the time, and you complain they're not running your stories. Right. And that was the case. And what was behind that? That actually happened. I mean, night reader news service would supply to a number of newspapers around the country. And we talk about it in the film that they were represented by a lot of military bases that got there. And there's the speech that my character gives in the film. And he says, we don't write for people who send other people's kids to war. We write for people whose kids get sent to war. And so we were concerned that the night reader stories were not getting out. And many of the night reader papers did not print. Were they not getting out because they didn't print them? Yeah, but even in the broader media, were they not getting a lot of pickup because of the mindset and the mainstream media at the time in Bob Woodward told me after the war that he was part of the group thing. Right. Because obviously the Bush administration sold us war very hard. Right. The two reasons. What is that? We were swept up in patriotism, 9-11. And people just went with, like you say, the group think. The other thing was the Bush administration in a smart way, and from their standpoint, they never responded to these articles. They gave them no oxygen. They didn't refute them. They didn't talk about them. So it never got any attention. The underlying assumption, and it was more than an assumption in the film, was a Bush administration was lying about Iraq. Right. But that, as opposed to cherry picking intelligence, as opposed to not being skeptical enough about the intelligence. But even John Wolcott says in an interview that to this day, he doesn't know that people were alive. That seems like a bit of a stretch on your part. Well, we're saying that Cheney lied. We say Cheney lied at this one thing about the idea in general because he had, he talked about a connection between Muhammad Ata and Iraqi intelligence, which didn't exist. He talked about they were on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon. They talked about aluminum tubes. My point is, it's the same thing that turned out to be untrue. However, terrible that is is not necessarily the same as lying, deliberately peddling falsehoods. Yes. That, that's true. But if you do know that you've already made an assumption that you want to go to war, and that you are crafting bits and pieces of intelligence in order to make that case and ignoring the vast amount of intelligence that says, we're not sure about this, we don't have good intelligence because we hadn't been inside Iraq with weapons and inspectors for four years, I would argue that you're lying. At the same time, this president has gotten overwhelmingly negative coverage. He did during the campaign. Everybody acknowledges that. It shouldn't, fairness be also a part of a message for a fair and independent president. He got a lot of negative coverage. There's no question about it. But I don't think in the, during the primary season and even during the general, he got the kind of, there's one thing to say negative coverage and there's one thing to say, do diligence and scrutiny, real scrutiny. I don't think he got that. He recently had a very civil debate with Anthony Scaremucci or you and Mucci are going to do some kind of a couple of shows. Oh God, oh my God. You know, it's funny. I didn't even know because I was going to go on the Ari Melbers show, you know. And they said, well, Scaremucci, I didn't know he was going to be it. But are we going to do a show? You mean like, you know, Crossfire, you know, Anthony, you ignorant slut. You know, I don't worry, whatever, you know, we're going to do that. No, I don't think so. I think you're giving it a thumbs down. Yeah, probably not. Rob Reiner, thanks very much for your time. Thanks for having me.