Jake Tapper on Terrorism, Executive Power, and Venezuelan Boat Bombings

CNN journalist Jake Tapper's latest book, Race Against Terror: Chasing an Al Qaeda Killer at the Dawn of the Forever War, tells the little-known story of an Al Qaeda operative who surrendered to Italian authorities in 2011 and claimed to have carried out attacks that killed American soldiers. With no evidence to prove the murders happened, two assistant U.S. prosecutors traveled around the world to investigate his claims and build a case. The book shows how early counterterrorism decisions shaped the broader global war on terror.

Tapper is a longtime reporter and, since 2013, the host of The Lead with Jake Tapper; his other books range from political nonfiction to historical thrillers. In October, he spoke with Reason's Nick Gillespie about Race Against Terror and why the story it tells still matters today. They also discussed threats to free speech, President Donald Trump, the shortcomings of legacy media outlets, and how the industry is adapting to a new era.

Reason: The new book takes us back 25 years almost, to 9/11, Afghanistan, and the beginning of what was called the global war on terror. What brought you back to this topic? You've already written about Afghanistan.

Tapper: I heard about it from one of the prosecutors randomly at a birthday party—at my son's birthday party, in fact—and what was interesting to me about it was the detective story, the true crime story. He and his colleagues had to prove a criminal case that would be upheld in court against a terrorist for actions on the battlefield that took place in 2003 and an attempt to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Nigeria not long after that. And all of the sleuthing and the detective work that they all had to do—it was just this incredible story about all the stuff I love from police procedurals like CSI or Cold Case.

The Al Qaeda killer, known as Spin Ghul, showed up in Italy. He was arrested by Italian authorities after bragging, "I killed American soldiers." But then they had to prove it, since that was only his assertion, right?

They had to prove it because it was the Obama years, and [President Barack] Obama had closed off [Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp] from any new terrorist suspects. Obama wanted to try terrorists in criminal court. That was really controversial at the time.

Trump is trying to do it now. Spin Ghul was the first terrorist tried like this. Trump is trying to do it with a guy named Jafar [a.k.a. Mohammad Sharifullah]. Not controversial at all—no hue and cry. This terrorist is sitting in a cell not far from where you and I are sitting, in Virginia, and nobody's acting afraid about it. But at the time, people acted as though these terrorists had superhuman powers and if you brought them to Manhattan or Brooklyn they would escape and wreak havoc.

What was so interesting to me about it was proving a case that was not just cold. People are generally not brought to court for killing people in a war. It generally doesn't happen. The sleuthing was so interesting.

I wasn't trying to give a history of the war on terror, but you had to tell it. You had to describe what was different about [President George W.] Bush to Obama to Trump, because it was part of the hurdles that these prosecutors and FBI agents had to jump over.

Are we really done with the "global war on terror" era of foreign policy?

I don't think it's done with us, is the bottom line. I think as long as there are dozens, hundreds, thousands of radicalized Islamists who are willing to kill Americans and target Westerners, the war is not done with us.

Trump, he's a complicated guy and I have a lot of complicated feelings about his foreign policy. There's a ceasefire in Gaza right now. That's empirically a good thing. People might not like what happened with the strikes against Iran's nuclear infrastructure, but I think the fact that they don't have it is a good thing.

He didn't follow it up. He said, "This is something we're gonna do but we're not gonna stick around."

Yeah. We're not. That's it. We're dropping the bombs on their facilities, and then we're out. I think [it's something] to be cautiously optimistic about. I also think he's exercising a mix of hard power and soft power. His hard power is the threats of tariffs, the threats of force.

Blowing up Venezuelan boats.

Well, that's another question. That's a different part of the war on terror powers. This is something that you guys at Reason always know, which is: Once a president establishes for himself that he has a shiny toy, good luck getting that toy ever wrested away from whoever the president is.

Bush used drones. Obama multiplied it by 100. And now Trump is using the same arguments to a) label antifa a domestic terrorist group, which I'm not sure he even has the power to do, and b) use these powers to strike terrorists abroad, like going after [Anwar] al-Awlaki or whoever in Yemen.

Using those same powers and saying, "We're going to use them against what we're calling narco-terrorists," because they're killing 100,000 Americans a year through fentanyl. It's tragic, but it's not really the same thing as terrorists blowing up Americans in embassies. To say, "We're selling drugs and Americans are overdosing on it." I don't shed a tear for any narco-terrorist dying, but I don't know that it's sane.

As Sen. Rand Paul [R–Ky.] points out, when it comes to those strikes on these boats from Venezuela or Colombia, even if you're wrong only 25 percent of the time, that's 25 percent of the time you're killing innocent people. Also, there's no judicial process for this.

Ultimately, as with all presidents, I think it's a mixed bag. I do think it's a positive development that President Trump is using the criminal court system to prosecute Jafar. I don't know that they even remember that it was really controversial to do this in the Obama years. I take it as a positive development that President Trump thinks we can use the criminal courts to prosecute foreign terrorists captured abroad. I think that's a good thing.

It's only been about a month since Federal Communications Commission [FCC] Chair Brendan Carr, as well as Trump himself, explicitly said that Disney and ABC should fire Jimmy Kimmel because airing him is not in the public interest. You said this was the most direct threat to a free press that you've seen in your lifetime. Do you stand by that? How are you thinking about it now, a month on?

I absolutely stand by it. There have been a lot of egregious examples. I don't like what the Biden administration did with social media companies—a lot of it was confirmed years later. They used a very slippery slope, which is always the argument. If you say, "Don't put this on the internet because it's going to hurt people," and the social media companies comply, [because] we're in the middle of a once-in-a-century pandemic, etc., then the next thing they're gonna do is start removing stuff that is just politically untenable, like the lab leak theory.

I stood up when the Obama administration was saying that Fox was not a legitimate news organization, when they were declaring that from the White House podium. I said—and I got a lot of shit for it, and I still get shit for it to this day—"Why is it appropriate for a White House to label a credentialed news organization not legitimate?"

This has nothing to do with my feelings about Fox. My feelings about Fox are irrelevant, really. First of all, in 2009, that was a very different Fox than what we have now. And second of all, it's a question about why is it appropriate for the White House to do this. So I do have a history of this. I will say that this was the most direct.

Brendan Carr goes on the podcast of a MAGA right-wing person and says: I don't like this speech, and Disney should act, and the local affiliates that air this garbage should stop airing it. Which was followed by the largest owner of local TV stations, Nexstar—which needs Brendan Carr for some business transactions they want to do. Not just approval, but to lift a limit on how many households they can reach. They need Brendan Carr. It was basically, "Aye aye, sir, how high do you want us to jump?" And they did that. And it was awful. I have not seen ever before a direct infringement on the right to free speech like that.

Do you feel like this threat, plus the lawsuit that Trump is bringing against CBS and his actions against other broadcasters and news organizations, is having a chilling effect? Or are people in the regulated media developing a backbone to push back?

Both is the answer. Anybody has the right to sue anybody in this country. And corporations don't have to acquiesce if they don't want to.

One of the things that's troubling is that this is coming at the same time that, for want of a better term, the oligarchs are out oligarching. They are very susceptible to what one CBS News employee called "legalized bribery."

The lawsuit against CBS News was absolute nonsense. The idea that CBS, in making an edit like that, was defaming President Trump in any way—it was an edit to a Kamala Harris interview. She spoke in word salads. They took one clip and used it, and they took another clip and used it.

On your show, you showed that Fox News had done the same thing for Trump. None of this rises to the level of even a notice, much less legal action.

I'm not crazy about taped interviews to begin with, because I think people get lazy in terms of the talkers. They're not concise. They're long. But generally speaking, most of the time—no, every time—that we're trying to edit an interview, we're just trying to save time. "OK, here's this 20 minutes of whatever. Can we find a minute that answers the question?" Because that's the business here. That's what 60 Minutes was doing. That lawsuit was nonsense.

Now President Trump is using this stuff to argue that he's constantly defamed, that he's consistently attacked by the media unfairly. It's not true. I see stuff about him that's not fair, of course. So I think there is a chilling effect.

What comes next? What does the White House do next to turn the pressure up even higher?

They're already doing it to CBS News.

I think the legacy media has work to do. Absolutely. In terms of credibility, in terms of inclusivity of voices. Not just from the right, by the way, but also libertarians, independents, and all the rest.

It feels as though President Trump feels very empowered. He only insults NBC and ABC when he talks about networks. He always excludes CBS now, ever since the Ellisons took over. He says, "Larry Ellison is a good friend of mine. He's a good guy, blah blah blah. They're gonna make it fair, da da da da." That's not how presidents should be talking about people who cover them. Presidents in general should think we're all pains in the ass. Every president. About every news outlet.

We're also talking about a president who, in response to the No Kings rallies or marches, released an AI video of himself wearing a crown and literally dumping shit on protesters. What can the media do to push back in any meaningful way?

When Hillary Clinton referred to half of Trump supporters in 2016 as fitting in a "basket of deplorables" or when Joe Biden said what he said about Donald Trump's supporters being "garbage"—or whatever he said, I know that's disputed—those were considered gaffes.

Michael Kinsley's famous saying is "a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth." Those were accidents. Those were mistakes. Them accidentally revealing what they really think about millions of Americans.

But here's Donald Trump, in a strategic way, showing himself dropping shit not on MS-13 gang members, not on antifa rioters, but on Americans demonstrating peacefully. The No Kings rallies were peaceful, as far as I know. And certainly the ones in the AI were that. If you look closely, you can see he's dropping shit on a woman holding a baby. He's dropping shit on an American flag.

I think it's incumbent upon us to cover the president, including when he does things like that. We don't have to use adjectives. Just use verbs.

This is the president, as a strategy, attacking millions of Americans and dividing the country. That is what he is doing. And then you ask people for their opinions on it. But I think we can't shy away from covering it.

At the same time, it's not for us in the news media—unless you're an opinion journalist—to say how you feel about it. You just state the facts of it and let opinion people talk about it. Also, we have to cover everything else he's doing, whether you like it or not: tariffs, Mideast peace. There's a lot going on.

What's the big failing of legacy media right now?

Fox has its own issues. I don't think I'm spilling any secrets when I say they are commodifying preaching to the choir. That is a channel for Trump supporters. Not for conservatives, not for Republicans—it is for Trump's supporters. Very seldom are there voices that are allowed to criticize Donald Trump or even question what he's doing. Period. Full stop.

There is another channel on cable that is the exact mirror image of that, and that is commodifying ideology. And that's fine. I think that's a fine supplement for a news diet. I don't think it's a news diet. Ideological media has been part of this country since it was founded.

I think legacy media, as a general rule—and this is difficult to do in an era of cost cutting, etc.—but I think we should be doing more stories outside the Delta Shuttle corridor and Los Angeles. I think we need to be covering the heartland more. I think there should be more voices from all over the country included in coverage. And I do think that the biggest bias is often story selection. It's not necessarily in coverage. It's: Are we covering this? Are we covering that?

Ideologically, we need to expand our aperture in terms of what we think is news. And I don't only mean issues that conservatives are interested in or libertarians are interested in. We could be doing better. That's what I would do.

But one of the problems is this is happening at a time of media consolidation. It's happening at a time of oligarchs taking over news media. It's also happening at a time where there is this commodification of rage bait, of making people hate each other. I don't just mean Fox or [MSNBC]. I also mean social media driving people away from each other. Villainizing each other.

CNN as a network has flat-to-falling ratings, and the cable system writ large seems to be fading. Most networks peaked in 2020. How much of this is the typical pattern of a sunsetting industry—not experimenting, not trying something new, just doubling down on the very strategies that led to the decline in the first place?

First of all, I think everyone's ratings are going down, including Fox. They're just losing viewers at a slower rate than others. The cord cutting is a real thing. But it's not just the cord cutting. There is just a plate tectonic shift in how we are all, as individuals, consuming information.

I've written eight books now, and the difference between how much people factor in e-books and audiobooks today is light-years away from just two years ago. There is a recognition now that people are listening to books and reading them on their phones in a way that just a few years ago people did not recognize—they were only looking at hardcovers.

It's entertainment. It's news. It's movies. It's everything. And everybody's trying to figure out how to do it.

I don't know what the future is. I know that Mark Thompson, who is our boss at CNN, helped The New York Times get from a newspaper with a website to a website with a newspaper.

Is the decline of the networks—legacy or otherwise—being supplanted by a rush toward independent or alternative journalism? Or has credibility across the media world become so damaged that nothing is taking its place?

I don't know where it's going to land. People can compare the ratings for, let's say, CBS Evening News with Joe Rogan. Well, they're not doing the same thing, right?

People might be getting information from both of them, but they're not doing the same thing. I don't think that's a fair comparison. I'm not belittling Rogan—he's created this giant empire based on long-form, authentic conversations. But he's not calling himself an expert on anything. These aren't news reports.

I just think we, as reporters, need to figure out how to get in that space where viewers are. Publishing has figured it out, in the sense of audiobooks and Kindle books. That's basically how I consume books now. I'm listening to them in my car and then I'm reading them on my phone.

How do we get there? I don't know. CNN has been doing a lot more in terms of the vertical video space. That's different, right? People don't want a highly produced news report in that space. They want—or they seem to want—a much more authentic, produced but Instagram- or TikTok-friendly presentation of information in under 3 minutes. We're all just trying to figure this out.

Does it feel like you may be one of a dying breed—an old-style newsman whose politics are secondary to the journalism itself?

I don't think so. Because I think there will always be a need for somebody who is not a Democrat, not a Republican, who is able to moderate debates; who is able to perform—or provide, rather—a news service and accounting of the day; who can have on Speaker [of the House Mike] Johnson [R–La.]; who can have on Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries [D–N.Y.]. I think there's always going to be a need for that. I don't know the format for that in five years, 10 years.

While you and I are both having success in these short vertical videos—CNN and Reason—there is also simultaneously this explosion of these incredibly long-form podcasts or YouTube podcasts, hourlong conversations, three-hour-long conversations in the case of Rogan sometimes.

I don't know where this lands. I just know that I think we need to experiment, need to get out there, need to try stuff. Hew closely to the brand of nonpartisan, nonideological, trying to get information. Yeah, you stand up for facts. And yeah, you stand up for democracy. But as a general note, I'm not saying that this politician is better than that politician. I just think we're all trying to figure out how to get there.

What are the things that the Trump administration is doing now that you don't think are getting enough attention?

I think the way they're hollowing out experts from the Justice Department and the FBI is bad.

One of the things I've learned from writing this book is how important it is, if you want to put terrorists away forever, to have really good prosecutors who know what they're doing and really good supervision of those prosecutors. And they're firing them for nakedly political reasons.

There's a guy in the book named George Toscas. One of the toughest guys in the National Security Division of the Justice Department. There since '93. You had to get everything through him before you could get it to the attorney general or the president—indictments, extraditions. He's been sidelined because he approved the Mar-a-Lago classified documents warrant. The guy in charge of the Jafar case in the Eastern District of Virginia, fired because some MAGA person hypothesized that he was against the Comey indictments, which he wasn't.

We're getting rid of really good people who are there to protect us. That concerns me a lot in the national security space. I was covering it a lot—every day—and we're not doing it as much. And I want to get back to it.

The effect of tariffs on small businesses is really important. I think we are covering the Mideast peace achievements, such as it is right now. We're covering it plenty, but I think that's important and significant.

Another thing that I think is important, that we're not covering enough, is—and we'll see what the effects will be—the cuts to Medicaid. Is it reform? That's what Speaker Johnson says: "It's reform to Medicaid. We're just making able-bodied men have to work," etc. Or is it going to actually hurt people? That's to be determined because it's just starting to happen now. But all of that, I think, is important.

This interview has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.