About the Show
Anchored by Jake Tapper, The Lead airs at 4 p.m. ET on CNN.
On the Next Episode of The Lead
We've moved! Come join us at our new show page.
politics lead
White House says IRS e-mails lost in crash, calls explanation 'entirely reasonable'
(CNN) – 'Sorry, my hard drive crashed,' is probably not the kind of excuse that would get someone off the hook if he were being audited.
FULL POST
politics lead
40 years after Watergate: Woodward and Bernstein talk Washington scandals then and now
Washington, D.C. (CNN) – Missing documents, zig zagging explanations, looming scandal – the more things change in this town, the more they seem to stay the same.
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the Pulitzer Prize winning journalists who broke the mother of all political scandals, are out with the 40th anniversary edition of their book "All the President's Men," a thrilling account of their reporting on the Watergate scandal that brought down a sitting president.
They joined CNN's "The Lead with Jake Tapper" to discuss the challenge of reporting in the digital age, and why they have no nostalgia for the parking lot where they met "Deep Throat."
world lead
Iraq unrest 'is a time of opportunity' for the U.S.
(CNN) – As the situation in Iraq continues to unravel, President Barack Obama will meet tonight with his national security team who will lay out the commander in chief's military options moving forward.
"It's a time of some opportunity for the United States," says former NATO supreme allied commander retired Gen. Wesley Clark.
"There's been some question in the region about whether the United States is still committed and still working, and willing to assert its power," said Clark.
For more of our interview with retired Gen. Wesley Clark, check out the video above.
world lead
Does the U.S. have an obligation to help save Iraq?
(CNN) – It's almost possible to trace a straight line from the American tear down of Saddam Hussein, to the struggle to rebuild a destroyed nation, to the U.S. armed forces' exit from the country, to now: an Iraq possibly devolving into a Sunni-Shia civil war.
"What the Americans left behind was an Iraqi state that was not able to stand on its own. What we built is now coming apart. This is the real legacy of america's war in Iraq," journalist Dexter Filkins wrote in this week's issue of The New Yorker.
Check out the video above for our interview with Filkins, who has been covering Iraq since the United States first started Operation Iraqi Freedom.
world lead
Pentagon: Sudden rise of ISIS is not an intelligence failure
(CNN) – Militants from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria are in the midst of a fast-moving offensive that has already captured vast swaths of northern Iraq.
The swift gains seem to indicate that the U.S. was not quite there when it came to intelligence, but Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby denies that is the case.
FULL POST
