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Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather on Tuesday applauded the recent leaks that are coming out of the White House, calling them a "public service."

Rather pointed to a leaked report published by The New York Times that revealed climate scientists fear the Trump administration will try to suppress a "blunt climate report."

"Obviously President Trump and those in his administration didn't want this information out, but somebody somewhere said, 'You know what, the public really needs to know this,'" Rather said on MSNBC's "All in With Chris Hayes." "And they did a public service by letting somebody in journalism, in this case, The New York Times, know it."

"News so often is what the public needs to know that someone, particularly someone in power, doesn't want them to know. Everything else is pretty much advertising and propaganda," Rather added.

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On "Outnumbered" today, Judge Andrew Napolitano said he is actually likes to see many of these leaks, because the government owes the American people transparency, but it often resists.

"Sometimes certain leaks tell us that the government has been lying to us, and we have a right to know what the government is doing," Napolitano said. "Sometimes whistleblowers are great. Sometimes whistleblowers are afraid their careers are destroyed and they have to leak outside the whistleblower channel."

Harris Faulkner pointed out that many of the leaks coming out about the Trump administration contain classified information, which gets into the hands of people who don't handle it properly.

Katie Pavlich agreed and argued that recent leaks - including transcripts of Trump's conversations with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull - are purely about politics.

"It's about the people publishing it having a political motive for publishing it, instead of thinking about what kind of damage that will do ... to the country as a whole," Pavlich said.

Watch the "Outnumbered" discussion above, and see the full MSNBC segment with Rather below.

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