ISIS Bride Captured, White House Press Evacuated

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra.

JOHN HARWOOD: Hello, and welcome.

I'm John Harwood, filling in for Gwen Ifill.

Joining me around the table, Juliet Eilperin of The Washington Post, Michael Scherer of

Time Magazine, Manu Raju of Politico, and Nancy Youssef of The Daily Beast.

Nancy, let's start with your exclusive story about the wife of an ISIS leader who is

being held in U.S. custody.

Why is she being held?

And what's going to happen to her?

NANCY YOUSSEF: Well, she's an interesting case.

She has a nom de jure, Umm Sayyaf, and she was captured with her - when her husband was

killed about a month ago in what was really celebrated by the U.S.

military as a treasure trove of intelligence and everything else.

It's a unique case because, remember, they've been fighting this war primarily from the

air, through airstrikes, and so the whole idea in doing that in part was that they would

not confront captives and what to do with them and whatnot.

Now the argument that they're holding her on is that she was an ISIS operative, that she

was not just the wife of one of the top ISIS officials but someone who knew things about,

for example, Western hostages who was taken and overall ISIS operations.

And so she is being held in Iraq and the U.S.

has determined that they have the legal grounds to hold her, but it's opened a whole list

of questions about what happens in future cases.

Can you apply her case to other cases?

Are there going to be new legal groundworks that need to be set?

And it really brings the Obama administration right back to where it didn't want to be:

at the end of the Bush administration of having to deal with terrorist detainees, what to

do with them, what are the options once they've been interrogated.

JOHN HARWOOD: Fascinating.

Thanks, Nancy.

Juliet, you cover the White House, which had a quite extraordinary moment this week

when, mid-briefing, they sounded an evacuation order of the Briefing Room.

Now, I will say - I actually tweeted this - I'm not sure that the evacuation of the room

affected the amount of actual news that would - was conveyed in the briefing - (laughter) -

JULIET EILPERIN: Right.

JOHN HARWOOD: - but it was still an extraordinary thing to see.

What happened?

JULIET EILPERIN: Basically, a couple of Secret Service agents came into the briefing.

They looked a little nervously over at Josh Earnest, the press secretary, who was in the

middle of answering a question about the data breach of personnel records.

And they said that there's been a threat and we needed to evacuate, and we dutifully got

up and got out of there and walked across the street.

JOHN HARWOOD: Was anybody scared?

JULIET EILPERIN: People were not scared, and part of it was - I have to say, one of the

funniest moments is that all the press folks got up and then they just went back into the

press offices within the White House.

So we felt like it couldn't be that seriously - serious if they were not immediately

exiting with us.

So that kind of made us feel better about it.

But it was this conundrum that we felt like this was perhaps the one time it seemed that

the Secret Service was taking the security of journalists more seriously than the

president of the United States, so -

JOHN HARWOOD: And the idea that I read about that the cameras, the television cameras,

were covered or tilted while reporters were out, what was the reason for that?

JULIET EILPERIN: They never provided an explanation, although one assumes it was so

that we would not be able to record what happened in terms of the security sweep.

But we were pleased that at least they used the Washington Post Sports Section to block

out one of ABC's cameras.

(Laughter.)

So that at least made us feel like there's a use for the newspaper.

JOHN HARWOOD: Very nice.

MICHAEL SCHERER: Print's not dead.

(Laughter.)

JOHN HARWOOD: Michael, I want to talk about Rand Paul and some of the fallout from what

he did on the surveillance issue, where he allowed those authorities to expire.

And you've got now the potential for the conservative Bush/Cheney foreign policy

apparatus to come back at him hard because that's their surveillance regime which he was

targeting.

What can he expect?

MICHAEL SCHERER: Well, you know, a couple years ago when he had that filibuster over

drones, it seemed like the party was shifting, that there was this big titanic movement

happening and he was clearly rising.

And he had tried to prepare himself for this moment by since then sort of moderating

some of his foreign policy views.

He's now in favor of fighting ISIS, for instance.

He's fighting the claim of "isolationist."

But it became apparent a couple weeks ago

now that the party has not moved, and I think a lot of it has to do with ISIS.

And when he stood up and did, you know, very bravely, courageously in his way, stop the

Senate in its tracks, force McConnell to take a bill on the NSA that he didn't want to

take, no one on the Republican field stood up with him.

And on top of that, clearly several people on the Republican side are just raring for

the fight.

They can't wait to come after him.

And it - and it puts him where he didn't want to be at this point.

He wanted to be this expansionist candidate who's going to break out of his father's

box, and it very much looks like at this point in the race that the box is being rebuilt

around him.

JOHN HARWOOD: Does not feel like that's happening, you're right.

Manu, Ted Cruz has been famous for his all-out, over-the-edge-of-the-cliff fights

against Obamacare.

Now Republicans have the prospect, if the Court rules against the president, of, to

avoid flack being directed to them, passing some sort of alternative plan, fix, extension

of subsidies.

He says he's going to fight.

What are the implications of that?

MANU RAJU: It's pretty significant.

It really shows the divide within the

Republican Party right now and the challenges of Congress responding in case

they do lose - the administration does lose this court case.

What Ted Cruz told me is that he's going to oppose all Republican plans

to extend subsidies for 18 months.

This is a leading proposal right now in the Senate.

What they would do is that they would extend those subsidies for the millions of people

who would lose them for 18 months, but at a cost: they want to also force the

administration to kill the employer mandate, the individual mandate, pretty - the central

core of Obamacare.

They want that in exchange for temporarily extending the subsidies.

But that is not even enough for Ted Cruz.

He wants to fight even that because he doesn't think that the subsidies should be

extended.

He said at the very least states should be allowed to opt out of Obamacare.

That seems to be his bottom-line demand.

JOHN HARWOOD: And how do other Republicans feel about this idea of his?

MANU RAJU: They're divided.

They're all over the map.

I mean, you're seeing a lot of House Republicans align with Ted Cruz on this and not

really like what the Senate Republicans are proposing.

And then you have Senate Republicans saying, look, we got to do something because the

system is going to be in chaos and we're going to take a brunt of the blame if people

suddenly see their health care coverage skyrocket.

It just really shows that if there is a(n) administration loss, the Republicans are

still struggling with a plan to replace Obamacare.

They're been saying repeal and replace for so many years; they still don't have a plan

to replace.

And they may soon have to come up with one.

JOHN HARWOOD: Little bit easier to oppose something than it is to take something away

after people already have it.

MANU RAJU: That's right.

JOHN HARWOOD: Thanks, Manu.

Now, stay online all week long and check out the news you need to know on the Washington

Week website.

That's, of course, at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek.

And that's all for this edition of the Washington Week Webcast Extra.