Special: Webcast Extra: Bob McDonnell's fall from grace, ISIL social media and immigration reform

JOHN HARWOOD: Welcome to the “Washington Week” Webcast Extra. I’m John Harwood of CNBC, sitting in for Gwen Ifill this week. I’m joined by Indira Lakshmanan of Bloomberg News, Yochi Dreazen of Foreign Policy Magazine, Peter Baker of The New York Times, and John Dickerson of Slate and CBS News.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Once a rising star in the Republican Party, former Governor Bob McDonnell of Virginia, barely nine months out of office, was convicted this week on 11 counts of corruption, fraud and bribery. His wife Maureen was convicted on nine charges.

John, this was a stunning development for someone many thought had national aspirations; just two years ago might have even been on the Republican ticket.

JOHN DICKERSON: That’s right. Well, he definitely did have national aspirations. And he was being vetted by the Romney team as a vice president. So score one for the Romney vetting operation that they didn’t put him on the ticket. But he was named in every conversation as one of these rising Republican governors. OK, so he wasn’t a vice president with Mitt Romney; he might go on to do something else. And it is extraordinary.

And the drama of this court case, in which basically he sold his wife down the river and basically said that they couldn’t have colluded in this scheme because they were – because she was – I don’t know how to phrase the way he portrayed her, but it was that she was unstable.

MR. HARWOOD: I think my colleague at The New York Times said that he portrayed her as a harridan. (Laughter.)

MR. DICKERSON: And that they didn’t spend much time together. Of course, they took - I think it was 18 vacations in a period of a year, so that was a key blow in their defense case. It was really - it was quite extraordinary.

I wonder if there’s something about the Virginia governor’s office. And Peter, you covered this. It’s a single term. OK, money is all over the place in politics, but usually politicians get close to fat cats, which was the case here, but so they can build a war chest for their next campaign, for their reelection campaign. Well, there is no such reelection campaign in Virginia.

PETER BAKER: Right.

MR. DICKERSON: But since you’re there for the year, you have to pay back your donors quickly, because you don’t have a second term in which to kind of slide them a goodie on the second term.

MR. BAKER: Yeah, it’s the only state in the Union that doesn’t allow a governor to run for reelection. And it’s – I think part of it is two things. One is, Virginia has this self-image as a clean state, as a place of Mr. Jefferson’s virtues and so forth. And you saw a lot of that this week.

The truth is, the laws are relatively weak. He wasn’t convicted under Virginia law. He was convicted under federal law, because under Virginia law there’s nothing wrong with taking a lot of gifts from a fat-cat donor as long as you don’t sell the office. That’s what the federal prosecutors argued; he sold the office.

It is striking, because I covered Richmond, as you said. I covered Bob McDonnell when he was a young state delegate 20 years ago – a law-and-order Republican. He was – I remember the stories we wrote were about his anticrime kind of legislation. He must look back on that with some degree of irony. But he was well-liked on both sides of the aisle - thought of as a real comer – and not seen as the sleaziest of the bunch. In other words, there’s a whole lot of guys who are. He was not seen that way. And yet the culture clearly got away with him, and he couldn’t resist.

MR. HARWOOD: Peter, I want to ask you about another federal issue, and that is immigration, which the president addressed at his news conference today. He was asked about it near the end. He has talked about taking executive action if Congress doesn’t pass legislation. And he earlier gave signals that he was going to do it right at the end of the summer. He was going to get recommendations, act without delay.

It sounded to me as if he was signaling today that that’s not going to happen. It’s going to be later, perhaps after the election. Has the White House decided to yield to Democratic Senate candidates in conservative states and say we’re going to back off right now?

MR. BAKER: Yeah, I do think that’s where they’re heading. I think, you know, the president, as you say, almost said that today. He’ll be asked about it, no doubt, in his interview on Sunday on “Meet the Press.” Look for him to say something there.

It is a calculation for the 2014 senators. It’s also a calculation that to put this out now would make it this giant, big, monster target. It would define the election. A billion dollars’ worth of ads would be taking issue. And he wants, I think, when he does this – and his aides do believe he will do this after the election – he wants it to be sustainable. And if you made it so toxic before the election that people take positions that they have to live up to after the election, it makes it harder to sustain in the long term. And that’s what he’s thinking about.

MR. HARWOOD: Yochi, I want to go to one of the foreign challenges the administration faces, and a particular aspect of it, and that’s ISIL, but in particular the way ISIL has become extremely sophisticated in its use of social media. Talk a little bit – you know, on the one hand, you’ve got this force that appears barbaric, medieval, whatever sort of word you want to attach to it. But they’re also very sophisticated in some ways.

MR. DREAZEN: John, a former colleague of ours - when Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered, I watched the videotape. I sort of felt like I owed it, in a weird way, for him to watch it. And besides the gruesome horror of it, it was crude. It was something shot on what looked like a hand-held camera. And again, besides just the horror of it, the production of it was not something that you would be impressed by.

You watch these videos. These could be Hollywood-produced films. The color is right. And again, I’m not trying to be glib; set aside the horror. But they are well-produced. They have music. They have a crawl on the bottom the way cable news does. These things look professional, and they are.

There was a briefing, an intelligence community briefing, a few weeks back talking about the way ISIS uses social media. But they have tens of thousands of people on Twitter who just retweet instantaneously what ISIS tweets out, not just in Arabic, not just in English, but in German, Uzbek, Chechen, Indian; just language after language – Turkish – language after language after language.

So think about a group that can tweet out information, tweet out videos, tweet out photos.

MR. HARWOOD: How many groups are there like that? That’s a depth of sophistication I don’t think I’m familiar with.

MR. DREAZEN: They’re the most – by far the most sophisticated. Al-Shabaab was sophisticated when they were besieging a mall in Kenya, which is what put them on western maps, killing unfortunately dozens of people in the mall. They were live tweeting it; I mean, really sophisticated. But ISIS, their level of production value, their level of (reach ?), their level of access, we’ve never seen anything quite like it.

MR. HARWOOD: Today, speaking of al-Shabaab, for all the talk of failure and difficulty and hardship in American foreign policy, there was a success that was announced today, which is the killing of one of the leaders of al-Shabaab in Somalia. How significant is that? And how much of a threat is al-Shabaab?

INDIRA LAKSHMANAN: Well, it is and it isn’t. And I’ll say it is because the leader, Ahmed Godane, had really centralized power around him. And he is thought to have been the mastermind of the attack that Yochi referred to at the Westgate Mall, this upscale mall in Nairobi, Kenya that killed 67 people, including foreigners. And it really brought it to the attention, put it on the map of westerners. Of course, people who follow intelligence and terrorism already knew all about al-Shabaab. They’ve been operating, you know, for more than a decade.

But this is the second time in six years that the U.S. has killed the head of this group. And if you remember back into the aftermath of 9/11, we killed three number threes for al-Qaida in fairly quick succession. So, you know, you can kill them, but they’re always replaced. You know, the head grows back. There’s someone else waiting in line to succeed this guy.

MR. HARWOOD: Which is making the point that Yochi was making during the broadcast, that the idea of wiping out a group that’s based on an idea and a consistent motivation of an identifiable group of people is really hard to do.

MS. LAKSHMANAN: Very hard to do. I mean, obviously it’s good for the president to be able to check this off as a victory and to say, you know, we remember. We know about the West – that you were behind it, and we’re getting rid of you. But I don’t think that anyone is naive enough to think that that means the end of this group. Of course it doesn’t.

And one thing I would really like to know – and maybe it will eventually come out – is the U.S. actually gave a $7 million reward they offered towards information about him. And I’d really like to know whether it was someone in his own group who actually gave up the information or whether the U.S. just got lucky with its surveillance in this particular drone strike. That will be interesting to know whether these rewards work.

MR. HARWOOD: Thanks, Indira, Peter, John, Yochi.

That raps it up for now. Be sure to keep up with what all of our panelists are writing each weekday. We call it the “Washington Week: Essential Reads.” And you can find it on our website, PBS.org/WashingtonWeek.

I’m John Harwood. Gwen will be back next week with another edition of the “Washington Week” Webcast Extra.