Special: Republicans Court Kissinger, Instability in Yemen, Spying on Wall Street and Gov't Intervention in Hand Washing

ANNOUNCER: This is the WASHINGTON WEEK Webcast Extra.

GWEN IFILL, "WASHINGTON WEEK" MODERATOR: Hello and welcome.

I’m Gwen Ifill and I’m joined around the table by Michael Crowley of "Politico", Eamon Javers of CNBC, Karen Tumulty of "The Washington Post", and Doyle McManus of "The Los Angeles Times".

We talked in the main program about the dilemma U.S. officials wrestle with in defending our allies. One challenge we did not get to, Yemen, where the U.S.-friendly government has now apparently been turned out of office by not-so-friendly rebels.

This has quite a ripple effect, doesn’t it, Doyle?

DOYLE MCMANUS, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES: It has a big ripple effect because, actually, if you ask American officials where the most dangerous terrorist group in the world is today for Americans, it’s that branch of al Qaeda in Yemen, because it’s got people who keep generating these plots to blow up American airliners and they haven’t succeeded yet, but it’s in part because we’ve been very lucky, in part because the CIA and others have been very good.

And in part because that government that Yemen had had for the last, let’s see, since 2011, basically, had gone whole hog into a partnership with the United States to go after that al Qaeda, and in doing so, it’s kind of neglected its local problems.

IFILL: Yes, plenty out there (ph).

MCMANUS: Yemen -- you don’t want to get to be talking about Yemen because it’s a big, hairy mess with lots of --

(CROSSTALK)

IFILL: Explain this bit -- who are the Houthis who’ve taken over and thinking we do business with them?

MCMANUS: Right. Well, because the people who’ve taken over are called Houthis that is --

IFILL: Houthis.

MCMANUS: Huh?

IFILL: I’m sorry, I said it wrong. Go ahead.

MCMANUS: Oh, no, it’s either way. It depends on which Arabic dialect -- Arabic dialect you’re using. So, you’re OK.

IFILL: Thank you.

MCMANUS: The Houthis are basically a large both sort of clan and sect in Northwest Yemen. They are maybe as many as the third of the country, but that’s an important number to note. Twenty-five million people in Yemen, about a third of them, Houthis are kind of Shia Muslims, like the Iranians but they’re a different sect of Shia Muslims. I’m not going to get into --

IFILL: Yes.

MCMANUS: -- weird analogies about Methodists and Presbyterians because that would be dangerous one to get into.

(LAUGHTER)

MCMANUS: But --

IFILL: Good thing you didn’t say that, yes.

MCMANUS: Right.

(LAUGHTER)

MCMANUS: Exactly.

But the Houthis are getting have been trying to overthrow this pro-American government. They’ve been getting support from Iran. One of their favorite slogans is, "Death to America". So, they don’t really sound like great allies of the United States. But nevertheless, the U.S. government is talking to the Houthis and trying to talk them into a partnership because the one thing the Houthis hate more than the United States is al Qaeda.

IFILL: Oh, my goodness.

MCMANUS: So oddly enough --

(CROSSTALK)

IFILL: The friend of your enemy if my friend.

MCMANUS: This maybe the case of a friend of a friend --

IFILL: Whatever.

MCMANUS: The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

IFILL: My friend.

MCMANUS: Generally thought to be an old Arabic proverb, but I looked it up. It’s actually from pre-historic India.

IFILL: Really?

MCMANUS: Yes.

IFILL: You thought me a lot tonight. I’m just saying.

(CROSSTALK)

MCMANUS: Bonus fact.

IFILL: Fun for me.

MCMANUS: Only on the webcast.

IFILL: Michael --

(LAUGHTER)

IFILL: Michael, you wrote a great piece this week about the Kissinger primary.

MICHAEL CROWLEY, POLITICO: Yes.

IFILL: Now, explain to us why it is that Henry Kissinger, who was at this peak some decades ago, is still so sought after by candidates trying to burnish their own foreign policy credentials.

CROWLEY: Well, and not just candidates, but it -- seemingly, everyone in the Washington power establishment wants to talk and be seen talking to this 91-year-old --

IFILL: Except Code Pink.

CROWLEY: -- former statesman. Except for the people who think he is a war criminal and actually, that does include some respected historians and academics and I get into that in my history.

But let’s just start with your original question. For instance, we saw recently Rick Perry went to see, who has no particular foreign policy credentials, goes to meet Dr. Kissinger and tweets a photograph of the meeting of them together. Marco Rubio, somewhat ostentatiously is carrying his book around and talking about how he’s reading it. Scott Walker, let it be known, that he has sat with Dr. Kissinger.

If you want to go back to 2008, Sarah Palin had an audience with the former secretary of state.

IFILL: I would have loved to sit-in on that one.

CROWLEY: He has become I think in a way because he is, despite the controversy around him and I have to say, some of the episodes he’s associated with, some of these old quotes, they’re very ugly. That is a complicated conversation we wouldn’t be able to do justice too here. But despite all of that controversy and his detractors, he’s a sort of household name now who represents wisdom and knowledge and worldliness.

And so, if you’re a Republican candidate, who may not have very strong foreign policy credentials, if you can say, I’ve been talking to Henry Kissinger, it’s a very easy way to broadcast -- I’m intelligent. I know the right people. I’m learning about the world.

And to some degree, an endorsement from Henry Kissinger I think would be, you know, not a trivial factor in a Republican primary where a lot of these guys don’t really have again foreign policy credentials. Chris Christie is another one who’s close to him but has none of this experience, and would be a kind of validation for Americans who don’t follow foreign policy that closely to say, hey, if he’s good enough for Henry Kissinger, how bad can he be?

IFILL: Well, let’s talk to -- I want to talk to Karen about that, because we did see, not only Chris Christie this week, but also I think Bob Jindal not too long ago, kind of make an obligatory trip to London, to try to, I don’t know, be seen standing around foreign leaders or something. And that’s part of the burnishing as well, right?

KAREN TUMULTY, THE WASHINGTON POST: I think so. And I think it’s also a recognition that this next presidential campaign is likely to be a lot about foreign policy, and making Americans feel safe in a very, very unsafe world. The problem is that when -- as Chris Christie found out, he did not do a sort of Mitt Romney-style gaffe of, you know, criticizing the security at the London Olympics right before the Olympics.

IFILL: But he did criticize the president on a foreign soil.

TUMULTY: He did. And he also -- there’s a different kind of glare that these guys seem to get caught in when they themselves are on foreign soil. But I think that you are going to see a lot of this, because again, it’s just very clear that right now at least, foreign policy is I think a much higher priority issue for Americans than we have seen in the last few cycles.

IFILL: I want to talk to you a little -- it’s a little bit of a turn but not so far, because on Wall Street, they’re concern about foreign governments, foreign agencies spying on our business field.

EAMON JAVERS, CNBC: Yes, I had a fascinating meeting over at the Department of Justice this morning with John Carlin, who’s the assistant attorney general for national security. He oversees U.S. investigations into cybercrime, terrorism, but also in the espionage.

And we saw this fascinating case just last week where the U.S. disrupted an alleged Russian spy ring, arrested one alleged Russian spy, two others left the country under diplomatic immunity, and said that one of the things that they had been doing was trying to gather information about the New York Stock Exchange in New York.

And what Carlin told me this morning was that there are multiple foreign intelligence services active on Wall Street right now, trying to gather information about the U.S. financial system, and he was using his interview on CNBC to sort of send a message to Wall Street, CEOs in particular, this is a new concern. You have to be aware of it.

They’re looking for information to use, in case they decide to disrupt the U.S. financial systems.

IFILL: Well, even this week, the big cyber breach we saw at Anthem Healthcare, 80 million people affected, was almost immediately pinpointed to China.

JAVERS: Right. And that’s one of the areas that Carlin oversees also. I asked him about the Anthem hack today. He said that -- he couldn’t say anything about an ongoing investigation and those rumors of whether or not it came from China have not been substantiated.

But we’ve seen nation states active in this hacking game against the U.S. companies, as recently as the Sony hack over the winter. So, this is a new nation state level threat to American companies and they’re grappling with it in a way that sort of -- it’s totally new to them.

IFILL: You can’t run for president anymore and pretend not to know anything about what’s happening abroad. But I want to come back to a completely disgusting local history.

(LAUGHTER)

IFILL: Senator -- a freshman senator from North Carolina was trying to make a case about --

TUMULTY: Oh, you are not going there, Gwen.

IFILL: Government intervention -- I promise the people I’ll talk about it.

So, tell me how this happened? What the point he was trying to make and what he actually said, Thom Tillis?

TUMULTY: Senator Thom Tillis was trying to make a sort of broad point about government intrusion into the workings of business.

IFILL: He was speaking in a conservative or a libertarian think tank.

TUMULTY: But he used the most disgusting analogy that I think any politician has made in recent times, which is basically, he argued that restaurant should not be forced to require their employees to watch their hands because that was really an intrusion on their freedom, and besides it could be a competitive advantage if you’re the Starbucks, where people wash their hands rather than the one where they don’t. You know --

IFILL: How did that go over?

TUMULTY: Well, my immediate impression was, the next time I go to Starbucks, I would ask for a shot of Purell in my latte.

(LAUGHTER)

IFILL: The next time I go to that senator’s office, I’m going to ask for a shot of Purell. There’s not a sign in -- never mind. We’re not going to go into all of that.

Thank you very much for disgusting the entire online streaming audience.

Thank you, everybody.

Stay online to check out my take this week on what happens politicians who want to be president trip over their tongues.

And we’ll see you next time on the WASHINGTON WEEK Webcast Extra.