Special: ISIS Bride Captured, White House Press Evacuated, Ted Cruz Battles GOP and Rand Paul's Payback

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

MR. 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?

MS. 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.

MR. 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) –

MS. EILPERIN: Right.

MR. HARWOOD: – but it was still an extraordinary thing to see. What happened?

MS. 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.

MR. HARWOOD: Was anybody scared?

MS. 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 –

MR. 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?

MS. 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.

MR. HARWOOD: Very nice.

MR. SCHERER: Print’s not dead. (Laughter.)

MR. 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?

MR. 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.

MR. 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?

MR. 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.

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

MR. 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.

MR. HARWOOD: Little bit easier to oppose something than it is to take something away after people already have it.

MR. RAJU: That’s right.

MR. HARWOOD: Thanks, Manu.

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