Special: The Libertarian Ticket, Delegate Count Puts Trump Over the Top and Clinton Staffers Role in Email Investigation

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

GWEN IFILL: Hi, everybody. And welcome to the Washington Week Webcast Extra , where we pick up where we left off on the daily – the weekly, that is, broadcast.

I’m joined around the table by Josh Gerstein of POLITICO , Doyle McManus of The Los Angeles Times , Michael Scherer of TIME Magazine, and Molly Ball of The Atlantic .

While we’ve all been focused on the apparent inevitability of a Clinton-Trump general election campaign, there is still real resistance out there. There is, for example, an actual Libertarian ticket, made up of two former governors, and there are a constant murmurs about a draft. What is true, Molly?

MS. BALL: Well, in fact, there is not yet a Libertarian ticket. The Libertarian Party’s convention is this weekend, and there are several candidates vying for the nomination. Now, the favorite is thought to be former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, who ran four years ago – first as a Republican, in fact, got into, I think, one of the Republican debates, and then was the Libertarian Party nominee and got a record number of votes for the Libertarian Party. There’s perennially this dream in American politics of some kind of third-party movement to give people an alternative to a two-party system that many people find sort of suffocating.

MS. IFILL: More than a dream, actual candidates from time to time.

MS. BALL: Well, there’s two problems with the sort of impossible dream of a third party, right? One of them is that there are a lot of people who agree that they don’t like the two parties and the two-party system, but they don’t agree on anything else. So when it comes down to actually formulating a platform –

MS. IFILL: Kind of like an Occupy problem.

MS. BALL: – for what your third party stands for, then you lose most of those people because some of them, you know, want fiscally conservative and socially liberal, and some of them want socially conservative and fiscally liberal, right?

MS. IFILL: Some of them want to audit the Fed and some of them want to provide free college.

MS. BALL: Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it. And then – and then, the second problem, this election obviously there’s a major contingent of disaffected conservatives, people who feel that Donald Trump’s Republican Party is not their Republican Party. And there’s been an aggressive attempt to try to get either Mitt Romney or somebody like him to run as a conservative third-party candidate.

MS. IFILL: Why won’t that idea go away? It keeps coming back.

MS. BALL: They don’t – well, it keeps coming back because there’s a lot of people who really don’t like Donald Trump and are part of the sort of Republican establishment, are used to sort of getting to run things. But the problem for those people is they don’t have a candidate who’s willing to do it. And without a candidate who’s willing to do it, preferably someone quite prominent because it’s very difficult to get attention when you’re not the major party – a nominee for either major party – they really have very little chance of being anything other than a sort of fringe candidacy either.

So the Libertarians, because it’s impossible – it’s almost impossible to get on the ballot in a lot of states. In some states, their deadlines have already passed, so an independent candidacy wouldn’t even be an option for many voters. The Libertarian Party is on the ballot in all 50 states, and so could provide an alternative if they have –

MS. IFILL: Isn’t the Green Party out there, too, I think?

MS. BALL: I’m not sure if it’s all 50, but that’s also – that would more be for the disaffected liberals.

MS. IFILL: Isn’t William Weld also being talked about for vice president on this governor’s ticket, just for the record?

MS. BALL: He is – he is Gary Johnson’s running mate, and so they’ve got extraordinarily well-credentialed candidates. The question is whether the activist base of the Libertarian Party will accept them.

MS. IFILL: I don’t know how you break through at this point, either.

Michael, OK, you’re the math whiz at the table – at least I now decree that you are the math whiz.

MR. SCHERER: I’ll be for now.

MS. IFILL: So one of the things that – one of the things that did break through this week was that Donald Trump got the required number of delegates to win. Now, there wasn’t an election that I saw that made us decide that was true, so exactly how do we decide when someone has clinched? And are they counting the same way on the Democratic side?

MR. SCHERER: The most delightful part of democracy in America is it’s not that democratic. And so there are lots of fine print to the rules in both parties. What happened this week is that a number of unbound delegates in North Dakota who have the option of committing, even though they’ve been nominated as delegates to the convention, to any candidate they want announced – after previously saying that they were going to not be with Trump, announced that they were switching and they were going to support Trump. And that was enough to put him over the 1,237 that he needed.

MS. IFILL: Which allowed him to go to North Dakota and do a victory lap.

MR. SCHERER: Well, it was well-timed, wasn’t it?

MS. IFILL: Yeah, it was.

MR. SCHERER: Yes. He went there for an energy speech, but yes, the announcement was well-timed.

On the Democratic side, they have a slightly different system. Unlike the Republican side, where there are a lot of delegates who actually have the ability to change their mind on the first ballots, the Democrats make it undemocratic in a slightly different way. They have a group of superdelegates, who are basically elected officials and other people that have been named as delegates, even if they are not nominated or elected or result from any caucus of primary process. Given that Hillary Clinton at this point in the Democratic primary is the only Democrat running with a historic Democratic pedigree, and because a lot of these people committed to her very early on, she’s way ahead in that count. And that is what will allow her –

MS. IFILL: Infuriates Bernie Sanders.

MR. SCHERER: – to declare after the California vote that she has enough delegates to win the nomination, no matter really what happens.

MS. IFILL: Even if she doesn’t win California?

MR. SCHERER: Even if she loses California, because in the Democratic primaries it’s always proportional. So if she gets 40 percent, it’s a blowout and Bernie gets 60 percent, she’ll still get 40 percent of the delegates. And that’ll be a lot. And so Bernie’s case at that point will be – or at least he’s saying it will be – it’s not over yet. The mainstream media is lying to you. The corporate media won’t tell you the truth. These superdelegates can change their mind at any point. And that is true.

MS. IFILL: And that won’t happen till the convention.

MR. SCHERER: And they could change their mind at any point over the next six weeks before the convention – or five weeks.

MS. IFILL: I’m sorry, is the convention only five weeks away?

MR. SCHERER: No, after California, so two weeks. Yeah, in July. Maybe it’s seven weeks.

MS. IFILL: Oh, Mr. math whiz, I see. (Laughs.)

MR. SCHERER: You called it. The problem with his argument is that the people he has to convince to switch to his side are the people who he has angered the most, so it’s just not a natural argument. And he may, if he continues on the road he’s going, go full bore for that – the month of June and the beginning of July, and really rail against the party establishment, the undemocratic process, how they’re not following the will of the people. Now, it should be noted also that Bernie Sanders has got about 2 million votes less at this point than Hillary Clinton. So it’s not just those undemocratic superdelegates that are doing it, he’s also losing in the total vote count.

MS. IFILL: Wow. OK, Josh, back to the emails for a moment. It seems that one of the enduring questions about this – and every time another statement comes out, it doesn’t really tell us anything that much different from what the last report and investigation told us. But one of the unresolved questions is Hillary Clinton’s lieutenants, her staff, and whether they have been cooperating with all of these investigations, and whether they even feel the need to.

MR. GERSTEIN: Well, they didn’t cooperate with the inspector general investigation. Some of them are cooperating with the ongoing FBI investigation. Her people said that the reason she didn’t cooperate with this IG investigation is because they’re prioritizing the FBI investigation, which is a little puzzling because she hasn’t met with any of the FBI investigators, so it doesn’t seem like her schedule would be full with that other matter.

But I think the real question is where they develop their attitudes about sort of transparency and response to not just investigations, but all kinds of outside queries. And I think the answer to that probably has something to do with something that Donald Trump actually brought up this week, which was the suicide of Vince Foster, the White House official, back in the early ’90s. It’s not specifically that, but that whole climate in which the Clintons came to Washington, they were so sort of pilloried or felt pilloried during that period and the ensuing investigations. Many of those people are the same people that are either – were working for Hillary Clinton when she was at the State Department, continue to advise her either officially or informally. And they were all forged in that cauldron of the early ’90s scandals, where it did seem that if you gave an inch it was only to your detriment.

MS. IFILL: It should be said that a lot of us reporters were forged in that cauldron as well. And having covered the White House at that time, it does all feel horribly dated to me. And a lot of things, like the Vince Foster suicide investigation, have been litigated and resolved over the years. So I’m not certain what stirring up that particular cauldron will do to her now.

MR. GERSTEIN: Oh, I don’t think it will do any damage to her, but I think it gives you some insight as to the baseline that the Clintons and many of their top aides come from. You know, we live in this era of extreme transparency. And it’s just, frankly, not something that she or her people seem sort of instinctively comfortable with. Maybe it’s age, maybe it’s what they’ve been through. It’s hard to know. But it doesn’t seems that their initial reflex when confronted with some kind of problem is to say, well, how open can we be about this?

And you do think again and again – this report, for example, mentioned that somebody noticed that she had used this email address in 2013. And some people were like, oh, that’s a scandal it was so long ago. Well, but it also makes you think, if this came out in 2013, many of the events that have played out in the last year during the campaign might have played out a year earlier. Maybe bottling these things up is not always the best way to do it.

MS. IFILL: It should be said, even back in 1994 and ’(9)5 and ’(9)6 they were not that transparent. (Chuckles.)

Doyle, let’s talk about Vietnam, the part of this trip which was actually very amazing and interesting but got overlooked by what followed, the president’s trip to Asia.

MR. MCMANUS: President Obama was the third American president to go to Vietnam. That’s a reconciliation that has been a long time coming. But it is still kind of amazing to look at Vietnam, this country that we were at war with for the better part of 15 years, an impossibly divisive war here, an impossibly damaging war there, and how much of that has slipped by – how much Vietnam wants to have a close relationship with the United States, and how much the United States wants to have a relationship with Vietnam.

And one index of that, before President Obama went, the signals were quite clear from the White House that he was going to lift the arms embargo on Vietnam, which had been in place since the Vietnam War, since the communists took over, to some degree. But most of the experts thought it would partial, it wouldn’t include lethal weaponry. It might include boats, vehicles, you know, help bulk them up, but we wouldn’t go all the way into weapons, in part because of continuing concerns or problems with Vietnam’s very tough, repressive human rights policies. It’s still a communist dictatorship and they still put dissidents in jail.

So President Obama goes to Vietnam, and he decides – and the decision actually, apparently, was not made until very shortly before the trip – he decides he wants to go big. He’s no half-measures. They get the full embargo lifted. Human rights groups were furious. They were rightly furious, because in fact there was a mini-crackdown just before the president’s trip. There were three dissidents who had wanted to meet with the president who were blocked from meeting him by the government. So they were playing hardball. They weren’t being very sweet. And, boy, that’s an indicator of how much these two countries want this relationship to work.

And that all goes back to China. How do you counter the growing influence of China economically, militarily, China’s reach for territorial rights in the South China Sea? Where the largest country with the most overlapping claims on islands in the South China Sea is Vietnam, of course. So we’re not – technically, the United States is not choosing sides in those disputes. Technically, the United States’ position is it should be decided by international judicial means. But, boy, it sure looks like there’s a kind of self-reinforcing tendency here for a China bloc and a not-China bloc to line up against each other.

MS. IFILL: OK. Thank you, Doyle. Thank you, everyone else, as well. Anything on your phone while we were sitting there, anything interesting you can tell me? I’m just hoping.

MR. SCHERER: Just playing with it.

MS. IFILL: (Laughs.) We need our toys.

Stay online and see what else our panelists are seeing in our daily Washington Week feature, News You Need To Know. All that is at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek. Plus, be sure to join me Wednesday night for a PBS Town Hall with President Obama from Elkhart, Indiana. And we’ll see you next time on the Washington Week Webcast Extra .