Full Episode: Fatal shootings revive questions of race and policing, FBI closes Clinton email probe and Trump meets with GOP Congress

GWEN IFILL: Shootings in Dallas, Baton Rouge and Falcon Heights, Minnesota, shock the nation. Plus, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump survive a week that would have eliminated any other candidate. So much to talk about, tonight on Washington Week .

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: (From video.) We are horrified over these events. There is no possible justification for these kinds of attacks or any violence against law enforcement.

MS. IFILL: Two big stories tonight.

DALLAS POLICE CHIEF DAVID BROWN: (From video.) There are no words to describe the atrocity that occurred to our city. All I know is that this must stop, this divisiveness between our police and our citizens.

DIAMOND REYNOLDS (fiancee of Philando Castile): (From video.) He’s licensed to carry. He was trying to get out his ID and he was reaching for his wallet, and the officer just shot him in his arm.

MS. IFILL: What, if anything, are our leaders doing, can they do, to stem what is becoming a summer of violence.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: (From video.) I’m with her.

MS. IFILL: And on the campaign, the collision of ambition, accusation and attack.

DONALD TRUMP: (From video.) These are all lies. We say lie – lie, lie, lie. Dirty, rotten liar.

MS. IFILL: Has Hillary Clinton finally shaken the controversy about her handling of classified emails?

FBI DIRECTOR JAMES COMEY: (From video.) No reasonable prosecutor would bring such a case.

MS. IFILL: And has Donald Trump found a way to calm nervous Republicans?

INDIANA GOVERNOR MIKE PENCE (R): (From video.) I’m ready, willing and able to help.

SENATOR JEFF FLAKE (R-AZ): (From video.) Public officials, I think, have a responsibility to stand up and say that’s not our party.

MS. IFILL: Covering the state of the nation and the state of the campaign, Carrie Johnson, justice correspondent for NPR; Manu Raju, senior political correspondent for CNN; Beth Reinhard, political reporter for The Wall Street Journal ; and Karen Tumulty, national political reporter for The Washington Post .

ANNOUNCER: Award-winning reporting and analysis. Covering history as it happens. Live from our nation’s capital, this is Washington Week with Gwen Ifill . Once again, live from Washington, moderator Gwen Ifill.

MS. IFILL: Good evening. It seems every week we come into your homes and we tell you we’ve never seen anything like this before. Sadly, it’s true once again.

We start tonight with events on the streets of our nation’s cities: law enforcement officers targeted, citizens killed by their protectors. This was Washington’s response today. House Speaker Paul Ryan.

HOUSE SPEAKER PAUL RYAN (R-WI): (From video.) There will be a temptation to let our anger harden our divisions. Let’s not let that happen. There’s going to be a temptation to let our anger send us further into our corners. Let’s not let that happen. That script is just too easy to write.

MS. IFILL: Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: (From video.) As a white person, I want to make clear that whites have to listen. We have to recognize, you know, many of the fears and anxieties that our African-American, our Latino and others in our – our society feel.

MS. IFILL: Attorney General Loretta Lynch.

ATTORNEY GENERAL LORETTA LYNCH: (From video.) Now, after the events of this week, Americans across our country are feeling a sense of helplessness, of uncertainty, and of fear. These feelings are understandable, and they are justified, but the answer must not be violence. The answer is never violence.

MS. IFILL: Even Donald Trump opted against the inflammatory, calling in a statement for “love and compassion.”

So, Karen, were lawmakers just hitting pause, or are we actually seeing something different this time?

KAREN TUMULTY: You know, it’s so sad that both the country and its leaders are getting so much experience going through moments like this. It seems like each one is worse than the last. But it really doesn’t feel like it’s getting any easier to bring people together. And, yes, you know, in those clips you had a lot of rhetoric about unifying and moving forward, but you also, by the middle of the day, had – you know, in this political system, which has become essentially zero-sum, where, you know, you cannot acknowledge one kind of horror without being accused of diminishing or excusing another kind. So we found by the – you know, by this morning President Obama was being accused of having – you know, given some kind of horrible permission to what happened in Dallas. We saw, you know, politicians all across the spectrum, you know, already positioning themselves to get some kind of political advantage out of this.

MS. IFILL: You know, Manu, we are used to hearing the reaction – the people going to the floor of the House, the people walking to the microphones to say my thoughts and my prayers. But what about action, then? We have seen the reaction after Orlando. We have seen the reaction after any number of mass shootings and individual shootings. What about the action?

MANU RAJU: Well, there’s not a whole lot of action where the two sides can agree upon. We’ve reached the point where, as Karen said, gridlock in Washington. I mean, if you look at the one thing that Democrats in particular are pushing for is some sort of gun violence, gun control measure. I mean, Congress couldn’t get something done after Sandy Hook, and that was one of the most unspeakable tragedies. And that was in 2012, and there was a Democratic Senate at the time, and they tried to pass a universal background checks bill, and it still stalled. Right now Republicans control Congress, and there’s no way that universal –

MS. IFILL: But is gun control – that’s always going to happen. Is gun control the natural fallback, though? Is that the natural action?

MR. RAJU: For Democrats, certainly. The disagreement from the Republicans, they say this is not an issue about gun control. They believe it’s an issue about behavior, about mental health, it’s about a broader strategy on counterterrorism when you – when you look at potential terror suspects getting into the country, dealing with homegrown extremists. So the two parties are just in completely different ballparks about what is the root of this problem, which is one reason why they’re not going to get anywhere.

MS. IFILL: So, Carrie, is there then – assuming that there is not a legislative action to be taken, is there a legal one? We saw – this was – at the heart of these actions this week, these events, was law enforcement in every case, whether it was law enforcement acting out of – out of school or law enforcement as victims.

CARRIE JOHNSON: So from the White House and the Justice Department, there was a reemphasis on the 21 ^st century policing commission the president instituted after Ferguson and Trayvon Martin and some other awful incidents of the recent past. And those commissions recommended things like police treating communities – acting as guardians, not warriors; police treating communities as their clients, in a way, Gwen. And so many – Gwen, and –

MS. IFILL: As we heard happened in Dallas.

MS. JOHNSON: It did happen in Dallas, and yet we still had this awful shooting where at least five law enforcement officers lay dead.

MS. IFILL: It just takes one person.

MS. JOHNSON: One person.

MS. IFILL: I want to ask both Beth and Karen about this, because the political part of this, we’ve heard what the candidates said and what they say, but today it felt like a little different in that we heard conservatives start to say, hmm, I do understand – after silence, by the way, mostly in the wake of what happened in Minnesota and Baton Rouge, today I started hearing people like Newt Gingrich and others say, well, maybe – I’m beginning to see the point.

BETH REINHARD: Right, and it’s very striking to see how different Donald Trump’s reaction was compared to after Orlando. If you remember, after that horrible shooting, he had those tweets that seemed to congratulate himself about, you know, being able to recognize terrorism, and then he had that strange insinuation about the president being sort of in cahoots with the shooter. This time, his message on Twitter was, you know, very calm and –

MS. IFILL: After having said nothing about Minnesota or Baton Rouge.

MS. REINHARD: That’s true. And Hillary Clinton had, and he hadn’t. And then he offered his condolences, and then to my great surprise he talked about the senseless deaths in Louisiana and Minnesota. And if you’ve been to Trump rallies, you know he frequently is like, let’s give it up for law enforcement, and he’s big on supporting the police. Not that I’m saying you can’t be on both sides, kind of like what you said, but it was striking that he took a moment to notice those deaths too.

MS. TUMULTY: And – sorry I’m the glass half full person here – but at the same time, Trump’s statement referred to the two men who were killed by police officers as motorists. It did not suggest that there – first of all, one of them wasn’t a motorist, in Baton Rouge. It was a man who was outside a convenience store selling CDs in a parking lot. But his statement did not mention or acknowledge that there could have been –

MS. REINHARD: Race.

MS. TUMULTY: – any sort of racial factor in this at all.

MS. IFILL: Except that, I suppose – I don’t know if I’m glass half full or empty anymore because we seem stuck at the same level. But I do wonder whether the beginning of listening to one another is you begin to hear the point that the other side might be making when, in fact, you know, you can still find the people pointing – doing the zero-sum game, but it felt like a little bit different today. Maybe I’m wrong.

MS. REINHARD: Well, also – I’m sorry – you know, just to also recognize about Trump’s statements, these were his statements, and Donald Trump via statement is a lot different than Donald Trump unleashed at a rally. And so we haven’t seen him in the flesh talking about this, and you know, just two days ago – or on Wednesday he was up in Cincinnati talking about, you know, these inflammatory tweets and remarks he had made about Saddam Hussein, really digging in. And so that’s the Trump we see on the stump, very different.

MR. RAJU: But, you know, but there’s still a lot of blame game going around, too. I mean, even – I was in the Capitol today. A lot of Democrats were pointing the finger at Republicans for being complicit, for not allowing votes on things to stem gun violence. So clearly that – you know, even as we are saying, you know, that maybe something’s different, they still go back to the same partisan attack lines at the end of the day.

MS. JOHNSON: But outside of Washington, you’ve got to think that the advent of these videos, in particular this video outside of Minnesota, where you have this woman whose boyfriend or partner has been shot as part of a traffic stop when he was just trying to pull out his ID, she says, and she has the presence of mind to start recording on her cellphone. And you hear her 6-year-old daughter say, I’m with you, mommy, I’m here, it’s going to be OK. That kind of experience I think does touch regular people outside Washington, and perhaps some of that messaging gets back to the people –

MR. RAJU: It’s a question of whether the regular people – you know, if Washington is listening to the regular –

MS. JOHNSON: Yeah.

MS. IFILL: Well, we have 72 hours since that event, maybe 36 hours, so it’s unclear to know what – because in Washington things have a way of returning to their natural level. But path forward, do you see?

MS. TUMULTY: Legislatively, Manu’s right, none. The question is whether these events are jolting enough to force more of this conversation and more of this dialogue. And Hillary Clinton today was very, very, you know, adamant that that really is much more than anything else the solution in the long run.

MR. RAJU: And it’s also hard to say that this is not going to be a major issue in the general election, something that we really have not talked about in the 2012 campaign, 2008 and before.

MS. IFILL: Well, we’ll come back to the 2016 campaign in just a moment, just because this was of course a huge campaign week. The biggest moving part came from FBI Director James Comey, who managed to make it both Hillary Clinton’s worst and best week of the campaign.

REPRESENTATIVE JASON CHAFFETZ (R-UT): (From video.) Did Hillary Clinton break the law?

DIRECTOR COMEY: (From video.) In connection with her use of the email server, my judgement is that she did not.

MS. IFILL: Republicans say they are mystified how Comey, a Bush appointee and registered Republican, could judge Clinton “extremely careless,” in his words, but not bring charges.

REPRESENTATIVE TREY GOWDY (R-SC): (From video.) If you are a private in the Army and you email yourself classified information, you will be kicked out. But if you are Hillary Clinton and you seek a promotion to commander in chief, you will not be.

MS. IFILL: That’s Trey Gowdy, the Republican. I want to know, Carrie, for you – I want for you to parse what he just said and then tell me why it didn’t work with Comey.

MS. JOHNSON: The FBI director said there just wasn’t enough evidence to demonstrate that Hillary Clinton or any of her close aides at the State Department acted with malicious or bad faith, bad intent, when they set up this private email server and did government business on it for a matter of years. The FBI director said, Gwen, that he discovered seven or eight classified email chains – top secret, not just classified email chains – on that server, and 110 classified emails. But when he dug down, he didn’t see the kind of bad behavior that they’ve used in the past to charge people with a crime. Hillary Clinton, in her three-and-a-half-hour interrogation at the FBI Headquarters last weekend, did not lie to investigators as far as the FBI could tell, no destruction of documents or emails maliciously, and there wasn’t any evidence that she intended to be disloyal to the U.S. government or engage in espionage in any way.

Now, one thing that Republicans have cited is that his – the FBI director’s suspicion that Hillary Clinton may have been hacked. He didn’t have direct evidence of that, and he said it’s possible. And that’s a devastating conclusion.

MS. IFILL: Except he seemed to be a lot less strong about that at the hearing than he was at his announcement even just two days later. Manu, you were in the room at the hearing. I was struck throughout the hearing – there are a lot of ways which members could have gone, and what they would generally say, it was long speeches about what they thought was crazy, but then not follow it up with a question that really nailed – what a shock, right? I know.

MR. RAJU: It’s amazing for members of Congress to grandstand. (Laughter.) You know, I thought that there were – you know, Comey made a pretty convincing case about why he could not bring charges, but I think that Republicans were satisfied in making the political argument that clearly that she did something very wrong. And Comey said a number of things that could help that argument, one of them saying that it was a reasonable assumption that the deleted emails contained classified information, also saying that maybe that she wasn’t sophisticated enough to understand the classified markings on the email chains. And also there’s going to be –

MS. IFILL: Which every grandmother in America would get, but maybe not many former secretaries.

MR. RAJU: Exactly. And you know, also saying that if she was an FBI employee she would be fired, potentially, or face disciplinary actions. And Republicans are planning on sending a letter of inquiry to the FBI to launch another investigation to see whether or not she lied to the Benghazi Committee last year when she said that she did not send any classified material that was marked classified through her private email server. That will be difficult to prove, too, because you have to prove intent, but it will still keep the political argument alive.

MS. JOHNSON: I must say that, having lived through the George W. Bush administration and investigations thereof, there were many, many perjury referrals of false statement referrals for lying to Congress, and I can’t remember one where a case was actually made.

MR. RAJU: Very hard, right.

MS. JOHNSON: Moreover, Comey was brilliant in terms of bringing up the case of General David Petraeus, the former CIA director, and pointing out that Petraeus had – who was a favorite of Republicans – had engaged in much worse behavior, in the FBI’s view, than Hillary Clinton.

MS. IFILL: But, Beth, if you’re Hillary Clinton’s campaign this week, and all the things we’ve just said sound perfectly horrible, they’re still not so unhappy.

MS. REINHARD: A very big sigh of relief that there will not be criminal charges, that the investigation is closed. That gives them something to say: this matter has been resolved. She has her talking points down pat. She acknowledges it was a mistake and that she wouldn’t do it again. But she did in an interview – at least one or two interviews today – push back a little but at – because the FBI director did use such pretty strong language to describe her –

MS. IFILL: She told Judy Woodruff, among others, that this reckless idea, this idea that her staff had been careless, was not true.

MS. REINHARD: Right, she pushed back. And you know, Hillary Clinton has a history of not being able to admit mistakes very fluidly, as many politicians do – it’s not just her. And so I’m not sure that people are satisfied with her response.

MS. IFILL: Karen, you, like I, have covered the Clintons for years. And in the end, if she came out smelling marginally better – not like a rose – this week, it’s the distinction between intention and mishandling. And sometimes it’s always that definitional stuff when it comes to Bill or Hillary Clinton.

MS. TUMULTY: Yes, we can go – we can go right back to the meaning of “is” here. But the fact is that Comey has given the Republicans a lot to use against her this fall, that her single biggest political problem right now is that a majority of Americans consistently in the polls say they don’t trust her. And you know, this is a – this is sort of a pattern throughout her career. It goes all the way back to refusing to turn over the Whitewater documents, you know, a scandal that turned out to be I think arguably not about much. But because she refused to do that – because she wouldn’t be transparent – she triggered an independent counsel, which snowballed into ultimately an impeachment inquiry.

MS. IFILL: And in the end it all comes down to paper, or digital paper, and you can get completely covered in and just say let’s move on, which is what Bernie Sanders did when he said he didn’t care about the “damn emails,” something I’m sure he’s regretted many times.

OK, now we move finally to Donald Trump, who veered from defending a widely derided star of David post on his Twitter feed this week to issuing a measured and unifying statement today on the police shootings. In between, he attempted to make peace with his party. What are we seeing here, Manu? Did he pull that off?

MR. RAJU: Mixed reviews. You know, this was the first time that he came to Capitol Hill to meet with House and Senate Republicans as a full conference since becoming the presumptive nominee. He spent the first part of the day talking to House Republicans. It went generally well, based on talking to the House Republicans who were there. You know, he – not everyone was totally thrilled about the things that he said. He misstated the number of articles in the Constitution, for instance, and –

MS. IFILL: Small, small detail.

MR. RAJU: That’s a small detail. You know, he received some applause for his remarks. But then when he went over to the Senate Republican side, it was still overall a relatively collegial affair, but he got into an argument with Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican, who is not endorsing Donald Trump, and he criticized him – Flake did – over Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants. And Trump responded and said I will try to defeat you in your election this year.

MS. IFILL: Except –

MR. RAJU: Except Jeff Flake is not up for reelection this year. And he also criticized – Trump criticized Mark Kirk of Illinois, a Republican senator who is not endorsing Donald Trump. And that didn’t go over very well the room.

MS. IFILL: No, I bet not. Beth, for the biggest part of – the first part of the week, so much conversation about this tweet that he sent out involving a five – one, two, three –

MS. REINHARD: Six.

MS. IFILL: Six-pointed star – (laughs) – had to count it up myself – which was widely considered to be anti-Semitic, lifted from a right-wing site, and which he – first they yanked it out, then they said it’s not what it meant, and then he said I’d put it up again. What was that?

MS. REINHARD: Right, so this was a six-pointed star against a backdrop of cash and the words corrupt, and also of course a picture of Hillary Clinton. But you know, it was the six-pointed star and the cash and the words corrupt that sends up red flags for – in the Jewish community. And you’re right, if there was nothing wrong with it, why did it come down and was the star replaced with a circle? And then he just – he dug in even more than ever, saying we should have left it up. In fact, he made it clear that he had not told anyone to take it down, that –

MS. IFILL: Here’s the weirdest thing about it. It’s not just that he kept a story alive that he could have served to die earlier in the week, but then in the course of two nights of speeches he went everywhere. I mean, what Republicans want is for him just to attack Hillary – she had a bad week, stay on that – and he wouldn’t do that.

MS. REINHARD: Well, that is the big frustration with Donald Trump. This week, you know, silver platter of bad news for Hillary Clinton and good news for him on the fundraising front in that he raised a good chunk of money – not as much as Hillary Clinton, but a lot more than he had before. But by always coming back – by coming back to the tweet and also his favorable comments about Saddam Hussein, widely reviled Iraqi dictator, he dug in on that too.

MS. IFILL: And criticizing anyone who’s ever criticized him, including people we know. I mean, like Chuck Todd gets a long speech about how he didn’t like his eyes or something.

MS. TUMULTY: Well, he – in fact, he later found an ad or a Disney poster from the movie Frozen with a six-pointed star on it, and he said, see, so Disney must be anti-Semitic. I think the lesson that a lot of Republicans would like to see him get out of the movie Frozen is the song Let It Go . (Laughter.)

MS. IFILL: Oh no, you’ve got it in my head now, that song! (Laughter.) Actually, he could use it in his head.

MS. TUMULTY: (Laughs.) Right.

MS. IFILL: But I sometimes wonder, as we look and we laugh and we say, oh, I can’t believe he did that, whether there is a strategy, there’s a method to his madness. He’s still only five points behind in the biggest national polls.

MR. RAJU: And this is why a number of Republicans simply are scared of endorsing him, scared of being too close to him, because you don’t know what he’s going to say on any given day, and then you’ll have to defend his comments, distance yourself from him, clean them up. Some of them say, you know what, I just want nothing to do with that.

MS. IFILL: Quickly.

MS. TUMULTY: But the thing you hear from his supporters is that – they like about him, that he won’t let himself get pushed around.

MS. IFILL: OK. Well, we’re going to see if he – he’s certainly not going have it at his convention, and we’re going to be watching that very closely. Who knows what’s going to happen at the convention? Thank you, everybody.

Next, we’re off to Cleveland for a special Washington Week roadshow. Join us and our audience for a roundtable and an extra half-hour Q&A from the Hanna Theatre in PlayhouseSquare. That’s a full hour of Washington Week , what you’ve been begging for, on most stations, kicking off our joint PBS/NPR coverage of the Republican and Democratic nominating conventions. Join us for the ride.

In the meantime, stay with the NewsHour every night, and stick around for the Washington Week Webcast Extra at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek tonight and all weekend long. And we’ll see you next week on Washington Week . Good night.