The Daily Signal - Andy McCarthy on the Real Collusion, and the Lessons of the Mueller Investigation

Episode Date: October 22, 2019

Was there ever a valid reason for the Mueller investigation? What are the lessons for the country about this two-year process and how it unfolded? And what about this new impeachment push? We speak about all this with Andrew McCarthy, author of the new book, “Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency." We also cover the following stories: President Trump is dismissive of impeachment push. House Republicans fail in an attempt to get the House to censure Rep. Adam Schiff. A transgender athlete is defiant after winning in a women's competition. The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes, Pippa, Google Play, or Stitcher. All of our podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts. If you like what you hear, please leave a review. You can also leave us a message at 202-608-6205 or write us at [e-mail]. Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Tuesday, October 21st. We're coming from the annual President's Club meeting where supporters of the Heritage Foundation gather in Washington, D.C. I'm Kate Trinco. And I'm Daniel Davis. Well, it feels like old news now, but before the Ukraine story hit, Democrats were intently focused on collusion allegations, the notion that President Trump colluded with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Well, we now have the Mueller report, which put to rest many of those claims, And today we get to speak with Andrew McCarthy, an attorney who's written extensively about this for National Review, and is out with a new book called Ball of Collusion.

We'll also ask him about the unfolding Ukraine controversy. And if you're enjoying this podcast, please be sure to leave a review or a five-star rating on iTunes and please encourage others to subscribe. Now on to our top news. Speaking Monday, President Trump was dismissive of the impeachment push. Here's what he had to say. I think they want to impeach me because it's the only way they're going to win. They've got nothing. All they have is a phone call that was perfect.

All they have is a whistleblower who's disappeared. Where is he? He's gone. Then they have a second whistleblower. The second whistleblower's got, oh, it's going to. Where is it? He disappeared. Then they have an informant.

Oh, the informant is. Where is he? House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn't letting impeachment go forward yet, but it looks like she's posturing for it. On Monday, she released a short. document accusing President Trump of conducting a shakedown with Ukraine and then engaging in a cover-up. The document, which is titled Truth Exposed, says that President Trump has betrayed his oath of office, betrayed our national security, and betrayed the integrity of our elections for his own personal political gain.

The document goes on to quote from President Trump's July phone call with the Ukrainian president and highlights key phrases like, I would like you to do us a favor, and we do a lot for Ukraine. I wouldn't say that it's reciprocal. The document then says Vice President Mike Pence is implicated because he met with Ukrainian president and said military aid was being withheld due to concerns over corruption in Ukraine. The document says that withholding of aid

may actually have been part of a quid pro quo in which Ukraine was expected to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden. The document also notes that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo listened in to President Trump's phone call And so the document says he's implicated too. Interestingly, the document then quotes a text message sent from U.S. ambassador Bill Taylor to two other ambassadors. That text message said, I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help with a political campaign.

The House voted Monday on a resolution to censure Representative Adam Schiff, a key figure in the impeachment push. Representative Andy Biggs, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, led the way. President Trump tweeted, censure, at least, corrupt Adam Schiff. After what he got caught doing, any Paul who does not so vote, cannot be honest. Are you listening, Dems? The resolution language includes these statements. Chairman Schiff concealed his dealings with the whistleblower from the rest of the Intelligence Committee, and when asked directly in a television interview whether he had any contact with the whistleblower,

he lied to the American people and said, we have not spoken directly with the whistleblower. And instead of quoting directly from the available transcript, Chairman Schiff manufactured a false retelling of the conversation between President Trump and President Zelensky. The resolution did not get enough votes to pass in the Democrat-controlled House. Well, the Trump administration's acting budget director has refused to testify in the ongoing impeachment probe,

where us vote, the acting head of the Office of Management and Budget, tweeted out his announcement Monday, saying, I saw some fake news over the weekend to correct. As the White House letter made clear two weeks ago, OMB officials, myself and Mike Duffy, will not be complying with deposition requests this week. Hashtag sham process. Mike Duffy, who he mentioned,

had the task of freezing $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, money which eventually flowed in September. Just last week, vote also rejected a Democratic subpoena for details on the decision to withhold that aid money. Transgender athlete Rachel McKinnon, born male, is attracting controversy after winning gold in a women's sprint cycling event, the Masters Track World Cycling Event, this weekend in England. McKinnon wrote on Instagram Monday, there were many more barriers this year, a much bigger spotlight, truly incessant hate, and people doing everything in their power to have me banned, make me fail,

and make me quit. But I didn't. and I won't. McKinnon added, I will be back next year. I will be stronger and faster than ever. You can count on it. Up next, we'll speak to National Review columnist Andrew McCarthy about his new book on the collusion controversy. Do conversations about the Supreme Court leave you scratching your head? If you want to understand what's happening at the court, subscribe to SCOTUS 101, a Heritage Foundation podcast, breaking down the cases, personalities, and gossip at the Supreme Court. Well, I'm joined now by Andrew McCarthy.

He is a columnist for National Review and previously served as assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. Andy, thanks for joining on the podcast. My pleasure. So right now, the president is embroiled in this controversy over potential quid pro quo with Ukraine, and we've seen a lot of the media about that. But just not six months ago, it was a different story. It was about collusion between Trump and Russia. and you argue in a new book called Ball of Collusion that you've written, you argue that the real collusion crisis wasn't between Trump and Russia,

but between the Obama administration and democratic goals. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yeah, well, what I try to lay out in the book is that there was collusion in connection with the election, but it was the essential collusion was the Obama administration putting the intelligence and law enforcement apparatus of the government in the service of the Hillary Clinton campaign. And there was no small amount of collusion in that endeavor to take help in the way of information from foreign intelligence services also toward that end.

And it was obviously for the political purpose of trying to win the 2016 election and when that failed to hamstring Trump's presidency. But it was clearly doing what... Trump is actually being accused of doing now, which is basically taking your government power and exploiting it for political purposes. What would you say was the biggest piece of evidence pointing to that? Well, you know, there's a lot of evidence, probably the most interesting evidence, and what I hope Congress will cover closely when we finally get to the point of having public hearings about this is the day before the intelligence agencies briefed then-president-elect Trump

at Trump Tower about the Russian interference in the election based on an assessment that the intelligence community, mainly under the direction of John Brennan, who was then the CIA director, had done. the day before that. So the Trump meeting happens on January 6th. On January 5th, there's a meeting in the Oval Office between on the political side, President Obama, Vice President Biden, and Susan Rice, who was then the National Security Director or advisor.

And on the law enforcement slash intelligence side, Jim Comey, who was then the director of the FBI, and Sally Yates, who was then effectively the acting attorney general. And that meeting involved a discussion about what information should be withheld from the incoming Trump people in connection with Russia. And it's a very interesting meeting in that Susan Rice, actually papered it with what, you know, we often refer to as a CYA memo. Yes.

But interestingly, she was intent enough on doing it that she actually wrote the memo, not contemporaneously to the meeting, but 15 minutes after she was out of power, although she still had access to her White House email. So, in other words, on January 20th, she wrote her, quote-unquote, contemporaneous memo of this meeting that had happened on. on January 5th. And of course, by then we had had a tumultuous two weeks in which the briefing of Trump at Trump Towers

was followed hard on by first the leaking of the steel dossier and then the publication of the steel dossier and all hell breaking loose in that two-week period. So I think that's a very interesting chapter of it. But it shows President Obama in a hands-on way talking about holding information back from the Trump administration. Yeah, very interesting. You know, looking at the way the Democrats launched into the beginning of this Trump-Russia collusion, you know, allegation. Would you say that there were legitimate grounds for beginning that investigation?

You know, we don't know yet. What I've always tried to do with this is not to tell. take wild swings that we can't justify because it doesn't help anyone and it certainly doesn't help my credibility. So I've always tried to do, I've tried to look at this as I tried to look at things when I was a prosecutor. Now, you're at a disadvantage as a journalist on the outside because the prosecutor always knows things that nobody else does, right? So you're always making judgments a little bit in the blind because you don't have the information available to you that's available to them. But what I've always tried to do is stay within what we knew and therefore

draw inferences that were based on that rather than get too extravagant and too far out in front of what we know. To the point where I think it's a fair criticism that I've made mistakes along the way, mistakes were based on this conservative approach. And to be more concrete about that, probably two and a half years ago, when the Steele dossier first emerged, this set of faux intelligence reporting by this guy, Christopher Steele, who had been a British asset, a British intelligence officer, who was working, as it turned out for the Clinton campaign and the DNC through an outfit called GPS Fusion or Fusion GPS.

When the stories first emerged that he had cooperated with the FBI and given these reports to the FBI, people instantly theorized that the FBI had taken this information and run to the foreign intelligence surveillance court to get warrants based on it. And at the time I told them, I thought that was nuts.

because in my experience, what the FBI would have done with any information it got was pick out the five or six facts that it needed to make out probable cause that someone was an agent of a foreign power, and then do an FBI investigation on those facts so that by the time they got to the FISA court, you would never have had to hear Steele's name. You know, they would have documents and independent witnesses. In other words, by the time they got there, it would be an FBI investigation. And it turns out I was wrong about that. They did exactly the thing I said they wouldn't do. So, you know, you do the best you can on the basis of the finite amount of information you have and what you think you can logically deduce from it.

But, you know, it's a crapshoot when you don't know everything you should know. What do you think of how Robert Mueller handled this investigation? Yeah, I think it was appalling. I think, first of all, while his appointment was outside the regulations. I always want to say illegitimate, but that's a loaded word because the regulations actually have a provision at the end of them, the ones that pertain to special counsels that basically say there's nothing in these regulations that's actionable, meaning the Justice Department is saying, if we violate our own regulations, you can't do anything about it.

You can't take us to court. You can't enforce it. So it's not like the Justice Department can't appoint a lawyer from the outside. So anything that Mueller did is legitimate in the sense that it is a prosecutor acting with the authority of the Justice Department. So I wouldn't want to say it's illegitimate, but it's totally outside the regulations. The regulations say that you're only supposed to have a special counsel if you have a fact. actual basis to believe a crime has been committed. So in other words, there's a basis for a criminal investigation. And secondly, a conflict of interest that's so profound that the Justice Department

can't handle the case in the normal course. And what you judge the conflict on is whatever the factual basis for the criminal investigation is. Here, with respect to President Trump, they never had a factual basis for a criminal investigation in the nature of a cyber espionage conspiracy between Trump and Russia. So you never even would get to the question of whether there was a conflict that required the Justice Department to get out of the case. But you know there wasn't because when Mueller returned these indictments that he returned, what he did was he basically parceled them out to different components of, of the Justice Department, which you couldn't do if there was a conflict. And the other thing Mueller did was he recruited from the upper levels of the same Obama Justice Department that had been investigating Trump.

So if DOJ is conflicted, why are you grabbing staff lawyers from the conflicted DOJ? Well, and by the time he finally delivered his report and answered to Congress, I mean, I think there was this almost universal impression that he was not as, as, well-versed in the facts of his report as he should have been if he was really running the thing. So did that give you pause and make you really wonder if someone was, if he was more of a figurehead and that someone else was really running the operation? Yeah, that's admirably charitable on your phone. I congratulate you on that. I think from the beginning, I thought he was very staff-driven.

And by the way, his staff, you have to separate out. the politics of these actors from their skill level. They are grade A lawyers, very good, very good. Andrew Weissman's, you know, a really driven, clever, aggressive prosecutor. Michael Dreven is a very accomplished appellate advocate. They have people in this investigation who were, you know, alpha lawyers. and it was clear to me because I've followed the work of some of these people over the years and I knew some of them back when I was in the Justice Department to the tail end of my years there.

You know, you could recognize their work and you could recognize the way they went about things in their in their charging instruments. My big criticism of the charge of the, I had a number of criticisms, but the big one I had about the way that the investigation was conducted was there never was a cyber espionage conspiracy between Trump and Russia. There was never any evidence of it. And the reason that's relevant is they would bring these cases like a one-count false statement case in which they would write a 25-page narrative about collusion. It's almost collusion.

It feels like collusion. We're getting close to collusion. And then you'd flip to the last page, and it would be a, you know, a guy lied about the date of a meeting. Right. Right. Right. Right. So it seemed to me very transparently that what they were doing was feeding a political narrative rather than pushing forward with a criminal investigation.

That was the criminal investigation was not their top priority. It was the narrative. And they kept talking about, you know, statistically, all these people they had charged, you know, the dozens of Russians that had been charged and the number, I can't remember the exact number, but the Trump associates. And what they never wanted to cop to was none of the Russians had anything to do with the Trump campaign, and none of the Trump campaign people had anything to do with the Russians. So they ran their numbers up, and I remember saying at the time, when Mueller did his last dozen or so Russians,

saying that, you know, there's 144 million people, other people in Russia, who will never see the inside of an American courtroom. And if Mueller indicts every one of them, he won't be one inch closer to showing collusion. Yeah. So, of course, he never showed any collusion. Right. And there was, of course, so much hype in the media for over a year, really two years going into this final report. Right. The letdown, for so many folks who expected some bombshell, it was just not there. Yeah, well, it should be that way, though, if you think about it, you know, because in most instances, you do an investigation and then you charge people and the story is the charges that you bring.

Here, the narrative was about the investigation because they didn't have a crime, you know. So what lessons should we take from that? I mean, does this, is this, I feel like a lot of folks are concerned that the media just cried Wolf big times. time. And, you know, all those who were pushing for this investigation, cried Wolf, because they suggested this was going to lead to some smoking gun or some compelling case. What lessons should we take away from this? Well, I think the biggest lesson is that we don't want law enforcement and intelligence involved in our politics. You know, I said to you a few minutes ago that I was I was flatly wrong when I told people that the FBI, with respect to steal, that it would be crazy to think the FBI ran to the FISA court with an uncorroborated screed of faux intelligence reports.

And of course they did. And I've had, because I hate to be wrong, I've had to spend a lot of time on why I was wrong about that. And I think, you know, it goes back to we had this set of procedures in the mid-90s that was known as the wall, which prevented the intelligence side of the FBI's house from cooperating with the law enforcement side to pull together information about terrorist organizations. And there's a good argument that having that wall in place stopped us from at least detecting one strand of the 9-11 conspiracy, and if you had gotten one strand, who knows whether you could have folded up the whole plot.

So the rationale for the wall back in the 90s was that the FBI or the Clinton Justice Department was worried that rogue agents, if they didn't have the predicate for a criminal investigation, would fabricate a national security angle or a foreign counterintelligence angle so that they could spy on people until they finally got a crime. And then they would throw that over to the criminal side. And I said back at the time that could never, ever happen. And the reason I thought it couldn't happen was because if you assume a rogue agent, it would be much easier to lie and fabricate the basis for a criminal investigation

and just go the ordinary criminal route, then go the national security route, because in the Justice Department that's got a whole bunch of layers of supervision that you have to get through. So here's what I didn't account for. What happens when the supervisors decide to take over the investigation? And that's what happened here. And so, you know, you're asking me about what do we take away from all this? Number one, headquarters for these agencies, whether it's the FBI or the Justice Department, they need to go back to being headquarters.

You know, it shouldn't be hands-on doing an investigation because they're just as susceptible as every other investigator to the urge to cut corners and push envelopes. and buck the rules. And that's why you need supervisors here to say, we don't do that kind of stuff. And the second thing is, you know, we worry about the Russians, we worry about the Chinese, we worry about all these foreign elements.

The biggest threat, and the framers knew this, the biggest threat to our elections comes from within, not from without. And if our government exploits its law enforcement and intelligence authorities in a way that undermines our political process, that's much more threatening to us than the Russians are. The Russians come as the Russians.

Right, right, right. And they're not very good at this stuff, although they've been doing it forever. But our own government, putting its thumb on the scale of an election, is something to be much more worried about than the Russians. Well, President Trump is now facing the potential for impeachment based on his interactions with the Ukrainian president and allegations that he engaged in a quid pro quo with them.

and we've been seeing more of the transcript evidence coming out, and just the other day, you know, White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney made some comments about that seemed to admit that there was a quid pro quo, and then he went back on that, a lot of controversy there. Do you think that so far the evidence suggests that there was a quid pro quo that was withholding military aid for an expressly political partisan purpose? Yeah, quid pro quo is one of these terms that really is in hell. to our public debate. There's a lot of terms out there that have a literal meaning and a specialized legal meaning. And what you always have to watch is people flipping from one to the other without telling you they're doing that. And, you know, they can make things sound more sinister

than they are. Quid pro quo literally just means this for that. And all foreign exchange is quid pro quo. Every single foreign. Countries don't... Any deal is going to be something for something. In normal contract law, they'll teach you the first week of law school that if there's not consideration on both sides, there's no deal. Right. That's just the way it works. Now, the thing with quid pro quo and the reason that it sounds sinister and therefore the people who are accusing Trump want to use that term and put it out there whatever they can is it's not a common English term. It's an antiquated Latin term that we hear any more only. in corruption cases.

Right. And in those cases are distinct because the quid pro quo is corrupt. Right. But that doesn't mean it's always corrupt. Right. So you have to watch out with quid pro quo. You also have to realize when you're dealing with foreign relations, it's very different from domestic law and domestic law enforcement.

So, you know, when we're talking, I hear the Democrats speak a lot about Trump committing extortion. that was the flavor of the week, I think about a week ago, that he had extorted. He committed the crime of extortion with Zelensky. And now Pelosi was saying it was a shakedown. It was like the same kind of thing. And the thing is, extortion has a meaning in the criminal law when we're all in domestic law enforcement. We're all under the same sovereign and under the same law. In foreign relations, we want the president to be able to put pressure on other countries.

Our whole, for example, the maximum pressure campaign on Iran, is designed to squeeze them to make them come to the negotiating table and give us concessions. We want to be able to extort other countries in foreign relations. Now, that doesn't mean that you want to do it corruptly. The issue at the bottom of all this is always, is the objective corrupt? And in this narrow context, what it means is, is the objective in the service of the interest of the United States, or is it in the service of Donald Trump's political interest?

Now, that sounds like it should be a bright line. It's not. It turns out that, you know, presidents try to get reelected. Right. And when they do, what you find is that there's a melding between the American interest, what the American interest is and what the president's political interest is. Right. He might make the same case when, you know, Barack Obama decided to take out Osama bin Laden, right?

That was a decision that he made in foreign affairs that obviously was in the good of the country. Right. But hey, you know, it turns out that the president benefited from that. Yes, and the most important thing is, is it in the interest of the United States? If it is, then everything else is subsidiary. So if the president, if he got information or demanded, asked for information from the Ukrainians that helped him politically his campaign, So say it was dirt on Joe Biden. But so you're saying that if that served a legitimate national security function, then it's clean? Well, the way I look at this particular conversation, it seems to me that Trump asked for three things.

And you have to parse it out because each one of them may be different. So long before Biden even gets mentioned in the conversation, hundreds of words before we get to Biden, What Trump seems to ask is for assistance in the Barr-Durham investigation, that is the investigation that Attorney General Barr is doing into the origins of the 2016 election to see if there were abuses of power. Now, the Democrats don't like that investigation, and they would like it to be publicly seen as kind of an adjunct of the Trump 2020 campaign. But the fact of the matter is it's a legitimate Justice Department investigation. You know, I didn't like the Mueller investigation, but it was a legitimate Justice Department investigation. There is nothing wrong with the president asking a foreign counterpart for assistance in a Justice Department investigation. It happens all the time.

Now, normally, to be fair, the Justice Department asks for the help. Here, it doesn't look like the Justice Department. You know, Trump brought this up. It doesn't look like he talked to Barr about it beforehand. But that part of it is clearly. Legit. Then there's Trump asks him to investigate Biden and the firing of the prosecutor. Now, it seems to me that part of the origins investigation involves what was going on in Ukraine in 2016.

And specifically, what pressure did the Obama administration put on the Ukraine? authorities to investigate Manafort. And there's been a lot written about that. And that all went on between 2014 and 2016. It seems to have gotten revived in 2016. If that turns out to be a legitimate part or a relevant part of the 2016, of the origins investigation, this investigation that Barr and Durham are doing, it would obviously be relevant that the Obama administration and Biden specifically had so much influence.

over the Ukrainians could get them to do things that they could get a prosecutor fire. So it seems to me that would be relevant and legitimate to look into. The last thing is Hunter Biden. To my knowledge, there was no Justice Department investigation open on Hunter Biden. Now, what it seems he was doing in connection with Ukraine and China and who knows where else is cashing in on his dad's political. influence. That is icky, but it may not be criminal. And it sounds like Trump was asking them to look into something that wasn't under investigation in the United States and that the purpose

of that would be for his campaign. Now, they come back and say, no, no, this was about corruption. Right. Now, it would be legitimate for the president to inquire into corruption. On the other hand, if I'm the Democrats, what I'd be asking is, well, where else in the world did President Trump come down on corruption? Because it seems to me that when he gave his UN speech, his approach to the world is we should basically butt out unless there's some critical American interest at stake. So he's partly been the scourge of corruption. I don't think Kim Jong-un thinks he's the scourge of corruption, right? But on the other hand, you know, you can play this game all day. Right. The other, the thing the report,

Republicans might be asking is, you know, Biden says, we were committed to anti-corruption, and that's why I got the prosecutor fired had nothing to do with my son. So my question as an old prosecutor about that would be, there's a lot of prosecutors. You know, when I was a prosecutor, there's tons of prosecutors. Yeah. There's lots of prosecutors in countries where we're trying to help them with corruption. Can Biden name us one other prosecutor that he tried to get fired? Was it only the guy who happened to be investigating his son?

or is there a whole list of prosecutors and other officials that he tried to get fired over corruption? So, you know, I don't think either side is going to come out looking particularly great on this. It's very unfortunate to me that we're discussing it with the overlay of impeachment, because that makes it much more inflamed than it needs to be. But, you know, I think that you should be able to step back and say, nobody did perfect here. Yeah. Something tells me that's not going to be what they're. Either side comes to agree.

But my last question for you here, you know, first we had collusion with Russia. That turned out to be, you know, there was no collusion. Now we have potential impeachment over Ukraine. Do you see similarities between these two? Are they connected in any way? Or do you think Congress is doing its due diligence? Oh, no. Look, I think it's all political.

Well, impeachment is political by nature, so anytime it reared its head, even if it did so legitimately, it would be political. But, you know, before Trump, this is the most unusual impeachment in American history, not that we've had many, but every other impeachment inquiry that I know of arises out of some known episode of misconduct. Here, what you have is a president that the Democrats, their base, and a number of, you know, people who are anti-Trump people who are not leftists, but they're anti-Trump. They decided that Trump was not fit to be president before he ever stepped into office, and they have simply been waiting for the facts to catch up with their predisposition in the in the instantiation of something they could say is grievous enough that it's a high crime and misdemeanor.

So this has been basically a three-year conclusion about fitness that has been chasing around after some impeachable act. And, you know, for a long time, they waited for Mueller, and they hoped that Mueller was going to come through for them, and that kind of fell through. So this time, I think they're trying to go faster and get it done because the smarter Democrats know that this could blow up on them politically, but the base really wants it. So I think on this one,

Speaker Pelosi thinks they can do a fast and nasty impeachment. You know, they can do it by Thanksgiving, throw it all together, do most of it behind closed doors, get a couple of articles of impeachment out, make that the one and only time they vote, and then they can go back to their base and say, see, we impeach them. Right, right. But, you know, somebody smarter than me told me a year ago,

and I doubted this, but it's proven to be prophetic, that the thing about impeachment is no one's in charge of it. And the problem with that is that once the wheels start to turn and the machinery gets rolling, it's very hard to stop it. There's no one really who can jump in and stop it. And we're in this election cycle, where all of their candidates have been pulled to the impeachment position, by the base and they're the most high-profile people in the party right now because of the 2020

race so everybody who's got a platform is pulling for impeachment and it puts a lot of pressure on other Democrats who know better to say oh okay we have to impeach him because that's that's what the base wants but i i think in in the great middle america out there i don't even people who don't like trump don't want to put the country through the trauma of an impeachment and if we're we're only 12 months out. I mean, this is the first I've ever heard. We had an impeachment where they started the impeachment and then they went on vacation for two weeks, right? It's such a national crisis.

Yeah. So if we're only 12 months out, what's the good argument for it's so important to remove him that we have to take the decision away from the sovereign and let the political class make it? That doesn't make any sense to me. Well, we'll see how it pans out in the months ahead. You can follow Andrew McCarthy's commentary on this at National Review. view and his new book is called Ball of Collusion, the plot to rig an election and destroy at presidency. Andrew McCarthy, appreciate your time today. Thanks so much for having me. And that'll do

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