The Ricochet Podcast - Dramatic Docs

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

You saw the pictures! The walls are finally closing in; or maybe it’s the floor that’ll finally move in on Trump! Or maybe everyone should cool their jets, as our guest Bill Barr might recommend. The former Attorney General joins us again to discuss what we know (and don’t know) about the latest legal troubles for the former president. Without getting ahead of the facts, Barr thinks through the... Source

How do you know it's a full day work? Full day's work. You don't, you know, we don't know what he does. I have a dream. This nation will rise up. Live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident. That all men are created equal.

And for those brave right-wing Americans, if you want to fight against a country, you need an F-15. You need something a little more than a gun. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long.

I'm James Lilex. Today we have John O'Sullivan on Gorby and Bill Barr on Trump. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you! Welcome everybody. It's the Ricochet Podcast number 608. You can join us at Ricochet.com and be part of the most stimulating conversations and community on the web. And you wonder why you weren't there when we started talking about it in an episode one, but it's never too late. Join Ricochet and you'll see exactly what we mean.

I'm James Lonlakes in Minneapolis. It's September. Ah, September. Peter Robinson is in California, where September, I assume, means absolutely nothing because the weather never varies. And Rob is in New York, where September probably means galas and fall balls and all the rest of it. We'll get to that in just a second. Instead of our usual codswallop and blather sky that we begin these things with, we're going to go straight to our guest because it's late where he is. It's either Buda and or Pesh, I'm not sure. John O'Sullivan, president of the Danube Institute in Budapest, the senior policy writer and speech writer for Margaret Thatcher from 1987 to 1988. With the passing of the USSR's last leader, we thought you could help Peter recall the man and the latter parts of that regime.

John, thank you for joining us today. Thank you. John, may I hit you? May I hit you begin? Let's begin with a quotation from your former boss and our our joint heroine, Margaret Thatcher. I like Mr. Gorbachev. We can do business together. Remind us of the year and the context and tell us She'd been re-elected in 83. The Brits had been trying to make use of their diplomatic contacts and ministerial visits to Moscow to work out who was going to succeed. Andropov, and finally, Cheneyenko, all of whom died in relatively quick succession. And they had decided that one of the most likely successors, but also one of the most favorable from the standpoint of Western policy, was Mikhail Gorbachev. And so she asked him if he wouldn't mind, I think he was going to the United States or somewhere else. Canada, as I recall.

Well, perhaps Canada, yeah. Would he stop off in London on the way and have a meeting with her? And that meeting was the occasion in which they had their first conversation. And I think even the first conversation was kind of amiably combative. You know, they went at each other hammer and tongs on ideological questions. And that seems generally to have happened. And they liked that. Mrs Thatcher liked people who argued with her. She liked the opposite of yes-men. You could actually be quite an effective yes-man by arguing with her if you had

understood her mentality. But what she did was put him through the normal Thatcherite cross-examination. Now, quite a lot of people didn't survive that. On one occasion, some senior scientific advisor was carried out, wounded. And she turned to, I think, Charles Pearl and said, why do people take everything I say so seriously? But Gorbachev, you know, gave as good as he got. And she liked that.

And it was after that that she said, I like Mr. Gorbachev. I think we can do business together. And interestingly, I think, Peter, were you there at the time? But at the first summit, the Gorbachev-Reagan summit in Geneva, I think Reagan is leaving to go to the Soviet embassy for dinner. And he stops by, I think, Pat Buchanan and Peggy Noonan, who are writing the drafts, and he reads it and he says, you know, I would like to go easier on him than this. He didn't say, I think he's a man we can do business with.

He more or less said that. I think this is a guy we can work with. And I think that was, first of all, he saw for himself what she had seen. And I think that explains the relationship between all three of them. And secondly, the way in which both of them continue to say fundamentally friendly things about him right to the end of their lives. John, the big question here, if you looked at the Wall Street Journal yesterday, you saw a long article by William Taubman, an American academic who's written a biography of Gorbachev. And Taubman presents what has become the canonical liberal view, which is that Gorbachev did it all on his own. If John Paul II had never visited Poland, if Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher had never been born, Gorbachev would still have wrapped up, attempted to reform communism and wrapped it all up just as he did. And then if you looked at the rando, the editorial,

which I'm sure was written or at least overseen by our friend Paul Gigot, it presented the other point of view, which is containment worked. Gorbachev turned to reform once Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan proved to him that the old game was over, that he could not defeat the West in any kind of arms race, they backed him into a corner, and at that point, he became a reformer. Who's right? Well, obviously, I haven't read Mr. Taubman's piece, and I don't really think I need to, because I've heard that case put many times in the past, particularly during the period in which the West was swept with Gorby mania. My own view is that there is, of course, a strong case for Gorbachev.

And I'm happy to make the parts of it, I think, accurate. But the fact is that he was the necessary excuse for the liberal left and for the academic Sovietologists too, the excuse they needed to glide over their errors and failures, failed predictions of the previous 20 or 30 years. If you look at a great deal of the Sovietology, of the higher journalism in the West, they are constantly treating the Soviet Union as a power as important as the United States, which we now know was nonsense. When Reagan makes his speech in Westminster, they are completely puzzled. I mean, we're not at war with the Soviet Union. Why is Reagan saying these things, which strike them as unbelievably bellicose and insulting? Well, he was telling the truth. And, of course, the people who heard it in the Politburo knew he was telling the truth.

It was Western liberalism in those years which simply failed to face up to the reality of that period. And so, yes, I would be on Paul G. Goh's side in that particular battle. But I think we have to say this. I do take to be, I put it in my book, actually, that Gorbachev is a response to Reagan and Thatcher. He's a response, a sense to containment, but containment lasted under different permutations, really, from 1946, 1947 onwards.

So you have to say it didn't happen under Kennedy. It didn't happen under Johnson. It didn't happen under Nixon. Although Nixon and Kissinger, in my view, took a giant step towards bringing it about by detaching China from Soviet Russia and bringing it into a kind of Western friendly neutrality almost. So that was important. But now Reagan and Thatcher had in effect competed the Soviet Union to its early grave. And that's something that was recognized by, in a sense, the more realistic and sensible people in the Politburo. I mean, when I was trying to write my book, I came across all kinds of interesting internal discussions and

letters and diaries, most of which are now very easily available, of senior Politburo officials, people around Andropov and Gorbachev and so on. And they are all pessimistic. And they're looking at Poland and they think this is going to be what happens to the Soviet Union in 10 years. And almost exactly 10 years later, the Polish collapse is echoed by the Soviet collapse, in the Soviet collapse. So, yes, this was the excuse of Western liberalism for overestimating the importance of the Soviet Union and for underestimating the contributions of Reagan and Thatcher. John, here's my final question. Well, of course, you and I could talk about this

for a couple of hours, but my final question right now is this, and I'm giving you my thought and simply asking my old friend John O'Sullivan whether he agrees, I suppose. By the way, you said very diffidently as I was trying to write my book, you did write your book. It is called The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister, and it is magnificent and delightful as well. Just a wonderful read. The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister by John O'Sullivan. Here's the question. Even we conservatives, even old cold warriors such as John O'Sullivan and Peter Robinson, have to give this much to Mikhail Gorbachev. In 1956, in the city in which you sit right now in Budapest, the Red Army rolled in and

killed hundreds of people suppressing the Hungarian Revolution. In 1968, the Soviets rolled the tanks through the streets of Prague to put down Alexander Dubček and the Prague Spring. And in 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev kept the Red Army in its barracks and permitted one communist regime after another to fall and to fall peacefully. Now, we have to give him that much, don't we? We have to give him that much, and it's a considerable amount. Let me make just a couple of points. You know, it was under Andropov, really, that the Soviets lost the Cold War. Because when the missiles were installed in Western Europe by the United States, which the Soviets and the peace movement had done

the very best to prevent happening, that was the end of the military conflict of the Cold War. What Gorbachev did was he came in, he saw two things realistically. One, we've lost that. We now have to try to get the best kind of negotiated peace we can. Even then, he couldn't really do that. And when he came to Washington and New York after Reykjavik, he essentially surrendered all the points of Soviet resistance of the Cold War. And that was one thing he did. The other big thing he did, of course, was to try to resolve peacefully the terrible disaster that the Soviet Union had become. And he was over-optimistic. He got it wrong. The Pope, I think, John Paul II

said it best. He said, Mr. Gorbachev is a good man, but communism is unreformable. And when you try to reform it, it collapses. He accepted the consequences of that rather than kill a lot of people. Now, he did, by the way, and this is where you get a different reaction in this part of the world to him. He did, of course, kill people in Lithuania, or rather the Soviet forces did, and in Baku. And he also put troops into the streets in Moscow when there was a huge demonstration. And his attitude to the coup, well, it failed, and he lost power. So we'll never really know. But I don't think that matters in the historical context. What we do know is that he didn't send people in the thousands, he didn't send the army

to murder people in their thousands and hundreds of thousands. And he did try to reach, and he made significant sacrifices to reach an accommodation with the West. And in his later years, it seemed to me, I don't think he became a Christian, as some have suggested. I think what he became was a man who genuinely thought that peace was much better than any alternative, and he was willing to try to preserve it. I think he became a good man, really. John, we're going to have you, and a great Pizza Hut spokesman, too. John, at the time, a lot of us were wondering how a system, a totalitarian system, could elevate a man who would preside over its destruction. How a system that would produce such a turnip like Chernenko would then turn around and give us somebody who was voluble and a little bit more Western-facing like Gorbachev.

When you mentioned before that he was chosen because they thought that he would be a good face for the West, you know, they tried that with Andropov where they said that he likes jazz and he likes, you know, Glenn Miller and whiskey. So, you know, he's really okay that didn't work was it because they thought that he would be good at at uh cost and convincing us or that uh they didn't really know that he believed what he believed in the end in other words did they think he was just going to be a good pr agent and act the same as all the other Soviet leaders. That would seem to be what they would think. No, I don't think they thought that. In fact, when he was proposed for the senior position by Gromyko, who had been the stone face of Soviet politics, Gromyko said he has a nice smile, but he has sharp teeth.

I think that was the genuine view. He, after all, had fought his way to the top of the Soviet Union as a young man. That wasn't easy, I'm pretty sure. Everybody had sharp elbows, if not sharp teeth, he was competing with. So he got there, and their view of him was he was competent. He might turn the system around. Remember the later stages of Brezhnevism. People were coming to Brezhnev and giving him one depressing story after another.

And the old man said, surely it can't be as bad as this. But they'd come to realize it was as bad as that. And so when they did, they turned to someone who they thought might do something about it. He tried. I mean, the first things he did. And remember, if you read the reports, the commentaries, rather, by Vladimir Bukovsky in 84, 5, 6, and 7, Bukovsky is saying that the Western reaction to Andropov and Gorbachev later irritates him because he said, I don't want to turn on my vacuum cleaner in case it starts babbling about the virtues of the new Soviet leader. You just kind of had sense that the Western opinion was desperately keen for the Soviets to produce a titanic figure. Well, he wasn't a titanic figure, and they tried to turn

him into one. But the fact was, his attempt failed. When he then had to deal with the failure of his reforms, he dealt with them not in an effective way always, but in a civilized way, and broadly speaking um and then finally um he actually in his diplomacy with the west he accepted reality which was something that is very praiseworthy even if it's it should be more common well he may be a titanic figure in the nautical sense and that he met the the iceberg of ronald reagan in the dark of the, but we're happy the way it turned out. John, we can talk to you for about 19 more hours about this, but we have to go and you have to sleep.

So regards and thank you so much. We hope to have you on as soon as possible. James. Thank you, Rob, Peter. Good to talk to you. Give our very best,

give our best to Mrs. O'Sullivan, please. She's just come in. Yes. Okay. Thanks again. Take care, John you bye you know talking about presidents of yore and missing ronald reagan as we all do for a variety of reasons you just wonder though if ronald reagan had been uh coming along at a later age post-soviet union what he would have been like what would have animated and motivated

him and you wonder also whether or not he would have slept on those sheets that the other presidents love so well. You know, people like Peter with their recollections of Ronald Reagan, those anecdotes get better over time, just like Bowling Branch sheets, right? Now, anything you can think of that gets better over time as you use it? Well, you know, maybe a great leather jacket or a cast iron skillet you take care of, solid wood furniture. But would you can think of that gets better over time as you use it? Well, you know, maybe a great leather jacket or a cast iron skillet you take care of, solid wood furniture. But would you ever think that sheets could be on the list of things that improve over time? No, because they wear out, they snag, they get ugly, you know, like a bowl and branch. No, no, no.

Bowl and branch sheets are a whole different level. They're not just buttery, breathable, and possibly comfortable. No, they get softer with every wash. But you say, hmm, what's the thread count? Forget thread count. Boulder Branch gives you thread quality. Doesn't matter how many threads your sheets have if they aren't the best threads possible, right? So I know this, and I can say this, that my sheets are better this week than they were last, and the week before, and the week before. Now, we're not talking some great big change, like, wow, these sheets were like butter before. Now it's like that Irish butter that costs a lot at the store.

No, but incrementally over time, they've just gotten better and better and better, and I trust them to do so every week. I've got the signature Hamda sheets. They're from Bowling Branch, and they're a bestseller for a reason. You will immediately feel the difference. From there, the sheets get softer and softer with every wash. They're made with threads so luxurious they're beloved by, yes, three U.S. presidents. And if the presidents can't convince you, well, check out their more than

10,000 stellar reviews. Plus, Bolan Branch gives you a 30-night risk-free trial with free shipping and returns on all your orders. Get 15% off your first set of sheets when you use promo code ricochet at a BowlingBranch.com. That's BowlingBranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com, promo code ricochet. And we thank Bowling Branch for sponsoring this Ricochet podcast. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Bill Barr. Yes, William Barr served as the 77th and 85th United States Attorney General in the administrations of President George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump. Today, he is a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute. And you can read all about those easy years in Washington in the lovingly titled memoir,

One Damn Thing After Another. He's back with us again after the publication of the book to talk about his successor and the raid at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Barr, thank you so much. Look, we all saw the photograph. We all saw documents strewn on the floor. Guilty. Frogmarked to prison just from that picture, right? No, but I do think the government's filing does raise troublesome questions for uh for the president for president trump i look i've said all along

that i think people are out in front of their skis a lot of the people have been commenting on this either about the reasonableness of the search under the circumstances or whether there's a potential crime here or whether if there is technically a crime, whether it would be prudent to actually pursue the president. And there are two central facts that we have to know much more about in order to sensibly address any of those questions. One is what were the documents that the government was concerned were there and how sensitive were they and how sensitive were they in fact and second uh the second question is um whether there was active deceit by the people at mar-a-lago and how raw if any uh if there was any deceit how raw was it was their misleading of the government was their obstruction and i think the government knows the answers to both those questions and everyone out

there, all these commentators are talking about it, but we really have to know about that before we can judge any of those issues. And I think that the government's filing makes the government's action look more reasonable. And if in in fact, there's highly sensitive information, diverse information there that was sort of strewn around these boxes without rhyme or reason, and if, in fact, the government was affirmatively misled and they can tie the president to that, then, you know, it's serious business. And I think it would be a hard decision for the department as to whether to proceed with it. So, Attorney General Barr, I'm going to call you that once, and after that, I'm going to find it hard not to call you Bill.

Call me Bill. All right. So, you've just, you mentioned three hurdles. One is whether the search was reasonable. Second is the likelihood of a crime. And the third is the wisdom of indicting and prosecuting. So in your judgment, the first hurdle is done. Based on what you've seen, the government had reasonable grounds, probable cause, the magistrate was correct in permitting them to go ahead and search. He was correct in issuing the warrant.

All that, none of that at this point raises eyebrows for you. No, no. I think the issue of the search, when I say reasonable, I don't mean legally reasonable. Obviously, it passed legal muster. They had probable cause. I persuaded the judge they had probable cause. It was a lawful search, as far as I can tell. The question is, under the circumstances of being a former president and involving questions of classification and all the sub-issues that could arise there, was it prudent for them to do a search right off the bat? Now, the initial commentary right out of the box was, oh, they should have served a subpoena. Well, it turns out they did subpoena, and the subpoena appears to have been flattered. And so that cast the government's action in somewhat different light. And I think, you know, as I look at what the government said, there were longstanding efforts to try to jawbone Mar-a-Lago to give these classified documents back. And they were, you know, the President Trump apparently played games.

How much he was directly involved in that remains to be seen. But there was a lot of gamesmanship going on and jerking the government around. Imagine that. We'll come to that in a moment. One more, before we get to the former president himself, Andy McCarthy was on this podcast just a couple of days after the search, and Andy's view at the time was that, although no doubt legally permissible, this search was a pretext. What they were looking for, what they were hoping to find was evidence related to January 6th. Does that strike you as plausible anymore or does it now look, now that we have this heavily redacted, but we still have bits of the affidavit that we can see through almost through as if looking at it through a construction site fence.

But does it seem to you that actually they were looking for documents? They were concerned with classified documents. I think, you know, that's always conceivable. But I think the more we know, know the less likely that is that they were fish that they were looking for something else or hope hoping to find something else maybe hoping to find someone else that and of course you know that goes to whether it was prudent to launch this search but when you actually look at the machinations that were involved in the fact they waited a year and when they got the documents, they looked

through and waited several more months, got more that indicated that there hadn't been a thorough search, and then got apparently significant inside information. The way I read the government's filing, I believe they have a number of sources inside Mar-a-Lago that have provided information. And if I were sitting on the sideline and wasn't aware of what that information was, I would hesitate to be too critical right now and get out on a limb because, you know, I think it was a hard decision to make to authorize this search. And my guess is it wasn't made unless they feel they have fairly strong evidence. Got it. It just sounds strange to hear the phrase, you know,

the government has sources inside the president's house. Not sources, meaning not planted agents in place, but when you have a grand jury, when you have a grand jury, which they had, okay, investigating this, and you subpoena someone or ask someone to come in and talk to you about a potential crime, most people would go in and tell the truth. Now, what's tragic about all of this, of course, is that it's all a gratuitous episode that will cause great damage to the Republican Party in the midterm elections and benefits Biden because it diverts attention from all his failures, and it's a self-inflicted wound. So, sorry, one more, if I may, before James and Rob come in. This is, we're back to the question. It's in your book again and again and again,

one damn thing after another, your bestseller. It was in the conversation you and I had on Uncommon Knowledge. What is Donald Trump thinking? What motive could he have had for scooping up classified documents, taking them to Mar-a-Lago, however it's pronounced, and then playing games with the government when they asked for apparently straightforward information about just what he had taken, what he intended to do with it, and where it was all stored. Why would you, what motive can you construct that makes sense of this behavior? Well, as I said, I am withholding final judgment on this stuff until I have more facts, but I have been concerned since the inception of this that this was another example of sort of a harebrained activity by a willful president who doesn't have people around republicans are forced to sort of or feel compelled to go forward and try to justify going back to the ukraine matter and january 6th and and what i said is after the election you know he wasn't willing to take advice from anyone i believe

that people in mar-a-lago were advising him to to just give back all the documents and stop this nonsense. And for whatever reason, he didn't want to do it. I am very interested in seeing the distribution of these classified documents. Look, if they're all relating to Russiagate, which I doubt, then it puts it in more perspective. He may feel he had a reason to keep it, but I suspect they're disparate documents. They're things that just happened to find their way up into his residence, which means they could have been very important and related to some important decisions he was making. And I think they could run the gamut of what classified information could entail, including sensitive sources and and you know potential

consideration of military options under certain circumstances and so forth and i think if if if they prove to be a wide variety of classified information uh that was picked up you know scooped up willy-nilly and taken down there i think it puts things in a very bad light for the president uh hey um thank you for joining us you you said um that this reminds you of those days in the white house when he wasn't listening to anybody he wasn't taking any advice but in fact he was he just was getting advice from some pretty bad people right so and this may be unfair for you to comment on but how bad is his legal team they seem to be making two weeks of elementary mistakes well i don't know i'm not gonna i'm not gonna sort of make it it was unfair but i was kind of hoping you would you know let loose i didn't

think the argument for a special master was persuasive but whether it was persuasive or not it came uh it came two weeks too late. And do you think that he had legal counsel telling him for the past 20 months, just give it back? Not necessarily legal counsel. I think there were people down there that were telling him that. I spoke to somebody this weekend who knows him quite well. I mean, before his presidency. But work with him is in real estate here

in new york and he said look i'll tell you what's in those papers i'll tell you what the classified information is it's stuff that makes him look bad it's stuff that casts a doubt on decisions he made that's how he that's what he does when something makes him look bad he hides it in a basement somewhere um does that make sense to you? Because that's the mystery, the heart of all this is like, what possible value do these papers have to a person who is no longer president and certainly isn't going to be president even in his own mind for another three years, four years, and even then will be able to get those papers again when he's president again?

There's no reason to continue having a personal library of selected classified documents what what other reason would there be well there's another scenario and again you know i hate speculating about this because we're going to find out soon enough i hope but uh i question whether there was a deliberate decision of picking and choosing and vetting what information was taken i think things were sort of scooped up and put in boxes and just taken wholesale in an undiscriminating way down there. And I'm not sure he really was aware of every document, which is one reason I think the idea that he declassified it is strange, is strained. But then when the government wanted it i think then then it brought the ego into play and the idea i am the president i am really the lawful bill the the valid president here and he basically wanted to keep the documents because the government wanted the documents

yeah right now just like a dog now now that you want it, I want it. Right. How much... The other question I have is sort of a larger one. How much trouble is he in? Is it Mar-a-Lago? I mean, we have now locations of trouble. We have Southern District, New York trouble. We have Mar-a-Lago trouble. And we have Georgia trouble.

Which one of those areas do you think should be the one that makes them nervous? Well, I can't speak to what the DAs are going to do because they can sort of do what they want, even if it's not particularly justified. I'm not as concerned for the president about Georgia or New York. I think the most hazardous one in terms of the pieces falling into place that support a criminal indictment would be Mar-a-Lago, but it's also one that the government would need the right set of facts to bring in and explain why it's an appropriate thing to do against the former president. I think the January 6th is a serious one because the subject matter is quite serious and people understand that, but I think the chances of making a case against him are not high. Yeah, what am I not getting about january 6 i mean i i i don't see what the i don't see what the crime was what andy mccarthy was telling us a couple

of weeks ago what was it the uh defrauding the united states which used to be you know financial but then became any sort of thing is that would that be the crime i mean it seems kind of confusing i'm not sure i know what the crime is in january 6 i know what the i want the blunder is i know what the the mistake i think there's sort of two there's sort of two axes of of uh attacks sort of one of them would be that um there was a plan to delay the count to use violence to delay the count, to use violence to delay the count. And delaying the count was essential for them to put it off, to lobby the states to then do the next thing and the next thing. So the first step in the plan was delaying the count. And therefore, if they can tie the president and say

the president knew there would be violence up there. That was the plan. And he essentially precipitated it by telling those people to go up to the hill. That's number one. Number two is that the whole idea of creating alternative panels and claiming that he had won the election, he knew better he understood that was was fraudulent and that was a that was a false claim and this whole thing was was uh you know knowingly uh uh you know misrepresentations and so forth as part of that a fraudulent scheme those are the sort of two so as do you think he as a citizen

who now i got a lot going on i can only focus on one or two of these things can i stop reading about georgia or do i have to kind of keep all these pots on a simmer in my brain i'm just looking for a little more efficiency because it seems like there's new there's new avenues of prosecution investigation opening up every couple of weeks. Yeah, I, you know, something like Georgia, you know, if the DEA goes forward with that, I mean, I think that's entirely possible because they may persuade themselves they have a good case. I just don't think, based on what I've seen, they have a good case. And furthermore, I think essentially play into Trump's hands and be bad because it would make him a martyr and actually end up strengthening him.

So my view is it would not be in the public's interest to bring honky-tonk cases against him. If you're going to bring a case, it would be a good case. But speaking of good cases, Hillary is walking around loose. A whole lot of people who voted for Trump started shouting, lock her up, lock her up, lock her up. And she didn't get locked up. And it seems, I'm clarifying this because I'm sure I'm wrong, it seems like she kind of did the same thing. or are there specific differences in the way she handled classified material as Secretary of State and the way he handled classified material as President of the United States? Well, let me just say that she was Secretary of State. She left in February 2013, six years before I arrived. You know, the statute of limitations, five years. Oh, sure. So I wasn't saying as an attorney general you should have locked her up,

but you know what you know what i mean like the hillary standard seems much much more much looser than the trump i was going to get to the stand i was going to get to the standard but just say that and the decision that you know to clear her was initially made by the by the you know obama administration justice department Department. But put that aside. Again, there's the same two questions in that case, which is one was a crime there and two, under the circumstances, would it have been prudent to pursue it? And, you know, as I mentioned, you know, the president said to me before he hired me that he actually felt it was it would be a bad idea to prosecute Hillary Clinton, that it would

make us look like a banana republic and so forth and so on. And those are legitimate prudential reasons not to pursue it. I think there's a double standard, which is what you're getting at in the Department of Justice. And I think that the people who were pursuing that when my experience is a that the there are a lot of people in the department that are hankering for a chance to go for republican scalp but when a democratic uh politician is under the gun they're very lethargic about it and hand-wringing about it and and figure out ways to sidetrack it that's as a general rule they're not as aggressive and um that and so i think that was in play but uh i also think there are distinctions uh but a lot of that depends on how sensitive the

stuff is that the president had i'm aware of the sensitivity of the stuff that's believed to have been in hillary's things and i'd be interested in seeing how that compares to what the President Trump had. And the other thing is, she had good lawyers, really good lawyers. And I think the issue somewhat less on the other side. Yeah. And so there would have been there were a lot of obstacles and hurdles to successfully any prosecution, even if we decided to go forward. Bill, Peter Robinson here again. Shifting from Donald Trump a little bit to the people who still support him, the 74 million who voted for him, you've said repeatedly that for all your charges against

Trump concerning January 6th, for the way he ran his administration, well, you've said that his policies were fundamentally sound and there were a lot of talented people in the administration, but you've also said, and this is my point here, that he was more sinned against than sinning. And since he sinned a lot himself, that's saying something. But here we have, I'm just trying to put myself in the position of, this past summer, I spent some time in Wyoming and Idaho, and there's still a lot of Trump signs out in front of ranch houses in Wyoming and Idaho. and there's still a lot of Trump signs out in front of ranch houses in Wyoming and Idaho. And you know what? Those people have a point. The FBI, we now know, engaged, well, we have one FBI agent who's pled guilty to fixing a document to try to get Trump. I'm just off the top of my head. Mark Zuckerberg was on

the Joe Rogan show the other day, and he said that Facebook algorithmically deleted any mention of the Hunter Biden laptop on all its properties in the run-up to the election at the request of the FBI. We have 50 former intelligence officials who have signed that letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Of course, that's not true. Even the New York Times has admitted it was genuine. one of them apologized? Zero. Not one. On and on we could go. So, it just seems to me that if you're Mitch McConnell or you're Ron DeSantis or you're Tom Cotton or Nikki Hale. You're a responsible Republican who says to himself or herself, there's a huge amount at stake here. How do we handle Donald Trump? He himself is impossible. But he has an argument.

Or rather, the millions of people who still support him are angry for good reason. Anger. As a political matter. Anger is not a strategy for making a member of the great again. Advise Rhonda Sanders. Advise Mitch McConnell. Peter, Peter. Yeah.

Yes, he was more sinned against than sinning. I've said that. And people should be mad as hell and frustrated as hell about how he was treated in office. Although after he lost the election, I think he lost the moral was involved. Yes, the FBI has done some bad things, things that have hurt the institution and things which make people not give them the benefit of the doubt. That's part of the damage. But I'm pretty familiar with the problems in the FBI. And a lot of agents who were there today and former agents believe there are problems and that should be reformed. But trying to squeeze everything, but for our side to squeeze everything that's done into that narrative, that it's an out-of-control bureau and the bureau is corrupt, bottom, goes too far, in my opinion. The other side obliterates truth and uses narrative. We

can't do the same thing. We have to uphold the truth. And the fact is, whether this was a reasonable search or not, it wasn't the FBI's decision to make the search. In a case like this, this was a DOJ decision made by the Attorney General. I'm sure all the prosecutors were on board on this thing, and the FBI was acting as agents. So why we focused our ire on the FBI who were executing a warrant, I think goes too far. That's number one. Number two is the fact that Trump was unfairly treated, although he brought a lot of problems on himself, doesn't mean he should get a pass or that the Republicans feel obliged to man ramparts every time he does something stupid and something that's destructive and something that hurts the Republican Party.

We shouldn't necessarily man the ramparts for him and defend that. It doesn't mean that he's entitled to ignore, you know, to feel like the Democrats are skillfully provoking the election for the next election to turn this thing around. And and, you know, every time every time we we go to this sort of blind rage without thinking things through and being strategic about picking our candidates and so forth, we end up losing ground. And Trump is proving himself to be very active in defeating Republicans, but not so much at defeating Democrats. Whom do you admire? Two people. How do you answer the charge that Mitch McConnell has been too hard on Trump? And how do you answer the charge, or how do you respond to the charge? It's not your job to answer it, but what do you make of the charge

that Ron DeSantis hasn't been hard enough? There are plenty of Trump people, and Trump is now taken to attacking Elaine Chao, who is Mrs. Mitch McConnell. I mean, aside from Trump, the notion that Mitch McConnell is too old, too cautious. He was much too rough on Trump in the speech that he gave in the chamber of the Senate after January 6th. We can't win with this guy. And then the other argument that Ron DeSantis should be putting space between himself and Trump right now. What do I make of that? Yeah, what do you make of

it? Well, I'm asking you now, not as a former attorney general, but as somebody who's been around Washington and Republican politics since you were a kid. You started in the Reagan administration, same time I did. You've seen a lot. What do you make of this? I think that wrangling between our members on the Hill and the president is not something new, although we usually keep it quiet and don't wash our dirty linen in public. is an excellent legislator and statesman who is responsible for the biggest achievements of the Trump administration, his working of the Senate, and especially on judicial nominations, and especially saving Scalia's seat. That was all Mitch McConnell. And I'll give you an example of how crazy this is. You know, when Biden was trying to get his Build America back through and he couldn't get enough Democratic votes, what did our, you know, what did Trump and some of his followers do? They wanted to shut down the government. They wanted not to extend the debt limit. Now, what would that have done? That would have bailed out the

Democrats who weren't able to pass their own damn bill because they couldn't get Democratic votes on it. And we would have come in as deus ex machina, shut down the government and and then had the whole debate shift to our, you know, our actions and shutting down the government. So what did Mitch do? Mitch said, OK, we're going to give you a couple of months. He extended it for a couple of months. He let, he got out of the way and let the other side hang themselves, whereas Trump's, you know, let's punch him in the nose and go right at it, you know, would have completely seized defeat from the jaws of victory. I mean, that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about. Now, I'm very sympathetic to the Tea Party movement. And but they did get into the point where they basically had us lose about five or six Senate seats. And, you know, that has been very painful for us. And we're experiencing that now. So I just hope the same thing doesn't happen with the Senate races now, because some of the candidates, you know, are not doing as well as people thought they would.

So, DeSantis? I think DeSantis is a very able politician, far more able than Trump as a politician, understanding the whole battlefield and looking at the whole battlefield in an integral way, whereas Trump just, you know, fights the fight of today, regardless of the costs and benefits to the whole battle. And I think any successor to Trump, I want a successor to Trump who is a fighter like Trump. OK, I'm not looking for a namby-pamby, what they would call a country club Republican who wants to get along. I'm looking for someone who fights, but someone who fights smart and wins. And and I think that DeSantis and therefore I think any successor to Trump has to be someone who is pro Trump in terms of policies and so forth.

And I think DeSantis is I think DeSantis is. I think DeSantis would be an able successor to Trump. I think a number of the other people would, too. But I don't blame them for not distancing themselves from Trump at this point, because I think that would hurt their chances. Last question from me, because I know Rob and James, and I can tell they're champing to get in here. Fair enough. If Trump runs again, should DeSantis sit they've lost, or they defeat him in the primary battle, but then he does everything that he can to undermine them in the general. There's no upside for a Republican challenger. Or do you say, wait a minute, wait a minute, this is politics. The next generation has to take this guy on. We just have to have a – we have to fight this out. Well, I think if we're in if we're in the position of saying we in probably what will be one of the pivotal elections in our history that we're going to put up a suboptimal candidate because we're afraid he's blackmailing us and will sabotage anyone else we put up, then we don't deserve to move forward as a party. And I don't think if anyone does not run because of that,

then they're not suited to be president of the United States, in my opinion. Now, I think DeSantis will have to make his own decision based on personal factors, including things about his family and so forth and so on. And my advice to him would be, you know, don't not run because you're afraid of Trump or Trump beating you up. And and also remember that it's you have to sort of seize the opportunities that are there. I think there is a lot of support in the Republican Party for an alternative to Trump. He doesn't strike me as somebody who's particularly afraid of him.

And if he is, it would be a surprise. And if he is and doesn't run, well, then's particularly afraid of him and if he is it would be a surprise and if he is and doesn't run well then we dodged a bullet on that one who knows we'll see but we hope to have you back again as soon as possible to discuss this one damn thing after the other the latest book by bill barr thank you for joining us again today on the podcast always a pleasure right thanks sir listen if you're looking for somebody to help with the laptop next time, just give me a call. Oh, my Lord. I will. Good, Peter. Thank you.

Okay. Take care. The thing is, Peter, do you really know a lot about laptop repair? I got to ask. Are you the sort of guy? Are you kidding me? Okay. Oh, my God.

Why would you ask? I just like job phoning. You wouldn't charge for it. It would be an act of charity for you true oh i'm trying to stay out of the way in case this is a segue oh this is a segue i just it is of course of course with this much time left on the clock and all that stuff how could it not possibly be i'm speaking it should it's probably going to be a second but for whom you may ask well i talked about charity charity when it comes to charity, you think donors trust, or you should.

It's the tax-friendly way to simplify your charitable giving without compromising your values. Are you worried that cancel culture might come for your charitable dollars? Well, big banks that sponsor charitable savings accounts, or donor-advised funds as they're formally called, they have a history of slow-walking or altogether blocking donations to conservative charities. Charities that have found themselves in the crosshairs of the woke mob include Alliance Defending Freedom, National Review Institute, National Rifle Association Foundation, Liberty Council, Turning Point USA, and others. Clearly, not every donor-advised fund provider is safe for conservatives.

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so you can come to one of these and we can meet you. So keep an eye out for coming events page. Go to ricochet.com slash events. Couple upcoming meetups uh on the official schedule happening in williamsburg virginia and huntsville alabama in october huntsville alabama's beautiful town so is williamsburg but you already know that uh and we've got one uh set i don't know if it's set but there's one kind of set question mark but it's going to happen in new orleans next year during the french quarter fest i will be at that one for

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Find a module on the sidebar of the site. Join Ricochet. We'll see you soon. And it says something about the quality of the people at Ricochet. That when somebody announces a meetup, I look at it and say my schedule, how long would it take to get... I went to the one in New York. You know, for all we know, the people who just joined Ricochet, you know, paid their money and had a meetup, this could be a devil in a white city kind of thing. Yeah.

I mean, what better way for a serial murderer starting out you're not selling very well james i have to tell you the point that i'm making rob that that hasn't happened yet which tells that hasn't happened i see which tells you which tells you an awful ricochet serial killer free since its founding this is not enough that's As far as we know, this many days without a site connected to evisceration. Exactly. Peter, we were talking before at the start, of course, about Gorbachev,

and of all the guys we want to hear about, you're the one. You posted on Ricochet a couple of anecdotes of your meetings with Gorbachev. Tell us about the fact that you have a baseball signed by Gorbachev. Tell us about the fact that you have a baseball signed by Gorbachev. I do. I do. Let's see. That American object, that potency there, signed by the leader of the Soviet Union. So, go on with that tale. Former leader. Well, this is in the early 2000s. Somewhere, I'm sure I have,

I made notes on all this. I could look it up and find the date, but I didn't do that in the last couple of days. Early 2000s, and the collapse of communism was so total that the former leader of the communist world embraced capitalism and came to this country and did some speaking events represented by a big speaker's bureau, and I'm sure he was extremely handsomely paid. Michael Reagan, the president's son and a pal of mine, interviewed Gorbachev on stage, and Michael asked me to suggest questions. So I did, and the result of all this was that I spent a couple of evenings backstage chatting with Mikhail Gorbachev before he went on with Michael. I brought back, the baseball comes about just because I took a buddy of mine to meet Gorbachev, and my buddy is baseball crazy, and he pulled out

of his jacket pocket two baseballs, one for him and one for me. It's not clear to me that Gorbachev understood exactly what a baseball was, and it was quite clear that he didn't understand why anybody was asking him to sign a spherical object. He held it a little awkward, and it was quite clear that he didn't understand why anybody was asking him to sign a spherical object. He held it a little awkward, but he was game. He signed it. He was happy to do so. What was the most striking piece of this was that Mike got to a question that I suggested

because I really wanted to hear the answer. This was up in Sacramento, and Mike set it up just the way we discussed it with John O'Sullivan at the top of the show. In 1956, the Soviets rolled in the tanks to Budapest to put down a rebellion. In 1968, they rolled the tanks into Prague. And in 1989, Gorbachev kept the Red Army in its barracks. Why? And Gorbachev replied through his translator, because, Michael, I shared basic Christian values, Christian values with your father. And that's a surprise. That sets you back right there. It did. And the audience murmured. It was a surprise to the audience.

And he chuckled and he said, no, no, no, don't mistake me. I'm a good communist. But then he told the story about growing up in his town in the Urals where his grandfather was the big communist in town. And when the communists would come over to their house for a meeting, his grandfather would put up a picture of Lenin and a picture of Stalin. And as soon as the communists left, his grandmother, who always remained a believer, would take those pictures down and she would put up an icon of St. Andrew, who's the patron saint of Russia, and an icon of St. Michael, after whom Mikhail Gorbachev was named. And Gorbachev went on to say that later when he was married and he achieved some standing, he was living in Moscow, his grandmother came to live with him in Raisa,

and she would go to church every day and she would always say, I'm off to pray for you atheists. And he said, so you see, I have a respect for, I have always respected basic Christian values. And I thought to myself, what this proves is that the failure of communism was total. Lenin decreed the importance of a new communist man. That is to say, among other features, the communist man would have no conscience but what the party decreed. And in Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, the head of the communist party, what that system produced was not a new communist man but an old-fashioned Russian. He believed in conscience. He believed in individual conscience over and above any dictates of the party, and he was a man who had been formed by the Judeo-Christian culture.

Russia isn't Christian in exactly the same way the West is Christian, history's different. Nevertheless, the God of Abraham is still god in russia and the fundamentals of christian values informed a thousand years of russian history before the communists took over and they formed mikhail gorbachev so that that's my gorbachev story whether or not the russian character the russian soul is individual though, or collective is a different question. We don't see, I mean, one of the conceits that we had in the 80s was that if given the chance, they would break free

and they would, democracy, whiskey, sexy, it was later said, they would form a simulacrum of the democracies that we have because they, too, valued the same things. It's an idea that you can see at the end of the Rocky movie, right, number three, or Ivan Drago, the instrument of the state is being defeated, and the Gorbachev character in the movie stands up and applauds, and everybody else does too,

because he's plucky, he's an individual, he's brave, as opposed to a culture that would celebrate the investiture of the entire culture into one man who is a cog in the machine. When we see the pathologies that Russia has fallen into in the last 10 years, it seems less likely that sort of individualism is flowering and flaming in the breast. But when you mentioned that the communists start with a new communist, they do. In architecture, in Soviet architecture, they broke completely with the past, utterly, and came up with new styles, constructivism, that were supposed to demonstrate the new utopian world that they were building. And after a while, you can see it start to modify and change. You can see it enter a Baroque period almost. Then you can see the Stalin influences of classicism come back. You can

see the restoration of beauty in the subways until finally you end up with these ghastly, fascistic, but still classically oriented things as if there was it was in they were incapable of not being drawn back to these historical models because everything that communism supplanted was better than what it provided and the whole idea of this godless utopia just falls like like like hail on the tin rain and the tin roof of people's souls. So, yes, I mean, I believe what you said about Gorbachev. I think that that's possibly true, whether or not that means that the Russian soul and the Russian experience, that he was the exemplar of it or a sort of offshoot of it that was needed at the time, I can't say.

I mean, I interviewed Vladimir Posner, who was one of the most charming people I've ever met and, you know, just a complete opportunist and could convince everybody. Bad guy. Yeah. So he could make a great case for everything and you could have a great drink and he smoked western cigarettes and wore a leather jacket. He was cool. But he was a fraud. So you always

got to watch out for that. Rob, you were going to say something before I rambled on. Am I on mute? I'm sorry. No, no. We've said it already. Well, then we've said everything that needs to be said. I can't possibly think what anybody would want to add to any of this. I'm just kidding. Go to the comments at Ricochet, and you will find

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