The Ricochet Podcast - In Like Flynn: A Conversation with Andrew McCarthy

Episode Date: May 14, 2020

On the most recent edition of the Ricochet Podcast, former Federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy was our guest to discuss the Michael Flynn case. In the course of that conversation, Andy mentioned to Rob that perhaps it might be valuable to have a longer, in depth conversation about the details of the case then was possible in a single guest segment on the Ricochet Podcast. As we are never one to let... Source

Hello and welcome to a special edition of the Ricochet Podcast. I am Rob Long. I'm here with Andy McCarthy. You might remember there was a middle of the podcast we had last week. Andy was a guest and he and I started talking about stuff and he made a tragic error and he said, you know, we could probably talk about this another time. And this is that other time. So we roped him into it. How are you doing, Andy? I'm doing great, Rob. Glad to be with you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. So, all right, we were talking about the Michael Flynn case, and when we first talked about it, what I planned to talk about today was just how weird it was that they had set a perjury trap with no underlying crime, whether this happens all the

time, whether this is normal, whether we're just looking at something that is in fact a kind of business as usual, maybe not the right kind of business as usual, but a business as usual, and now it's sort of being exposed. But in the intervening days, two other things have happened that are pretty weird. One is the judge in the case, Judge Emmett Sullivan, has decided to sort of become an investigator of his own, right? He's – that seems like an overstep for a federal judge, is it not? Well, it is. Now, I am not a Judge Sullivan fan, but to try to put myself in his shoes, you could see where he's he'd be a little bent out of shape in that they've had a lot of proceedings in this case. He very carefully went through a kind of a sort of a second plea proceeding with Flynn. Just to give you the background, Rob,

Sullivan didn't take the original plea. The first plea was taken in, I think it was December 1st or so of 2017 by a judge called Rudy Contreras. And he weirdly drops out of sight after taking the plea. We don't know if he recused himself or if he was recused. We later learn that he comes up in the text messages between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page because he's a pal of Strzok's. But in any event, he's out of the case, but he's taken the plea. And then there starts to be some sort of saber rattling out of Flynn's camp that he's been railroaded into pleading. And the first time Sullivan has a proceeding with him in court of any depth, he pushes him on. Are you know, are you pleading guilty because you are guilty? And he virtually takes him through yet a second plea proceeding.

So there's that, and then there's also the fact that he's written a couple of very long opinions in this case, and he's put a lot of work— Why would a judge do that? Why would a judge walk the defendant through the process of how he got to the plea? Well, first of all, a court is supposed to make sure that there's a factual basis for the plea and that the person is pleading guilty because he is guilty, not because he's being coerced into pleading guilty. So it's actually a responsible thing for a judge to do, especially if he's hearing noises. You know, Flynn was trying to have it both ways, Rob. The thing is, Flynn wanted to maintain his innocence because he never really believed he

did anything wrong. At the same time, he got a very favorable plea from Mueller's prosecutors, by which I mean, let's assume for argument's sake that he's innocent. He could still have been prosecuted for a variety of felony counts because they could have taken every single separate false statement that they alleged and charged it as a separate count. And they could also have tried to go after him on the foreign agent registration stuff, although they've had, they've been equivocal about whether they really thought he was guilty of that or not. And then of course, the big thing is they could have charged his son. So the game that, that Flynn is playing is he wants to have locked in the protection of the plea deal that only allowed them to charge him with one

count of false statements. And since he's a first offender and, you know, his background, he was not going to get any jail time. So he wanted that locked in. But he also wanted to keep saying wasn't guilty. And at a certain point, I think the judge is saying I'm not having any of that. So it was a pretty good deal. I mean, if you were Flynn's defense attorney, you'd be happy. Yeah, not only that, Rob, that's the reason why I've always thought his current attorney's strategy was a real high wire act, because what she was trying to do is get the judge to throw the case out on the ground of outrageous government misconduct when the legal remedy and the reason I never thought this would work is the legal remedy in this kind of a situation is if he was

led to plead because his rights were violated, then you get your plea back. But the thing is, he doesn't want his plea back because if you start at square one, then they charge him with everything. You know, all the protection of the deal goes out the window. So she was trying to ignore that step and get the judge to be so outraged by what happened here that the judge would just throw the case out. And it's unlikely that Judge Sullivan would be outraged by what some of us look at and think of as outrageous government investigatory conduct? Well, he has a track record. I mean, he's the guy who had the Ted Stevens case. Right. And part of the reason that, you know, part of the reason that we're in this very strange posture is when you when you plead guilty, the government makes

you waive your right to any further discovery in the case, including any exculpatory evidence. But because Sullivan has been burned in his mind before by cases like the Ted Stevens case, where he thinks the government outrageously withheld all this exculpatory evidence. He has a standing order in every case that he takes that requires the government to turn over the exculpatory evidence. And therefore, he would not enforce that provision of the plea. If he had, this would have all been over a long time ago. So I guess they had reason to think that Sullivan could get bent out of shape by what went on here. But what they didn't calculate was he might get bent out of shape at Flynn, too, because I think in his mind, he's convinced that Flynn pled guilty because he

really did lie to the FBI. So where it is right now, it's Sullivan has decided to bring in his own, essentially his own special prosecutor, right? Yeah. Yep. And so we have now a nested independent counsel investigation

within an independent counsel investigation. And then he's done this weird thing of the, I'm going to say it wrong. Cause I say everything, the amicus curiae. Is that what that is? Amicus curiae. Amicus, they're friends of the court. Right. A lot of them, by the way. Yeah. A lot of them. Yeah. Well, the court's very friendly, but you're not really allowed to do this in criminal cases. And there's a case right on point in the D.C. circuit, which is what controls the D.C. district court where Sullivan is a judge that says you can't do this.

So, you know, why would it say because it's a criminal case where it's just you did it? It's you're guilty. You're not guilty. you're not going to establish any kind of case law? Is that why? Well, really, in a civil case where it's usually private parties litigating against each other, you have a lot of situations where the court ends up being in a position of making big social policy that might affect a lot of people who are not involved in the litigation. And it makes sense in a criminal case. It's really the government against an individual over, you know, violating a statute of Congress. And you already have a defendant who's basically facing the Justice Department with its $30 billion budget. To make the defendant not only defend that, but have a bunch of amici come in really is not fair.

And it's generally unnecessary because there's not, you know, they're not making broad social policy. They do set precedents that control other criminal cases, but it's not the same thing as civil litigation. So what's his game here? I mean, it seems like Sullivan, on the one hand, you could say on a human level, as you put it, he's just kind of he's super, super PO that he spent all this time on a case. And then the Department of Justice said, OK, all that work is irrelevant now. We're not even going to pursue this.

But then it just seems like he's just made a whole lot more work for himself. I mean, there's at least 16, I read this morning, 16 former Watergate prosecutors are going to file an amicus curiae. So, you know, it's going to be a kind of, it's going to be a gigantic amount of paper this judge is going to have to read. What's he going for? What does he think that they're going to say? that you should – you can sentence Flynn if you want? You can – Right. He's looking for creative arguments. Well, he's looking for two things.

I think one thing – I remember saying yesterday that this group called the Watergate Prosecutors. Yeah, right. This is like a bunch of geezer lawyers who are even like more ancient than I am. And they're you know, they see the Rolling Stones are on tour. So why shouldn't they get together? Right. So they want to they want to make a little noise because they can't stand Trump. They've been trying to get Trump impeached, you know, since before he walked in the Oval Office door. And there's plenty of other groups like that. The legal profession is heavily left of center, to put it mildly. So, you know, as we see from every single, you know, 2000 lawyer signed petition that comes out every time Barr breathes,

they'll have no trouble getting a bunch of amicus briefs. Right. And what I think it's two things. I think for one thing, this is really political. They're just trying to make a lot of noise about how politicized the Justice Department is. And it's a political argument against the Trump administration. And I think probably Sullivan would also like to see if there's some, you know, creative argument out there that passes the laugh test for why he can continue to prosecute a case that the Department of Justice doesn't want to proceed with, notwithstanding that the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals have said any number of times you can't do that. So I think that's basically what he wants. And, you know, the distinction between anyone who works in the system, Rob, it's not just the judges. You know, there's a lot of times in criminal cases where I was ready to strangle the people who I was prosecuting. But, you know, you go out, you count

to 10, you maybe hit your head against the wall a couple of times, and then you come back in and do your job, which is that you can't react the way you react as a human being. You have to react consistent with what your obligations are under the circumstances. So, you know, this judge should understand that it's up to the Justice Department to proceed with this case or not. And if it's true, as he, I think, wants to suggest that Trump is politicizing the Justice Department and he wants to look at it that way rather than to look at whether this was a whole politicized exercise by the Obama administration to begin with, he can have his opinion about that. But that's really a political issue. You know, if the public thinks that Trump is politicizing the Justice Department and the rule of law is at risk, then they should vote him out of office. But that doesn't give this guy the right to, you know, take over the case. So I guess that's my question. Sometimes when this stuff happens, we hear a thing and we, I mean, and it seems outrageous. And then somebody tells you, oh, you know what, this goes on all the time. And so it is probably clear that the Justice Department is being, has been politicized,

certainly, and it has certainly has political, has, takes political considerations into its, you know, larger decision tree. But I guess what I mean to say is how how normal is it to investigate somebody like this? I mean, in all of these investigations, this is my overarching theory. Tell me if I'm wrong. In almost every single one of these cases, I mean, from Whitewater on. And for those of us, those are our podcast listeners who are not not. I can't believe I have to say this but not in in their 50s whitewater was this gigantic all-encompassing investigation independent counsel investigation that started

a few about a month into the clinton administration and kind of went until the very end um and it encompassed started with a with a investigation of an snl in Arkansas. And eventually, a couple of Hillary Clinton's former law partners went to jail for, I think, building irregularities and some other stuff that was not connected. It was before we had Flynn there

going, lock her up, lock her up. Right, right, exactly. And that was where Monica Lewinsky, that scandal came out, kind of arose from that same investigation. There's always collateral damage in these things that is kind of like, you know, Paul Manafort, who's now, of course, walking out because he was released from prison because of coronavirus fears. But Paul Manafort. He should have sold heroin while he was doing everything else. He would have been out six weeks ago. That right especially in new york city yeah like you

get the old steve martin show you get a ticket for that um the uh he's not in prison he's not in jay didn't do time for anything he did for trump or anything to do that anything to do with that, anything to do with Trump. This is just stuff they unearthed. So how much of this is the dangerous ancillary damage of being peripherally associated with a political figure who is deemed as a target by investigators? How much of this is, uh, is, uh, is, um, is Washington DC establishment use a better, you know, the, uh, I can't think of a better term, but, uh, people who kind of know each other and kind of agree that like the judge knows the FBI investigator in this job, how, how much of that is going on here? And, and then at the bottom of it, like, did is this going to is justice going to be done here? I don't mean the process, but I mean, just in the larger sense of like.

Is Michael Flynn going to get the justice that he deserves? Well, it's a lot of questions. Sorry about that. Yeah, well, well, but I think the overarching thing is this doesn't happen all the time. And I think that what we're seeing here is kind of a combination of two things that in in and of themselves are really problematic. But when they're brought together, it's really combustible. And those two things are the institution of a special prosecutor or independent prosecutor, this whole idea where you assign a prosecutor to pursue one set of targets. In a normal prosecutor's office, every case has to compete for resources with every other case.

And you don't, you know, if you can't make a case, you got too much other work to do. You just move on. You close it and you move on to the next thing. Whereas this independent counsel thing, I think, is a really perverse institution because you're, you know, the old saw that, you know, show me the man and I'll show you the crime. You know, these guys can pursue things till the end of the earth until they finally come up with something to justify the investigation. I worked on one of these, Rob, years ago, this Cisneros Independent Council. They asked me to do some legal work on it, not to represent them in court, but to do some legal motions. And I was astonished when I first met the guy who was running the

investigation. And he hands me the indictment. And it's like 22 counts. This is a false statements case. It's like it's almost. And it's 20. I think it was 21 counts. But the amazing thing was the first 10 counts were false statements and the second 10 counts were material omissions. And it turned out that when you match them up, the material omission was the truth that the falsity in the first count was, was meant to, was meant to conceal. So, um, it, in effect, like we're going to get you for lying and then we're going to get you for telling the truth. Right. You, you tell me two plus two is three. And I get you for telling me three and, and for not telling me it was four.

So I turned it into, I turned it into two counts. It's pretty good, by the way. Yeah, it is pretty good. But I remember walking in and saying, you know, this is exactly the sort of stuff that you don't do. And the reason that the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals have pretty forgiving authority for prosecutors in terms of stacking counts and writing indictments is precisely because we don't do stuff like this. But you have all those kinds of abuses, I think, when you're dealing with a prosecutor assigned to get one target. So that's one problem. And then the other thing is something I think we talked about at our last conversation, which is this whole idea of counterintelligence and doing a criminal case under the guise of counterintelligence.

Because in the criminal system, everybody operates with the assumption that even if I get to go to the judge privately to get a warrant or even if I have a million things I can do in secret in the grand jury, everybody knows eventually there's going to be a prosecution. There's going to be discovery. Everything you did or represented is going to come to light. And it keeps people honest in a way counterintelligence doesn't because in counterintelligence, theoretically, you're not trying to build a case. You're trying to get information. So everything is under the cone. Everything is classified. Nobody ever thinks their work is going to be checked. There's no adversary on the other side. And when people don't feel like they're being watched, the temptation to push the envelope

becomes too much. And I think what happened in this case is that the people who took over the case were headquarters people. And they're the people who were supposed to make sure the underlings always abide by the rules. So it turns out, you know, when they take over a case, they're just as susceptible to doing abusive things as the line guys are, but there's no one there to tell them no. So if you combine these two things, we have an investigation that's being done in deep, dark secret, and a special counsel who's assigned to get this one set of targets. And I think that's the reason this is such an unusual situation. And I don't know that justice will ultimately be done in it. We know, I mean, I want to get to the actual

Flynn stuff in a minute. But so we, one of the things people worried about when the, these procedures were being designed really in a post 9-11 world was the, you know, all my sort of crackpot libertarian friends were saying things like, that, you know, all my sort of crackpot libertarian friends were saying things like, well, you know, it's FISA court. This is like a kangaroo court. We can't have that. And then all of us who were, you know, real patriots who believe that, you know, security was important, we said, you bearded radical libertarians, what do you know? This would never happen. All we're trying to do is put terrorists behind bars. And it does seem like the irritating hippie libertarians were right, that it didn't take long before a procedure that was essentially designed just to put bad guys, bad guys who were not even Americans behind bars, right,

to prevent the next 9-11, quickly became a way to sort of get a guy you didn't like from working for a president that you didn't like. Well, let me suggest, though, that I want to push back against that a little bit because it didn't take a short period of time. FISA actually goes, FISA started in the late 1970s. And I actually, because I was prosecuting terrorists in the 90s, had what was then one of the few cases where you actually used FISA-derived evidence in a criminal case. And it was actually very hard to do. And in the 90s, we ended up having a big brouhaha over what was infamously at the time known as the wall, because the Clinton Justice Department was afraid, even though there was no empirical evidence of this, that rogue agents who didn't have enough evidence to do a criminal case could exploit their national security authority to do a criminal investigation without a criminal predicate under the guise of national security.

And I argued very strongly at the time that that could never happen. And I've obviously been spectacularly wrong about that. But the reason I thought it could never happen was because it didn't occur to me that maybe headquarters would jump in and run the investigation. At the time, it seemed preposterous to think that if you assume a rogue, it would be a lot easier to fabricate the evidence that you needed to just use the normal criminal process than to fabricate a national security angle because of all the rungs of supervision and approval you have to go through to get that. But what happened here is the headquarters guys decided to run the case and, you know, they don't have to worry about rungs of approval. They are the rungs of approval. That's right. Okay. I said, breaking bad, I am the knock on the door. Okay. So I think that, you know, I think that took a long time to break down. But don't you, I mean, I don't know. I asked this before of some journalists I know.

But don't you feel like, I don't know. I mean, I know you have political beliefs, right? I know you have like you're I know that you have partisan feelings every now and then. Don't you, when you're doing your job, think, OK, I got to be aware of that stuff. I got to put that stuff away or I have to be, you know, as they say in Buddhism, be present to it. So I know it's there. So I know my actions aren't being directed by my partisan fervor. It doesn't seem like anybody did that.

It doesn't seem like, and we have, we have an enormous amount of personal communication between the big stars of this investigation. And at no point does anybody say, well, you know, look, I think Trump's a pig. And Michael Flynn, I think he's probably a little bit of a sleazebag, too. But let's, you know, buy the book here, fellas. Let's not go.

If we can't get him, we can't get him. It doesn't seem like it'd be that hard to do. And boy, it would save a lot of these people some major career humiliation. Right. Yeah. You know, though, one of the things that's really shocking to me, and maybe it shouldn't be, I could, I could certainly understand how somebody outside this world would, would look at it differently. But, you know, my best friends

as a, as a prosecutor in New York for 20 years were liberal Democrats. Yeah. And it just like never, it would matter when we, you know, go out and have a few beers on Friday night. But in terms of like doing your job, it was much more clinical. I mean, people didn't think of what their political differences were.

Now, we weren't doing a ton of political corruption cases, but we did enough of them. And we did Republicans and we did Democrats. And it was really more in the world I was in, the political, your personal politics didn't enter into it. And I always thought that it shouldn't matter who your prosecutor is more than it matters who your dentist is. You know, you basically, it's a job and, you know, there's the law and there's the facts and you match one to the other and that's how you do it.

You don't like say, I feel really queasy about doing this case because I'm a Republican. I mean, just it's it's not something that ever occurred to me now in in this thicket. It's very different. But I think the reason it's it's different is because a lot of this investigation got pushed by the political people in the administration. You're talking about Flynn really shows that. Yeah. So, I mean, what we discovered, of course, is this thing called and I don't want to keep you on, but I don't want to just work it out in my head. This thing called unmasking, which is when, when, uh, you know, ordinary, decent, hardworking Americans like me, uh, read that we think, Ooh, that sounds really spooky and weird. Um, and then it is kind of spooky and weird. And then we discover it's

kind of normal. I mean, this happens a lot, but in this specific case, it seems to have happened in a way that suggests that there's a trail of breadcrumbs that leads somewhere from the inner Obama administration to that. behavior, that there was this drive from somewhere, a political drive to pursue this investigation with Flynn in as, you know, zealous as you can. And everybody knew it was Flynn because he'd been unmasked a million times up to and including people in the Oval Office. Is that that's a particularly lurid way to describe it. And if you're a Flynn partisan or you're a Trump partisan, you like to describe it as this special breaking news headline on Fox News, oh my God, with a smoking gun. And if you're on MSNBC, you say, oh, this is normal.

I mean, there's like 10,000 unmaskings in the Trump administration alone. Who's closer to right? I mean, I'm assuming both are wrong, but who's closer? Well, they're, uh, unmasking is not a normal routine thing. It's simply not. And unmasking to the extent that it happens tends to happen, um, because of the intelligence intelligence community analysts who are looking at raw intelligence collection and realize that they need to know who the identity of the U.S. person is who's been incidentally intercepted in order to understand the significance of the intelligence. And just so people understand what incidental collection is, it's very, you know, when I had criminal cases, let's say against the mafia, if I had a wire tap

on a mobster and he called the pizza guy to order a pizza for lunch, I would collect the pizza guy because the phone's tapped. So these are people who are not being targeted for, they're not the targets of your lawful surveillance, but they come up in the surveillance because they have interaction with somebody, someone who is the target. And because this is not criminal and you don't have to satisfy the Fourth Amendment to do all this collection, the government's very hinky about protecting the identities of Americans, mainly because they know that if the country realized they weren't protecting them, that they wouldn't allow this kind of surveillance to go on.

And that's why there's such a big push now against it in Congress. And the heart of this is just that we have had a longstanding rule that you cannot collect in the CIA, basically, right? The NSA is not supposed to collect information, spy on the American people. You can't spy on the American citizens. Okay. So, so I'm, I'm sitting there and I'm, I'm, uh, in a, in an office somewhere in the white house campus. And I, I'm reading this stuff and it says unnamed American, this or that. And I think, who is that guy? Who is that guy?

And then what do I do? I make a phone call. Is there a form you fill out? There's a form you fill out. And there really is a form. It's got to be a course. And it's in triplicate. Of course.

Although no one's allowed to see any of the three copies. But right. But there is a form you have to fill out and you have to justify why you want to see it. And what one of the things that was being argued pretty strongly, we'll see if this turns out to be true, if we ever get to see this paper trail. But calling up and saying, I want to see it because I'm Vice President Biden and I said so is not a good enough reason. You actually have to articulate a reason why knowing the U.S. person's identity is necessary to understand the significance of the intelligence and that the intelligence is so important, it needs to be understood. So that's supposed to be the deal. It. ambassador for the Obama administration, is responsible, according to the NSA's records, for 260 unmaskings. And when she testified in Congress, she said that she may have done basically one or two, but she didn't do 260 and she has no idea

who did it in her name. So so you know that we haven't gotten to the bottom of this pile yet but um there's some funky stuff going on that doesn't usually go on an intelligence collection okay so i yeah i want to get back to flynn and i know i won't let you go but before before i do so um so we're gonna because it's the federal government and because you do have to fill out a form, and the form is in three copies or ten copies, there's got to be signed by 65 people. And because there's – every single court case, every single investigation, there's a room full of files somewhere. We are going to find out the whole TikTok here, aren't we? I mean, eventually, if anybody wants to know that the true history of why Michael Flynn was investigated, charged, pled guilty, then took back his plea and why we're here now, that that is that those documents, that story is available somewhere, maybe not at this very moment, but eventually it will be

available, right? In our lifetime, will we know what happened? I don't know. You know, a lot of it is, the answer is yes. I think probably there are bits and pieces of those story all over the place and it can be assembled. It's not like someone took bleach bit to it should be able to, they may have like with a claw. We know like for the clock. But you know, there, you know, the other thing about this, Rob is it may be a long time before the whole story is known because what I'm finding, and this is as somebody who knows stuff about how this works and has followed this stuff closely for a long time, what I am finding is if you don't ask the right question or if the right question doesn't occur to you,

there could be a whole vast amount of stuff that you miss. One of the big stories of the unmasking, for example, that came out, we're talking Thursday, so this story kind of exploded yesterday. But, you know, for all the, we see dozens of officials unmasking Flynn. But the curious thing is the big Flynn conversation is December 29th. There's no one there's no evidence that he was unmasked in connection with that conversation.

You know, the next thing that happens in unmasking is on January 5th. But we know that before January 5th, they had identified Flynn on that conversation. So you say to yourself, that's strange with all this unmasking evidence. How come no one unmasked him? And, you know, that didn't really occur to me to think hard about it until the last day or two. And I'm starting to think that probably what happened because Flynn was out of the country at the time and maybe Kislyak was out of the country. I don't know exactly where Kislyak, the ambassador was, but it could be that the CIA got that information and the CIA isn't

subject when it's doing intelligence collection outside the United States to the same unmasking rules that the FBI and the NSA are when they're using FISA. So it seems to me like, you know, there's all kinds of strands of this. And if and, you know, there's something that's been like right under my nose for three years. And it didn't occur to me to think of it that way until the last 24 hours. And that only makes me say, how much more of this have I missed? You know, what else is out there that, you know, is staring you right in the face that you just haven't asked the right question? And so I want to wrap it up. So before we go, I've got a question I want to ask in general, but before we do that, Flynn. Am I right? Flynn is sort of like – he's a classic DC – creature of DC, probably a little bit on the make too much, probably has a lot of like – for lack of a better term, the way we might describe

a lot of Hunter Biden like connections, probably not. I mean, I don't know if he didn't. I'm not saying he's a criminal, but yeah, kind of a sleaze, you know, a little bit on the make, a little bit, you know, not terribly honorable dealings with foreign governments and not forthcoming in his connections to them, probably shouldn't have had a conversation with Kislyak at the RNC, Trump's convention. But I'm not sure it's a crime either. Either way, is this going to be eventually justice for him? I mean, capital J justice, a justice that we can all agree is justice, or is it going to be a guy who probably has a few flaws, but caught up in a machinery much bigger than he was and it's going to cost him everything he's got to get out of it?

Well, it's already cost him a great deal. I think the bottom line on that, Rob, is that notwithstanding how nutty judge Sullivan is acting at the moment, that eventually the charges are going to get dropped because the law is the Justice Department doesn't want to pursue the case. It's not going to be pursued. So that may take a longer time to work out than it should, but that's how it'll work out. But in the meantime, he's been ruined. Now, you could argue that, you know, in some ways, did he do things that courted that outcome? He probably did. I mean, you know, the, the, um, I like Flynn, but I really don't like the Turkey stuff.

Yeah. And I don't like, like, uh, you know, getting a $50,000 or whatever it was payment to talk to RT, which is the, which is the propaganda arm of the Russian regime. Now, as I understand it, he he briefed the Defense Department before and after he went on that trip. But I don't see any good explanation for what what went on with the Turkey stuff. Right. Erdogan's regime is one of the worst ones on the planet. Right. So, you know, you're going to play with fire, you get burned and still play. He played with fire, but did he, did he deserve this kind of blowback? I don't think so. I think this is going to turn out to be unprecedented political spying and he was ruined. Um, you know,

he's, uh, six or $7 million, uh, in the hole. Uh, He doesn't have the same professional financial prospects as he had before. His family's been just put through the ringer. And now, even though it doesn't look to me like he got due process from the government in investigating him, from his first set of lawyers in defending him, and now from the court in adjudicating his case. This is like terrible in a lot of different ways. I don't think he'll ever get made whole for that, but I do think the case against him will be dismissed. So that's something. That's something. So how cynical should we be? I guess that's a kind of, I know, this is my last question to you. I hear it and it sounds to me like, it just sounds to me like it's putting, it's driving me to a place of cynicism that, well, you know, look.

Not that he got what he deserved, but there's a group of people who get into trouble. And it's almost like there's a lot of people who were in the Clinton administration who got into trouble. And he's one of them. And they just have to be more careful. And every now and then, the giant eye of Soren of the Department of Justice decides to – people on the right like to say – whenever anybody says something about Obama was a scandal for the administration, we sort of turn to – we put to this stuff and say, what do you call this? This is an Obama scandal right here. Or what do you call the IRS? That's an Obama scandal right there. But every now and then the eye of Sauron turns and turns away. And this time it's turned on him. And this is the way of the world. Is there anything out of

this that you could say that is, that, that makes you think, um, okay, well, next time we'll be better next time it won't happen. Um, or, uh, the, the good news is this doesn't happen that often, or this is not, or the people, and even people who know, who probably think that Flynn, that, that, you know, Trump's terrible and Flynn should be in jail. They'd all should be in jail. Even those people are thinking themselves, well, next time I better dot all the I's is that, is there, is there any hope here? I'm really pessimistic about this. I hate to be this way because I really would like to be optimistic about it. But I see two really bad outcomes here, and I think they both end up playing themselves out. a lot more upset about the idea that a bunch of bureaucrats at the top of the government decided that they knew better than the American people did in an election. And I say that, Rob,

and this is what disheartens me about this. I'm not a Trump guy. I mean, I voted for Trump because of what the alternative was, but I'm not like one of these, you know, five alarm Trumpkins out there. But I think it's really, you know, I think that, you know, our system and our self-determinism is what makes America, America. And what happened here is, you know, a bunch of bureaucrats who thought they knew better tried to change the outcome of the election. And then when they couldn't do that, they tried to undermine the incumbent government's ability to govern instead of trying to help it govern better, which is what they're supposed to do. So I think more people ought to be upset about that and that it shouldn't be such a partisan issue. But I realized that, you know, Trump's personality is such that he so rubs people who don't like him the wrong way that they can't

get themselves in a place where they can get whipped up about what happened here. So that's that's one bad outcome. The worst outcome, you know, because this all will pass. Trump will go away. You know, so we're going to have another president someday and on we'll go. But what I worry about is the way these guys, the bureaucracy did this was by exploiting powers that are necessary to the protection of the United States against really bad foreign actors like mass murdering jihadists. And I learned because I got to use, most prosecutors don't get to work this side of the street, but I got to do national security stuff. The last several years I was in the justice department. And you really do learn that this is like the one area where the officials have to be able to look people in the eye and say, you can trust us to wield these powers that nobody can really have effective oversight on. And what I think this episode is demonstrating is that you can't. You can't trust them. And there's now a very strong current

in Congress and in the public that these powers have to be rolled back. And having seen up close how this works against the people that it's supposed to work against, what I'm worried about is there's not going to be an effective argument against why these powers don't get rolled back, but we can't protect the country without them. And that's much more important than the elections in 2016 and 2020 and Trump and whatever else. That's the part that I think is really dangerous. Yeah, no, I think I'm with you there. I was hoping you were going to wrap it up in some kind of stirring defense and cheerful outlook and optimistic. We could put some music behind it. I have one. How about this? On the other hand, it's always five o'clock somewhere.

That's exactly right. All right. Well, that's a small victory. But I guess for people who are real sticklers about what, you know, five o'clock, I myself am not as we sort of endure more quarantine. Hey, Andy, so much. Thank you for explaining this to me. I feel it's I didn't think I could feel smarter than I already feel, but I feel much smarter than I did. I wish I could have made you feel better. Yeah, that's like that's that's not your job. That's you just got to do the job you're told to do. Hey, thanks a lot. And we will we'll check it again when this thing gets because this thing seems to me, and it seems like it's only going to get more interesting. I guess I hope it does, because there's a spy novel in there somewhere.

Great to talk to you, Rob. Good talking to you. Thanks, Andy.