The Ricochet Podcast - Ridin' in Biden's Classified Corvette

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Last August when the FBI raided former President Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-A-Lago, we were told that DOJ finally had him where they wanted him. Now, five months later, we find out the real crime is that Trump forgot to store his documents under the little known and under-appreciated Corvette exemption clause of the Espionage Act. Andy McCarthy stops by to explain how then Vice-President... Source

Okay, good, good, good. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. Read my lips. No new action. I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman. We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning. As I said earlier this week, people, and by the way, my Corvette's in a locked garage. Okay, so it's not like you're sitting out in the street. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson. I'm James Lallex, and Stephen Hayward is sitting in for Rob Long. Today, we talked to Andy McCarthy about all the gates. So let's have ourselves a podcast. I can hear you. Welcome, everybody. Coming to you transcribed from the Ricochet Audio Network. It's the Ricochet Podcast, episode number 625. Why don't you join

us at Ricochet.com? What's stopping you? What's killing you? Go over there, take a look, see what is there, and then join and have access to the member feed where the communities form as well. It's a great place. You're going to wonder, where's this been all my life? Well, it's waiting for you. Ricochet.com. I'm James Lilacs in Chile.

Chile. Great Minnesota. Peter Robinson is in sunny California. Rob Long is off somewhere on Madagascar, we believe, or perhaps in the Levant. We don't know. We'll talk to him next week. And sitting in for Rob is Stephen Hayward, our old friend Stephen. Stephen, how are you? Peter, how are you? I think Stephen will confirm it is definitely not sunny in California today. Ah, well, that's our illusion of it. I was doing a California thing on the way to work today. Yes, and I go into the office every damned day, driving up the highway, headed all to

myself practically, doing a few more miles than I should have per hour. And on the radio comes Opus One, live version, Dorsey Brothers. Just turn it up. Great kickin' American song. And I'm driving up, feeling that joy of going fast in a car and listening to great American music. And it's Friday, and I realize there's got to be some other thing that's making me so elated. And then I realized this was the week we won the gas oven culture war. Okay. Now, this is important, I think, because this might be the first time in which we have been gaslit about literal gaslighting. If you know how this whole thing began, it began with a news report saying Trump over at Consumer Products or whatever had said, yeah, banning gas ovens going forward is on the table.

Everything's on the table. Health hazard, all the rest of it. Global warming. At which point people realized, picked this up and said, no, you're not going to do that. No, this is not going to be another one of those incremental diminutions of life that you people love to impose on the rest of us, from our dishwasher soap to our light bulbs to the flow of our showers. No, no. And out came the memes, with a wink and a nod, as Chris Hayes correctly noted, you know, come and take it with pictures of gas stoves and gas burners. But it instantly devolved into absolutely pitch-perfect modern discourse,

where you had the people on the left saying, well, no, no one is going to try to take away your gas stoves, but they should, because they're a health hazard, and here's why. An induction is better, and all of a sudden, everybody's an expert on gas stoves. And then by the end of the week, they backed off from this and said, well, no, nobody was ever trying to take your gas stove. Why are you starting a silly culture war over this? And the reason it matters is because it's a typical perfect example. They propose something, the right responds to it, and the right is therefore starting a culture war by attempting to get in front of the thing that they want to change or eliminate or regulate out of existence uh i don't know how you stand on this gentleman but uh you're probably you know veterans of the gas oven war today so go on tell your i

have a question for steve jump in james if you have an answer to this but i think but because steve has been following the science of the environment, but also the politics of the environment for a couple of decades now, producing Steve's reports. All right. So, Steve knows a lot about this. Here's the question. Why did we, the American public, why did we permit the feds to regulate, quite minutely, our toilets? As far as I can recall, the only real pushback against that was a wonderfully amusing, a brilliant piece by Andy Ferguson. That was about it. And we have permitted them to regulate, in minute detail, our light bulbs. If the new light bulbs last so much longer and are so much cheaper and

use so much less energy, the market would have taken care of that. And nobody really pushed back. Why are gas stoves different? Oh, they're not different at all, Peter. Look, this is a perfect microcosm of what I think it's not an exaggeration to call the tyranny of the administrative state today. And it goes back quite a ways. The difference this time is they got caught at the front end of their attempted tyranny. Right. And they were embarrassed. Normally, the process is you do a formal rulemaking process.

And then suddenly you have fait accompli. Gas stoves are now going to be banned in two or three years. And the politicians say, we had no idea this was happening. Look, you remember our great late hero and mentor, William F. Buckley, once said years ago that the fundamental impulse of liberalism is to reach in and turn down your shower. He said that about 40, 50 years ago. And sure enough, we got the low-flow showerheads that don't give you much water in your shower, toilets that you have to flush two or three times sometimes, right? And gas stoves, this is amazing because there's two or three things going on here. One is, and James put his finger on it, this is part of the climate change mania.

The climatistas, as I call them, hate natural gas. And so they want to ban all the gas things that you possibly can, furnaces as well as stoves. If you were to put the best possible construction on the argument they make, what construction would you put on it? I mean, hating natural gas, if you're a climate activist, makes no sense. It's cheap and abundant, and therefore it stands in the way of the electrification of everything. Oh, yes, that's right. As long as it's cheap and abundant, there's less of a reason to go to geothermal power and tidal power and solar and all the rest of it. Oh, yeah, by the way, it's better than coal.

They'll grant that. But they're purists. They want to drive us back to the Stone Age or something. Yes. Well, one of the mantras they have these days is electrify everything. And it might make some sense in the abstract until you have, oh, I don't know, power outages and also supply issues. Nobody does the math on these things. If you actually are going to electrify everything and we're all going to drive electric cars in another 10 or 20 years, the electricity supply has to something like triple.

And that's not going to happen. And you can't do that with wind and solar. And they still don't like nuclear power, most of them. Okay. And then you have, on the other end, the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Those are the people who are going to look into stoves. This is a Nixon-era creation that gets to decide what products it wants to regulate all by itself without any direction or specifications from Congress. I think it's an unconstitutional agency from the beginning, but we still have it.

And did you notice, let's linger on this for a moment, the person who's on the commission right now who proposed this is Richard Trumka Jr. Right. Take it from there, James. Well, yeah, no, go on, go on, go on. Well, right. Well, his father, of course, is Richard Trumka, who is the head union goon of America, the AFL-CIO. So, you know, using... Oh, really? Yes. So, I thought that was not a

coincidence that that this came from somebody named trumpka who comes from a shall we say a line of work that to believes in authoritarian solutions and who also has a mustache that looks like he should be standing on the sidelines of the chicago bears in 1974 yes i saw that too we're making this old picture of him, but it's not old. Yeah, yeah. So, one more story on this. I mean, you know, you said, Peter, I've been doing this a long time, longer than you mentioned. I remember in the late 80s, and the air quality regulators in Los Angeles wanted to get after the very bad smog in L.A. Fine.

They proposed two things that raised hackles. One, they wanted to ban backyard charcoal barbecuing. And two, they wanted to ban drive-through windows at fast food restaurants because cars idling pollute more than cars that are driving at speed down the highway. Well, you can imagine how this was greeted. A bunch of us at the time put out bumper stickers that a couple local politicians then waved around the media that said, use a barbecue, go to jail. And the Air District backed down from those. By the way, there was the emissions claims from those two sources were negligible and it's ridiculous. But this is a lifestyle thing, right? For the climate people, and you notice that they weren't saying climate this week about the stoves. They were saying, oh, it's a health hazard,

it contributes to asthma. Yes, that's right. it's a health hazard. It contributes to asthma. Yes, that's right. There's a misdirection going on here. In other words, they're simply making stuff up to get what they really want, which is to destroy natural gas. Well, we have done away with drive-thrus here in Minneapolis. We have seen other states, California, New York, ban gas installation going forward. You banned drive-thrus in Minnesota? In Minnesota, yeah. Oh, in Minneapolis. In Minneapolis. Which means you can have them

in the suburbs, of course. You just can't have them in the city. They don't like them, because people drive, and they shouldn't be doing that. They should be taking the light rail to a stop, and then they go to a bus, and the bus takes them to a corner, then they walk five blocks through the unplowed snow to get to the place to have their hamburger before they repeat the entire thing to go back. That's the idea. Of course, they shouldn't really be living anywhere that they can't walk anyway, since that's the general urbanist idea. But yes, again, I'm all in favor of people choosing options that they believe to be right for them and fit their ideological precepts about the environment. If you want to live in a dense housing in a city

and the rest of it and take mass transit, great. I'm all for a robust public transit system that helps those people who don't have access to cars. But this isn't about choice, as Stephen will note. It's about eliminating the alternatives so that there is no option but to do this thing. And electrify everything. You're right. If we were to build enough nuclear power plants, it wouldn't be a problem. But as it is, there seems to be this belief, there's this sort of something, something woo-woo hand-waving that goes on between today and the electrification point at which the grid is completely built up and solidified and will have power from the sun and power from the wind.

But it's not going to happen. There isn't going to be any big batteries that they're going to be able to put jumper cables on in the case that something goes down. It's not there yet. And I say, let the market decide. Let industry do what it can to develop these things. But the idea that we're going to electrify everything without increasing the capacity that we have is madness. So, Stephen, let me ask you, and Peter, too, what am I missing? Do they actually believe that we can force into being this wonderful new world simply by cutting off the alternatives, and that any scarcity that we have will be a growing pain,

or do they actually think that by the time we get to this point that everything will be fine, and we'll have wind farms everywhere, and massive arrays and and and there won't be a problem i think it's the former i think they're not troubled by the idea of of great disruptions to people's lives because the end result is noble and good which is reduce the temperature of the earth by 0.002 degrees thanks to the united states efforts on the part and not China and India. I think they're willing, you know, our uncomfortableness, our shivering in the cold, our inability to get where we need to go is a sacrifice they're willing to make. Some of that, a lot of that, there's a sort of religious impulse for sure. But I would put this to Steve. There is also an

argument I encountered over and over again, and Steve is up the, I don't know where you are today, but Steve has been spending a lot of time teaching the lone conservative on the Berkeley campus. So you're among academics a lot. And they actually believe, truly believe, and by the way, there's an argument, which is why I want to hear Steve comment on it, because he's smarter than I am. They really believe that government regulation has worked pretty well, that they have a pretty good track record, that the smog in LA got cleared up. How come? Because they passed emission standards. And in a weird way, as long as the market is subservient to them entirely subservient to them they're in favor of it we tell detroit the standards it has to meet detroit whinges and whines and but then detroit

does it we tell you you're going to have new kinds of light bulbs and lo and behold general like well general electric is now collapsed as a corporation but lo and behold, General Electric has now collapsed as a corporation. But lo and behold, the market supplies these light bulbs. People go out and buy the light bulbs. And it all happens because we say it happens. The market is good as long as it's our little puppy dog. And I repeat, they believe they have a record of considerable success. Is that correct, Steve? Yes, there is what I call the Captain Picard policymaking presumption, which is all we need government to do is say, make it so, and it will happen. So in the area of air pollution, the right answer is yes, but. You know, I grew up in LA with terrible smog and was delighted that

you can now see the mountains almost all year round, even in the summer, which I couldn't two miles from them when I was a kid growing up. However, what I like to say about the EPA in general is their specialty is billion-dollar solutions for million-dollar problems. If you actually get into the details, you find it was done in the most bureaucratic, most expensive, most intrusive way. And the real heroes of environmental improvement in this country are not environmental lawyers, not EPA bureaucrats, it's engineers, it's nerds with pocket protectors, who are the ones at General Motors who said, actually, we can reduce emissions from cars by 98% from the tailpipe and things of that kind. The untold story, and I'll stop, is, again, having followed this at a granular level for a long time in the LA area, is the number of proposed regulations. I mentioned two ridiculous

ones a minute ago, but there are others that take longer to explain. The number of regulations that California proposed and said they were going to enforce that became so infeasible, they quietly dropped them. And that's never reported. You could write a whole book about regulations that were abandoned because they were just ridiculous that lesson does never get through to the the captain picard policymakers of our universities and bureaucracy and there's also the fact that the institutions regulatory institutions once they accomplish what they've done have to look around to find other things to do we all agree that a lot of the rules that were made in the 70s that cleaned up the air were good. Now we can discuss how they were done and the rest of it and whether or not the market would have solved it, et cetera, et cetera. But you're right, the air is cleaner. And a lot of

those initiatives were wise. For example, at some point, the EPA, the government said, you there with your petroleum distribution center, you really can't pour oil on the ground to get rid of it. You just can't. Because there's a creek over here, there's the water table, you just can't. And so, consequently, you didn't have the brownfields that you had before, you had cleaner areas, you didn't have contaminated land, and that's good. But in order for the organization to maintain their usefulness, they have to look around and say, well, we've done that. What else do we have to do? I know, and I speak from experience from our family business. Here you have a building that is full of barrels of oil, lots of barrels of oil. And we know that it's all very nicely

contained. It doesn't leak. That's good. But what if a tornado hit it? What if a storm hit it and caused a 100% failure of the containment of every one of these barrels? Well, that would be bad because the oil would get everywhere. So we want you to build an asphalt berm around this entire facility, and it shall be this high. If it's any lower, we're going to fine you. Any higher, that's your business. And so our company was forced to build the berm, which would be there to contain a spill of 100% of the stuff that was sitting in the warehouse. Unbelievable. Absolutely preposterous.

And so I extrapolate from that. Don't get me started on the satellite interrogation of the of the uh areas where we fill up the diesel the diesel in the trains i mean it's just get sad literally have satellites over there looking down saying you know you spilled something here's a hundred dollar fine uh so i extrapolate that to every other industry that they do and figure there's a lot there that doesn't really need to be done but to say that is to say that these organizations might be reined back slightly. By the way, it's not just environmental, James. This whole story takes too long, but I can tell you in two or three sentences, if you are, say, a magician and, you know, you make a little bit of pocket change doing magic shows for little kids' birthday parties and stuff, and if you produce a rabbit from a hat,

you are required to have a rabbit evacuation plan in the event of natural disaster by a regulation from the department of agriculture i swear i'm not making yes it's a true story i'm not making this up a rabbit evacuation well i'll tell you this much uh yeah rabbit evacuation that is i i'm just i'm turning that over my head and I've seen a lot of little pellets at the bottom of the cage, which means something else. A lot of people actually do have rabbits at home as pets. You might think they would also be good food, wouldn't they? I mean, what was Jed Clampett shooting at? I think he was shooting at a rabbit to feed his family. Well, Jed was poor. We don't like to think that we're going to be in a situation where we're food poor, but, you know, drought, inflation, and even new policies are pushing America's food supply near its breaking point. Rob Long at this point would interrupt and say, James, you're making a commercial, and I am. And you want to hear this because survival food, it's more important than ever. Think about it.

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That's right, we've got Andy McCarthy to talk about all the gates going on. But we were talking about rabbit evacuation plans and regulatory overreach, which is something, a sentence I've never said before in my life. But Peter, you had a comment. Yeah, James, I joke that James mistakenly introduced Stephen Mears sitting in sunny California. It's not sunny right now. We've had, by the way, I never heard this term, atmospheric river, until about 10 days ago or two weeks ago. Some enterprising weather person seems to have dreamed it up. In any event, we have had already, it is still only January 13 as we record this, we here

in California have already had one of the wettest winters in several decades. Background to this here, here's the fact that California has average rainfall of X, but it also has immense variability. So we are capable in our beloved state, still beloved in spite of everything, we are capable in our beloved state of going quite a few years without much rainfall at all. And that turns into what is called drought. And Gavin Newsom then gives big speeches about climate change and how the world is ending and we all have to put cactuses in our front lawns and in fact, get rid of the lawn, fine.

And then along comes a year like this when we have just one deluge after another, mudslides, but what's happening up in the mountains is lots and lots and lots of snow. And 50, 60 years ago in this state, in the middle of the last century, California responded to this climate variability by building dams. It knew what to do in years when there was a lot of water. And that spirit of construction, of building, of doing what we need to do to work with the environment when water is abundant so that we can continue to use it when water is scarce seems simply to have disappeared. All of this, I moved to California only a couple decades ago steve has lived here off and on all his life so what gives steve how is it that this state which is so full of talent including engineering talent has lost the ability to build a dam we haven't lost the ability we're tying it up in red tape uh by the way, first of all, atmospheric river, Peter, you're quite right. It's brand new.

It's climate. It is, isn't it? We used to talk about the Pineapple Express because that's the term that was used for all my life. When the weather people would say, oh, we're getting all this moisture coming from Hawaii. But now it's atmospheric river and it's part of climate speak. All right. But your point on water storage. Well, you can go on a long time about this.

The variability point is correct, isn't it? Oh, absolutely. Right. Yeah, I can talk about that a long time. Look, one thing you should know, Peter, is the voters of California in 2012, I think it is, passed, I think, a $10 billion bond for water storage and infrastructure improvements. And in the 10 years that have spent since then, the state water authorities authorized one dam north of Sacramento, and it's been tied up in regulatory delay. So we've done nothing in 10 years with money in the bank to do it.

So there you are, because we're idiots. Well, I would love for the rain to continue. It's great to see the reservoirs fill up. It'll be interesting to see if it gets so torrential that they have to stop construction on the high-speed rail and delay that by another 17 years that's another issue but right now we got to get to andy mccarthy because he's here and we're always happy when he's here andy c mccarthy senior fellow of the national review institute and our contributing editor an author of ball of collusion the plot to rig an election and destroy a presidency andy welcome back uh andy is probably

in his garage right now hardening it against any sort of uh soviet penetration but uh andy i'm sure that it's triple locked it's got all kinds of security systems that never turn on it's got cameras and all the rest of it because as we know if you put something in the garage and you lock the garage that's that's all you need to do it's pretty much safe so initial thoughts on this and the speed with which merrick garland is on it well you know as far as the speed james he's he's about two years too late appointing a special counsel look he did the right thing yesterday even if it may have been for the wrong reasons but um hold up somebody andy just back up and tell listeners we should we what's happened in the last three days just one sentence each just make sure we have everybody

we found out earlier this week that president biden had retained classified documents which he had in his possession after he was vice president, in places where they were not authorized to be. So the issue, just to be clear, it's not that Biden didn't have authority. He maintained his security clearance after he was out of power. But no matter whether you have, whether you're in government or you're not in government, you're only allowed to review classified documents in places that it's authorized to conduct that review. And he had them in places that clearly were not authorized to conduct that review. The original thing, Peter, that we were told was that it was one location.

And then amazingly, it dribbled out that there were at least two other locations. I say amazingly because they evidently first found out on November 2nd that there were these documents in a closet in his office. And it was clear they were going to take a political hit for waiting over two months to disclose this. So you would think that in that two-month period, they would have battened everything down and found every document. So they'd only have to roll this out once, but obviously, they didn't do that. Okay, so, I've got, I know Steve and James are going to want to come in here, but I've got a couple of questions for you, and I'll just trot them out and let you do what you will with them. Question number one, now they're saying that too many documents are classified, that this kind of misfiling, so to speak, of documents that have one stamp or another that

suggests they're classified, this actually happens all the time. And from my limited experience in the federal government long, long, long ago, they're right about that. They're much too, much too much stuff gets classified as secret. And it actually is complicated to keep track of it if you actually, if you take, it's just crazy how much stuff is classified as secret. lo these many years ago every evening a special unit of the cleaning operation would come by and pick up your burn bag because there were certain kinds of documents that after you had seen them including speech drafts which was nuts so we just ignored it because we needed to refer to old okay you get the picture they're right about that item one item two but of course that's not their attitude when it looked as though donald

trump was the only person who had taken classified documents so that leads to the second question analytic as a legal matter politics aside as a legal matter to what extent is the are the trump and biden cases similar and to what extent are they different so i just offer both of those well let me the first one i i emphatically agree um you know i did national security cases in the 90s but i found that uh classified information is like the ball and chain of government as a practical matter you can't go through and carry out all the things you have to do for example i'd like be halfway between the skiff in the courtroom and i'd have to decide oh i have this document i shouldn't have taken out should i get back to the skiff so i don't get prosecuted for a felony or should i

blow off the judge and get held in contempt you know and now we're talking about at a skiff is a secure compartmentalized I.F. So I can't remember what that something facility intelligence facility. It's a it's a place that the government designs. There are places in government facilities where you're allowed to review classified documents. And then they set up these SCIFs in other places like the vice president's home the president's home you know other places where you can um review these documents under secure conditions and those yeah just just think of the old cone of silence from get smart exactly i almost want to talk into

my shoes but but um so i agree with you on the other other hand, the fact that there's way too much information that's classified doesn't mean that there aren't national defense secrets that if they fell into the wrong hands really would hurt the country. And the stuff that comes, unlike when I was a prosecutor, where I got sort of a wide array of some stuff that was very sensitive and some stuff you kind of shook your head and wondered, why is it classified? The stuff that gets the president and the vice president tends to be the heavy duty stuff in terms of sources and methods of information. So that has to be protected. And everybody understands the deal. When you get privileged access to this stuff, it's on the condition that you agree to safeguard it in a manner consistent with the regulations, which is why when you violate the law, the most peculiar thing about this, Peter, for the last few days is Biden's representative, his lawyer, came out and said, by the end of this investigation, we're going to know that he inadvertently misplaced these documents. And I have found that very peculiar because it's not a defense to a charge of mishandling classified information.

The statute makes it a crime to use or show gross negligence in the handling of this stuff. So, you know, they're actually saying things that make the case worse for them rather than better i don't think i've answered your second question but sorry about that trump trump trump versus biden yeah well see now i would look at this as like there's there are differences in degree and differences in kind right so in terms of in kind, right? So in terms of in kind, which is the bottom line issue, which is which statutes or which crimes are at stake here, it's the same crime. It's really the same crime. Now, we don't know a lot about what happened with Biden so far. We'll get more details. But I think in terms of the degree, you could say that, you know, Trump's offense in some ways is more serious or culpable than Biden's in the sense that there's more documents and he fought the government.

And there's an allegation that there's a lie to the grand jury when they were trying to get the documents back. That all may be true, but it doesn't change the bottom line fact that they both mishandled classified information. And what I've been taken aback by in the last few days is the constant comparison. I guess it's a natural, the constant comparison between Trump and Biden. But it seems to me the framework or the context, the most significant thing is that Hillary Clinton somehow so uniquely awful that he deserved to be prosecuted when Clinton wasn't. And I don't think they could afford this development for their case. So I think it's a lot more about Clinton. Draw that out a little bit. I think I see what you mean, but they can't afford Biden.

Why? Well, because now, you know, it's hard enough to show after I mean, what Clinton did was willful behavior that went on for years. It was she intentionally tried to defeat the government's record keeping requirements. She destroyed tens of thousands of records even after she knew they were relevant to investigations i mean what you know a normal prosecutor i think looking at that um would have found that to be very serious behavior and obviously when when comey described it he described it as very serious behavior and he never even got to the destruction of the documents he only dealt with the classified information. So I think, you know, now Trump comes. Trump's best defense has been that Hillary didn't get prosecuted. You know, I mean, it looks

pretty obvious that Trump had these documents. There isn't any real evidence at the moment that he declassified them. I frankly agree with Bill Barr that if he did declassify them, you'd have a bigger scandal than if he didn't, because he shouldn't be declassifying things just so he can hold them as mementos in Florida if they would cause the country a big problem if they fell into the wrong hands. So I think his best defense all along has been, you let Hillary skate on this monumental problem. And the Justice Department has known that precedent may not matter in politics, but it matters in law enforcement. So they know that it's going to be

very hard to justify prosecuting Trump, even if you didn't have the overlay of the fact that he's running for president in 2024. And you have the, you know, the fraught political situation of the fact that he's running for president in 2024. And you have the, you know, the fraught political situation of the Biden Justice Department, the prospect of them trying to sideline their main opponent in the election, right? So it's all fraught with politics. I think they only had, in order to make this case, everything had to go right for them. And everything obviously hasn't gone right for them, because if the sitting president of the United States has committed the same offense that Trump is under investigation for, I think you have to treat both of them the same. And they're not going

to prosecute Biden on this, so I don't see how they prosecute Trump. So, Andy, I can't decide what metaphor to use here, whether this is just a case of schadenfreude or the torpedo that's been launched against Trump that's doubled back against the Democrats. I'm having flashbacks to, I know, a period we all remember well, when Democrats discovered that the independent counsel could be used against Democrats when Clinton was president. And we got rid of it, right? Or, you know, right now we're so promiscuous in appointing special counsels that we're back to that time when people used to say, gosh, we ought to just appoint a special counsel for every president on Inauguration Day, right? I do have one question. I mean, you made reference to the fact that Trump claimed to have declassified the documents he took with him, and that's problematic for reasons you bring up. I'm

curious, though, can a vice president do that? I don't think so. So, Steve, here's how I understand how it works. The vice president is what's known in national security law as an original classifying authority, which means if he sees government records that are not classified and he believes that there's information in them that would cause the government harm if it got into the wrong hands he can classify it and that's important because an original classifying authority can declassify anything he classified the president is categorically different from everyone else because he can declassify anything he classified. The president is categorically different from everyone else

because he can declassify anything. But let's say the CIA classifies something. If the vice president doesn't think that should be classified, the vice president has no authority to declassify it. You have to go to the CIA because they're the original classifying authority with respect to that document. The president can declassify anything. So the vice president's got very limited declassification authority, even when he's vice president. And once he's out of office, he has none. So the other thing is, in the Trump case, is we did get an itemization of the things that were seized in the FBI raid. And I guess they needed to do that for various reasons. But do you think we're going to get

an itemization of what's in the Biden case? Probably not, at least not at this stage. If he gets charged, yes, we'll see it in the discovery. The reason you had to get it in the Trump case was because there was a search warrant.

And under Rule 41 of the Federal rules of criminal procedure um the bureau has to leave an inventory behind when they do a warrant and that's actually for it's mainly for their protection so that everybody is agreed on you know what was taken and that prevents there from being you know litigation afterwards about whether things were planted or things were stolen etc all right i've answered all your questions great well i can't circle back to one other which is something you and peter both brought up that's uh goes a little bit beyond this particular case but it is the over classification of

you know the over secrecy and i you know once again my mind runs back to Pat Moynihan, who wrote a whole book about it. Moynihan being the last sane Democrat of the last generation. And I don't see a solution for this problem. You've given too much credit, but that's a separate issue. He talked and wrote a very good game and that he'd go into the chamber and vote with the stupidest, most progressive. Our side gives Pat Moynihan much too much of a pass, in my opinion. I will now fall silent. I get that. I asked George Will about that once, and he said he had the worst statement. Oh, no, George Will's one of the worst defenders.

I know, I know he is. Okay. Anyway, back to the point, I don't see any solution for this, Andy. It seems to me that this is endemic to modern government, and I don't think there's any possible way of fixing it unless you have some reform ideas. Steve, I think on the old premise that the first thing is to stop digging. So I think it would be nice

if we could arrest the problem, but what I see is it gets worse, and it has gotten significantly worse in the last 20 years because you have a combination of too much information getting classified, which has the sinister effect of kind of making the momentum that you classify even more stuff that shouldn't be classified. And then the other thing that I don't think we talk about enough, but we should, is that there are somewhere between five and six million people in this country with security clearances. And, you know, people want to know why can't we ever find out who leaked anything? Yeah, they can all keep a secret. But a lot of times we, you know, a lot of times we can't, we don't find who leaked something

because we don't want to, actually. But a lot of times, you can't find out because the information is so dispersed and so many people have access to it that as a practical matter, you know, within a short period of time, it becomes very difficult to track down like a small nub of people who may have spoken to the media about something. Well, let me ask you a slightly broader question that does bear some relation to this, and that is the House this week voted, as I understand it, to set up a special committee on, I think they're calling it, on the weaponization of the government. And that's not the best title, but I... Select subcommittee, select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which passed on Tuesday on a pure party-line vote of 221 Republicans and 211 every Democrat, with the result that the New York Times writes this,

Republicans pushed through a measure to create a powerful new committee. Not that the Democrats tried to oppose. Anyway, you get the picture. But yes, I want to hear some questions. Well, what do you think of this idea and how should they go about i think it's a it's an important development that has to be done i think it's got to be done not in the manner of it's amazing for democrats to complain about this after the january 6th committee but you know i think this committee has to be like a normal congressional committee where we actually have you know, I think this committee has to be like a normal congressional committee where we actually have, you know, bipartisan representation and crosstiered justice, where the quality of justice that you get

depends on what your political affiliation is, and particularly your partisan affiliation. And that has become a sickness, I think, that's infected not only the FBI, but the whole, I call it the law enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the executive branch. And I think it's got to be examined. You know, I would just point out that before there ever was a Trump presidency, the chief judge of the FISA court ripped the FBI for what he called their institutional lack of candor in administering the FISA laws. This is before anything about Trump and FISA and Carter Page and all that stuff, because this is a problem that goes back for years. And it's got to be explored, and we have to have a better record on it.

I'm not a big fan of the outcomes of the church committee, but I think the idea that something like that was necessary was absolutely true. Well, the amusing part is that the people who in the past would have supported the church committee because all of our intelligence apparatuses were fascist organizations bent on extirpating human freedom now these people are defending the fbi um and believing that any attacks on it is an act of uh you know unpatriotic nonsense the very people who in the past would have said the fbi is corrupt and it was run by a man in a dress are now supporting the fbi um because it was man run by a man who wore a dress in his spare time i mean it's just the inversion is hilarious except Except, James, you guys uniquely, and I'm of similar age to appreciate this.

The problem is that the people in the 1970s who were the radicals are, you know, two generations later, they're running the show. So obviously they feel very different. You know, the Democrats are the party of government. The FBI knows that they're the the show right so obviously they feel very different you know the democrats are the party of government the fbi knows that they're the party of government they serve the party of government um so it's a very cozy arrangement for them now because the fbi right because the the parties move left the progressives have running the show and instruments of state surveillance are convenient and useful which brings brings us again to the Twitter files. The same people who would defend the FBI today against any charges that it's behaving in a

two-tiered fashion are the same people who are getting out there and defending every possible example the Twitter files have shown in which the government attempted to stem, to channel, to suppress the flow of information about things that they didn't want talked about. And again, it's just remarkable. What have we learned recently, for particularly, about Russiagate that you find interesting, if you read the last, I think it was Twitter Files 14 by Matt Taibbi? I mean, it's nice to be vindicated. So, you know, one of the things I tried to argue in the book that i wrote was that it was preposterous to claim that that what they called the russian uh you know collusion with

trump which itself was a myth but the thought that that had you know the thought that a bunch of morons you know putting out messaging about like uh you know hillary on wrestling with jesus or whatever those uh you know stupid um you know i think i actually saw them in the stuff that steve runs on saturday and the power line but um you know the thought that that affected anybody's voting or that the drop in the bucket you know what did the russians spend like a few comparatively like a few thousand bucks in a sea i mean an ocean of billions of dollars of political messaging in the united in the united states and also the righteous indignation of democrats about this when they had a long history of working with the russians and when when everybody knows that when they're talking about how the Russians interfered with our election,

we have a whole, you know, multibillion dollar intelligence apparatus that is part of the objective of which is to affect Russian elections and to affect their politics. So, you know, this whole thing was a clown show as far as I'm concerned, and I'm glad now that we're seeing a solid record that shows that that's exactly the case. But we'll have no accountability for it. It's just going to pass from view, and that will be it. I mean, right?

There's going to be no accountability for this. There's the weaponization committee. Right. So, so and serious question 51 in senior intelligence officials former senior intelligence officials including leon pameda who ran the cia including that jackass brennan who ran the CIA, including Michael Hayden, Air Force General, who was National Security Advisor. I mean, these guys were at the very top of our intelligence organizations. And they signed an open letter to the American people shortly before the election, saying that the Hunter Biden laptop bore all the hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign. They could not have known. Of course, it was untrue. The laptop was genuine,

and anyone who took a moment or two to think about it knew that at the time. Even if there were a genuine question about whether it was true or not, they had no way of knowing. There was no evidence at all that it was a Russian disinformation campaign. It was brazen. Those who knew, who were experienced enough, which I think is pretty nearly all 51 of them, to think it over for a moment,

knew that they were intentionally misleading the American people. I can't think of any action of which the Russians have been accused that represented as brazen an attempt to interfere with the electoral process in this country as the men, were there a couple of women? There may have been a couple of women. The people who signed that open letter engaged in. And that to me means on the very face of it, that our intelligence operations, our intelligence agencies, we hear over and over again, yeah, there are wonderful people out in the FBI field offices. There may be, but that 51 of the people who ran these agencies could lie to us, and that all these months later, nobody has apologized, nobody has said maybe on second thought, maybe on the basis of new ep, not a peep. Those agencies stink to high heaven. Christopher Wray, I think you have said good things about Christopher Wray. I've never met the guy. He may be a very fine, but he's now been in office for, what, four, going on five years as head of the FBI? What heads have rolled? What deep reforms have taken place? This stinks to high heaven. Now, maybe I'm just giving you another example of the high dungeon that you encounter all the time when you go around the country speaking. But isn't this, I mean,

this is a genuinely serious problem. And the notion that now the Republicans have squeaked into a majority in the House, the New York Times, oh, the poo-poo-poo, the Republicans are jamming, that's nonsense. This is sort of Republicans doing their minimal duty by setting up a committee to look into this. Am I right? Well, let me put it this way. If you were speaker, if you and not Kevin had been elected, Kevin McCarthy had been elected speaker, what would you do? Well, let me first say, I think you're emphatically right about your description of the 51. I think at a minimum, you know, there's not much you could do to those guys. I think you could strip them of their security clearances to the extent that that hasn't been done already.

And I think it should have been done. I think I think Trump did do it to Brennan. But I think across the board, to the extent that these guys maintain their clearances, they should be stripped. They use those clearances to make money. Yes. Part of what's going on, they all leave government and they get big consulting contracts. And part of what's in the background is that the corporations that hire them to consult get to say to their board members and their shareholders, well, blah, blah, blah, blah, former high official at CIA who still has a security clearance. It's outrageous. And look, we give them privileged access to classified information. Part of the conditions of that is that it's not politicized, and they couldn't have politicized it more. And I actually

think, Peter, it's worse in a way than you described, because I think this was a coordinated strategy. And we now know this from the Twitter files in a hard document way. The FBI went into these social media companies and leaned on them and basically said, you know, we're the FBI. We can make a big problem for you if we find you swinging around Russian disinformation. And, you know, we're very fearful that the same thing that happened in 2016 could happen in 2020. And wink, wink, we know what happened in 2016 is the Russians

interfered with our elections. So they as much as, you know, they painted a picture for them that essentially told them, you need to suppress disinformation. And the language that they used is reflected in the letter that you're describing. They're both talking about the same thing. They're talking explicitly about Russian disinformation. So, you know, the thought that this wasn't all coordinated to me is far-fetched. I think it was much bigger, and that those 51 guys were just implementing the next step in the scheme to suppress all this. So it is disgraceful. To lie to the American people.

I think that Russian disinformation at this point is sort of, you know, repetitive. I mean, is thereussian information that we try well you know the other thing is it's remarkable though that you know in terms of russian disinformation a lot of times the russians put things out you know because they're true not because they're false you know um so i mean the whole thing the whole thing is farcical but but to go to your other point peter i don't't know what the Republicans can reasonably do with a five seat majority or whatever they have. I think what they can do is they now have subpoena power, just like, you know, the January 6th committee, despite the fact that the Democrats had only a very thin majority, they were able to wield that subpoena authority in a very powerful way and get a lot of disclosure. Now, they're not going to get cooperation from the Biden administration the way that the January 6th committee did. But I would be wearing out those

subpoenas because I think the best thing you can get right now is disclosure. And then what you hope is, you know, two years down the road, maybe you get a Republican White House and a Republican Senate and a better Republican House margin, and you can actually do some things. But for now, I think we're in the education stage. And it's very clear that not enough people know how abusive this is. And I, you know, we all follow this stuff very carefully and closely. I don't think the country does. I was, you know, in a related subject, there's a guy, Andrew Arthur, who writes at the Center for Immigration Studies, and he was writing about the southern border about a week ago. And I was taken aback to see he said that there was polling that i think was done by

some outfit at harvard that said that 85 percent of people didn't know how bad the border situation was and that half of those people uh underrated how many people were coming in by a factor of two um so you know we think commonly everybody's hair must be on fire on this stuff but it's really not and we have to do a better job of educating people agreed and i think one of the things we can do about the fbi is simply to declare that their headquarters in washington dc is harmful it causes visual harm it causes psychological trauma um and it should be destroyed in order to protect the mental health and well-being of people going forward.

And what argument could you possibly have for that? So we'll knock it down and then just build something new and hope the right guys get into it. Yeah, that's not going to happen either. Andy, thanks for joining us today. Andy McCarthy, we'll hear you and see you around your usual places and hope to have you back as soon as possible. Thank you, guys.

Great to talk to you. Take care. Yeah. Bye-bye. Andy, you're right. I do follow this carefully, but it takes exactly one form. I read Andy McCarthy. We were

talking before about Pat Moynihan, and I wanted to just say, how can you possibly say anything against him? He had that puckish smile, and he looked over the top of his glasses. That made him endearing to so many and seemed intellectually substantial. That, of course, was his brand. And I have to ask, do you have a brand? Do you? Huh? Huh? Are you thinking about creating one? Have you ever thought about starting your own business? Have you ever thought about sharing your wealth of knowledge

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That's Hover.com slash Ricochet, 10% off your first purchase. And we thank Hover for sponsoring this, the Ricochet podcast. As I mentioned before, Rob Long, in his peripatetic ways, is somewhere elsewhere in the world. I think in the Levant. We don't know. We'll find out next week. We've got Stephen here, of course, and that's enough. That's enough. I know he's in California, and I know that Peter is in, and I'm here, but you are where? You listening to this podcast, you are where?

Somewhere thinking, gosh, I wish I could meet all these funny, smart, clever, witty, insightful people on Ricochet. Well, here's the deal. We always think that the internet is just full of avatars and fake names and bots and the rest of it, but Ricochet's little corner of the web is different. It's got real people who, well, they get out of the house now and then. They touch grass. That's right. Real life people. More than occasionally, though, our people meet in real life places, get together, clink glasses, eat food, laugh, talk. And when you join Ricochet, you've got an invitation to some of our exclusive members-only meetups. You know, hosts come. I went to the one in New York.

I'd drop anything and go there in a second. It's just fantastic. They pop up regularly. A couple coming down the pike. Susan Quinn is going to having a meeting this weekend in Sarasota, Florida. Quiet Pie has reservations set in Vacaville, California, January 28th. Randy's working on something for New Orleans and so forth. If this doesn't work for you, and I understand it can be expensive to travel,

why don't you join Ricochet and start your own? That's right. Just announce you're going to have a meetup, and the Ricochet people will come to you, which sounds terrifying. I know when you think about it. No, they're not coming to your house. They're not pressing up against your glass and moaning like zombies. No, you all meet in some friendly place and have barbecue and laugh and get sauce in your face and the rest of it. You can start.

Join Ricochet, find out where the meetups are and meet the people in person that you talk to online. It's one of the unique things about Ricochet and one of the reasons we love it. Something unique and that we loved passed away this last week, and I believe Stephen or Peter are going to perform the necessary ceremony and tell us who the man was and what he accomplished. Who wants to take it? Stephen, you want me to start first? It's the passing this week of Paul Johnson, the great British historian who I only got to meet once, although it was over a several-day period on one of those Hillsdale College cruises. So we got to have some very long conversations that it was a real thrill because he was always my hero and model, by the way, for how history ought to be written. I think among the many things that could be said about him, the leading one in my mind right now, Peter, is he's, I think you could say, the last of a long line of British thinkers. You could trace back to maybe Orwell at the starting point,

who began on the left and who moved by degrees over the right and made their impact. So, you know, Orwell, Stephen Spender, you think of Malcolm Muggeridge to some extent. And I think he's the last of that lineage. I mean, he's 94 years old in his passing. What he was best at, and, you know, he was amazingly versatile. He wrote those big doorstops like Modern Times, Birth of the Modern, History of the Jews, History of Christianity. But he could also write these very short books. He has a biography of Churchill that's only 150 pages long that's just terrific. And so, he could do short form and long form both. And, you know, a man of great faith. I'll just stop there, Peter, and you please fill in. Peter T. Leeson Well, yes to all that, of course. What I can recall, to me, it's a test of the impact a book has if you can remember where you were

and what it felt like when you first picked it up. And I was in Tony Dolan's office in the old executive office building. Tony Dolan was office in the old executive office building. Tony Dolan was the chief speechwriter. When I picked up a copy of a then brand new book, this would be 80-something or other. 83, I think. 83 came out. And this book was called Modern Times. And I picked it up and I began to flip through it.

Now, I was a kid in those days. I'm happy to emphasize that I was a kid back then. And I had been hired into the White House on a kind of fluke. I loved Ronald Reagan. I loved Bill Buckley. You and I came from the same milieu, Steve. The conservatism in those days seemed fun. It had a sense of morale. And yet, of course, we were getting beat up in the press every day. And so, I tended to think, partly because I was still so young, I tended to think from speech to speech and what would the New York Times say about it. the Reagan White House was part of a historical conflict, that it had importance, that whatever we did, succeed or fail, would be part of this larger story that was affecting the whole world. And it meant something, particularly, that it was written by an Englishman, by someone I'd never

heard of, my ignorance, but someone I'd never heard of until that moment, because it meant that somebody outside these circles of friends and acquaintances and people I'd been following, someone outside could look at it and see the importance of that struggle himself. That just, I just stopped, looked through the table of contents and sat down on a threadbare GSA-issue sofa in Tony Dolan's office and started reading the book. It just was one of those reading, it was just one of those books that had a real impact. I could still almost sort of feel it. Do you know one of those books that had a real impact. I could still almost sort of feel it. Do you know what I mean by that?

Oh, absolutely. I mean, it was one thing to have had at the time people like Milton Friedman or Tom Sowell who made great intellectual and technical arguments about policy. What Johnson did was he told a narrative story. In fact, what I put it to when I met him, I said, would you accept the description that your history is what I call analytical narrative? In other words, he'd weave in the details. That's a beautiful phrase. Well, and he said, oh, I've never thought of it that way, but you're right, I like that. And I think the other historian who wrote in that vein was the late John Lukacs, the Hungarian-born historian.

I think you can compare those two figures. And so, I mean, the point of modern times, it really had two main lessons to it. It told the story beautifully, but at various points, by the way, Churchill wrote his histories this way. He would drop in his judgments about the matter that were always spot on. And the two main points of modern times were the rise of moral relativism, you know, the fruits of nihilism that really took shape in decisive, destructive ways early in the 20th century. And then secondly, the centralization of government, right, which has its totalitarian forms under communism, but also its, he never said benign forms, but the sort of more watered-down forms in the democratic West.

And he was somewhat optimistic at the end that the experts and the new class, as he called them, was discredited, but he said they're still in charge of things. And it's worth going back and rereading that last chapter again just now, I think. Pete T. Right. I'd add one element to the two that you mentioned, and that was you read modern times, you read his work generally, but you read modern times and you come away with a recognition or an appreciation of the importance of the United States of America. Yes. Of the central role that we played. His chapter on the 1970s was entitled, Suicide Attempt.

America's Suicide Attempt, right. Yes. America's Suicide Attempt. America's Suicide Attempt. I said, of course, of course, the Soviets didn't do that to us. That's what we did to our... It reminds me, of course, in all kinds of ways of what the left is attempting to do all over again right now, in any event. And of course, the other... I'm talking about this in a very solipsistic way, what the book meant to me, but the man's erudition, he'd read everything. Yeah. And the extent he had the best treatment, I think it's still the

best treatment of Allende and the attempted capture by Chile of the communists and what Pinochet was, Pinochet had his faults, but he really can understand it for the first time. It's the best treatment I've ever seen. How on earth is an Englishman working in his study in London able to master what was taking place in Chile? But that was Paul Johnson. Yeah. Well, we may never see his like again, but you know, you guys got two or three decades ahead of you.

Get cracking. Inherit the legacy, be the next person that they want to be mentioned in the same breath. I know it seems as if the great intellectuals are all passing, but one will arise. One will emerge to tell the truth and tale of our times. In the meantime, of course, there's always Ricochet.com, where that person may be writing at this very moment. You won't know until you go there. Find out. Join up and take a look at the member feed.

And also, go over to 4patriots.com and hover.com. You're going to find fine products, and by supporting over to four patriots.com and hover.com you're going to find fine products and by supporting them you support us uh if you could take a few minutes to leave a five-star review on apple something i have been asking you to do for about 525 podcasts have you got around kill your people would it just kill you i know i but no they say no i'm not going to do it because i want him to say it for a 526th time. It's a mantra that says the week is done. The labors have been set aside and now rest can begin.

All right. You know what? I'm not going to say it next weekend. I'm going to say it twice the week after that. Anyway, Stephen, thanks for sitting in for Rob, who I guess is in Madagascar. Like, we can prove that. By the way, full points, James, for sounding like a 19th century, like a Victorian gentleman. He's either in Madagascar or the Levant.

Yes, right. I had to throw that in. I wanted to start out being as pretentious as possible and see if I could work my way down or up, and we'll let the people in the comments be the judge of that, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0.

Next week, guys. Next week. Steve, a real pleasure as always. at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, guys. Steve, a real pleasure as always. Well, thanks. Always fun to be with you guys. And I'm going to send you via message a PFM tune to take your head off. Alright, boys. Later, guys. Ricochet. Join the conversation.