The Ricochet Podcast - We Called It A Raid…

Episode Date: August 12, 2022

We’re not short on takes about the search (or whatever you wanna call it) at Mar-a-Lago this week; but one can’t ever get enough of people who know what they’re talking about when it comes to something as big as this! Ricochet’s old friend Andy McCarthy joins to provide just that kinda commentary. He gives some essential vocab clarifications; lays out the charges he believes the Justice Department... Source

Well, I actually think that's what it is, is the return of sanity. I have a dream this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal. Where possible, it is standard practice to seek less intrusive means and to narrowly scope any search that is undertaken. With all due respect, that's a bunch of malarkey. I've said it before and I'll say it again, democracy simply doesn't work. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. Rob's not here. I'm James Lileks. and we talked to andy mccarthy about well you know what the raid can we call it that in any case let's have ourselves

a podcast i can hear you welcome everybody it's the ricochet podcast number 605 i'm james lilacs in an unusually autumnal Minnesota, Minneapolis, today. And joining us again after a... Lord knows where he's been around the world is Peter Robinson. Now, Rob, we know, is off somewhere in the world. He's in Tunisia or he's in Malaysia or Myanmar or somewhere. We'll find out next week. But Peter, where

have you been? Well, we spent about three weeks in various places in the western and middle United States. On the middle. We spent, our base was Jackson, Wyoming. Our base was Jackson, Wyoming. And here's what happened in Jackson, Wyoming. Three days in a row as I sat, I was trying to combine work with vacation, so I sat in my bedroom at a desk and

typed and typed and typed on this, that, and the other. And three days in a row, a bull moose walked up out of the woods and looked at the window. I assume what he saw was his own reflection, but maybe he looked in and saw me. And he laid down on the other side of the window, this is 10 feet from me, who was by now pressing his nose against the window to observe all this, and made himself comfortable and spent the afternoon lying outside my window chewing his cud. And I don't know, I can't even really quite articulate how strange and wonderful it is to be that close to this weird beast that even no child would ever design. It's like a rhinoceros. Who would ever design such a creature? And yet, there

it was. And at that range, it was beautiful. Its fur was different colors of brown and black and these strange velvet covered antlers, horns. What are they in a moose? And I thought to myself, I'm not that far from coastal California and its dense population. I flew to Wyoming and met my wife and daughter who had driven. It's a 14-hour drive. It's not nothing, but on the other hand, it's a long day's journey. And there we were in a place where big creatures such as moose

just wandered around wild, enjoying themselves. I don't know. Is this another place to say, what a country, only in America? Something like that. Something like that. When last we spoke, before you left, you were also regaling us with a tale of a moose. The same moose. It's just been in my head.

It's looms even larger in retrospect. So I'm waiting for next week you to speak of his little flying squirrel who would alight on him and encourage him to go off on adventures somewhere. Well, we also went to Idaho. I have to throw this in just to get to a different animal. And in Idaho, we saw antelope. So I have now seen the whole, oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam, buffalo tick. And the deer saw deer as well big mule deer deer tick and antelope tick play now moose don't appear in that song but if they did

i'd be able to tick that box as well well i hope that nobody said a discouraging word because that's not the place to do it or at least you can do it but of course people plug their ears so that seldom is heard a discouraging word and the skies are not cloudy all day, which is another strange way of putting it. How's the weather today? Well, the sky is not cloudy. So welcome back. And I'm glad that you got to touch grass and get in touch with the earth. Hurrah. Now, however,

here we are in this mess that we find ourselves in. We're going to be talking about the political ramifications of Mar-a-Lago and what was behind all that with Andy McCarthy later. Of course, Andy knows his stuff. He wrote a piece about how it's sort of gone from, it was a fishing expedition, but as somebody else pointed out, it's gone from a fishing expedition to a fishing expedition. So we're going to get to that. But I wanted to posit a few things, Peter, first. Yes. Let me just throw something out there, and you tell me what you think. Now, I think my view of the FBI, some people have their view baked in. It's fossilized.

They know what they think about it. I think that the FBI's behavior in the Russiagate embryo was intentional malice. It was institutional keister covering in the end and in between you had a lot of credulousness and wrote bureaucratic people doing what they did because the thing was in motion i think it was bad uh i don't think that this is this is premar alert right right right all right that it's that it started with them knowing exactly the dodginess of what they were doing and then it took on it sort of on bureauc inertia, and they ended up covering their key story for the sake of the institution, as I just said. So all of that combined gave me a bad taste of the FBI. But I never really

believed, as maybe some people do, and I don't want to overstate the number, that the entire institution is corrupt. There are good people who work there. There are dedicated people who work there. I mean, that's just because I grew up watching Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. do his G-Man thing every week. But I still have some faith in the organization. I haven't given it up completely, even though we seem to know what they are capable of. But if there is nothing big that comes out of this, and by big, I mean, well, you know, they've been saying all week, the walls are closing in, which we've been hearing for six years, like an endless loop of the Star Wars trash compactor scene. But unless Trump is manacled and marched off into the back of a Black Mariah, it seems to me that this will push people like myself a little bit more towards the I just don't trust the organization, period.

And I'm automatically suspect now and the people who hate donald trump and believe he's a criminal and don't really care what means are used to get him if nothing comes of this their belief in the sbi will be unmoved un unchanged that they'll just you know shrug and move along a little bit more radicalization on one side and indifference on the other. How about that? Does that seem unwise? I'd rather talk about the moose, because the things you're talking about are really dire. And what you're talking about is a justified erosion in faith in our intelligence, let's put it, FBI isn't just law enforcement, it's domestic intelligence. I have to say, when I was preparing for the interview that

I did, what was this, a month ago now, six weeks ago with Bill Barr, former Attorney General William Barr. I just reviewed, I looked up, well, here's what I came up with on the FBI. I did an interview years ago with Judge Silberman, Larry Silberman, Lawrence Silberman, who is now retired but was for many years on the DC Appellate Court, a very important jurist. Lawyers such as John Yoo tell me that this is in all kinds of ways the second most important court in the land after the Supreme Court. And Judge Silberman had a long and distinguished career before becoming a judge on that court that included time at the Department of Justice. And early at some point, as I recall, in the 1970s, he was given the job of reviewing J. Edgar Hoover's private files. J. Edgar Hoover kept filing cabinets in his, and it turned

out nobody had moved them. They were still in filing cabinets in his secretary's office. Hoover had died. Somebody needed to look at what these things were, at what was in these things. And Judge Silberman wrote a piece at the time in the Wall Street Journal, I found it. And he said it was the lowest moment in his career in government service, that file after file after file was disgusting. That it was the results of surveillance on people whom the FBI had no right to be surveilling, that it was Hoover collecting evidence that he could use to place pressure on politicians. Larry Silberman said he felt that justice couldn't be done, the FBI couldn't be righted,

until the FBI headquarters was renamed after somebody other than J. Edgar Hoover, something that has never happened. So there you have right at the inception of the FBI and under the figure who made it what it is, and the figure who engaged in all kinds of propaganda and had the FBI cooperate with Hollywood in producing those Ephraim Zimbalist Jr. television programs, you have corruption that goes on for several decades. Then we have this period when it supposedly got cleaned up, except that we now know, because he admitted it before he died, that Deep Throat throat the source for Woodward and Bernstein for all kinds was Mark Felt who was number two at the FBI and whom we now know thought he should

be number one and he leaked material to Woodward and Bernstein out of sheer spite. And then we get the Russia... I have no faith in the institution. I'm sure there have been many, many good people who have prevented all kinds of crime and done justice in all kinds of ways. But the incentives for people to engage in bad behavior when they have enormous power and get to behave in secret, get to conduct themselves in secret, those incentives are just wrong. It's not the incentives, it's the lack of disincentives. I mean, whoever pays the price. In between Mark Felt and Russiagate, of course, there's Ruby Ridge and Waco and the rest of it.

There's a lot of things. Yes, all of it. But maybe we should take a little solace in the fact that we haven't now seen a point of, we haven't crossed a Rubicon of behavior because they've been doing bad stuff all along. I mean, it's cold comfort, I suppose. But the idea that this previously upright institution has now been corrupted like never before, we'll see. But what you mentioned is interesting because Hoover and the FBI and the way they spied and surveilled and MLK and the rest of it was for years, for decades, held up by the progressives, by the left, by the liberals as one of those things that's wrong with America. The FBI was the enemy now in that inversion of nearly everything that we're seeing uh you have the right that is castigating the fbi as an out of control corrupt institution and the left that

is defending it as the bulwark shall we say um that keeps our freedoms from being eroded by the second coming of trump okay all right So what are we to do then? I mean, when we talk about, well, we have to dismantle the FBI, like with every other institution that people talk about. If we can't get rid of something like the Department of Education, which, as far as I can tell, directly educates exactly zero students. Correct. The idea of doing something like getting rid of

and reconstituting the fba rebuilding it um you you have to have a societal catastrophe that scours to the ground nearly every single institution and requires them all to be rebuilt along new lines which i don't see happening anytime soon we're on our way we're doing a pretty good job over the last few days well they want to tear down i mean the hoover building that you spoke of is one of the ugliest and most hated in Washington, D.C. True. Perhaps, and there's always been talk about replacing it, destroying it. Maybe if they just said, well, we are announcing the destruction of the Hoover FBI headquarters.

Oh, and by the way, as long as we're at it, we're just going to get rid of the constituent institution that sits inside and come up with something different. You know, we had four years of a guy who wanted to drain the swamp. Seems to be at, you know, chin level where it was before. So I'm not exactly sure that a second term of Trump would do anything about it or a first term of DeSantis. But we would be hearing endless calls for reform if these slippers happen to be on the other gouty feet, don't you think? Don't you think? I mean... Oh, without a doubt. Absolutely without a doubt. Absolutely without a doubt. That's the other... I was about to say tragedy here, but I don't want to be too pompous about it. Just here's the political... The latest polls showed that over half of Republicans were ready to move on from Donald Trump.

Over half of Republicans were backing someone other than Donald Trump. I saw a poll in which I believe his numbers dipped below 40%. If you ask registered Republicans, actually, I can't remember. I don't want to state the poll in any detail. But it was asking Republicans, whom do you back for president? Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, this, that, or the other, Nikki Haley, so forth. And Trump fell to something like 40%. Well, for me, I stipulate yet again that I believe Donald Trump was far more sinned against than sinning. But I am ready to move on. Personally, I'm ready to move on. And

it is my judgment that what the country needs is a Ron DeSantis or Tom Cotton or Nikki Haley, a no-holds-barred Republican primary in which the next generation of leadership asserts itself, gets elected, and puts this country back on some kind of even keel. And now, Merrick Garland, I cannot, we'll have to ask Andy McCarthy about this. I, in my mind, cannot conceive, I can't even imagine anything that justifies what just took place. But the political effect of what took place is this the justice department may just have donald trump of the republican nomination all over again perhaps we were told a little while ago that the dobbs ruling from the supreme court would upend our predictions of the midterms which i don't think it's going to do and in this case by the time we get around to people yes people are going to be angry about this and people are going to want trump to fight back but the point is um i think

people believe well i can't speak for everyone i can speak for my side of the of the equation that people are concerned enough about the dire straits in which the company country seems to find itself in economically energy wise foreign policy etc uh require a fresh mind young blood smart idea somebody who's smart somebody who's persuasive and that the idea of just reinstalling donald trump in a in an active peak yes that's exactly what it would be in order to show you what it would be will you say we can't have this we'll show you okay i get that right but once that's done then what then what right if you're telling me that a lame duck president is going to be able to somehow up end of the swamp drain it completely and uh i don't think so but again this all depends on what they what they

have i mean the fact that it went from well the fbi is serving as the process or is the process service for the national archives and we're going to send send in the FBI to get the post-it notes and the menus and the wrapped up pieces of paper from the toilet for the national seemed thin spaghetti at the beginning of it. Right. And then all of a sudden that story morphs into the nuclear codes. Now everybody nuclear classified. Well,

if there's one thing we learned from the Hillary Clinton episode, it's that the term classified applies to nearly everything that flies. That's true. So that doesn't necessarily mean something. But what I saw on Twitter in the more excitable corners was the belief that Donald Trump, traitor that he is, they know he's a crook, they know he's a shady businessman, they know he's an absolute traitor, was going to use the nuclear secrets that he took and sell them to Putin. Or to Iran. Are you kidding? You actually saw that people were saying that on Twitter? Oh, absolutely.

So they absolutely so believe that he was going to traffic nuclear secrets. Now, I cannot for the life of me figure out what kind of nuclear secrets he would have that would require this sort of action. I just don't. I mean, I can easily imagine that, well, I can imagine that he had some documents, perhaps, that he wanted to keep, perhaps, as, you know, a little safety net, you know, in case something comes out, I got this on you. But on the other hand, Donald Trump strikes me as the kind of guy that, if he had that sort of information,

would have been waving it around and talking about it a long time before, right? I mean, the idea that the 17-dimensional chess player thing here, well, I've got this little secret envelope. If this person says this, I'll be able to do that. No, I mean, he would have been alluding to something or talking about it. If he had evidence of this or evidence of that, says me, based on examination of the guy for the last 30 years or so. So I don't know what they they have to come up

with something and it has to be big it's got to be big right and if it's as big as it needs to be to justify raiding the home and i know it wasn't technically a raid but i don't care people go into your home when you're not there and without your permission and you 30 fbi agents ransack your house including your wife's wardrobe that's a raid i don't know i don't know whether what technical definition is required but that's a raid it's i know that's an invasion of personal privacy personally somebody go go on no i was just going to say if they have something so big that it required that response then why why did they wait a year and a half? This man's been out of office a long time. If they had to take that drastic action to

ensure national security, what have they been doing for the last year, year and a half, or year and four months, or however long it's been since he left office? I just can't see any way it adds up. If they knocked on my door and said they were going to make a complete search of my house, I would let them in and say and say well let me see the warrant okay i got that as you go upstairs you know it's kind of a mess up there you know i haven't made the i would feel bad bad if i hadn't made the bed but on the other hand perhaps i didn't make the bed for a very good reason because i wanted to look at the sheets you know so you make your bed you cover your sheets oh my you don't make your bed Your sheets are there for all to see.

And maybe that rumpled, unmade bed is actually a sign of pride. The master at work. Because they might come in and look at those sheets and say, is that a santine finish right there? I'm sorry, my warrant says I'm able to look under the mattress. But I've got to ask, what's your thread count on that? And I would tell them, I would tell the FBI, ha, thread count. It's a myth.

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That's bullandbranch, B-O-L-L-A-N-D, branch.com. Promo code RICOCHET. And we thank Bull & Branch for sponsoring the Ricochet podcast. Someday I'm going to have to buy another pair, another pair of sheets from them. And I, you know, I'll probably be about 87 years old. And they'll be great sheets then too. One. And now we welcome back to the podcast, Andrew C. McCarthy, Senior Fellow at the National Review Institute and a contributing editor to That Fine Magazine, served as Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He wrote a widely shared piece after the big news broke out of our log ago.

We wanted to have him on so we could elaborate why the search happened and what it means. Hey, Andy, welcome. Good to see you again. Gents, how are you? Great to be with you. Could you take us through, could I ask some layman's questions? Okay, so the two, just take us through, I mean, all kinds of questions about what on earth, the private home of a citizen without that citizen's permission. How does that happen? What kind of legal groundwork is necessary before a law enforcement agency does that? And then the second very basic point, Andy, I've been watching you on Fox, and I've heard you draw the distinction between the warrant and what you have referred to as the underlying affidavit. And I honestly need a kind of just a definition of both and why

the underlying affidavit is of such importance. So, just baby stuff, before we ask your judgment about whether the project is coming off the wheels in this great republic of ours, just give us a little bit of an explainer. Peter, I think the first question is really important in this particular case, for reasons I'll get to. Let me answer the question first and then bounce back to that. What you need to seize property from someone under the Fourth Amendment, and there are statutes and rules that have been engrafted on top of the Fourth Amendment, but the Fourth Amendment is our minimal protection. you need probable cause that a crime has been committed and that it is probable that evidence of the crime

will be found in the place to be searched so those are the two things that are required to her reason yes and there are distinct hurdles right yes you show both i mean generally speaking they they you know they often conflate as you can imagine but but you do have to show those two things the reason i think it's really important in this case is because we've heard a lot of information thrown around about the presidential records act for example okay the presidential records act is not a criminal statute there are no, there are no penal provisions in the Presidential Records Act. It's basically guidance that Congress enacted at a time when, you know, up until Watergate, the assumption was that presidential materials belong to the president, not to the government which is why we have all these fabulous uh presidential libraries all over the country right um it was only after watergate that congress acted in a way that now the assumption was changed and we're talking about uh government

material and there's still disputes between uh former presidents and the National Archives about who gets to keep what. But for our present purposes and directing myself to your question, it's not a criminal statute. So even if we assume for argument's sake that a president wildly violated the Presidential Records Act, that's not a crime because there's no criminal provision um so you can i just ask give what what would a wild violation of the presidential records act involve if he kept a diary and he took it to mar-a-lago to his into his retirement with him instead of turning it over to the archive what What? Just give us an actual... He took the Endeavor desk home. Okay. Well, I would say, for example,

let's say he said, bring me all the State Department records of, you know, X trip to go visit this country and the meetings we had, etc. And you had all these State Department reports that were written about that. Those are clearly government reports. They're government records. But they're also executive branch records that are generated by the presidency of whoever the incumbent is at that time. I would regard that as different, Peter, than,

say, a personal diary where, you know, a president made notes for himself with an eye toward whether it was toward history or to writing memoirs or just having something to refresh his recollection if he ever needed it. So I think some things are pretty obviously government records. Other things are probably fairly obviously the personal property of the president. And then there's probably an awful lot of mush in between. Yeah. But your point is, even if there was an undisputed violation of the Presidential Records Act, that could not have served as probable cause in the Department of Justice's request to the magistrate in Florida. Is that correct? That is correct. Now, I don't think... All of that speculation is just totally misguided. It goes right out the window.

Well, it's not irrelevant, and let me try to explain why. So, what there is criminal law about is classified information, you know, mishandling classified information, and worse, a crime there are a number of statutes uh in title 18 which is the u.s criminal code uh which pertain to the mishandling and worse of classified information now here's the principle of law and let me just explain try to explain why i think it'll be interesting to see how it relates to this particular case there's a doctrine of law that says as long as the agents have a lawful license to be in the place where they are conducting a search and it's legit legally legitimate to conduct the search so to be more concrete about it they have a search warrant

that's been ordered by a court because there's probable cause of a crime. Right. So they're in the door based on that. The agents are not required to turn a blind eye if they see obvious evidence of illegality that is not covered by the warrant. warrant so once they're in the door and the way i the way i often frame this is let's say i have um evidence of a of a notorious robbery in my jurisdiction and i'm pretty sure x committed the robbery but i'm dead certain that he's a small-time drug dealer i write i write a search warrant for the drugs i don't say a word about warrant for the drugs. I don't say a word about the robbery. And the reason I don't say a word about the robbery is both legal and practical. Legally, if the agents go in on my drug search warrant and they find the robbery tools, like the gun and the

screwdriver and the mask and what have you, they take it the law allows them to take it so i don't have to cover it in the warrant in order to make it lawful for them to take it as a practical matter as a prosecutor if i put the robbery tools in my warrant and the agents go in and they don't find it then the defense lawyer at trial is going to say, and you told the judge you were going to find these robbery tools, right? And did you find any of that stuff? So why do I want to guess if I don't, you know, if I don't go there, they can still take the stuff. But if I guess and I guess wrong, it could read down to my detriment at the trial. So that's just a practical consideration.

So how does this relate to the Presidential Records Act? Well, the Presidential Records Act is not a crime, but it is illegality if you violate it. So I think one very interesting thing that may come out of all this is, yes, if the agents find evidence of illegality um when they're in the warrant in the conducting a search for a different reason on the basis of a warrant that describes different crimes aren't they allowed to take that because we're not talking about we're not talking about crime we're not talking about another crime that is unrelated to the world we're talking about civil illegality so you know the doctrine is basically

if they see something that's obviously against the law they don't have to to have blind eyes to it but we're not talking with the presidential records act about something that's crime we're talking about something that's illegal in a different way so you know i i think that's going to be an interesting we're going to have a lot of very interesting issues here. And let me let me quickly go to your second question, because I want to please also important when we talk. There's a lot of talk out there about the warrant. There is no the warrant. The warrant has two pieces. One is the it's it's basically a single sheet and it's a federal form all search warrants in the federal government look alike it's just a federal form it's what the magistrate judge signs uh and it

the most important part of it is that lays out with some specificity what the agents are allowed to take it's required that that be laid out specifically because absent that the warrant is a general warrant which is the very thing that the the framers were so worried about the idea that you just basically give people lunch right so we don't allow that you have to have you have to specify what they are allowed to take so that's usually a single page uh document although if you're going to be exacting and lengthy about what you're allowed to take what frequently prosecutors do is they staple an appendix to the warrant like a few pages which you know in the part of the one page warrant where it says describing the items to be seized, it'll say

C Appendix A, and then you'll flip to Appendix A, and that'll lay out what they're allowed to take. But isn't that a list of screwdrivers and masks and guns, though? I mean, if they're telling them what they can take, I mean, if you're hypothetical, you stated before, if a guy goes in and they get the drugs and they get the scale, but the only burglary tool they see is a screwdriver, that has a variety of purposes. Likewise, if they go to Trump's house and they see a whole bunch of documents, those could be just documents that he gets to have. I don't think anybody looked at this and said, hey, look at this. It's the cyclotron.

It's our latest nuclear device schematic schematic i know exactly what this is yeah they had to know something they had to know something about what they were looking for right yes but they might look at it and this is the the relevance i think of the federal record the presidential records act um they might look at it and it might have like the department of state letterhead on it you know so it's in other words, it's obviously a government record. Right. But it's not classified. Can they take that because he's in violation of the Presidential Records Act, even if it's not a classified document, which is what they're supposed to be in there to take? and i we may get to this i guess but you know my view of it is a lot of this is pretextual because what they're really trying to do is make a case on them about january 6th so i think they want the expanse of the federal records act because that means they can grab more stuff and grabbing more stuff will eventually help them potentially prove more crimes than just classified information.

Even though they follow the letter of the law in requesting and receiving this warrant, what they really want is a phishing license. I think so, although I don't want to suggest because I've gotten in a little trouble. That's what you guys were talking about. Can you imagine? Can you imagine? And I need you to help me, except there you are saying raid. And I just I heard that you're not allowed to say raid

anymore. And here's another word for you, Peter, that I'm in trouble for using pretextual. So what I suggest to people is that the real agenda here is to try to make a case on Trump on January 6th. And I think if you look at the timeline, that's clear. And I can explain that. But I use the word pretextual. And I got myself in trouble because the connotation of that word is that I might be talking about fraud or suggesting that somebody told a lie to a court. And that is not what what i'm saying what i'm saying is they have a closet agenda that is more important to them than their ostensible agenda by the way i think that before we lose it the distinction between the warrant and the affidavit because now you're getting into the deep waters that we want to pursue but we still got to get these couple of

basic points i think all right yes so quickly, the warrant just is the judge signs it and it says what the agents are allowed to take. And importantly, because there's been a lot of confusion about this this week, the federal law requires the agents to leave a copy of the warrant in the premises after they've executed it. So President Trump has had this warrant, or his representatives have, since Monday when they did the search. And when he says that he demands now that they release it, he could have released it himself any time since Monday. He's had the warrant. You have to leave a warrant, and you have to leave an inventory, which is a listing of the items that you've seized and there's a variety of reasons for that not least it's an anticipation

of litigation later on if somebody says like you know um you the government sees this for me and the government says no we didn't you know somebody may come in and say they took 20 million dollars for me and the government says what are you talking about here's the you know here's the inventory one thing i'll check for 4.99 about that inventory though do they have to specifically list every piece of paper or is it sufficient to say we took a banker's box full of documents it's sufficient to do that because james otherwise the rest of our lives would be spent doing that. So it has to be specific enough to be a decent inventory, but it doesn't have to be that exact. So now the warrant affidavit, as we said, you have to have probable cause, both that there's a crime and that the evidence of it is going to be in a place you want to seize a search that is what is laid out in the probable cause affidavit which is sworn to by an fbi agent it's usually an fbi agent in federal investigations um it's generally written in

federal practice by the prosecutor i mean you consult with the agent because the agent has to be satisfied that it's true since he's going to swear to it. But the prosecutor generally writes it because the prosecutor is the one who knows what it takes to make probable cause of a statutory criminal violation. So that affidavit usually goes on for many pages, depending on how complicated the case is. It could be 10, 15 pages, or it could be a couple of hundred pages I've seen in some cases. Well, sure. Like we did when I had a big mafia case that we investigated for a couple of years before we took it down. And that went on for years and years, and it went on for pages and pages.

So the important thing about the probable cause affidavit is that is filed under seal with the court. It is not part of the warrant. You do not have to leave that. You never leave that on the premises to be searched and if i could just to to hammer this point home we criticize uh i certainly criticized the fbi a great deal for abusing pfizer yes and during the r Russiagate stuff. And one of my main critiques was that in FISA, there's too much temptation to violate the law because nobody checks your work. You know, the agent never, the agent and the government lawyer meet with the FISA judge,

and there's no defense lawyers, there's never going to be a defense lawyer because they don't anticipate there's going to be a prosecution. So the only due process an American gets is if they follow the rules in that meeting. That is not true in the criminal justice system. We hope we get honorable people in the criminal justice system, but what keeps people honest is they know their work is going to be checked. So even though that affidavit is not left in the place to be searched, if an indictment is filed and a prosecution follows, which generally does happen in a case where things are serious enough that you've gone to the point of executing a search warrant,

that stuff gets turned over in discovery to the defense. So if the government has lied to the point of executing a search warrant, that stuff gets turned over in discovery to the defense. So if the government has lied to the judge, or if there are errors in the warrant, or if it's a very shoddy investigation, it's not like FISA. You're going to be found out here, and there's hell to pay. Okay, so three quick questions before I turn you over to James. You think you're a tough guy, Andy. You've put away bad guys. You just wait, because James Lelix you over to james you think you're a tough guy andy you put you put away bad guys you just wait because james lelex is about to come at you but item item number one on the affidavit the signing agent has exposed himself to penalty of law that is to say he that's the point of an affidavit. If it turns out to be untrue,

he has perjured himself and can go and... Is that not correct? Sworn statement to a court, yes. This is a very serious matter. Item number two of three. Can we suppose that this affidavit was reviewed personally, if not written by, but at least reviewed personally, by the Attorney General of the United States? I would doubt that. Oh, you would? That he read the affidavit, I would doubt that. So how much does Merrick Garland know? He said he personally, in his little news conference the other day, he said he personally approved this. What does he know? At what level of detail

does he know what's going on?eter let's say the let's say the uh affidavit was 80 pages long uh and i'm the boss who has to review it i've read it and then merrick garland who i work for says to me so what do we got and i sit there and for five or ten minutes i summarize for him what the evidence is i don't think he needs to if he gets that i don't think he needs to read the warrant because if he read every single important thing and look there's nothing more important than a case like this but he can't there's not you know life is too short that's why you have subordinates uh so i i you know i give him slack on that. Okay. And then my third and final question before I turn it over to James, I'm confused. This is not me asking on behalf of listeners. This is me asking on behalf of me.

How do they get to choose which judge to give the warrant to? And can you clear up, who is this guy? Magistrate. And I keep hearing he's a judge magistrate not just a judge who the heck signed this thing and why did they go to him all right let me first let me explain what a magistrate judge is because there's been a confusion about this too a magistrate judge is not an article three judge like a district court judge who was appointed by the president on advice and consent

of the Senate. Magistrate judges work for the court. They're kind of quasi-judges, and what they do mostly is help the judges hash through their civil dockets, which require refereeing a lot of discovery disputes and that sort of stuff. So it's kind of like a junior judge who's appointed by the court, not the president. These are employees of the court, and they have fixed terms. I can't remember. I think it's seven years, something like seven years. But the court appoints them. There was some reporting this week that because this guy became a magistrate in, I think, 2018, that Trump appointed him. Trump did and i think 2018 that trump appointed him trump did not appoint him the court appointed him okay uh now it looks to me his name is reinhardt

um and it looks to me like he's a progressive democrat although he's apparently made a contribution to jeb bush uh as well but uh he's he's not only um made contributions to i think obama um he recused himself from a case that involved a dispute i can't remember if this is a defamation case but it's a dispute between clinton and trump and he got out of it because he said he couldn't be fair. And he's got a posting on Facebook where he's taking shots at Trump. So he's obviously one of these people who is an anti-Trump person. And I think it was a mistake for him to keep this case.

I think that it would have been much better for the Justice Department if a different judge had taken this. So do they have discretion? Why did they end up with him? They chose him? In different districts, Peter, they do it different ways. In the Southern District of New York, where I was, one judge is on what they call miscellaneous duty for about two weeks. You know, they go through the whole roster of judges, and each one of them is on duty for two weeks. The judge can refer things to the magistrate, but there's a magistrate who's on duty for two weeks the judge can refer things to the magistrate but there's a magistrate who's on duty at the same time the judge is um you don't always know depending on the district

which judge is going to be on duty but once the two-week period or whatever it is starts you know right because that's just they have to clear their calendar for a certain period of time so they would have even known that this guy was coming up on, you know, that his turn was coming up to be in that miscellaneous duty, or it would have been obvious. You know, I think they got this warrant on a Friday. So I'm sure by the end of the week, they would have known which judge was on duty that week and which magistrate was catching cases. We cannot eliminate the possibility that somebody at the Justice Department was waiting for a friendly to sign the warrant. We cannot eliminate that. No, in fact, look, this wasn't even thought to be, back in the old days, this wasn't even

thought to be gaming the system. Like, if I had a cooperating defendant, I would wait until the softie judges were going to be on duty because one of the things the miscellaneous judge does is take pleas. You know, among things they do is they, you know, they sign search warrants and title wiretaps and all this other stuff. But sometimes they take pleas as well. So you wanted to get your people you wanted to hammer. You wanted to get them in front of the hard ass judges. And then the other guys you wanted, you know, in front of the softies. But on the other hand, with something as big as this, as taking a step as unprecedented as this, you would think they'd want to be really careful to avoid any, any appearances of favoritism or impropriety. Or they're just so confident in the whole thing

that it's almost a dare. It's like, let's find somebody who contributed to Clinton, who also defended some Epstein people, and let's get a picture of him sitting in George Soros's lap. What are they going to do? I mean, or it could just be, well, any number of things. Yeah, but James, I got to say, the judges that they often deal with in the District of Columbia, who have all these, for example, the January 6th cases, those hundreds and hundreds of cases, they are such a layup for the Democratic Justice Department that, you know, they're used to getting softer touches than the judges are going to find in Florida. All I'm saying is that it's not that hard for them to find a judge that.

Oh, I imagine. I imagine not. So here's my question. And this goes back to something that you wrote on your piece. You had a quote saying that you were not given to bad legal takes. But but but but but but what if actually you say it is about January 6th and not whether or not he kept a menu. Then at some point you seem to suggest that the DOJ believes that Trump stopped the steal, posted January 6th, that all of this crossed over from the realm of ill-advised acting into actual criminal behavior, perhaps a criminal conspiracy, and that they were saying things, the administration and the people were saying things that weren't true, and that this constitutes a crime.

I'd like to know how, and if so, the difficulty of having to prove that in court, because even if it was true, it seems to be an extraordinarily subjective thing to prove in in court, because even if you even if it was true, it seems to be an extraordinarily subjective thing to prove in a court. And that would be a mess. Yeah, I agree with that. And I want to be clear, this is not a case I would bring. What I'm trying to do is figure out what the Biden Justice Department would do, which is a which is a very different thing uh and you know this is the biden justice department which is getting a lot of pressure from the democratic base which doesn't understand why trump hasn't been drawn and quartered already right so the reason i think this is this is all uh important is because they clearly ratcheted up, I would say theatrically ratcheted up,

their investigative energy in June when there was a revolt on the left about whether Garland was moving hard enough on this investigation and on Trump. So the theory, James, that the January 6th committee in the House is pursuing which i think the justice department is also pursuing based on reporting that that we can see is that i think there's two main crimes there's the crime of um corruptly obstructing congressional proceedings so it's obstruction of congress rather than obstruction of justice and that would be in connection with uh the january 6 count of the electoral votes and then the second thing and this is the more i think insidious statute that if i were on the trump

team i i would be worried about there is a there is a statute called Conspiracy to Defraud the United States. And I think when it was enacted eons ago, the Congress that enacted it meant by fraud what you would think fraud means, which is that, you know, you basically steal money. But the way the Supreme Court interpreted that statute in the 20th century, it's got such looseness in the joints that it covers anything that a prosecutor can dream up that amounts to a deceptive practice which prevents the government from carrying out one of its proper functions. Oh, great. So we have the emanations of the penumbra of the Commerce Clause. Fantastic. Yeah, pretty much. And this is basically, this was Andrew Wiseman's favorite's favorite statute for example in the mauler uh probe so as you can see there's a

lot of room uh to make mischief in in something like that so here's what i think they're where they're going and i think the players here are important as well uh in late june they served uh they executed search warrants against two lawyers john eastman and uh this guy jeffrey clark eastman of course was uh trump's go-to guy on on the constitutional theory that pence had the authority to discount electoral votes right uh jeff clark was the justice department lawyer who uh trump threatened to you know fire his acting attorney general and install uh clark uh clark was the guy who wanted to send a letter to the to the different states starting with georgia that said that the justice department was very concerned about fraud and they should think about reconvening their legislatures to consider voiding the popular vote and substituting the vote of the Republican-controlled legislature. Those two guys, they did search warrants on in late June.

After that, they gave grand jury subpoenas to Pence's two two top aides was it mark short and um greg jacob uh and then last week they subpoenaed uh pat cipollone and patrick philbin who were trump's two top lawyers in the white house counsel's office and the day after they do the raid in mar-a-lago they walk up on a street in pennsylvania to a member of congress scott perry and they give him a search warrant and take his cell phone just like they took the communications devices from eastman and clark who is perry in this equation he's not only a guy who was pushing very hard on the stop the steal stuff and contending there was a lot of fraud in Pennsylvania that should overturn the election. He's the guy who introduces Jeff Clark

to Trump. So to me, it's very obvious looking both at the way that January 6th committee looked at this transaction and the activity that they've been engaged in in the last six weeks, that they are looking very hard at this aspect of the investigation, which involves what they call the fake electors. I actually, I call them the contingent electors. They call them the fake electors. And this whole, the use of the Justice Department to put pressure on the states to change their electoral results. I think they're going for this conspiracy to defraud the United States on the theory that they were undermining the government's ability to count state-certified electoral votes. And the reason I say this is pretextual is the Mar-a-Lago

search happens in the middle of all this activity. The guy who owns Mar-a-Lago is the guy who's the main kahuna that they're trying to make the case on. And if you're going to tell me that everything else they've done is about January 6th, but the Mar-a-Lago search has nothing to do with that, it's just about classified information, I'm not buying it. Right. So not nuclear then. that that is just another red herring along with everything else um i don't think it's a red i'm not again i'm not suggesting that they're not interested in the classified documents i think they are interested in it they're just not as interested as they are in making the january 16th so hold on a second sure sure sure and then do you

so i mean at so if they hadn't done any it, if they hadn't decided to make this case against Trump and the rest of us, we all would have moved along. I mean, I'm trying to get my head around the severity of what they're accusing these people of doing, aside from offering their advice on various things. And I don't know. But at what point do you arrest Michael Lindell for making YouTube videos in which he believes that the election was stolen? I mean, at what point does somebody's protestation of the continuation of the idea of the stolen election cross into criminal behavior to the Department of Justice simply because you won't shut up about it. Right. So now you're getting to why I think this is not a crime. My bright line, James, is violence. I think that anyone, from Trump on down, if you have strong evidence that somebody conspired to use force against security personnel or against the Capitol,

everybody who did that should be charged with a crime as far as I'm concerned. But if you're not talking about violence, then particularly in the context that we just described about obstructing Congress and defrauding the government, you have two big problems. One is, and John Turley made a a brilliant remark uh observation about this referring to the remember the character in the vizzini in the in the princess bride where oh my goodness he says yeah he says um you keep using that word inconceivable oh yes so what john's point was very good very good by the way but john John's point was you can't prove that Trump knew that this was fraudulent and that he didn't really believe it by just saying it's inconceivable that nobody could believe this. I think Trump really thinks this was a stolen election.

So good luck trying to prove because it's you. This is a criminal case. It's not about the average person. The criminal case, you have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant intentionally committed fraud. And I think they're going to have a very hard time with Trump's state of mind. That's number one. And number two, just quickly, these two charges amount to criminalizing a frivolous legal theory. I don't think John Eastman said it. That's exactly right. I was going to ask you that very point. Because John Eastman put forward a legal theory about the powers of the vice presidency, which, as I understand, has never in American history been adjudicated.

He's as entitled to his theory, with which, on this very podcast, no less a legal expert than John Yoo, who after all teaches at one of the top ten law schools in America, John Yoo said, well, actually, I think there may be something to that. It depends on your interpretation of this phrase. This is the way lawyers think. It's particularly the way constitutional lawyers think. And you can't't that's not illegal yeah that's what i peter that's what i say i john has written uh john eastman that is

yes john you has written on this as well but john eastman has written like an 8 000 word defense of his theory now i don't agree with his theory but let's say it's not even colorable let's say it's frivolous it's bogus when i was a prosecutor i gotta tell you i mean frivolous legal theories are the coin of the realm if they were a felony i would have been indicting five felonies a day against defense lawyers i mean i just don't think for the sake of the country we want to go down the road of saying it's actually legal theory is it's it's a version of freedom of speech. You have to permit lawyers to test out different theories. You have to let kids going through law school what's frivolous, what isn't, what has better grounding in constitutional text and reasoning. You can't

say we're sending you to jail because you cooked up a theory with which the rest of us now decide we disagree. It's inconceivable! And how do you convince a lot of people that the election was stolen? You start jailing and putting in people who say the election was stolen. You know, not the ones who did anything about it, but just simply put forth a theory. So now, Andy, I'm gonna... This is truly my last series. By the way, I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to have you to ourselves, because doggone it, Fox News keeps going to breaks at all the wrong times. Just when I want a follow-up question from, what did McCarthy mean by that? Now I get a chance to ask.

Because he's not clear enough, damn it. Peter, you make an absolutely wonderful point, you know, and you're watching Fox. The problem is you can't watch the news in other countries. But if you had ExpressVPN, I'm sorry, I just wanted to do that. I'll do that later, but I just wanted to break away from the spot after you talk about how you didn't want to. Fox News, we can hear about the raid. Yeah, the raid. And nobody blushes for using the word.

Okay, so here are the theories on why they raided. One theory is that they raided because he took some documents he shouldn't have in violation of the Presidential Records Act. Andy McCarthy says, bogus. Not a chance they raided for that reason. Second theory is, although it's related to the first, but this is in the Washington Post as of this morning, that he took nuclear secrets. And as James said earlier before you came on, it's all over Twitter. Some of the crazier people on Twitter are saying, well, he was going to sell those secrets to the Russians or the Chinese. So they had to raid the house in the interest of national security.

And the answer to that has to be, are you kidding me? They knew he had nuclear secrets and was intending to peddle them and they let it go for a year and four or five months or however long it's been. And then the third theory is they're going to go after him on January 6th and they're going to go after john eastman and they're going to go after him on this very tenuous charge that you just laid out and if they do that that is political persecution and we have become a banana republic or it's intended to keep him from being able to run again that's a sub subset of political persecution andy well I do think that he'll be charged with that. I think it'll be a terrible idea. But, you know, look, Peter, I think, you know, Merrick Garland, who I I'm not pretending I know him well, but I knew him when I was prosecuting terrorists in the 90s. department the clinton justice department i liked him uh i thought he had good judgment and i know for example that if somebody came up to him and said you know here's what we ought to do we ought

to send the fbi out to investigate america's parents for protesting at the you know the woke curricula at the schools the merit garland i know would have known that was a loopy, stupid idea to do. But guess what? He did it. He did it. And it seems to me that when, you know, they try to keep a lid on their base as best they can. But when these guys get riled up and they say jump, the Biden administration goes how high? And I don't know of anything, including climate, the climate legislation of all time,

I don't know of anything they want more badly than they want Trump indicted. Okay. I keep saying this is my last question. This really is my last question. You're a man of some years, and you devoted a big part of your life to using the law in the interests of ordinary Americans and defending this republic. And you've devoted the years since to journalism in the interest of explaining the law and defending this republic. And I happen to know that you have a young son who has years to go, a long future ahead of him. How do you feel about the rule of the state of the rule of law in the United States of America today? And if you don't feel good about it, what on earth can be done? Well, I feel very not good about it. And I, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot recently because I think without knowing it, I was on the cusp of where it went wrong. in the 1990s which changed the culture of the fbi and federal law enforcement in general from

basically being what it was before was like the sort of federal version of cops and robbers it was straight law enforcement and i think once once uh terrorism started the the culture changed to national security and intelligence which even though we didn't realize it at the time, that's very different from law enforcement. It's almost night and day different. And we were talking a little bit earlier about the difference between FISA and how the criminal justice system, the way it works and the discovery provisions and the way you have to share information with the other side keeps everybody honest in a way that that doesn't exist on the national security side. I think when you deal with national security and foreign counterintelligence,

you're dealing in politics in a way and policy in a way that you're not in the justice system and you're you no longer feel as obliged to be transparent because you you convince yourself that what you're doing to to protect the country and save the country is more important than you know those those rules that we deal with in the in in the, in the criminal justice system. And I just think, I don't think anybody like, I don't think this was, was bad spirited on anyone's part. And I just, I'm not sure that we thought it through enough, but if I could make one change, I think at this point I would take away the FBI's domestic national security mission. I would take away the foreign counterintelligence mission and let them go back to what they did well, which is to to do crime, to do law and order.

And that should be the Justice Department's main role as well. And I would get another even though I don't like the idea of new agencies and new bureaucracies i think the brits and i used to argue i used to make the other argument so take take this with whatever grain of salt uh it should have i used to think it was a good thing that we had both the law enforcement and the national security mission under the same roof at the fbi because they could leverage each other, which they did during the counterterrorism period beginning in the 90s. And I always thought the Brits, that our system was better than the Brits, where they have a separate agency. MI5 and MI6, as I recall.

Right. But they're not law enforcement agencies. So they have a lot of surveillance powers, but they don't have police powers. And I kind of think now that we've had this experience of 20 or 30 years watching how that's not a it's a combustible mix. I mean, look, in the 1990s, when Jamie Gorelick put up the wall that didn't allow the law enforcement people to share information with the national security, the foreign counterintelligence people. Jamie Gorelick was a deputy attorney general or something correct and in the in the clinton under clinton right yeah when when when she did that um we took great umbrage at the suggestion that we would i mean the hypothetical problem and it was hypothetical at that time that she was worried about was that law enforcement agents who didn't have enough evidence to to bring a criminal case would pretextually use their national security

fisa surveillance authority to sit on someone for a long time until they you know use a lie that you had a national security angle to do this until they finally committed a crime, and then you leap on them and prosecute them. And I said back then, that's absurd. It's ridiculous to think that would ever happen, because on the national security side, you have to go up a whole different chain of command, and there's a million places, whether it's, you know, the top levels of the FBI and the top levels of the fbi and the top levels of the of the justice department they're never going to let you do that if you had a rogue you'd be better off lying about what your evidence was on the criminal side than trying to go visor but what i didn't what i didn't

factor in was the possibility that the headquarters the bosses would take over the investigation and when they want to do something abusive, there's nobody there to tell them no. You know, when I was a line prosecutor... James Comey does what he wants to do. Yeah, right. So I think that's the problem. I think that it just doesn't work.

There's too much... There's not only too much temptation to depart from the strong protocols that make the Bureau the Bureau on the national security side, it changes their ethos as an agency. lawden because he knew that gorlick would put up the wall which would prevent interop interagency operation which meant that bush would be free to commit 9-11 knowing that after bush did 9-11 the bureau would change in such a way that it would become instrumental in destroying anybody who threatened the power of the nomenclature down the road 20 30 years that's why bush lyden people died i think i think you nailed it or of this crooked timber shall know how straight be built and that this is what happens eventually in organizations become, they drift, they change, and something needs to be done.

So great. At least we know after talking to you, Andy, I'm a lot clearer than I was before on this and less inclined to blather misinformation as I'm prone to do. And I also have, you know, Peter saying, what can we do? We have a way forward about this, building on your comments on what changed in the institution after 9-11 and perhaps what we should go back to doing. Great ideas. I hope perhaps in the DeSantis administration, when you're running justice, we can get something about that done.

I know. I used to want McCarthy for governor of New Jersey. Now I want him for AG. Actually, I want him for president. DeSantis, your time will come. Guys, I don't need to be on the signature line of the indictments. I just need to stay out of the caption. That's my goal in life. Are you on the National Review cruise, by the way, that's starting up again? I am, yes, yes. Okay. Can you get me on?

Can you please put a word in there? I'd love to go back again, but we've got smaller ships. I think they have a lifeboat your size, don't they? Yeah, exactly. Well, it doesn't take much to have a lifeboat my size, frankly. It's in the kiddie variety. Andy, thanks. It's been a pleasure as ever.

We'll talk to you down the road. And, you know, good luck with Fox and the rest of them. And I hope somebody else besides Fox calls you because what you say needs to get out. You send Fox News a copy of this podcast and say, see what can be done when you don't cut for a commercial break every 90 seconds?

Great talking to you guys. I will. Take care. Bye-bye. Speaking of commercial breaks, I'm just going to do it. Grind all the gears and go right into what I mentioned before. ExpressVPN, did I not? Now, if you are a faithful listener to this podcast, number 605 and Ricochet, and of course, ricochet.com, where it comes from, you know that ExpressVPN is our VPN. And you might ask, why? Well, listen, here's one way of looking at it. Watching Netflix without using ExpressVPN is like going to a casino and

only being able to play the slot machines. I mean, why would you limit yourself like that, right? The big money is someplace else. Well, other countries have different content libraries, which is really fascinating. You know, and you, frankly, I love watching some shows, even if I don't understand a word that they're saying, because the visual style can be different, the women are just the locales, the storytelling, it can be fascinating to go other countries and look at what they got on Netflix. But how are you going to do that without a VPN? Well, you can't. So if you have no VPN and you're stuck here in America, then you only get access to a fraction of the content based on your location. But on your own, you see, you can change these things. With ExpressVPN, you can control

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he would tell you about Ricochet's great community and how people like to get together in real life. And he would be right. Texas Tribune Festival program is now live. Texas breakout policies, or I'm sorry, Texas breakout politics and policy ideas event is happening September 22nd through the 24th in downtown Austin. The lineup is chock full of big names you know and others you should, including a few from our own Ricochet network. Catch David Drucker as he interviews Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin and Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson

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Enter the code RICOSHAY15 in the promo code box at the bottom of the registration widget and click apply. Hope to see you there. Meetings galore coming up. Brian Stevens, he's hosting one in Atlanta over the weekend of the 19th. Michael Collins hopes to get UK members together in Dublin, Ireland

on the 26th of the month. I'd love to be there too. I'd love to be at the mall. We've got meetings coming up in Northern California, Huntsville, Alabama, New Orleans, various stages of planning. That's the great thing about Ricochet. And if you've gotten to the end of this podcast and you've never heard anything we've done before, you've missed

604 Ricochet podcasts. I implore you to go to Ricochet.com and discover the sane, civil, center-right community you've been looking for on the web low these many years. And if you do join Ricochet, hey, give us a place and time and tell us where you are. And the Ricochetti, as we like to be called sometimes, will come to you. Well, Peter, I don't know what to add to that.

We can do some pop culture thing with Rob not being here. I know Rob has been chomping and champing at the bit for a long time to talk about James Caan, but we probably shouldn't. I suppose I hate ending with a celebrity death. You know, I really do. I would like to end with a celebrity who is alive

and give them a round of applause before they shuffle off this mortal coil, for example. But then I keep going through the list of people who I think might qualify, and I wonder if they're alive or dead or not. But what we had this week was the passing of Olivia Newton-John, which occasioned much sort of knuckle-biting from a certain generation of men who recall her...

Our generation, let's face it. Yes, yes. Our generation, indeed. Which is strange, because she has such a squeaky good girl image. As somebody said about, you know, she was like Doris Day. Although, you know, Doris Day was married four times. She had that. And she had that good girl gone bad thing in Greece, which I never saw.

I loathe that musical. But then she did this physical thing in the early days of MTV videos, which I think readjusted her image quite nicely. But she's not been on anybody's radar for an awful long time unless you fire up the old Xanadu album because you've got a thing for listening to ELO, you're working with Gene Kelly, which nobody does. So, alas, it was too early, and there you go.

Do you have any particular memories? Only of watching her in Greece when I, what, would I have been in junior high, maybe? Something like that. Actually, and that's the, you just named three things. I had no idea. She did a workout show? No. I would have missed that, of course.

Physical. She did the song, Let's Get Physical, which is an early mtv hit because everybody's in their spandex and their leg warmers and the rest of it you know during during that whole craze well she actually talks about salacious things which you know coming from her was yes an epochal moment is upon us and i'm not talking about politics on monday unless i have miscounted and you will correct me instantly if i have this coming monday the final episode of a series to which you and i are both totally devoted will drop for all mankind better call saul oh i haven't watched an episode of it are you kidding me?

No. How did I get the idea? It's inconceivable. How did I get the idea that you were following that? Because everybody is. Because I think when we were having a conversation about this, and I was trying to text you, and it was not now. Saul's on.

Yes. Oh, you're being facetious. And someday I will. I'm a big Bob Odenkirk fan. I probably will someday. But here's the thing. It was attached to Breaking Bad, and I had the feeling like I have to go and watch eight years of that before I can get up to this. Apparently not.

Apparently you're supposed to. I don't know. It is odd that all of these things that I recognize to be absolutely fantastic with people that I really enjoy and the rest of it, I perfectly capable and and happy not having seen them i just am um there's no aching void in my life to see this if obviously so there are some shows i have to watch i just i have to but i find myself more and more these so what's the distinction why why why is that what what is it about a show you have to watch that's different from better call saul which you nearly should watch um i sometimes it's just that it has a it was recommended as such and i watched it and within the first five or seven minutes or so something either clicked or it didn't if it doesn't i just if i don't want to spend time with these characters i don't find the video interesting or the rest of it i just what you you can't tell. It could be a pheromone that comes off the television set.

I can't tell you. But sometimes it's almost like I am not watching this because everyone says I should. And I get, like, you get sort of mulish about it. That's Rob's attitude toward the game of thrones and i am sure that my life would probably be better if i watched this show and enjoyed it as much as everybody else does but the odd thing of it is that i find myself less and less drawn to episodic tv these days because it's such a psychological and intellectual and emotional investment to choose through all of these years of these things of a fictional story and become involved with the characters.

And I get that. I really do. And I'm not making an argument against it in any way, shape, or form. I just find myself gravitating, watching and studying old movies and trying to discern something from the culture and the times there as opposed to my own. I feel like i know enough about my times sometimes frankly and i'm not particularly happy in this time sometimes frankly uh and so i like studying what came before so i have a better grasp on how i got to this place on what culture used to be what the expectations were the language and the rest

of the stuff like that and i don't have an awful lot of time by the time i get around to it at the end of the evening sometimes i want to slip into the warm bath the familiarity of the stuff like that. And I don't have an awful lot of time. By the time I get around to it at the end of the evening, sometimes I want to slip into the warm bath, the familiarity of something I've seen. I watched This Old Man, which I enjoyed a great deal. I'm about to... That's the Boat, not Boat Bridges. Jeff Bridges. Jeff Bridges.

Yes, Jeff Bridges is 90 years old, and he's an injure. And I'm about to sit down and go through For All Mankind, which is a show that I dearly love, an alternate view of the future in which the soviets beat us to the moon and the space race intensified but you know here's what happens i have the vast menu that's available to me of all of these shows and i see i see the pain for saul right there and i realize this is quality stuff and i love bob odenkirk and all the rest of it and it's probably standalone and i could start at the, could start it. I could, it's 12 o'clock. I suppose I could, but then right down next to it

is another movie that I haven't seen in three or four years that I love and I know it. And it's almost like slipping into that warm bath of familiarity. Well, over the course of two or three nights while I was working, I have the bad habit that my daughter has as well, which is to watch things while you're also working on other things. Because if I know the movie, then I can just sort of surface for a moment to find my favorite parts. In this case, I hate to say it, it was 2010, the sequel to 2001, which I rewatch about every three or four years because it's a criminally underrated movie with great performances. Helen Mirren as Ripley, for God's sakes. So I watched this and at the end of it, I'm reminded that they use a very, very underwhelming version of Thus Sprach Zarathustra for the music.

That's not something you rush. You kind of go out and get the best version of it possible. Wouldn't you think? I think. Unless you run to the end of your budget. I guess so, but they got Lenny Bern not lenny bernstein's brother you know saul i don't know so the end of the movie comes up and i'm thinking well how did it sound in 2001 and lo and behold there on my streaming service is 2001 which i haven't seen in 10 years and i

start to watch it and now i'm fully gone with that. And I'm more interested in watching that movie for the third or fourth time and studying it from a distance of a decade than I am, frankly, in watching a bunch of criminals and low timers and the rest of even though I love Bob Odenkirk. So sorry, sorry, I will someday. But that's that's just it i'm becoming more and more um interested in previous cultures than i am in my own which is not that good a sign end of my rant how about yours no no no i just this is apart from anything else i just made notes for all mankind is a series that the and i have to take a look at this weekend. And I didn't know that anybody had made 2010. But Helen Mirren, I am not aware of a bad performance.

Helen Mirren is Russian captain of the ship. Oh, if she turned in a bad performance, it would be as a Russian cosmonaut. And she's not in bad performance. John Lithgow, Roy Scheider. Oh, these are serious people. To me, I think is an absolutely fascinating movie. It just is. And people hated it because they loved the Kubrick.

And this isn't Kubrick. It's Peter Hyams. But it's worth it. And it's a great period piece as well. Anyway, that's that. The Peter Robinson, James Lally on cisco and ebert show will be starting up in a whole new podcast series this week where he talks about one show he loves and then i say never saw it and talk about something else it'll be great don't miss it welcome uh back peter's

been great to have you i assume we get rob coming along sometime next week unless of course he is indeed dying bleeding in a marseille alley but But from the last photograph, he seemed to be up in a balcony with a cappuccino. Big surprise. Brought to you by Bowl and by Branch and by ExpressVPN. Support them for supporting us. And, of course, join Ricochet today. It's the best thing you can do. You will love it. It's cheap. You will meet people. Did I mention the fact that you have to pay to comment? Because that's what makes it different. That's why it's not accessible like Facebook or Twitter. And if you could just leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, it only takes a minute to do.

Or you could take five minutes and leave us a one-star. No, give us that five-star. The reviews help new people discover us, which keeps the whole maguila going. That'll do. Thank you for listening, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week, Peter. Next week, James. And you're right about Rob.

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