Conservative and sturdy so i guess we will do that the same way. Due to extreme planning i am so thrilled to announce that this here tonight is the World Premiere of andy after the release of the book which happened today. [applause] sometimes it just works out. Those who were here three years ago you may recall that andy spoke about some of those passings say hes at the center of attention for that and was the center of attention for the mueller pro handbook of collusion which we will be hearing about in a few minutes and also has some thoughts on the epstein case and if theres time and in your questions he can talk about that as well because he is always the center of attention. Thank you for coming. Ladies and gentlemen, mr. Andy mccarthy. [applause] thank you so much. She says its dumb luck. I think that she was planning this from the start. [laughter] it is a delight to be back here. I think we started to talk about coming back four or five months ago and i had such a great time the last time i didnt need to be asked twice. I think that it is sheer fortuity that it turns out to be on the day the book came out. The book is a big deal even for people who do what i do for a living. A book is something you really poll results into. This is a big day and im i am thrilled to spend it with you. I was even more thrilled, maybe not more, but i stepped off the plane and my phone is exploding because it turned out that Rush Limbaugh talked about the book on the radio today and she likes it, which is important. If hes going to talk about it, you want to make sure he likes it. So its just been i was totally blown away by that. I didnt know he was going to do that. When i got to the hotel, the first thing i did was give him a little note to thank him. He is great so of course he got back to me instantly and said sd there was something i forgot to say and im going to hit that tomorrow. [laughter] so its a double header for me. Its a great day all around. While we are talking about rush, how many married guys in the room . Okay so one of his favorite stories or lines is if a man is out in the forest and hes all by himself, nobody else around, if he makes a statement is he still wrong . [laughter] i was reminded of that today not only because its a great line and what actually got me into the collusion paper which a andy the time i got into it i dont think there was yet. It would be claimed in emails and that kind of evolved into collusion. But what made me so interested in the collusion narrative which is what the book is about. Its got to be made and i was fabulously spectacularly wrong about something that turned out to be very basic and that is back when i was a prosecutor i insisted eight ways to sunday in a very indignant way that it was possible it would never happen for the Justice Department and fbi would use their counterintelligence authorities as the pretext to conduct what actually was a criminal investigation that was done without a criminal predicate. And just so you know where im going with this, the theory behind and this wont be any surprise to any of you that follow this closely all this time. The real solution is that the Obama Administration put the wall enforcement apparatus of the government in the service of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and that included at its heart exploiting the counterintelligence powers our government is given in order to protect the United States from foreign enemies using those powers to actually monitor the opposition campaign. They would think that its against all odds and when they one that investigation, basically as a monitor on his administration to tie his hands and try to undermine his administration and make him unelectable which is the main goal. Just so you get the progression, i think what happened here is you have these counterintelligence powers, and they were used as a pretext to conduct. The criminal investigation was done as a pretext to spawn an impeachment come and be impeachment chatter is a pretext for what is the real agenda. That is what this was about at the beginning and the political narrative from the beginning. What was i so wrong about . Erica was good enough to mention eons ago i was a federal prosecutor. Towards the end of my tenure as a federal prosecutor, i started to handle National Security cases. It happened not out of any planning whatsoever. The planning was done by the geologists. They carry out the bombing of the World Trade Center in february of 1993 and it cost all of us flatfooted on the government decided to treat the National Security challenge as if it were a crime wave, and instead of the marines at the front line, what you got was me. Which is why we didnt do so hot for the first number of years. I had been a prosecutor for never worked for National Security cases. None of us have because they are not cases generally speaking. When you hear the National Security case and hear the expression for an in counterintelligence, these are not powers that we use generally speaking to create criminal cases, to develop evidence that you can present in court. The reason those powers are there is to protect the United States from threats and potential attacks by foreign powers and the idea is to allow us to monitor the threats and try to stop bad things from happening. I am from Law Enforcement and in Law Enforcement what happens, it doesnt happen in the trump russia investigation but what is supposed to happen in the country is a crime gets committed. We usually dont say there is a person like donald trump go out there and try to find a crime on them which is pretty much what he saw from the last number of years. So i knew nothing about how counterintelligence worked. And i barely kne knew him even though id been a prosecutor for the better part of the decade that the fbi actually has a nice job aside from being our premier Law Enforcement agency, the fbi is also our domestic security agency. Now what does that mean . In a lot of countries, there is a role that has to be carved out for Government Agencies to protect the homeland against foreign threats and those threats can come from outside attacks were people who are foreign agents working on behalf of the foreign Power Operating inside the United States. The idea is we are better off separating the Law Enforcement function from the National Security function of protecting the country against foreign threats. In our country what we have always fought is the best way to handle the challenge of the threats to security is to have those the wall enforcement and National Security mission housed in the same agency and the fbi so they have one side of their agency is the criminal Law Enforcement side coming into the other side is what is known as counter foreign intelligence or National Security. The reason we do it that way is the idea is the two missions can actually leverage each other. One of the best ways you can get intelligence for people is by developing criminal cases on them the cause and if you like they might be prosecuted, that gets them to talk. Sometimes the criminal prosecutions can help our Intelligence Mission and it can work the other way as well. We treated terrorism is eventually as a criminal justice problem. But that never made the National Security component of its go away or the National Security mission. And the reason thats important for what we are talking about tonight is on the National Security side we have a whole different set of powers of the criminal Law Enforcement and prosecutors commonly used. When i was a prosecutor if he had a mafia case and i needed to get a wiretap for my investigation working with the fbi, we wouldve used the criminal statutes are available. The reason its important to use the criminal statute is because we are dealing with the american criminal Justice System mainly dealing with americans and nonamericans. We are all presumed innocent. And our criminal Law Enforcement laws that congress has enacted account for and build in and assume all of our Due Process Rights as americans. There are protections builtin for people in the criminal justice rules. The National Security powers in the counterintelligence are different in the sense that the concentration on foreign counterintelligence is not americans. The concentration is the foreign power that may be a threat to the United States. And very often even when youre dealing with agents of foreign power that work here in the United States, they are not americans working for a foreign government, they dont have the same rights. So, one of the things that would have been in the eight years interim that i mentioned was when an investigation started, the fbi and Justice Department would try to figure out right at the beginning is this going to be a criminal case that we are going to try to do in court, or is this a National Security case where we are just going to try to collect evidence for the country, and that went on for a long time and it really shouldnt be the kind of thing that is a paralyzing decision to make. We should be able to go back and forth until everybody is acting in good faith. But one of the things the clinton Justice Department started to get very nervous about, with a kind of run their hands over was the specter, the hypothetical possibility of abuse. And what kind of abuse did they have in mind . They imagined a situation in which you had a rogue agent or set of rogue agents who didnt have enough evidence to make a criminal case. So rather than drop the case which is what you do in the Justice Department, we have lots and lots of cases if you dont have enough evidence you usually move onto the next one. Theres not enough time to do the stuff that they were worried about. What they were worried about is what if you had rogue agents that didnt have criminal agents and then rather than drop the case, in order to continue investigating because they felt like the people they were investigating were worthy of investigation or maybe corrupt reasons they wanted to take the case on them that rather than drop the case, what they would rather do this fabricate a National Security angle so that they could exploit the governments former and conduct it was a criminal investigation without a criminal predicate under the guise of the National Security powers. The worry that they had that that could happen which theres no evidence of it ever happening before, that resulted in something that a number of people im sure a lot of people in the room would remember were notoriously known as the wall. People remember the wall. This is a long time ago. All the rage in a big controversy in the big 1990s, but it was a set of regulations that the Justice Department interposed between the criminal investigation sid cited the fbis house and the intelligence side which made it impossible for those two sides to cooperate and compare evidence and it was a catastrophe. It probably led to the failure of our intelligence agencies including the fbi to detect the 9 11 plot before it happened. Im not blaming the government for the terrorist attack. But our failure to detect it and to do efficient intelligence collection and analysis we put this Administrative Law and was a disaster for americans in terms of our security because we couldnt get the full measure of what they call the threats mosaic a lot of people died. When the wall was established there was a lot of controversy in the Justice Department, and it pitted a number of people that were working the ticker was in cases like myself that rejected to it at the time and for one reason, the objection was on the basis of our honor. Basically you are saying that if we have these powers to protect the United States at our disposal we will use them pre textually. If you assumed i thought it was absolutely absurd to think that a rogue agent no matter how bad whatever export counterintelligence covers to fabricate a criminal case. The reason i was so confident about that wasnt because i think everybodys an angel and nobody would ever do something they shouldnt do. To use the National Security powers, they are not easy. You have to get a ton of approvals. So, from where i sat and this was somebody working day today with the people doing these cases, if you had a rogue agent and prosecutors would be easier for them to fabricate evidence to use the criminal procedures what i said again and again as that would be crazy to do because the bureau would never let anyone get away with it i was absolutely certain that it couldnt happen because he would have to give too many approvals. So, why was i so wrong . But i fail to assume is that there could be a case where the adult leadership to do the investigation themselves. The idea in the Justice Department and fbi has a very good idea is that we want investigations to be conducted in the places where either a threat to the United States exists or where the crime happens tha that is entirely consistent with the constituti constitution. The people that are closest to the event are always going to be the most efficient and gathering the evidence. They are going to have the best context. For the investigations to have an independent of the politics of washington, if the fbi headquarters does an investigation, they are right there in the thick of all of the politics. So, the idea is we want to insulate investigations from those kinds of considerations. So, for that reason with the fbi likes to do and what the Justice Department likes to do is have investigations carried out in the District Office where the relevant crime happened and then the fbi and the Justice Department headquarters can play the traditional role to of headquarters is supposed to play which is they are the leadership, they are the guardians of the standard, they make sure that everybody stays on the straight and narrow. There has never been a prosecutor as guilty of this as anyone who ever specified when you are working on an investigation especially if youre dealing with someone like terrorism or violent crime, you become convinced that your bad guys are the worst in the history of bad guys. And you rationalize and want to cut corners. You want to say why do i have to satisfy this threshold because what im dealing with is a problem with really bad people. And even if i dont have all the evidence i need, if we get a wiretap, we will get the evidenclook at the evidenceand. This is the higher calling, the better way to deal with it. And because we are all human and because we are all subject to that temptation, we need to have supervision which is detached in which tells us know, we dont do that kind of stuff. We dont take an Opposition Research from somebody that is working for a political campaign. They say for example if you want to go to the foreign Intelligence Surveillance courtt urges thwhich is the court thats National Security cases you must verify the information before you submit an application to the court. And while that is always important. In the fbi investigations, what we are allowed to do is monitor people for the government says there is probable cause not that they committed a crime necessarily, but that they are agents of the foreign power and operating on behalf of the foreign power in the United States they are publi called agr building the criminal investigation. You know why thats important . Criminal investigation keeps people honest. In the criminal investigation, its true that if i want to get a search warrant or i went to get a wiretap, or i went to get some other source of information where there was something in the law that allowed me to go to court and get an order tha to cl somebody to surrender the evidence to me it is true that i was allowed to go to the judge with my agent by myself. No defense lawyer, no defendant, no suspect, just us and the judge. But, in a criminal investigation, everybody operates under the assumption that eventually is going to be a trial. Eventually theres going to be a prosecution. Eventually the reason we are giving this as they are going to file an indictment and arrest people and when we arrest people, all the representations that we make to the court in order to get a sense are going to be turned over to the defense and the defense lawyers and they are going to go over every single line of every singles should see if we mislead the court. The court applied the best evidentiary hearing standard . Every single motion attacking the underlining basis of the evidence is going to be flushed out. So thats wha what people do itk in the criminal law are more honest than other people. They know what is in their selfinterest to be straight with the court because if they are not, someone is going to find out about it down the road and if that happens, there are going to be repercussions. Because we are only there to gather intelligence, we are not looking to make a case against somebody down the road, but the Justice Department and fbi are allowed to do i this go to the secret court that congress created in 1978 and present an application that says the person they want to surveilled with the person they want to monitor or spied on as an agent of a foreign power. The only due process, lets say you have an american, you have carter page as we have in the investigation, you have an american citizen they want to say is operating as an agent of russia, the only due process that american is ever going to get is the Justice Department and fbi play it straight with the court and the court forces them to comply with their own regulations which include making sure that you bring verified information only to the court. You basically have surveillance going on against people that are presumed innocent and who have a full array of Constitutional Rights and they never find out about it. That is what this was about through and through. When i started to write what became ball of collusion ultimately, i had a different idea about what it was going to be. I thought the way to do this is to compare the Hillary Clinton email investigation with the trump and russia investigation to take the case where they bent over backwards not to make the case, where they had a mountain of evidence of criminal activity. In the newer investigation, you lied to the fbi and you have prosecutors carry the clinton investigation you lied to the fbi and they get a medal and an immunity. No grand jury to speak of. Make all kinds of arrangements in the investigation they showed up at 6 00 in the morning or before if they needed to break into your house they broke into your house but they grabbed the evidence they wanted. If the person said no, they would make a deal to get the evidence did not look at it. Its a situation they bent over backwards not to make the case when they actually had real criminal of. And after two years they still were not able to do that. So, my idea was to try to prepare these two investigations into just pose that question whether you are a liberal or conservative, democrat or republican can you honestly look at these investigations ca can e either wayseeby the way, these s which were conducted by the same agents. I think over time i got away from it and the reason, i didnt get completely away from it but it turned out to be the hardest thing for the writer about Something Like this is to try to write something about a story that isnt over yet its a moving target and you dont know if you plant your feet and say this is what happened. You find out youre wrong about something and ive been wrong about enough. The challenge was to break off a piece of this that was sensible to treat that you could explain what really happened it was important enough to rate writing a book about. The collusion narrative that is fun for you never had a chance of being true. Its not just that it wasnt true but it never had a chance of being true. There were things that were false or preposterous. He had years and years that he dealt with ukrainian oligarchs that were described as tied to the kremlin and all that. Through the book of manafort come up with tax evasion, money laundering, stuff that they never prosecuted before something that i didnt have a dozen times in 50 years before they used it in this investigation you havent noticed what they never charged them with, they never charged him with being an agent in russia that is the whole thing but this is built on again and again its one thing to say they never brought a collusion case against him. They never even alleged that hes the guy this whole thing was built on so there were a number of things strewn throughout this not just the steel. Ca that is sometimes if it wasnt serious, some of it is laugh out loud. I believe that he mustve known that very soon after he took over the case. The second thing and i believe it to this as we have that dialogue back and forth, i am hoping that this narrative gets placed in a context we havent thought about up until now. Weve been so focused on the collusion story in a vacuum. When i try to demonstrate in the book is that the Obama Administration had an eightyear record of politicizing intelligence and using Law Enforcement processes to punish thpolitical goal enemies and scapegoats. When it got to the Hillary Campaign losing ultimately and they needed a rationale for why they lost, why would anyone think that they wouldnt be able to come up with one . Because this is what they do. The last thing i will say about this is like me bring you back to the last candidate debate between clinton and trump. When hillarys creatures, she was probably just speaking but thats what i hear something she was talking about she was talking about trump refusing three weeks before the election to say that the election was absolutely legitimate. Trump was saying that it could be rigged and in the american tradition we always say they speak and then everybody accepts the result. Cant you accept the result and he said no im not going to accept until after i see what happens. To question ththe question of le is attacking our democracy. And when she was finished saying he was attacking our democracy, obama went out the next day and said the same thing. He is attacking our democracy. He wont accept the legitimacy. The reason i want you to remember that as this as it was going on, the fbi and the intelligence agencies for the government of the cia in particular new as it was happening with russia was going to meddle in the election. They knew going back to 2015 that russia had its way into the democratic email accounts. In the counterpart in august of 2016 then obama in september of 2016 glared at putin and said we know what youre doing. Stop, we are not going to put up with that. Now, when Hillary Clinton reamed out of trump and obama did afterwards saying how can you question the legitimacy, understand the new racing we now know about russias interferen interference. Theres nothing whether it is through the investigation or through the cia and other agencies put out in january, 2016 theres nothing weve been told thats important about russias operations against the election that they didnt know when she was there standing there steering out of trump saying how can you question if this is legitimate. I look forward to your questions. [applause] and i else with index cards if you would like to pose a question that we will do the best we can. We are going to have some levity and this came from the Board Members we want to know is it true fox news wont let a person appear until they first people were here for that and you will be there on thursday. [applause] you may want to record. Im sure youll hear what a great talk. He told me that himself. To acknowledge what is right or wrong are they coming clean, are they still obfuscating, i realize they are under investigation but whatever you can say about that. Its interesting, the Inspector General at the Justice Department which is the office that reports of justice and congress, we were told by the attorney general a think that it was back in april but the investigation he was looking at the place of abuse and other things that it might be finished as early as may. Its still going on. What you hear in washington the reason its still going on as more people came forward to provide more information. If that is true i attribute it to the attorne attorney generalg a serious tone and making it clear to people he does intend to get to the bottom of this. In early to midseptember we will be able to answer that when the ears hear them. For those of us that are old enough to remember watergate, do you see the result as it comes out will it be as big of watergate. Its such a different media environment today than it was in 1972, 73, 74 and its such a big difference in terms of the scandal and the media is the wind at your back versus the wind at your face. The powers of used that should be one of the biggest scandals in the american history. I think that it will be treated that way, i hope that it will be treated that way in the history books that i am not holding my breath for the media to treat it that way. I think that this is worth noting we talk about the media all the time, but they lose a lot. Trump is president notwithstanding thapresident nota pushes against them with all its might and they are going to do that again. But i bet you that if you got to ask a president of th one of tht things he has going for him, he would say that his attacks on the media and the unfairness of the coverage really does resonate with people. So theres pushback against the media and they are much more ideological than they used to be plus the internet giving us the ability to Research Things on our own i just dont think the media punches above its weight the way that it used to. Why did he keep going understandinunderstanding of the we were getting saturated but it was unlucky to my mind unless he came out with something huge it would be old news now and also along those lines, why didnt the judge complained . Let me take the first part first and then we will get to the judges. The famous pets between peter and lisa page eight of the insurance policy and the idea was that in the highly unlikely event that trump one, they needed an insurance policy. The insurance policy kicks in after that thing has happened and the betting here from their perspective was trump being elected president and the insurance policy i believe was to have an investigation that would be a monitor on trump that would straitjacket him in terms of his pursuit on the parts of his agenda that the powers that be in the Obama Administration many of whom carried over into the next administration it wasnt necessarily to make the case as it was they were hoping to nick the case, but they want everythinwanted and to have thar on trump and heres something that i think is interesting they went back to get a fisa warrant from the carter page and each warrant by the way says the fbi believes carter page and perhaps others connected to the campaign were involved in russias Cyber Espionage so they come right out and say that. They got the warrant five times and the last time they went back to get one i believe it was ju june 2017 thats about a month or so after he took the investigation and i think that he is still sort of getting his arms wrapped around it. The reason i mention this is because they would have been due to go back to the court in september to get the warrant if they were going to extend it. To do that, that would have required them to reaffirm all of the things that were in the steel dossier and they didnt do that. They pulled the plug on the investigation. So, i always kind of look at that as the point in time that we can know that they really knew that this was not, this whole idea of trump in russia having a conspiracy to steal was bogus. There is the same theme will anything happen to them . My attitude about this is twofold. Number one, with the need to find out is what happened. And if we get a solid accounting of what happened, if it turned out that people violated the law in a way that is prosecutable, you can deal with at that point. The last time i wrote a book that didnt sell out when it came out, it was a book about impeachment and i didnt have the foresight to wait until trump was presented to write an impeachment book. Maybe it would have made a couple of bucks actually. But one of the things that struck me while i was doing the research for the buck was that a lot of things that are in the nature of abuse of power are not actually violations of the criminal code. Most things in fact, one of the most Debate Committee boasts is overstating but theres a lot of power that the Government Officials have that we have broad discretion to use and where you find abuse of power is usually where the Government Official is abusing the discretion that the law allows them. The reason that is worth noting is because criminal statutes are kind of blackandwhite. Constitutionally they are supposed to be written as they say that a person of ordinary intelligence knows what is forbidden. In a good criminal statute you dont really have a lot of room for judgment. Like bank robbery. Theres no judgment involved. You either robbed the bank or you dont whereas with the exercise of government authorities like shaddai unmasks somebody who is identity has come up in the intelligence reporting it says i can do that if its necessary in order to understand the intelligence significance of the reporting. Who decides the outcome and if i abuse my authority on that, who is going to say that its criminal and maybe if i did 100 times and its a pattern, thats one thing but once or twice, is that a crime . I dont mean to trivialize abuses of power because the plaintiff fact theyre a lot more important to the country than mere crimes because abuses of power are offenses against all of us. Thats why the framers did not require him indictable criminal offense in order to impeach an office holder. What they basically say it is if you abuse your power, you can be removed. This is a wonderfully simplistic question. When its all said and done, did russia do that much . I dont think so. A lot of it has been overstated. People throw stuff at you in some of the places i go when you say that. Russia did what russia does and this is what obama said right after the election until they flipped the switch and decided that this was the crime of the century we had about five minutes of time where they basically said it wasnt you cant steal a federal election as it is constituted because we dont have a federal election. We have 50 different state elections and they all have different rules and the like. But the other thing, and i tried to make this point in the book, two things to think about with this. Umber one, russia has been interfering with american elections since the bolshevik revolution. They do this all the time. They always do this. This type of the medias attention because it didnt happen to be designed to help democrats. It was historic. The fact is that this is what russia does. Theyve allowed the awful regime and this is the kind of stuff they do. Because we are now a cyber techno society, they are advancing their tools but they are not doing anything they didnt always do. They try to disrupt and metal and the like. The second thing about that is the country that i think more than any other in the world interferes in the affairs of other countries is ours. [laughter] that is a fact. We interfere and one of the reasons putin was supposedly up about 2016 is because he thought Hillary Clinton interfered in Russian Affairs back in 2011. In their narrow elections. Obama tried to knock off netanyahu and clinton publicly said that he did years before. Obama tried to derail and said if they do it, people will be at the back as he put it. I know you are not supposed to say this, but this is what great powers and even not so great powers do in the world when they are dealing with foreign governments that have interests of consequence to our interests. We try to influence them and the bad thing that has gone on the last two to three years is this is going to make life much harder for the american intelligence agents that have to operate in dangerous parts of the world getting what we want them to do, which is gather intelligence and also interfere with the plan of governmen the t that might harm the United States. Are there any grounds they are . I know that word gets used very loosely, but can you discuss that . There is a standard for impeachment, high crimes and misdemeanors. They had a very solid idea of what they meant. They had a contemporary example on hastings wa who was a governr general, british governor general in india and hamilton writes about them and says basically that they are political offenses and what he means by that is they are abuses of power directed at the body politic, not ordinary crimes and they are much more in the nature of ibb if they were always much or in the nature of the military law then federal, civil, ideas like conduct unbecoming abuse of power in the dereliction of duty and that sort of thing. So, we do have an understanding of people who say high crimes and misdemeanors, what does that mean. We have an understanding of what it means in the constitutional sense. Now also down here on planet earth, it was about 1970 when gerald ford was the minority leader of the house of representatives and they were trying to impeach William Douglas who was a justice of the Supreme Court and then he was asked about what an Impeachable Offense is and he said it is whatever the house of representatives decides it is at any given moment in history. They can fire articles of impeachment about anything. All they need to do it happens in the senate trial. Articles of impeachment only require a simple majority in the house of representatives to be filed. You need a two thirds supermajority in the senate to remove the president , and that high requirement for the removal has historically not that we have almost no impeachment. We have less than a handful of experiences with impeachment and for the most part, its because even in the house, if people think that a president deserves to be impeached, they realize that its to try at the top and it wont happen. So the design here is ingenious because the supermajority means that no president will ever be removed unless the conduct is so egregious that people on all sides of the ideological spectrum and partisan divide can agree the president needs to be removed and i dont think that we are anywhere close to that. Someone wants to know when we can expect the audio book. That is a great question. This is kind of a long book and it might take a while to get onto that. I havent even thought of that so thank you for that question. I will take it up with roger who is my publisher. Regarding the fbi, can its reputation come back, or maybe it shouldnt come and what the higherups face prosecution when it all comes down . When your reputation takes a hit, it takes a while to rebuild it. I agree with what attorney general barr has said about this what he has been able to detect it seems that there was a failure, it was that the managerial ranks of the bureau and the Justice Department, not the rank and file were most of the investigation is done. Im also sensitive to something profound that victor davis wrote, i want to say about two months ago which is that a lot of the worst that we seen in the conduct of some of the fbi agents, i think victor was talking in particular about peter and andrew mccabe, he noted that they came up through the ranks and he deduces from that that there may be something endemic in the agency that when it finally wises to the managerial level it is problematic. My experience in government is when you bring good people and, that has an electric effect through an agency and when you have people who are not so good then people run them off and you see the worst things that you fear. This is related to the reaction, the question was well printed under President Trump been fighting back and what can anyone do in that situation . I have been saying from the beginning that i think what he couldve done, there has never been a day since donald trump has been president , he could not have declassified and unsealed and publicized any of the intelligence files that he thought were necessary in order for the public to understand what happened. Now, there may be a variety of good reasons why he has not done that, i talked in the book about this, and for one thing, the way that this insurance policy was designed, every time trump did anything to fight back, the other side said he was extracting investigation. Its a convenient box of the pediment and if he had unsealed and put out public and a bunch of information, the next thing that wouldve been squealed was obstructing the investigation and undermining muellers ability to question witnesses without people having their story straight and the like. I was not terribly overblown by that explanation or terribly persuaded. But i see the sense of it. The other thing i would caution people, this is just on the basis of having written about a zillion search warrant affidavits and wiretap affidavits. And every investigation has a theory of the case. And what you write to record in order to get permission of a search of any kind whether wiretapping or physical search or search somebody house, submission that you make to the court is going to tend to echo your theory of the case right, the fbi and the Justice Department theory of the trump, russian case is that trump was bought and paid for by putin and that putin had him compromised whether in a personal nature or a variety of corruption whether financial corruption, political corruption and so on. Now, do not get me wrong, i am not saying these things happen, i am saying if that was the fbi theory of the case in the Justice Department theory of the case, what do you think the underlying submission and memoranda are going to say, they will be a reflection of the theory, even if it is not true in the things that they said about trump being imprudent pocket are not true, if that information sees the light of day it will not be flattering to the president. And theres a certain percentage of people, we all know this, whether something is true or not is beside the point. Can it be used by the tribe, does it help our side . Thats only thing of importance, for that reason the president may be gun shy about putting out information in the third and final thing, what you notice looking hard at the collusion table in the trump russia investigation is there is an awful lot of participation by Foreign Intelligence Services. And when we take information from Foreign Intelligence Services whether we should take it or not and whether they are in the wrong or not, we take it pursuant to agreements that we have with them that we will never compromise the information or where we got it from. I am sure part of whats going on behind the scenes that we do not see but here about is probably a brawl between the political people and the intelligence people, the political people would like to get the information out in the intelligence people are telling them if we put the information out it will rupture our relationship with x, y, and z government and that is not a small thing because we actually do rely on our partners for purposes of security, it is a big problem. It was only a matter of time with that suicide. [laughter] i will never tell. One thing i said, i worked i worked about a quarter century in the government and what he learned, never to assume the theory is conspiracies when sheer incompetence is a possible explanation. [laughter] [applause] so, i see nothing that ive seen so far to depart at all from that role. The mcc, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in new york is not as terrible as what some of the stories youve been reading in the last week or so indicate compared to a lot of state prisons, it is nirvana probably. But as federal prisons go it is a lousy prison. It has about a hundred it is a Holding Facility in federal, i think the state uses the same thing. That is to distinguish it from what would be like a designation present. The distinction is, who the Holding Facility is a patient he people whether cases are pending, they have to be able to meet with her lawyers still presumed innocent, have not played guilty and after your guilty then they send you to some penitentiary someplace in the rules are much different. And the mcc tends to be grossly understaffed and the stories i am reading in the last week about not only people being forced to work overtime, day after day after day, but taking people who actually werent trained Prison Guards and putting them in that position, that does not surprise me too read that stuff. What i think people ought to be angry about, and the answer to the question is yes, i think he committed suicide until we see something that indicates something different, i will believe that. But epstein and rich wrote a great piece about this yesterday or today, i just saw it today. But the thing that automate people really rapidly angry about epstein is how we was accommodated by the system at every step of the way. From the time he was committing these atrocities when he was given a slap on the wrist by the Florida Authority and even better from the federal authorities to the very end when evidently he tries to commit suicide or least indication of that two and half weeks ago and his lawyer, highpower lawyers to come marching into the prison and they demand that the suicide watch be taken off of him. In the prison accommodate that. How do you accommodate a guy, if you really thought he mightve committed suicide two weeks ago, you do not accommodate that, i would not have entertained a meeting with the lawyers about that. So it seems to me, eric and i were talking about this before in a number of the people we were talking to earlier, the whole idea and i started with this so is probably fitting to get to it again, the idea of two standards of justice, the twotier system where people who are insiders and connected or at least friendly to the powers to be at one quality of justice and everybody else gets a different quality of justice. What is really sickening is epstein, every step he got a real high quality of justice that the rest of us could not expect to get. I think they are starting to line up the books so will indent with the nonbinding, will President Trump be reelected and against whom will he run . [laughter] i think yes, he will get reelected, there is a long way between here and there and i dont know that we have seen the entire democratic field. This is not my area, theres a lot of people who would be better on this than i would. I have a feeling about one, in some ways is a hope. [laughter] but i just think, what i have seen up until now, i think she presents well, i think her ideas are not but she is thoughtful about them and she has an energy, i dont think biden is a serious candidate. Its hard to say somebody is not serious and they been the front runner for so long, but lets see whether they have the last draw or not. Thank you so much for coming and thank you for i think we all feel that way. [applause] thank you. Thank you. A pleasure to be here thank you. [applause] [inaudible conversations] you are watching the tv on cspan2 with top Nonfiction Book authors every weekend, booktv, television for serious readers. Wednesday night on book tv the theme is space, sarah reports on the use of technology in space to study archaeology, Edward Hudgins author of space, the freemarket frontier talks about sending humans to mars and historian recount president kennedys commitment to space expiration in the 1969 moon landing. Watch wednesday night beginning at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan2. Washington journal live everyday with policy issues that impact you, coming up wednesday morning, looking at the Disaster Response at the federal level with michael greenberger, director of center for health and Homeland Security of the university of maryland. Then we talk about the Republican Party in campaign 2020 with Washington Examiner executive editor philip klein. Also peter shea the attorney for the flores agreement will discuss the agreement and the ministration move whole families indefinitely. Be sure to watch cspan washington journal live at seven eastern wednesday morning, join the discussion. A look at the live coverage for wednesday. On cspan at 10 00 a. M. Eastern, a group of state department officials
comparemela.com © 2020. All Rights Reserved.