Transcripts For CSPAN2 Andrew McCarthy Ball Of Collusion 20240713

Them for you so theres an advance announcement for that. Some of you may remember andy was here three years ago and it was august so we are conservative and 30 so i guess weve always had to do that the same way and due to extreme planning on andy and my part, including double lot i am so thrilled to announce that this year tonight is the World Premiere of andyafter the release of his book which happened today. Sometimes that just works out. Those of you who work here three years ago may recall andy spoke about blind shake and some of those passings so hes the center of attention for that. He was at the center of attention with the Mueller Probe and the book of collusion which you will hear about in a few minutes and has some thoughts on the epstein case and if theres time in your questions he can talk about that as well because hes always the center of attention so thank you so much for coming and ladies and gentlemen, mister andy mccarthy. [applause] thank you so much erica, thank you joel. Erica says its dumb luck and i think erica wasplanning this from the start. But its a delight to be back here. I think we started to talk about coming back for her five months ago and i had such a great time here last time, i didnt need to be asked twice and i just think its sheer fortuity that it turns out to be 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 pour yourself into so this is a big day and im just thrilled to spend it with you. And i was even more thrilled, maybe not more thrilled but i stepped off the plane and my phone was exploding. Because it turned out that Rush Limbaugh had talked about the book on the radio today. And he 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. And when i got to the hotel, the first thing i did was a him off a little note to thank him. And he is great so of course he got back to me instantly and he said you know, there was something i forgot to say and im going to hit that tomorrow. So its a doubleheader for me. Its just a great day all around. And while were talking about rush , how many, you married guys will notice, how many married guysin the room . One of russias favorite stories or lines is if a mans out in the forest and hes all by himself, theres nobody around. If he makes a statement, is he still wrong . And i was reminded of that today. Not only because its a great line and rush was so great today. But because what actually got me into more deeply into the collusion take caper which at the time i got into it i dont think you can there was a collusion caper yet read it seemed to me it was the Clinton Emails caper and that kind of evil into collusion. What made me so interested in the collusion narrative which is what the book is about is, and this is an uncomfortable confession to make but its got to be made. I was fabulously spectacularly wrong. About something that turned out to be very basic. And that is back when i was prosecutor, i insisted eight ways to sunday in a very indignant way that it was impossible. That it would never ever happen that the Justice Department and fbi would use what are known as their Counter Intelligence authorities as a 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 ball of collusion and this will be any surprise to any of you who have followed this closely all this time is that i think there really was collusion in connection with the 2016 collection. But the real collusion was not this fable about donald trump and russia. The real collusion was that the Obama Administration put the Law Enforcement and intelligence apparatus of the United States government in the service of the Hillary Clinton campaign. And that included at its heart exploding the counterintelligence powers that our government is given in order to protect the United States from foreign enemies. Using those powers to actually monitor the opposition campaign. And when trump against all odds i think even the president himself would think it was against all odds. When he won, that investigation was used recently as a monitor on his administration, to tie his hands and try to undermine his administration and make him unelectable which i think was the main bowl. 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 a criminal investigation without a crime. The criminal investigation was done as a pretext to spawn impeachment chatter and the impeachment chatter is a pretext for what is the real agenda here and that is that by sometime at the top of the autumn of 2020, their hope is to make donald trump unelectable. And i think that was what this is about the beginning and it was a political narrative from the beginning. Now, what was i so wrong about . Erica was good enough to mention that back eons ago, i think it was the pleistocene era, i was a federal prosecutor. Toward 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 jihadists. They carried out the bombing of the World Trade Center in february 1993. And it caught all of us flatfooted. Our government decided to treat a National Security challenge as if it were a crime wave. And instead of the marines at the frontline what youve got was me. Which is why we didnt do so hot for thefirst number of years. But i had never worked, i had been a prosecutor for a fairly long time but i had never worked nationalsecurity cases. None of us had because theyre not cases generally speaking where you hear National Security case and you hear the expression foreign 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 of these powers is to allow us to monitor those threats and try to stop bad things from happening. Im from Law Enforcement. Law enforcement, what happens, it didnt happen in the trump russia investigation but whats supposed to happen in this country is a prime gets committed, and then we assign a prosecutor to investigate the crime. Usually we dont say theres a person like donald trump. Go out there and try to find a crime on him which is pretty much what we saw for the last number of years. So i knew nothing about how counterintelligence worked. And i barely knew even though i had been a prosecutor for the better part of a decade that the fbi actually has a night 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 theres a role that has to be carved out for Government Agencies to protect the homeland against foreign threats. And those foreign threats and come from outside attacks or they can come from people who are foreign agents working on behalf of a foreign Power Operating inside the United States. In some countries like britain for example, the idea is were better off separating the Law Enforcement function from this National Security function of protecting the country against foreign threats. In our country what weve always thought was the best way to handle the challenge of foreign threats to security is to have both a Law Enforcement and National Security mission housed in the same agency, the fbi though they have one side of their agency is the criminal Law Enforcement side and the other side is whats known as foreigncounterintelligence. But that never made the National Security component of it go away or the National Security mission. And the reason that is important for what were talking about tonight is, on the National Security side you have a whole different set of powers than what criminal Law Enforcement and prosecutors commonly use. So when i was a prosecutor, if we had a mafia case or a big drug case or Something Like that, and i needed to get a wiretap for my investigation working with the fbi we would use the criminal statutes that are available and the reason it is important to use the criminal statutes because were dealing in the american criminal justice system, mainly dealing with americans although an awful lot of nonamericans. Were all presumed innocent and our criminal Law Enforcement laws that congress has enacted account for, build in, and assume all of our Due Process Rights as americans. So there are protections built in for people in the criminal justice rules. The National Security powers in foreign 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 were dealing with agents of foreign powers here within the United States, theyre nonamericans, theyre working for a foreign government, they dont have the same array of rights, right . One of the things that would happen in the eightyear interim that i mentioned was when an investigation started the fbi and the Justice Department would try to figure out right at the beginning is this going to be a criminal case were going to try to do in court or is this a National Security case where were just going to try to collect evidence, collect intelligence to try to protect the country and that went on for a long time. Really shouldnt be the kind of a thing that is a paralyzing decision to make. We should be able to go back and forth if everybody is acting in good faith but one of the things that the clinton Justice Department started to get very nervous about, theyre nervous guys, but what they kind of wrung that are 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 agent who didnt have enough evidence to make a criminal case. So rather than drop the case, which is generally what you do in the Justice Department. We have lots and lots of cases. If you dont have enough evidence to make a case you move on to the next one. There is not a lot of time to do the story they were worried about. What they worried about, what if you didnt have rowing agents didnt have criminal evidence. Rather than drop the case, in order to continue investigating because they really felt like people they were investigating were worthy of investigation or maybe corrupt reasons they wanted to try to make a case on them, rather than drop the case what they would do is it be bring kate a National Security ainge fabricate a National Security angle to exploit the governments foreign powers intelligence powers, conduct a criminal investigation without a criminal predicate under the guise of our National Security powers. And, this worry that they had that that could happen, which there was no evidence of ever having happened before. It was something they decided to cook up and kind of worry about, that resulted in something that a number of people im sure a lot of people in this room will remember, notoriously known as the wall. People remember the wall . This is a long time ago. This was a, all the rage in a big controversy in the mid1990s but the wall was a set of regulations that the Justice Department interposed between the criminal investigations side of the fbis house and the intelligence side, which made it impossible for those two sides as a practical matter to cooperate and compare evidence. Remember all the talk back in the day about connecting the dots and idea that you have to know what the dots are before you can even correct them, connect them and what we did for those eight years was basically the left hand didnt know what the right hand was doing. 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. That is not, please understand what im saying. Im not blaming the government for the terrorist attack. Terrorists are responsible for the terrorist attack but our failure to detect it, our failure to do efficient intelligence collection and analysis was because we put this cockamamie administrative wall between the two sides and it was a disaster for americans in terms of our security because we couldnt get the full measure of what they call the threat mosaic. We couldnt understand where the threats were coming from. And it was, a lot of people died. So back when the wall was first established, there was a lot of controversy in the Justice Department and it pitted a number of people who were working terrorism cases like myself, who objected to it vigorously at the time. And for one thing, the objection was on the basis of our honor. You know, basically were saying, youre saying that if we have these powers to protect the United States at our disposal, that we will use them, well lie to the court, well use them pretextly, we were pretty indignant about that. That seemed understandable at the time but the other thing, the more practical thing, and this is what i was, now we finally get to what i was so wrong about, if you assumed a rogue agent, i thought it was absolutely absurd to think that a rogue agent, no matter how bad, would ever exploit counterintelligence powers to fabricate a criminal case and the reason i was so confident about that wasnt because i think everybodys an angel and nobody would ever do something they shouldnt do. The reason was it didnt make sense for them to do it. If you assumed a rogue, there is a whole different layer and set of rungs of approvals that you have to go through in the government and in the Justice Department to use the National Security powers. Theyre not easy. You have to get a ton of approvals. So, from where i sat, and, this was somebody who was working daytoday with the people who were doing these cases, if you had a rogue agent and rogue prosecutors or whoever, it would be much easier for them to fabricate evidence to try to use the criminal procedures than to fabricate a National Security angle to try to use those powers and what i said again and again was, that that would be crazy to do because the bureau would never let anyone get away with it. And if the bureau let them get away with it, the Justice Department would be there to backstop it. So i was absolutely certain it couldnt happen because you would have to get too many approvals. There would have to be too many people in on it. Why was i so wrong . , what i failed to assume was there could be a case where the rungs of approval, the adult leadership, the people who run the organization, actually decide to do the investigation themselves. You know the idea in the Justice Department and in the fbi is 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. That is not only consistent with the constitution, it also is Good Practice for two reasons. One, the people who were closest to the event will always be the most efficient in gathering the evidence of it. They will have the best contacts, they will have the best knowledge of the community. But the other thing that the fbi and the Justice Department want is for investigations to happen independent of the politics of washington. If the fbi headquarters does an investigation, theyre right there in the thick of all of the politicking. So the idea is, we want to insulate investigations from those kinds of considerations. So for that reason, what the fbi likes to do, what the Justice Department likes to do is have investigations carried out in the District Office where the relevant crime happened or the evidence is, and then the fbi and the Justice Departments headquarters can play the traditional role that headquarters is supposed to play, which is, theyre the leadership. Theyre the guardians of our standards. They make sure that everybody stays on the straightandnarrow. I can tell you having been a prosecutor for 20 years, there has never been a prosecutor, im as guilty of as inwhoever spent five minutes doing what i used to do, there has never been anyone who hasnt been tempted to press the envelope in their own cases. When youre working on an investigation, especially, if youre dealing with like terrorism or violent crime, you become convinced your bad guys are the worst bad guys in the history of bad guys. And you rationalize. You want to cut corners. You want to say, why do i have to satisfy this threshold because what im dealing with here is a real problem with really bad people. Even if i dont have all the evidence i need, if we get a wiretap, well get evidence and well figure it all out. You want to cut corners. Not because youre a bad person. You convince yourself youre dealing with evil. This is the higher calling this is the better way to deal with it, right . And because were all human, and because were all subject to that temptation, we need to have supervision there which is detached which tells us no, we dont do that kind of stuff, you know . We dont take an Opposition Research screed from someone working with a Political Campaign and is operating on hearsay information that is two or three times removed from the facts and we dont slap a caption on the front of that and bring it to court, say, heres our warrant. We dont do that kind of stuff. Youre supposed to have your supervision there to say, we have rules that say for example, if you want to go to the foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, which is the court that handles National Security cases you must verify the information before you submit an application to the court. And, while that is always important, it is always critical, for the honor of the Justice Department and the credibility of the Justice Department with the court, it is always important to corroborate your information before you bring it to a court, its especially important in foreign counterintelligence. In fci investigations what were allowed to do is monitor people who the government says there is probable cause, not that they committed a crime necessarily, but that they are agents of a foreign power. That they are operating on behalf of a foreign power in the United States, in a clandestine way, against our people and against our government and against our nation. Thats what these powers allow us to do. They are intelligencegathering powers. They are not again for building a criminal investigation. You know why that is important . Criminal investigation keeps people honest. In a criminal investigation its true that if i went to get a search warrant or i when to get a wiretap or get some other source of information where there was some thing in the law that allowed me to go to a court to get an order to compelled someone to surrender evidence to me, it is true, that i was allowed to go to the judge with my agent, by ourselves. No defense lawyer there. No defendant there. No suspect there. Just us and the judge. But in a criminal investigation everybody operates under the assumption that eventually there is going to be a trial, eventually there is going to be a prosecution. Eventually the reason were doing this is were going to file an indictment and arrest people. And when we arrest people, all the representations we make to the court, in order to get evidence are going to be turned over to the defense and to the defense lawyers and they are going to go over every single line of every single submission to see did we mislead the court . Did the court apply the correct evidentiary standard . Every single motion attacking the underlying basis for collecting evidence is going to be fleshed out. So it is not that people who work in criminal law are more honest than other people, they know it is in their selfinterest to be straight with the court because if theyre not, someone will find out about it down the road. If that happens, theyre going to be repercussions. That is not how it works in foreign counterintelligence. In fci, because were only there to gather intelligence, were not looking to make a case against somebody down the road, what the Justice Department and fbi are allowed to do is go to a secret court that congress created in 1978 and present an application that says that the person they want to surveil or the person they want to monitor, the person they want to spy on is an agent of a foreign power. The only due process, lets say you have an american. Lets say you have carter page as we had in the trump russia investigation. You have an american citizen who they want to say is operating as an agent of russia. The only due process that american is ever going to get is if the Justice Department and the 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. And if they dont follow their own rules, and if the judge doesnt make them follow their own rules, then, you basically have a dragnet. You have, you have, surveillance going on against people who are presumed innocent, who have a full array of constitutional rights, and they never find out about it. What we found out in this investigation, that was precisely what they did, but they did it for the purpose of monitoring a Political Campaign. That is what this was about, through and through. When i started to write what became ball of collusion i had a different idea what it was going to be. I thought the way to do this, compare the hillary Clinton Emails investigation with the trump russia investigation. And ask whether any objective person could look at both of them to say the same degree of justice as afforded to both sides. [laughter]. To take the case where they bent over backwards not to make the case. Where they had a mountain of evidence of criminal activity. You know in the Mueller Investigation you lied to the fbi you bottom prosecuted. The clinton investigation you lied to the fbi, they gave you a medal and immunity, right . No grand jury, to speak of, right . Make all kinds of arrangements. In the Mueller Investigation they shed 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 evidence they wanted, right . In the clinton investigation they said pretty please. If the person said no. They would make a deal to get the evidence but not look at it. Or not look at big sections of it. Youre talking about a situation where they bent over backwards not to make a case. When they actually had real criminal evidence, versus scorching the earth to try to find a case where there wasnt one. After two years they still werent able to do it. So my idea was to try to compare these two investigations and just pose that question. Whether youre a liberal or a conservative, whether youre a democrat or a republican, can you honestly look at the two investigations say, by the way, these two investigations were conducted by the same agents, the same investigators, the same Justice Department personnel and say, that they did blind justice . There is not a chance, right. So that was my idea, and i think over time i got away from it, and the reason, i didnt get completely away from it, but it just turned out to be, the hardest thing for a writer about Something Like this is to try to write something about a story that isnt over yet, it is all a moving target, you dont know if you plant your feet you say this is what happened, you find out three weeks after the book comes out or three hours before the book comes out and rush isnt there to help you, you find out youre wrong about something. I have been wrong about enough, if i havent been clear enough about that. So the challenge here i think became to try to break off a piece of this, that it was sensible to treat, that you could, you could explain what really happened, that it was important enough to rate writing a book about. I think the collusion narrative fits all of that. What i hope people take away from the book, is a couple of things, number one, the collusion narrative that was spun for you, never had a chance of being true. It is not just that it wasnt true. It never had a chance of being true. It was built on things that were actually false and preposterous. Beginning with the idea, they talk about Paul Manafort as the big lynchpin of all this, the guy who was Trumps Campaign chairman for a few months and he had years and years that he dealt with ukrainian oligarchs who were darkly described as tied to the kremlin, all that jazz. Did you notice that mueller threw the book at manafort, everything you can imagine. Tax evasion, money laundering, stuff they never prosecuted before, failing to register as a foreign agent, something prosecuted half a dozen times in 50 years before they used in this investigation . You notice what they never charged him with . They never charged him being with an agent of russia. This is the guy the whole thing is built on, right . Again and again. One thing to say they never brought a collusion case against him. They never alleged he was a an agent of russia, the guy 24 whole thing was built on. There are a number of things strewn throughout this. Not just the steele dossier, sometimes, if it wasnt so serious, some of it is latch out loud false. This thing they didnt have a case, they never had a chance of making this theory and i believe that mueller must have known that very soon after he took over the case. The second thing, and ill leave it at this so we can have some dialogue back and forth, the second thing is, im hoping that this collusion narrative gets placed in a context maybe we havent thought about up until now. Weve been so focused on the collusion story in a vacuum, i thought it was necessary, or would be at least valuable to put it in context. What i tried to demonstrate in the book is that the Obama Administration had an eightyear record of politicizing intelligence and using Law Enforcement processes to punish political enemies and scapegoats. So the question is, when it got to the Hillary Campaign losing ultimately to trump and they needed a rationale for why they lost, why would anyone think they wouldnt be able to come up with one . Because this is what they do. And the last thing i will say about this is this, let me bring you back to the last candidate debate between clinton and trump, right . At one point hillary screeches, no, she was probably just speaking, i heard it as a screech. [laughter]. She said something along the lines of horrible, or horrifying. You know what 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 there saying it could be rigged. And she is saying, well, in american tradition, we always say the voters speak and then everybody accepts the results. He says, no, im not going to accept the results after i see what happens in the election. And she said, this is just unbelievably horrifying, that somebody could question the legitimacy he is attacking our democracy. And when she was finished saying he was attacking our democracy, obama went out on the stomach the next day, said the same thing. He is attacking our democracy. He wont accept the legitimacy of our election. Now the reason i want you to remember that is this. In real time, as it was going on, the fbi and the intelligence agencies as the government, cia in particular, knew, as it was happening, what russia was doing to meddle in the election. They knew going back to 2015, that russia had weed delled its way into into the democratic email accounts. Brennan said, he was head of the cia, he said he confronted his counterpart in the russian government in august of 2016. Then obama in september of 2016, glared at putin, we know what youre doing, stop. Were not going to put up with that, right . Now, when Hillary Clinton reamed out trump and obama did afterwards for the last three weeks of the campaign, saying how, how on earth could you question the legitimacy of our elections . Understand they knew everything we now know about russias interference in the election. There is nothing that weve learned, whether it is through muellers investigation, or through what the cia and other agencies put out in january of 2016, there is nothing that weve been told thats important about russias operations against the election that they didnt know when she was standing there staring at trump, saying how could you question whether this is legitimate . You heard about collusion for one reason, she lost, thank god. Thank you all for coming. I look forward to your questions. [applause] thank you. Doesnt that make you mad . But anyhow well hear about it some more. The ushers are in the aisles with index cards if you like to pose a question. Obviously we wont have a chance to get to all of them. Well get to as many as we can. I have to keep the answers short. Well pass around the cards first. That is okay. Before we start, well have lefty here. This came from some of our board members. We want to know, fox news wont let a person appear until they speak at the Liberty Forum . This dovetails something, we had pete hegseth before he was big. People were here for that. Andy, you will be on fox friends, is it thursday . Thursday. Thursday. [applause] you may want to record it. Early at our end. Im sure you will hear what a great time. If not you can get it from my mom. Petes always been big. Thats true. He told me that himself. We had fun with him here. So well start probably with the real questions in a few minutes. Why dont we grab a couple of them. We can start. Yeah, yeah. There we go. Lets start. This is right. This one is interesting. Has anyone from inside any of these agencies acknowledged whats right, whats wrong . Are they coming clean . Are they still obfuscating . I realize it is under investigation, but whatever you can say about that . Well it is interesting, Michael Horowitz who is the Inspector General at the Justice Department, which is an office that reports both to justice and the congress, we were told by attorney general barr, i think it was back in april, that horowitzs investigation, he is looking at the fisa abuse and other things, that it might be finished as early as may. It is still going on. What you hear in washington is the reason it is still going on, more people came forward to provide more information. If thats true i attribute it to attorney general barr creating a serious tone, making it clear to people he actually does intend to get to the bottom of this. He is not just saying he will get to the bottom of it. I think that is why that has been delayed. Im hoping in early to midseptember well hear from horowitz, well be able to answer that one easier then. For those of us old enough to remember watergate, which is most of us, when this comes out, will it be big as watergate . Not as big . I understand the media is a lot different. The problem with the watergate comparison it is such a different media environment today than it was in 1972, 72, 74 and it is such a big difference in terms of a scandal when the media is the wind at your back, versus the wind in your face. So, i mean, if some of the things that happened here are what alleged to have happened here and these powers got abused, there was spying that was done on the campaign, that should be one of the biggest scandals in american history. Do i think it will be treated that way . I hope it will be treated that way in the history books, if that is how it comes out but im not holding my breath for the media to treat it that way. I would note though, this i think is worth noting, you know, we talk about the media all the time but they lose a lot. I mean trump as president , notwithstanding that the media pushed against them with all of its might, and theyre going to do it again, but i bet you, if you got to ask the president , what one of the best things he has going for him is, he would say, that his attacks on the media and the unfairness of the coverage really does resonate with people. So i think there is pushback against the media. Theyre much more openly idealogical than they used to be. Also between fox news and National Review and a lot of the alternative media we have, plus internet giving us the ability to Research Things on our own, i just dont think the media punches above its weight the way it used to. We have some questions which of course relate together. One specifically was what mueller knew two years ago, why did he keep going understanding on the public side, we were getting saturated. So, to my mind unless he came up with something huge, it would be, that is all old news now. Also along those lines, why didnt the fisa judge complain . So let me, let me take the first part first, then well get to fisa judges. You know, remember the famous text between peter strzok and lisa page where they talk about the insurance policy, right . And the idea was in the highly, highly unlikely event trump won they needed an insurance policy. Well an insurance policy is not something we all know, right . An insurance policy not there to prevent the bad thing from happening, right . The insurance policy kicks in after the bad thing has happened. And the bad thing 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 of parts of his agenda that the powers that be in the Obama Administration, many of whom carried over into the next administration, in their infinite wisdom decided were bad for america, right . As if we elected them, instead of trump. So you know the reason i think the investigation continued is because the point of it, was not necessarily to make a case as it was, they were hoping to make a case, but they wanted i think to have that monitor on trump. Here is something i think is very interesting, they went back to get fisa warrants on carter page, and each fisa warrant by the way says, that the fbi believed carter page and perhaps others connected to donald Trumps Campaign were involved in russias cyber espionage. So they come right out and say that. They got fisa warrants four times. The last time they went back to get one, i believe was june of 2017. That is about a month or so after mueller took the investigation. I think he still sort of getting his arms wrapped around it. The reason i mentioned this, they would have been due to go back to the fisa court in september to get the warrant if they were going to extend it on page. And to do that that would have required them to reaffirm all the things in the steele 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 and russia having a conspiracy to steal the election was bogus. There is a bunch of cards which have the same theme. They mentioned the name brennan and clinton and obama. Some of these, sort of bad actors. Will anything happen to them . Yeah. You know that is the big question that everybody has. My attitude about this is, twofold. Number one, what we really need to find out is what happened, you no know. If we get a solid accounting what happened, it turned out people violated the law that is prosecutable, you can deal with it at that point but the last time i wrote a book where i didnt show up in Silicon Valley the night it came out, it was a book about impeachment and, i didnt have the foresight to wait until trump was president to write an impeachment book. Maybe would have made a couple of bucks actually. But one of the things that struck me while i was doing research for the book is 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, maybe most things overstates it, but you get my point. There is a lot of power that Government Officials have that they have broad discretion to use. Where you find abuse of power is usually where the Government Official is abusing the discretion that the law allows them. The reason that, that is worth noting is because criminal statutes are kind of black and white. Theyre, constitutionally theyre supposed to be written as they say, so that a person of ordinary intelligence knows whats forbidden. In a good criminal statute, you dont really have a lot of room for judgment. Bank robbery, you know, there is no judgment involved. You robbed the bank or dont. With exercise of government authorities, should i unmask somebody who whose identity come up in intelligence reporting . The law says i can do it if it is necessary to understand the intelligence significance of the reporting. Who decides that . If i abuse my authority on that, who is going to say thats criminal . And maybe if i do it 100 times and its a pattern, that is one thing, but if i do it once or twice, is that a crime . I dont mean to trivialize abuses of power. Theyre a lot more important to the country than mere crimes because abuses of power are offenses against all of us. That is why the framers did not require an indictable criminal offense in order to impeach an officeholder. What they basically says is, they say, if you abuse you power you can be removed. This is wonderfully simplistic question. When all said and done, did russia do that much . Well you know, i dont think so. I think a lot of has been overstated. People throw stuff at you in some of the places where i go when you say that but you know, russia did what russia does. This is really what obama said after the election until they flipped the switch and decided that this was crime of the century. They had five minutes of time, they basically said, it wasnt, you cant steal a federal election, at least as it is presently 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 try to make this point in the book, two things to think about with this. Number one, russia has been interfering in american elections and western elections since the bolshevik revolution. They do this all the time. They always do it. Right . This time it got the medias attention because it didnt happen to be designed to help democrats. It was historic. But, you know the fact is, this is what russia does. This is lousy, awful, regime. This is the thing they do. Because were a cyber techno, society theyre advancing their tools but they are not doing anything they didnt always do. They disrupt, meddle and the like. The second thing about that the country more than any other country in the world interferes in the affairs of other countries is ours. [laughter]. Thats a fact. We interfere in russias elections. In fact one of the reasons that putin was supposedly whipped up about 2016 is because he thought Hillary Clinton interfered in Russian Affairs back in 2011 in their elections. Obama tried to knock off bibi netanyahu. Clinton publicly said he did years before. Obama tried to derail brexit, right . He said if they do it, the british people will be at the back of the queue as he put it. This is what, i know youre not supposed to say this, this is what great powers and even not so great powers do in the world when theyre dealing with foreign governments that have interests that are of consequence to our interests. We try to influence them. We do it. And i think one of the really bad things about what has gone on for the last two or three years is that, this is going to make life much harder for american intelligence agents who have to operate in dangerous parts of the world doing what we want them to do, which is, you know, gather intelligence and also interfere with the plans of rogue governments that might harm the United States. When you talk about russia and collusion, the next possible step on the parts of some americans is impeachment. Are there any ground there . That word gets used very loosely. Would you discuss that please . There is a standard for impeachment. High crimes and misdemeanors. The framers had very solid idea of what they meant by it. They had a contrary example in Edmund Burkes impeachment of hastings who was governor general, british governor general in india. Hamilton writes about them. He basically says they are political offenses. What he means by that are, they are abuses of power that are directed at the body politic, not ordinary crimes. And theyre much more in the nature of, i always thought theyre much more in the nature of military law than federal, civil, penal law. Ideas like conduct unbecoming. Abuse of power. Dereliction of duty, that sort of thing. So we do have an understanding. People who say, high crimes and misdemeanors what does that mean . We do have an understanding what it means in the constitutional sense. Now, also down here on planet earth in, it was about 1970 when gerald ford was the minority leader of the house of representatives and they were trying to impeach william o douglas, who was a justice of the Supreme Court and he was asked about what an Impeachable Offense is and what ford said, an Impeachable Offense is whatever the house of representatives decides it is at a given moment in history. Now in a raw, raw, cynical sheer politics sense thats true. They can file articles of impeachment about anything. Articles of impeachment unlike removing the president in the senate trial, articles of impeachment only require a simple majority of the house of representatives to be filed. You need a 2 3 supermajority in the senate to remove the president. And that high requirement for removal has historically meant that weve had almost no impeachment. We had less than a handful of experiences with impeachment. And for the most part it is because, even in the house if people think a president deserves to be impeached they realize it is futile to try if the politics in the senate wont allow for it to happen. I always thought the framers design here is ingenius because, the supermajority means that no president will ever be removed unless the conduct is to egregious, that people on all sides of the idealogical spectrum and partisan divide can agree that the president needs to be removed. I dont think were anywhere close to that. Someone wants to know when we expect the audio book . Thats a great question. You know, i think this one is kind of a long book. It might take awhile to get around to that i hadnt even thought about that thank you for that question. I will take that up with roger kimball, who is my publisher. Couple go together regarding the fbi. Can its reputation come back or maybe it shouldnt . And would any of the higherups in the fbi or doj face prosecution when it all comes down . As far as the prosecution go i will just repeat briefly what i said before. Lets find out what happened first. Well see if there is anything prosecutable. As far as the reputation of the fbi, it has taken a hit. You know, when your reputation takes a hit, it takes a while to rebuild it. I agree with what attorney general barr has said about this, which is that, from what he has been able to detect so far, it seems to him that if there was a failure here, it was at the managerial ranks of the bureau and the Justice Department, not the rankandfile where most of the work of most investigations is done. Im also sensitive to something i thought profound that Victor Davis Hanson wrote, i want to say about two month ago, which is that, a lot of the worst what weve seen in the conduct of some of the fbi agents, i think victor was talking in particular about peter strzok and andrew mccabe, he noted that they came up through the ranks and he deduces from that there may be something endemic in the agency, when it finally rises to the managerial level its problematic. My experience in government is, when you bring good people in, that has an electric effect through an agency. When you bring, when you have people who are not so good, then people run amok. You see some of the worst things that you fear. Lets see here. This is, related to the reaction, the question was, will President Trump, how will, has he been fighting back . What can one do in that situation . Well. Ive been saying from the beginning of the administration that i think what he could have done, there has never been a day since donald trump was president when 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 here. Now there may be a variety of good reasons why he hasnt done that. I talk in the book about this. For one thing the way this insurance policy was designed, every time trump did anything to fight back the other side said he was obstructing the investigation. So its a very convenient little box they put him in, right . If he had unsealed and put out publicly a bunch of information, the next thing that would have within squealed was that he was objecting, obstructing the investigation and undermining muellers ability to question witnesses without people having their stories straight and the like. I wasnt terribly overblown by that explanation, terribly persuaded by it, i see the sense of it. The other thing i would, i would caution people and this is basis of having written about a zillion search warrant affidavits, and wiretap affidavits and the like, every investigation has a theory of the case. And what you were it to a court in order to get permission to do a search of any kind, whether its wiretapping or physical search or you know, search somebodys house, the submission that you make to the court is going to tend to echo your theory of the case, right . The fbi and the Justice Departments theory of the trump russia case is that trump was bought and paid for by putin. That putin had him compromised, whether it was in a personal nature, or you know, through other varieties of corruption, whether it was financial corruption, political corruption and so on. Now, dont get me wrong, im not saying that these things happened. What im saying if that was the fbis theory of the case and the Justice Departments theory of the case, what do you think their underlying submissions and memoranda are going to say . Theyre going to be a reflection of that theory. Even if it is not true, even if the things they said about trump being in putins pocket arent true, if that information sees the light of day, it is not going to be flattering to the president. There are a certain percentage of people, we all know this, who, whether something is true or not is beside the point, right . Can it be used by the tribe . Does it help our side . That is the only thing of importance to them. For that reason i think the president may be gun shy about putting out information. And a third thing, the final thing i will say is, what you notice looking hard at the collusion fable and trump russia investigation, is there is an awful lot of participation by foreign intelligence services. When we take information from foreign intelligence services, whether we should take it or not, whether theyre in the wrong or not, we take it pursuant to agreements we have with them that we are never going to compromise the information or where we got it from. Im sure part of what is going on behind the scenes we dont see, we hear a little bit about, there is probably a brawl between the political people and the intelligence people. The political people would probably like to get a lot of this information out and the intelligence people are telling them if we put the information out, it es go is going to rupture our relationship with x, y, z, government. That is not a small thing. We do rely on partners for purposes of security. So its a big problem. It was only a matter of time. Would death a suicide. I will never tell. I worked about, sounds awful to say this, i worked a quarter century in the government. What i learned is never to assume nefarious conspiracies when sheer incompetence is a possible explanation. [applause] so, i have, i see nothing in the equation that i have seen so far to depart at all from that rule. The mcc, the Metropolitan Correctional Center in new york, is not as terrible as what some of the stories that you have 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 800 what we call a Holding Facility in federal parlance. I think think i the state uses the same thing. That distinguishes like would be a designation prison of the distinction is, the Holding Facility is place you keep people while cases are pending. Theyre, they have to meet with their lawyers. Still presumed innocent. They havent gone to trial yet. They havent pled guilty. After youre guilty, they send you to some penitentiary someplace and the rules are much different. And the mcc tends to be grossly understaffed. The stories that im reading in the last week about not only people being forced to work overtime day after day after day but also, taking people who were not trained Prison Guards putting them in that position. That did not surprise me, to 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 and until we see something that indicate something to the contrary im going to believe that, but, epstein rich lowery wrote a great piece about this either yesterday or today. I just saw it today. But, the thing that ought to make people really rabidly angry about epstein how he was accommodated by the system at every step of the way, from the time that he was committing these atrocities when he was given a slap on the wrist by the florida authorities and even better than a slap on the wrist from the federal authorities, to the very end, when evidently he tries to commit suicide or at least there are indications of that 2 1 2 weeks ago, and his lawyers, his high power lawyers, come marching into the prison and they demand that the suicide watch be taken off him. The prison accomodates him. How do you accommodate a guy, if you really thought he might have committed suicide two weeks ago you dont accommodate it. I wouldnt even entertain a meeting with the lawyers about that. Seems to me, erica and i were talking about this before, a number of people we were talking to earlier, this whole idea, i started with this tonight, probably fitting to get to it again, this idea of two standards of justice, two tier system where people who are insiders and connected or at least friendly to the powers that be get one quality of justice and everybody else getting a different quality of justice and what is really sickening of epstein, really every step of the way he got a real high quality of justice the rest of us certainly couldnt expect to get. Couldnt resist having one of those. People are lining up for your book. Well end it with all the these evenings do with prediction, nonbinding. Will President Trump be reelected and against whom will he run . I dont, i think yes, he will get reelected. There is a long way between here and there and i dont know weve seen the entire democratic field yet. This is not my area. There are a lot of people at National Review who would be better on this than i would. I have a feeling about warren. I have a, some ways its a hope that shes the candidate. [laughter]. But i just think that, from what ive seen up until now, i think she presents well. I think her ideas are nuts but she is, thoughtful about them. She, you know, she has an energy i dont think biden, i dont think biden is a serious candidate. Hard to somebody is not serious for so long, but whether well see if he has a glass jaw or not. Some people say, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for your candor. We all feel that. Ladies and gentlemen. [applause] thank you. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you. Host Glenn Simpson is cofounder of a Research Firm that is been in that is frequently the last couple of years, fusion gps. Is also the coauthor of a new book, crime in progress inside the steele dossier and the fusion gps investigation of donald trump. Mr. Simpson, how did fusion gps me