MOUNTAIN VIEW—Andrew McCarthy, a former prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, shared what he learned about the Trump administration and the Mueller report at the Liberty Forum in Silicon Valley on August 13.
Now a columnist and writer, McCarthy launched his new book that same day, titled Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.
“It’s really a story that traces us back to the Hillary Clinton emails investigation and goes through the Trump-Russia investigation. It’s an effort to show that the same quality of justice clearly was not afforded to the two investigations,” said McCarthy.
He believes there was collusion in the 2016 election, but not in the way we’re often told it happened.
“The real collusion is not the staple about Donald Trump and Russia,” he said. “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.”
According to McCarthy, the government’s counterintelligence powers were exploited. They are only supposed to be used for protecting our country against foreign powers.
“They’re not supposed to be used for any other purpose. They’re certainly not supposed to be used to affect a presidential election or any kind of political election, said McCarthy.
Rather than drop the case, what they would do is they would fabricate a national security angle, so that they could exploit the government’s foreign counterintelligence powers and conduct what was really a criminal investigation without a criminal predicate under the guise of our national security powers.”
From an attorney’s point of view, McCarthy says an investigation should always run in a district or field office where the offense allegedly took place, not at the headquarters.
“If headquarters take on that investigative role themselves, there’s no one there to correct them and force them to follow the normal rules if they stray from the normal rules,” he said.
Put simply, it was an unfortunate mistake that the Department of Justice, or DOJ and FBI were directly involved in the investigation.
He added, “I think they thought because of the sensitivity of the case that it was something they thought they should take on to themselves rather than have field offices handle it.”
McCarthy also said the DOJ and FBI’s reputation has taken a hit, and it will take some time to rebuild it. But he says the failure lies at the managerial level of the bureau, not with the people actually carrying out the investigation.
