Ep. 750 dissects Jeffrey Epstein’s suspicious death—hyoid fractures and pre-death screams dismissed as suicide despite forensic red flags—while exposing media bias, from NYT’s socialist leanings to Chris Matthews’ trivialization of elite abuse. Guest Andrew McCarthy slams the FBI’s Steele dossier-driven Trump-Russia witch hunt as a politicized counterintelligence trap, with Obama-era spying on Congress and FISA abuses targeting Trump. Epstein’s case mirrors systemic corruption: Ghislaine Maxwell’s unprosecuted charges, Polanski/Allen’s impunity, and power brokers exploiting "moral failure" norms. Meanwhile, the segment pivots to cultural shifts—disillusioned Christians (Josh Harris) and Yale’s David Gerlinter rejecting secular dogma—as a potential revival looms amid institutional decay. [Automatically generated summary]
Democrat presidential candidates have descended on Iowa, increasing the population there by 22%.
As the candidates try to act like normal Americans by grilling corn dogs on a flaming flag or staging sack races with people who were actually sacked during the Obama economy, voters are trying to choose whether to hear their stump speeches or just jab a screwdriver repeatedly into their ears to see if that's less painful.
Beto O'Rourke has seen his poll numbers rise since a drunken Cedar Rapids said he'd vote for Beto, then passed out before he could explain that he meant to say Biden and always gets those two confused.
O'Rourke has tried to change his campaign tactics by limiting his speeches to a series of outlandish hand motions wholly disconnected from any meaning he may be trying to convey.
O'Rourke tried to explain this new tactic to a reporter, but knocked her unconscious with a nonsensical gesture before she could understand what he wasn't saying.
Bernie Sanders attended a nail salon with Cardi B as part of his strategy to make socialism seem fun, or at least more fun than the part where you're roasting your pet cat over a trash fire so your children will have something to eat.
Cardi B says she thinks socialism will be great as long as her nails look terrific and all the socialism stuff is happening to someone else.
The 103-year-old Sanders promises that under socialism, Cardi will be able to afford a complete last name, and then maybe he'll know who she is.
Voters thought they spotted Elizabeth Warren outside a cigar store in Des Moines, but that turned out to just be a wooden Indian.
However, Warren did show up at a rally later where she led the crowd in a rousing rendition of, this land is my land, no really, it's my land.
She then threatened to scalp the bystanders, but Bernie Sanders had already done that.
Political observers say the Democrat campaign is likely to continue well into Donald Trump's re-election.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
I'm a hunky-dunky.
Life is tickety-boo.
Years are winging, also singing, hunky-dunky-dee-doo.
Ship-shaped dipsy-topsy, the world is a bitty zing.
It's a wonderful day.
Hoorah, hooray!
It makes me want to sing.
Oh, hurrah, hooray.
Oh, hooray, hurrah.
Well, as we've discussed many times, corrupt systems corrupt everyone inside them.
Once a society accepts the logic of evil, it gets difficult to tell the perpetrators from the victims.
In a society that accepts the evil of slavery, for instance, slaveholders will include good and great men like George Washington.
In a society that accepts the evil of abortion, people who commit abortion will include the girl next door.
It gets very tough to assign individual blame when the very atmosphere becomes toxic with corruption.
I believe that's happened to our news media.
Lots of good people cover the news.
Lots of good reporters do good reporting.
But even their good reporting supports a system whose corrupt mission is to expand the powers of the federal government to the point where America's unique commitment to individual liberty becomes extinct.
As part of its Red Century series, the New York Times ran hilariously stupid stories about how great sex was for women in the slave state of the Soviet Union.
And now, as part of their 1619 project, they're trying to rewrite American history to put black Americans at the center of it in Howard Zinn fashion.
This week, they're running a piece conflating capitalism with southern slavery and saying the two are deeply connected.
These stories are corrupt and dishonest and aimed at undermining the great good of American liberty in order to replace it with the slave system of socialism.
So if you're a good reporter at the New York Times, a guy or girl who's talented at gathering information, and you go out and get a well-researched story on, let's say, Jeffrey Epstein's death, you're giving credence and credibility to a newspaper that is selling garbage into the hearts and minds of its readers.
You too have become corrupt by being in the corrupt system that is the New York Times.
That's why Jeffrey Epstein's death is going to be such a test of our overall system.
Epstein was able to operate so long without consequences because powerful people sexually abuse underage girls and boys.
They do it in Hollywood.
They do it in churches.
They do it on Wall Street and in Washington, D.C.
They do it a lot.
Now, again, we're not talking about pedophilia.
This is not some sick, twisted urge to abuse little children.
This is the immoral choice of sane, successful, high-functioning men and some women to harness their power to the purpose of using less powerful people for their sexual pleasure.
This is corruption, plain and simple.
Now, I have no doubt that there are good people, even great people, in our government and legal systems.
They're the law dogs who tried to bring Epstein to justice.
They seem to have acted without fear or favor.
The Attorney General, William Barr, so far strikes me as a pretty straight arrow.
The Democrats and media are attacking him anyway.
That's always a good sign.
But the question now is, is our system so corrupt that even these good people cannot discover how Epstein died and run down his accomplices.
Personally, I think the federal government is too powerful.
I think that kind of power corrupts.
I think corruption will protect corruption.
And I suspect the abuse of young people will continue at an epidemic level among our despicable elites.
And the Epstein story will trail away to nothing.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Maybe the good guys will win in the end.
We're going to find out.
Let us talk.
We're going to talk more about this, but let us talk first about Birch Gold.
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So here is the Washington Post.
I'm sorry I can't quote a more reliable source, but this one sounds like a reliable story.
An autopsy, and again, I trust the ME who's doing this, the lady who's doing this, and also I know Epstein's lawyer has a very talented and generally well-regarded doctor watching this.
An autopsy found that financier Jeffrey Epstein sustained multiple breaks in his neck bones, according to two people familiar with the findings, deepening the mystery about the circumstances around his death.
Among the bones broken in Epstein's neck was the hyoid bone, which in men is near the Adam's apple.
Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they're older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject, but they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.
The details are the first findings to emerge from the autopsy of Epstein, a convicted sex offender.
You know, the thing about this is the word is that he strangled himself.
He hanged himself by tying a bedsheet to the upper part of a bunk and then basically kneeling down and strangling himself.
Hard to imagine that breaks a bone, right?
It's a salt with a soft cloth and you're not, it's not like dropping off a, you know, off a ladder, dropping through a trapdoor like when you're being hanged.
So if these findings pan out, if the story pans out, again, it's just really suspicious.
You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to think, wait, what the hell is going on?
There was another story recently from CBS News.
On the morning of Jeffrey Epstein's death, there was shouting and shrieking from his jail cell.
So, I mean, all we need, all we need is video now of Bill Clinton like running down the hallway and escaping.
And suddenly Donald Trump is going to sound like a lot more perspicacious than he did when he basically retweeted this.
From the Daily Beast, yet another story.
I've got to read these stories because this is just the stuff that's been piling up.
I didn't cover this yesterday, and this is stuff that's piling up.
Members of Congress, furious over Jeffrey Epstein's death in federal custody, are set on getting to the bottom of it before the many conspiracy theories swirling around the accused serial sex offender's demise completely overshadow the facts.
They're obviously running far behind by the time the Democratic and Republican leaders of the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to the Federal Bureau of Prisons on Monday demanding answers about the circumstances of Epstein's apparent suicide.
The country already had two full days to marinate in President Trump's retweet.
So it's all President Trump's fault.
Listen, it doesn't take President Trump to see a conspiracy here.
And again, again, we're talking about a media that gave us the Russian collusion conspiracy all this time.
There was simply no evidence, zero evidence, zero evidence that Donald Trump was in some kind of coordinated relationship with Russians to throw the election.
All the evidence now, really all of it, is on the other side, that it was Barack Obama and his spy organizations that were colluding and conspiring against him.
Andrew C. McCarthy has a new book out about this called Ball of Collusion.
We're trying to get him on the line for today.
Hopefully he'll be here later in the show.
But, you know, when you talk about this stuff, nobody, this story about sexual abuse of young people, and I know I've talked about this a lot, but I think about it a lot.
As I said, it's part of the plot of Another Kingdom Part 3, which will be starting as a podcast in September.
And it's part of the plot because I think it is at the core of the kind of corruption that's going on among our elites.
We have an elite that has lost its idea that there is some kind of religious meaning to life.
We have an elite that is so separated from the rank and file of Americans that they think it's perfectly fine to run a scam to throw the president out because they don't like him, because he's not one of them.
That we have this elite that has lost its way.
And one of the things that people do when they are so powerful that no one can touch them, that no one wants to touch them, when the press is in their pocket because the press is part of them.
The press is the elite, right?
Reporters used to be working class guys who loved taking down the powerful, no matter who they were.
Now when that happens, the upper middle management who has control over the editorials, they kill those stories.
That's why Cheryl Atkins isn't at CBS anymore.
That's why there were no stories about Obama abusing his power.
You know, they are part of this thing.
When you have that, young people are going to get abused because, as Roman Polanski said, after he raped and drugged and sodomized a little girl, he said, what's the problem?
We all like young girls.
Well, yes, we do.
We all are attracted to young girls.
That doesn't make it right.
I know this is such a tough thing for elites to understand.
I mean, I remember Woody Allen, when he was in that scandal going off with Mia Farrow's adopted child, he said, well, the heart wants what it wants.
Well, screw your heart and what it wants.
We all know.
I mean, all you have to do is go back to Aristotle, who says all ethics, all ethics goes against our desires.
That's what ethics are.
That's what morality is.
But once you get so powerful, once you lose the plot of religious life and metaphysics. you stop thinking about that stuff and it just seems right.
Those girls are there.
They're attractive.
You want them.
Why shouldn't you have them?
The heart wants what it wants.
I've got the money.
I've got the little island where nobody can find me.
I've got the private jet.
Why not?
You know, I have to just play this just for comic relief, really.
Chris Matthews, this is Chris Matthews trying to figure out.
He's trying to figure out, can't quite crack the case of why all these rich, powerful people were willing to hang out with Jeffrey Epstein.
What was that thing?
What were they looking for when they were hanging out with Jeffrey Epstein?
Here is Chris Matthews on the case.
You and I know politics in this town.
I know you're a lawyer and you specialize in the law.
But one thing culture that goes on in politics that I find really dismaying, politicians need money.
A lot of them aren't that wealthy.
They live on their salaries, 100 and a half a year.
They're not crying, but they love travel and private planes.
They have to get around for their professional and political reasons.
They become so-called friends with the wrong freaking people.
And these people are frightening and they want something from, they want the prestige of hanging around a politician.
And these relationships are awful, the names that have come out.
I don't want to use their names tonight.
But the names, why do these people know a guy like this guy, Epstein?
Why do they even want to know him?
Because a lot of times the most valuable asset that politicians have is access, access to their power that they exercise presumably on behalf of the American people.
But then they end up sometimes giving that access to sleazy characters like Epstein, who was running this vast criminal conspiracy.
Yeah, it's the private planes, Chris.
That's what they love.
They love those private planes.
You know, it's rich, powerful political people.
They just love those private planes.
It's not the girls, not the 12-year-old girls, the 13, 14, 15-year-old girls on the private planes, not the island that the private plane lands on that's filled with sex slaves.
You know, come on, that's not what people want.
They want those private planes.
It's really tough to understand.
I mean, this is the kind of blind.
The problem with Chris Matthews, the guy's not a stupid guy.
It's that he does not understand how badly power corrupts.
And this is the problem.
You know, this is the problem with all these guys who want more government, who want more power, who want to take our guns away, who don't think we should be able to speak freely.
This is the problem is they really have convinced themselves that all these nice Democrats are going to be fine.
It's hilarious because they go after Donald Trump every day, how awful he is, but they want him to have more power.
They want his office to have more power because they're convinced they can put Barack Obama into power forever, essentially.
If it's not Obama, it'll be the next Obama and the Obama after that.
And if there's a problem, they'll make sure they rig the system so that that doesn't happen anymore.
You know, just to finish up about Epstein, well, before I do that, let me talk about this.
Let me talk about something more pleasant than that for just a moment.
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What it does, you know, it's not just bad guys.
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You know, one of the things I keep talking about is how effective it is to kill people, you know, killing witnesses, things like that really works.
I mean, it really is a good strategy if you don't want to go to jail and you're some corrupt dirtbag who wants to protect himself.
You know, killing witnesses, if you get away with it, it really works.
And I was talking about the fact that now with Epstein gone, it's going to be very hard.
You know, they keep saying his co-conspirators shouldn't rest easy.
That's what Bill Barr said.
But I think they can rest pretty easy.
I mean, I think they can.
And there's an article in the op-ed page of The Times from Renato Mariatti, The Cold Truth about the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Mariatti is a former federal prosecutor, and he says, the cold truth is the pursuit of justice in the Epstein case just got a lot harder.
His suicide makes the path for his victims more difficult and the justice they could receive less complete.
Mr. Epstein's criminal case will end soon.
Prosecutors can't pursue a criminal case against a dead person.
Prosecutors can pursue charges against co-conspirators, but those cases will not be easy.
After all, it's not a crime to work for a criminal unless you're in on the crime.
So how are they going to prove that any of these people knew what Epstein was up to?
In addition, when Mr. Epstein died, prosecutors lost certain tools in their kit that would have helped them bring charges against accomplices.
If he were alive, he could have flipped down and cooperated against them if he was convicted and faced a stiff sentence.
Intelligence Investigation Revealed00:15:37
All that has been lost.
Perhaps the greatest blow, still reading from this, perhaps the greatest blow to victims was the loss of a public trial of Mr. Epstein.
That would have brought new evidence into view unless federal prosecutors charge someone like Ghislaine, what's her name, Ghislaine Maxwell, as an accomplice.
Documents obtained from grand jury subpoenas will not be disclosed.
Evidence obtained from subpoenas or search warrants will be preserved, but without a trial, it might never see the light of day.
And again, you know, this is a moral question.
This is a question of moral failure among our elites.
And I know, I know that poor people abuse young people too, obviously.
This is something that has been happening forever.
But it's a moral failing among people.
And it's important to remember this.
This is not saying, oh, it's not as bad when people abuse children.
Of course, that's even, in In some ways, that's even worse.
But if you are attracted to little children, there's something sick and twisted and even demonic about that desire that is urging you on.
That's not a normal thing.
That's like going after, you know, it's like a fetish.
That is not a normal way to be.
But it is normal to be.
Roman Polanski was right.
It is normal to be attracted to young women.
It's normal to be attracted to young people in general.
If you're gay, it's young men.
And that's why, you know, we talked for a while last week, I think it was about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the new Quentin Tarantino picture.
And there's this one scene in it that really sticks with you when Brad Pitt, who becomes the hero of the film and he becomes the moral center of the film, and he becomes the center of masculinity and manhood in the film, which is what everybody is reacting about.
The left, of course, is absolutely furious about it.
And people on the right are really charmed by the film.
And there is this moment when one of Charles Manson's, the murderer Charles Manson's women, tries to seduce Brad Pitt, and he just laughs it off.
He said, I don't sleep with 15-year-old girls.
That's not what I do.
But that speaks, first of all, in that moment, as an audience member, and I think everybody in the audience feels the same way, you suddenly love Brad Pitt.
You suddenly realize, oh, here's a man.
Here's a man.
Here's a guy who does the right thing.
The girl has been in the film.
They've put her in every sexual position you can put her in.
I don't mean sex positions.
I mean, they've had her bending over and they've had her throwing her legs and she's leaning back and she's doing everything to make her seductive and sexy.
And Pitt just says, no, I don't do that because it's not right.
And you sit there and you go, you sit up in your seat and go, ah, you know, a man.
Here is a man.
Here is a moral man because she's attractive.
And one of the things about Manson is Manson was hooked into some really important people in Hollywood.
He ranged free among them.
He was obviously a lunatic.
You only had to look at him to see he was a lunatic.
You wonder, like, how, why did he do that?
Why was he able to do that?
Why was he able to meet these people?
Why was he able to hang out with all these rock stars and so forth?
Yeah, it must have been the private jets.
It must have been the private jets.
Because he was followed around by young girls who did what he told them to do.
That's why.
That's why.
This is an aspect of this is a corruption thing.
This is a corruption thing.
I know it's a sex thing.
I know that makes it kind of interesting, but it is a corruption thing more than anything.
You know, I'm going to pause here and we'll get back to some of this in a little bit.
But we got Andy McCarthy on the line, and I've been looking at his book, which is so amazing and speaks right into this very subject of corruption at the highest levels.
Andrew, as you know, probably is a former U.S. assistant attorney who led and helped convict the 1995 terrorism case against Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.
He's a contributing editor, National Review, and he's on Fox News.
He has been the gold standard for writing about the investigation and the, I don't know what we call it at this point, except the plot against President Trump.
He has now brought out his book, A Ball of Collusion, The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.
I've been reading it.
Andy, it's good to see you.
How you doing?
Drew, I'm doing great.
How are you, Pod?
All right.
I don't get to see you enough.
I always seem to be interviewing you when I see you.
But this book, I mean, this book really rocked me.
And one of the reasons it really rocked me is because it's all in plain sight.
And it's so much worse than people really have their heads around yet, I think.
I got to, if I can, keep this as simple as we can.
Because once you get into the Carter page and Page and Struck, and it just gets very confusing.
But let's begin this way.
The corruption in the Obama administration, between the corrupt relationship with the Obama administration and the intelligence services, was there before Trump.
Is that a fair way to put it?
Yeah, I think so, Drew.
And that's really the thing I hope that people will take away.
I think to go to the point that you're making, this is such a sprawling narrative on its own.
And we've really been looking at it almost exclusively for the last two years.
What you forget, I think, is that it has a factual context.
It didn't come out of nowhere.
It actually fits in historically.
And I think if you place it in that historical context where you have an eight-year record, and I think it's a strong record.
People judge for themselves whether I made the case or not, but I think there's a very strong record that they politicize intelligence.
Certainly their intelligence agents thought they politicized intelligence, but they politicized intelligence for eight years.
I mean, we're all familiar with the Benghazi debacle and the stuff that they did to get the Iran deal across the finish line.
But there's a whole array of that activity that went on for eight years.
And I think they also used the criminal justice process in a punitive way very often over the course of eight years.
So that if you think about it that way, I don't think it should be surprising to people that when they really needed a political narrative supported by intelligence and law enforcement processes in order to rationalize Mrs. Clinton's loss, this is what these guys were made for.
This is what they do.
Give me one.
I mean, the example that leapt up to my mind is John Brennan lying about spying on Congress.
Can you just lay that out just a little bit so we have an example of what you're talking about?
Yeah, sure.
When Brennan was the head of the CIA, the Senate Intelligence Committee was looking at the interrogation tactics that were used against terrorists who were in American custody in the war following 9-11.
And the CIA hacked into the Senate Intelligence Committee's computer system to get a load at what they were looking at.
And when they called him on it, he said, spy on the Senate.
We wouldn't spy on the Senate.
I mean, that's just like, that's crazy.
That's beyond what we would ever do.
And since his lips were moving while he was saying that, you kind of knew that they did it.
And this, all right, so let me just read a portion of this.
By the way, I should mention that Rush Limbaugh gave this book such a great review talking about it, really is a comprehensive look at this.
And again, what is incredible about it is it's not like you were digging up stuff.
You just followed the actual news.
None of this stuff is stuff that they can deny.
But let me just read this one portion here very briefly.
RussiaGate is a complicated, sprawling story, multi-agency and transcontinental, spanning law enforcement and intelligence operations, featuring top-secret redactions, classified leaks, intricate narrative threads, and a list of dramatist personae that would dizzy a Russian novelist.
It's easy to lose track of basic facts, but here's the most basic one.
There was never a shred of evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin.
So there's nothing.
I mean, that's fair to say.
There is no evidence that this collusion thing actually happened at all.
I think it's fair to say, Andrew, if you look at collusion as freighted by what it was presented to us as in the first place, which was that there was this cyber espionage conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin in order to steal the election.
Now, I think the game that they play is: how can you say that there was no collusion?
Because as an English word, as opposed to the narrative that was presented to us, you and I are colluding by having this conversation.
I mean, it's just concerted activity.
It could be benign.
It could be sinister.
Our conversation is probably sinister.
As usual, yeah.
As usual, yeah, but but it could be anything in between, right?
There's nothing necessarily bad or let alone criminal about colluding.
But the way this was presented to the public, especially in the framework of the election, it was it was presented very specifically as Trump was in cahoots with the Putin regime in connection with the hacking of the Democratic email accounts.
with the objective of swinging the election to Trump or stealing from Mrs. Clinton an election that, you know, by right, she should have won.
And that's how it was presented to us.
With respect to that, I don't think there's a shred.
I probably should modify this by saying I don't think there's a shred of credible evidence of that.
And the reason I make that qualification is if you look at the Steele dossier, Christopher Steele does allege that that happened, but he's got no evidence that it happened.
So I don't regard his say-so as evidence.
And certainly if I were a prosecutor, as I used to be, you wouldn't regard that as evidence unless you could corroborate it.
And my beef, as you know, with Steele is that he really wasn't.
He's called constantly a source by the FBI and the Justice Department.
He was not a source in the term of art sense that we talk about sources when you go to a court to get a warrant.
He was much more in the position of a case agent on a case who aggregates all of the information from the various witnesses and presents it to the court.
The sources in the context of a warrant are the people who see and hear, who make the observations that the judge is being asked to rely on for purposes of probable cause to issue the warrant.
Steele didn't see or hear anything and didn't even report to see or hear anything.
Most of what he reports, which by the way, is quite intentionally from Russian sources.
So if somebody here turned to foreign sources to tap, you know, Kremlin sources to get dirt on a presidential candidate, there's no evidence that Trump did that, certainly not successfully.
There's immense evidence that the Clinton campaign and the Democrats did it.
But if you were going to a court for a warrant, the judge would ask you, well, what's your probable cause?
And if you said to him, well, I have this great case agent.
He wins agent of the year every year.
All his colleagues think he's just fabulous.
The judge would look at you like you had three heads because what the judge would say is, no, no, no, don't tell me about the guy who accumulated the information.
Tell me why I should trust the sources that you say saw and heard these things that amount to probable cause.
And they didn't have that.
And that's a problem, Drew, not just for, I think, the election process and the FBI and the Justice Department.
I think it's a fair question to ask the FISA court what the hell they were thinking of signing off on these warrants.
Because that's what they used.
But one of the things, and this speaks to the title of the book, Ball of Collusion, the very process they used to investigate this implicates Barack Obama, doesn't it?
I mean, the fact that this was an intelligence investigation.
Can you explain that so we can understand it?
I mean, yeah, we often talk about that we don't want political interference in law enforcement.
And I think that's absolutely right.
We don't want our political leadership to decide who gets indicted and who doesn't.
So what I like to say is that criminal investigations, which are very different in character from counterintelligence investigations, criminal investigations are about vindicating the rule of law in judicial proceedings.
The reason that you do them is to build criminal cases in order to uphold the law.
There's no political agenda to them.
We have to have rule of law if we're going to have a flourishing society, right?
Very different from that is counterintelligence investigations.
In fact, it's almost unfortunate that they're both called investigations because they're different in character.
Counterintelligence investigations are done only for the president.
The only reason we do counterintelligence investigations is to gather information about foreign powers that might threaten American interests so that the president can carry out his constitutional responsibility for national security of the United States.
So they are done exclusively for the president.
They're not done for judicial proceedings.
You can't obstruct a counterintelligence investigation.
Certainly a president couldn't because it's done for the president.
And it's the kind of information, Drew, that you would expect to find, for example, in the president's daily briefing that he gets every day about what the threat mosaic against the country is at any given period of time.
So when you say that something's a counterintelligence investigation, it's something that's being done for the president.
And that's the theory behind it.
As a practical matter here, I think there's a lot of evidence, and I lay it out in the book that Obama knew exactly what was going on from the beginning here.
Wow, wow.
So in other words, it's kind of a fishing expedition in the first place, right?
To have a counterintelligence investigation into a political campaign.
Yeah.
Yeah, I would, if I had it to do over again, I might have called this book pretext, although I don't know any temptation songs that go along those lines.
But what I think happened here is the counterintelligence investigation was a pretext for what they were trying to do, which was a criminal investigation, even though they didn't have a criminal predicate.
You know, usually in this country, what's supposed to happen is a crime happens, and then you assign the prosecutors and the investigators.
Here, they went after Trump.
They didn't have a crime.
They're hoping to find one, right?
The criminal investigation, particularly once they started to raise obstruction as an issue, was, I think, pretextual in the sense that what they were trying to do was find something they could impeach him on.
And the impeachment dribble, I think, is really also pretextual for what the goal of this has always been.
And I'm not saying that they wouldn't impeach him if they thought they could, but the overarching goal, I think, whether you're talking about counterintelligence, the criminal investigation, the impeachment, has all been to render Trump unelectable when you get to the stretch run of the 2020 election.
Mueller's Surveillance Warrants00:07:59
If they couldn't get rid of him before, the idea was to shorten this presidency, to hamstring him so he would have difficulty pursuing his agenda, and to get rid of him in no more than one term.
Wow, wow.
So it was completely a political operation.
Because you were a federal prosecutor, you know a lot of these guys and you know a lot about how the system works.
And some of your portraits, I mean, your portrait of Rod Rosenstein is not very flattering at all, I would say.
Is there anybody in there we can trust at this point?
Do you trust William Barr?
I do trust Barr.
I've known Barr for a number of years, but, you know, and I don't mean to take a shot at Barr here.
I have no reason to.
I actually do trust him a great deal.
I trust John Durham, who I also know for a number of years, who he's brought in to investigate this.
I know Mike Horowitz, who's the inspector general, who was a colleague of mine at the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York.
But, you know, just so our viewers have whatever grain of salt they need here, you know, two years ago or three years ago, whatever it was, I told people that I know Jim Comey for 30 years and I was confident that he would do a good job and do the right thing.
I still think highly of him.
I have a lot of affection for him as somebody I've known for a long time.
I have deep disagreements with how he handled this.
And I get a lot of flack that I treat him.
I give him a wider berth than I'm probably inclined to give a lot of people who I don't know, which I think is a fair criticism.
But knowing people, Drew, as you know, sometimes that's an advantage.
Sometimes it's a distinct disadvantage.
And I found it very difficult here.
I don't like writing about people I know.
No, of course, neither do I.
I hate reviewing books by people I know.
It's awful.
What about the Mueller investigation?
What's your take on that in the end?
Well, here's the very interesting thing to me about the Mueller investigation.
You mentioned Carter Page at the beginning when you go into the list of things we could go off on a tangent about.
And the Steele dossier was used to get these surveillance warrants on Carter Page, these counterintelligence surveillance warrants.
And in each warrant, they say, based on the Steele dossier, that the FBI believes that Page and perhaps other members of the Trump campaign are complicit in Russia's counterintelligence activities.
That's what they say outright in each one of these warrants.
What's very interesting is the last warrant they get on Page is June of 2017.
And Mueller takes over the investigation in May of 2017.
In June, I think he's still getting his brain around what's going on and assembling a staff.
And we now know the staff actually ran the investigation.
It doesn't look like Mueller did a whole lot.
But to me, the interesting thing, Drew, is they would have been due to reauthorize these warrants and 90-day warrants.
So they would have been due to reauthorize the Carter Page warrant in September of 2017.
That would have required them to reaffirm what was in the Steele dossier, which they had done repeatedly up till that point.
They elected not to do that.
And not only that, by September of 2017 or shortly after, almost everybody who has any fingerprints at all on these surveillance warrants is gone or have been completely marginalized and removed from the equation.
And I've always thought that that's a real telltale sign that we can probably fix the autumn of 2017 as the time when Mueller have known that there was no criminal collusion case.
And I think that's clear also from the indictments that he begins to file in 2018, where if you read the indictment, it's clear that the Russians are not looking for American partners.
They know how to do this.
They didn't need Donald Trump to help them do surveillance or do influence operations.
So the interesting thing to me is about the Mueller investigation, which I think was very, very aggressive and the antithesis of the Hillary Emil investigation, where they really bent over backwards not to make the case.
But to me, the interesting thing is, why did they keep investigating for a year and a half or two years after they knew that the thing that they got brought in to look at, this claim that there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, was a farce?
Wow.
I can't let you go before I ask you just one question about the Jeffrey Epstein case.
You're looking at this as a prosecutor.
What are you thinking?
You know, I thought the report from the Washington Post yesterday about the broken bones in the neck is interesting.
But what I hate about that kind of stuff is when they leak information about an investigation, they really cherry-pick facts.
And what a judge would tell a jury in any case is, and this is said to a jury almost every day of a trial, don't make up your mind until you've heard everything.
And to my mind, yes, the broken bones could be consistent with the strangulation.
They could also be consistent, particularly in a guy of this age, with suicide, with hanging yourself.
So it's not a conclusive fact.
And what I would want to know as the investigator, because of for some mind-boggling reason, they didn't have cameras that actually go into the cells.
And what is that for?
Privacy?
Your right to privacy in federal prison?
But they do have cameras that are trained on the common areas around the cells.
So it would seem to me that it should be a pretty simple thing to figure out, did somebody else go into his cage or not?
If they didn't, then he committed suicide.
And that's what we're dealing with here.
You'll appreciate this.
But I worked in government for more years than I care to say.
And I never assume a nefarious conspiracy when flat out incompetence is a possible answer to the question.
No question about it.
Andrew C. McCarthy, the book is Ball of Collusion, The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency.
You really, your coverage of this has been absolutely superb.
And I'm sorry to keep you so long, but I just find the book absolutely fascinating.
I hope I get to see you soon without the camera between us.
Thanks, my friend.
I like that.
All right, it's good talking to you.
Wow, it's quite a story.
And I can't wait to actually get down and just like read it cover to cover.
I had to go through it, but it's still just amazing, amazing stuff.
Hey, you know what?
There is barely any time left to purchase tickets to our backstage live show, which is next Wednesday, August 21st at the magnificent Terrace Theater in Long Beach, California.
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We may invite Ben Shapiro.
Who knows?
We may let the Daily Wire God King, Jeremy Boring, arrive, and even Michael Knowles will be serving drinks and cleaning up afterwards.
Our Backstage Live show will be on the road.
It's a one-night only event.
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So let me conclude the week.
The Clavenless weekend is almost upon us.
Let me conclude the week with a final reflection.
Faith's Fall00:06:25
You know, there have been two major pop culture Christian figures who've announced recently that they lost their faith.
There was the guy, what was his name?
Josh Harris.
He wrote the best-selling purity culture book, Kiss Dating Goodbye.
And this was where you weren't supposed to date because you were supposed to keep incredibly pure all this time.
And he announced that he had lost his faith.
And now songwriter Marty Sampson, who is the guy from Hillsong, he put out this statement.
He says he hasn't lost his faith, but he's trembling on the brink of losing his faith.
He says, this is a soapbox moment.
So here I go.
How many preachers fall?
Many.
No one talks about it.
How many miracles happen?
Not many.
No one talks about it.
Why is the Bible full of contradictions?
No one talks about it.
How can God be loved and yet send 4 billion people to a place all because they don't believe?
No one talks about it.
Christians can be the most judgmental people on the planet.
They can also be some of the most beautiful and loving people, but it's not for me.
And this is something very, very popular.
I think they were in that movie, God is Not Dead, I think.
But anyway, they're very popular, you know, worship music.
And I think you're going to see a lot of this coming up.
But I want to just point out that on the other side of this, on the other side of this, a lot of intellectuals and a lot of scientists are starting to discover that things don't make sense without God, which is just a really interesting fact.
And I think that you're going to see a lot more of this as well.
David, I can never pronounce his name right, but it's Gerlinter, I think.
He is a Yale computer science professor.
He wrote a piece reviewing some anti-Darwinian books for the Claremont Review of Books.
And he says, there's no reason to doubt that Darwin successfully explained the small adjustments by which an organism adapts to local circumstances.
Yet there are many reasons to doubt whether he can answer the hard questions and explain the big picture, not the fine-tuning of existing species, but the emergence of new ones.
The origin of species is exactly what Darwin can't explain.
And what Gerlinter says as a computer scientist is the math just doesn't add up.
What it takes to make amino acids into a chain that will cause a species, the odds are so fantastic, so amazingly against it, that it simply doesn't add up.
And he hasn't subscribed himself to intelligent design, but what he says is my argument with people is with people who dismiss intelligent design without considering, it seems to me, it's widely dismissed, this is in an interview he said, is widely dismissed in my world of academia as some sort of theological put-up job, but it's an absolutely serious scientific argument.
And I have felt this too.
I felt the dismissal of intelligent design has just been offhand and basically a religious dismissal of the religion of Darwinism.
Now, the thing is, the loss of faith of these people who have put forward a simplistic and moralistic faith is not surprising to me in the least, right?
If what you believe is that the creator of heaven and earth became human and suffered death for a purpose, that purpose, just by logic, was not to reinforce bourgeois values.
It wasn't to tell you not to commit adultery.
You already knew not to commit adultery.
It wasn't to tell you, oh, don't be gay.
I don't like being gay.
That's not why the creator of the universe, I mean, the thing is, the religion, Christianity is a big religion.
It is a big statement, a gigantic statement.
And when it's reduced to bourgeois morality, which I'm in favor of, I'm in favor of bourgeois morality.
I don't think you can really connect with God without living a moral life.
I'm in favor of all that, but that's not the purpose of this major cosmic event, this cosmic atom bomb that went off in our religious world when Jesus died and was resurrected, right?
That's an atom bomb that went off.
And you can tell by the way it affected people around it, in the presence who were in the city when it happened.
You can tell that it just kind of blew people away and absolutely changed the way they lived, the purpose of their lives, made them willing to die, to go out, walk into death in order to say what they had to say in order to spread the word.
If you have reduced that religion to shaking your finger at people who have sex the way you don't like it, or people who do bad things, or people who don't believe quite the way you believe or aren't part of your church, yeah, you can easily lose your faith.
But if you start to look at the gigantic thing that Christianity says, the idea that the mind of God could be incarnate and what that would look like and what it looked like in the world and how people reacted to it and what that means for your life, which is a big thing.
It is a big thing.
Your life is a big thing.
You've only got this very brief period to live it on earth.
It's a very big thing how you live it.
Those are big things.
And when you start to look at those big things, I believe if you are a thinking person, that God becomes more and more of an obvious presence.
He becomes more and more of an obvious reality.
The thing is, the thing that intellectuals have been telling us for the last, I don't know, maybe 100 years, doesn't make sense.
And eventually, common sense, ordinary people know this.
They know it.
When you say, well, you know, like, yeah, there's no God and so everything is relative and all cultures are exactly the same and no, there is no morality.
Yeah, I don't think that makes sense.
But even intellectuals catch on eventually.
All of that stuff, the relativism, the multiculturalism, the atheism, the default atheism, is starting to fall apart at the intellectual level.
So what you're going to see is people who have embraced a simplistic, nonsensical faith are going to fall away.
But you're going to see intellectuals start to say, wait a minute, wait a minute, our default atheism is not working.
And that's going to start to trickle down to the rest of us.
And it's going to start to trickle down until the ideas of intellectuals and the ideas of common sense people meet.
And I think that's when this revival that I keep talking about will take place.
And I think it's actually taking place as we speak.
So when you hear guys like a Hillsong songwriter fall away, remember what he's falling away from is not God.
He's falling away from his version of things, which may have been too small to contain God in the first place.
Andrew Klavan Show00:01:24
And with that, I leave you plunging into the chaos and misery of the Clavenless Weekend.
There's nothing I can do for you anymore.
But should you survive, we will be here on Monday.
I'm Andrew Clavin.
This is The Andrew Klavan Show.
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