Andrew McCarthy’s Ball of Collusion exposes how the FBI weaponized the Steele dossier—unverified opposition research—to secure FISA warrants against Trump’s 2016 campaign, exploiting a collapsed "wall" between counterintelligence and criminal probes. John Durham’s report confirmed fraudulent FISA filings but dodged accountability by shielding witnesses like Steele, while key figures like Strzok faced no real consequences. McCarthy reveals deeper politicization: Democrats allegedly pressured the FBI to inflate domestic terrorism stats by reclassifying Capitol riot cases, spreading fear of white supremacist threats nationwide. The bureau now operates as an unchecked intelligence arm, with FISA abuses shielded from oversight, leaving whistleblowers silenced and reform stalled. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the things that is particularly galling about the left-wing press, which is the press, the media, reaction to the Durham report is this meme, oh, it's nothing new.
We knew all this already.
And that's true.
It is nothing new in some ways.
But you would never have found it out if you've been listening to them.
If you've been reading the New York Times, if you've been watching NBC, you would never have heard the level of corruption that was going on.
Instead, what you heard was that essentially Trump was, you know, they were closing in, the walls were closing in, the end was near, there's the beginning of the end.
Trump is colluding with Russia.
The way you would have known about it, however, is if you had read a book called Ball of Collusion, The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, which was written in 2019 by the great Andrew C. McCarthy, who is a former federal prosecutor, best-selling author, and contributing editor at National Review.
So just to give somebody a chance to say, I told you so, who actually reported on the story, I thought we would have Andy on.
Andy, it's good to see you.
How are you doing?
Drew, it's great to see you.
And I appreciate the kind words, especially since I actually wrote the book because I felt like I was really angry about being wrong about, you know, when people came to me and told me the FBI would take a screed of unproven, uncorroborated, unverified opposition research, slap a caption on it, and swear to it under oath in the FISA court, I said, you guys are crazy.
And that's what turned out to happen.
Well, this is one of the things that I want to talk to you about.
I mean, this is a change, right?
This has not always been the case.
And in fact, in the report, there are many good agents who were being driven insane by the fact that essentially Comey and McCabe had taken this thing over.
Yeah.
The reason I was wrong, and I think this gets to the point that you're making here.
You know, back in the 90s, when I was doing counterterrorism cases at the Justice Department and the Clinton Justice Department put in these regulations that infamously became known as the wall, which prevented the counterintelligence side of the FBI's house, which has the domestic security mission, prevented them from sharing information with the criminal investigators and prosecutors,
which was a crazy way to go about business and actually caused at least part of 9-11 to happen.
I'm not saying that I blamed, obviously it's the jihad has made it happen, but you understand my point.
We could have detected him if it wasn't for the way we hamstrung ourselves.
And I remember arguing at the time that that was a nutty way to go about things in part because if you assumed a rogue agent, it would be much easier to lie to get the basis for a criminal investigation,
which is not that hard to do, than lie so that you would have a national security angle that would let you go the FISA route, because that had so many tripwires and rungs of approval, it would be much easier to be detected doing misconduct just going the criminal route rather than FISA.
So I argued back when the Clinton people were putting these restrictions in on this hypothesis that the FBI might rely on its counterintelligence powers as a pretext when it didn't have enough evidence for a criminal investigation, but felt like if they sat on somebody long enough, the investigation would yield something and then they would pounce, right?
So I used to argue that that would never happen.
And then it obviously did happen with Trump.
So part of what drove me to write the book was, why was I so wrong about that?
And I think what I didn't factor in was what would happen if headquarters decided to take over an investigation itself.
Because all those tripwires I referred to, all those places where you think that somebody who is up to no good will get found out and prevented from abusing power, that assumes supervisors who act as supervisors, who tell agents who are investigating cases, no, we don't take uncorroborated information that we think may be wrong and swear to it under oath in the Pfizer court.
That's like one of those things we don't do.
But it turns out that when headquarters itself takes over an investigation, it's vulnerable to all of the incentives that a line agent is to think that your bad guys are the worst bad guys in history, except when headquarters takes over the investigation, there's no one there to tell them no.
And that's what happened here.
Did you look at the Durham report and find things that surprised you that you didn't already know?
Not really factually things that I didn't know.
And it's because I've obviously followed this closely all along.
And after the Durham report, we got a report from Mueller, and then we got a few reports from the Inspector General at the Justice Department.
So you could tell the general trajectory that things were headed in.
What did surprise me, Drew, was I told people that I wouldn't expect Durham to file any big conspiracy type, racketeering type cases, because when you're dealing with people at a high level of law enforcement and intelligence, they have so much discretion to act.
It's very hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they acted corruptly, especially if there were alternative reasons that they, you know, they're allowed to be wrong, right?
So just because they do something that seems galactically off the charts bad doesn't necessarily mean they're doing it for a corrupt reason.
So those cases are very hard to make.
And I told people I wouldn't expect to see that out of Durham.
What does surprise me is he actually did find crimes, which I didn't think he was going to do.
But then in a, to me, a very unsatisfying way, and I say this as someone who likes the report and likes Durham.
But I'm annoyed that he says, for example, a fraud was pulled off on the Pfizer court.
People lied to the Pfizer court.
Now, that's a crime.
That's not like a hard one to prove, right?
You're not talking about, oh, well, they had so much discretion.
You lie to the court or not, right?
And where he comes out in the end is, well, the headquarters guys say this is what they were thinking.
And the guys who were dealing with the actual informants, meaning Steele and Igor Danchenko, this is what they say.
And we can't square those two things.
But we weren't able to interview Steele because he's a Brit and he didn't have to cooperate with us.
And we weren't able to interview Danchenko for Fifth Amendment reasons and otherwise.
So at the end of four years, our conclusion is we can't really figure out who lied.
And to me, first of all, four years, you got to figure out who the hell lied, right?
And I think that if the FBI was investigating another agency, and mind you, you know, Durham is being assisted in the investigation by the FBI, right?
I have a feeling if the FBI investigated another agency, we'd have found out who did it.
Right.
So he gets to this conclusion.
He says, you know, we can't bring charges because we can't make it stick beyond a reasonable doubt because we can't really figure out based on people's failed recollections and the unavailability of certain witnesses, we can't get to the bottom of it.
And I'm thinking, you know, I was a prosecutor for a long time.
Durham is too.
I have a lot of respect for him.
But, you know, you don't get to interview the defendant in most cases.
Like the most important witness in most cases is the defendant.
You often do not get to interview the defendant.
You still make the case.
So to me, what that means at the end, and this is what I think gets people very angry, is how do you hold these guys accountable?
If you get to the end, you say, there was a crime here, but we just can't figure it out.
When you see yesterday, the House had a bunch of FBI whistleblowers come on.
One of them we had on the show, a friend, I think his name was, and they come in and say, we can't, if you talk to anybody, the FBI will crush you.
The FBI will take you out.
They will destroy your career.
They'll come after your family.
Yesterday or the day before, we saw two female FBI agents show up at the house of an anti-abortion activist and sort of harass her, her mother.
Does this surprise you?
Is this something you feel, yeah, this is the kind of thing that the FBI does?
I don't see how you could push back against that because we have too much indication of it over the years.
Now, I wouldn't want to generalize and say that it's typical behavior, but at the same time, I'd be uncomfortable calling it atypical.
I know I sound like a weasel saying that, but I think they have a significant problem, Drew.
And it goes to what I just said, which is that no one ever gets held accountable for anything.
You know, when you ask Chris Ray about the Durham report, what he says is two things.
He says, well, all those guys who were running that investigation, they ain't around anymore.
We removed all those guys.
Well, they did that awfully quietly, didn't they?
I mean, did you get the feeling that there was a lot of accountability here?
I sure did.
You know, when that happened, I came on my show and I said if they were reporting the number of people who've been fired, this would be a massive scandal.
It would be like an actual house cleaning.
But nobody said anything.
It just kind of faded away into the distance.
So yeah, it was very quietly done.
Nobody feel, you know, Strzok is on TV.
He's a commentator somewhere.
It's remarkable.
So this is another thing.
These are people you knew, some of them, Merrick Garland, James Comey.
These are not strangers to you.
And you respected them.
Many people respect them and not just you.
And you've said that after 9-11, the domestic agencies got too much anti-terrorism power.
But is something else happening?
I mean, conservatives are so naturally paranoid that the country is being taken over, but it does feel like something really terrible is happening in the government.
Yeah, well, I do think something terrible is happening.
And there's two points I'd make about it.
One is pivoting off the point you just made about the whistleblower guys, one of, you know, you said you had a friend on.
Yeah.
So I have a piece that just came out at National Review.
They have been making the FBI, Democrats have been trying to get the FBI to cook its books for four years to inflate the number of domestic terrorism cases so that they can create the misimpression that there's a white supremacy domestic terrorism threat that pervades this country and could erupt at any moment in mass murder attacks.
And in point of fact, the way they've done this is, first of all, they regard the Capitol riot as a terrorist attack, which it was not.
I don't carry a brief for the Capitol riot, but to say that a riot is not a terrorist attack is like saying a murder is not a terrorist attack.
You know, it's a terrible thing, but it's a different thing, right?
So they have used the 1,100 people that they have arrested in connection with the Capitol riot.
And instead of just, you know, sending out to other offices leads, like when I ran the Blind Shea case in the 90s, the case was in New York.
It was one case, and we may have sent out 1,000 leads, but they return everything to New York, right?
In this case, what the Washington Field Office does, instead of sending out leads, they tell the offices around the country, open an investigation, and then produce this evidence.
And what they then do from that is they tell Congress, we now have domestic terrorism investigations in every state in the United States.
When in point of fact, what they have is like somebody from Minnesota took a bus to the Capitol and then like a schmuck walked through the Capitol, but like didn't break a window, didn't hit a cop, didn't do anything.
And that case is opened as a domestic terrorism case in Minnesota.
Right.
So they're trying to create the impression to feed a political narrative.
There's no other reason for this.
It's completely a political narrative.
So they're absolutely being abused to do that in the service of politics.
And I think the greater point is that the FBI is part of the administrative state and they are the service of the party of government.
It just simply is the case.
And they are much more responsive to Democrats than they are to Republicans.
And it's a totally new world because I think up until around 1993 and certainly up until 9-11, the FBI was principally a police organization.
And since then, they've become an intelligence agency.
And it's a very different discipline.
It's got a lot more cloak and dagger to it.
It's much less deferential to people's civil rights.
It's just, it's not the way a police agency works.
And when you're doing police work, Drew, everybody goes about their business expecting there's going to be an indictment, which will mean there's discovery.
And everything that the FBI represented to a court is going to be poured over by defense lawyers who are incentivized to highlight any misconduct.
On the national security side, on the Pfizer side, everything's classified.
Discovery's Absence00:00:42
The only due process any of us ever gets is if they don't lie and they follow the rules when they're in the FISA court because no one's represented.
There's never going to be discovery.
It's all under the cone.
And what I think it's proven is it's too tempting for them to bend the rules because we can see they've bent the rules.
It's not just against Trump.
There's like massively, they've made misstatements and misrepresentations to the Pfizer court across the board.
Yeah, really frightening stuff.
Andy McCarthy, thanks so much for coming on, former federal prosecutor, contributing editor, National Review, and his book, Ball of Collusion, the Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency, could have come out yesterday, basically.