Conservative and sturdy so i guess we will do that the same way. Due to extreme planning i am so thrilled to announce that this here tonight is the World Premiere of andy after the release of the book which happened today. [applause] sometimes it just works out. Those who were here three years ago you may recall that andy spoke about some of those passings say hes at the center of attention for that and was the center of attention for the mueller pro handbook of collusion which we will be hearing about in a few minutes and also has some thoughts on the epstein case and if theres time and in your questions he can talk about that as well because he is always the center of attention. Thank you for coming. Ladies and gentlemen, mr. Andy mccarthy. [applause] thank you so much. She says its dumb luck. I think that she was planning this from the start. [laughter] it is a delight to be back here. I think we started to talk about coming back four or five months ago and i had such a great time the last time i didnt need to be asked twice. I think that it is sheer fortuity that it turns out to be on the day the book came out. The book is a big deal even for people who do what i do for a living. A book is something you really poll results into. This is a big day and im i am thrilled to spend it with you. I was even more thrilled, maybe not more, but i stepped off the plane and my phone is exploding because it turned out that Rush Limbaugh talked about the book on the radio today and she likes it, which is important. If hes going to talk about it, you want to make sure he likes it. So its just been i was totally blown away by that. I didnt know he was going to do that. When i got to the hotel, the first thing i did was give him a little note to thank him. He is great so of course he got back to me instantly and said sd there was something i forgot to say and im going to hit that tomorrow. [laughter] so its a double header for me. Its a great day all around. While we are talking about rush, how many married guys in the room . Okay so one of his favorite stories or lines is if a man is out in the forest and hes all by himself, nobody else around, if he makes a statement is he still wrong . [laughter] i was reminded of that today not only because its a great line and what actually got me into the collusion paper which a andy the time i got into it i dont think there was yet. It would be claimed in emails and that kind of evolved into collusion. But what made me so interested in the collusion narrative which is what the book is about. Its got to be made and i was fabulously spectacularly wrong about something that turned out to be very basic and that is back when i was a prosecutor i insisted eight ways to sunday in a very indignant way that it was possible it would never happen for the Justice Department and fbi would use their counterintelligence authorities as the pretext to conduct what actually was a criminal investigation that was done without a criminal predicate. And just so you know where im going with this, the theory behind a this wont be any surprise to any of you that follow this closely all this time. The real solution is that the Obama Administration put the wall enforcement apparatus of the government in the service of the Hillary Clinton campaign, and that included at its heart exploiting the counterintelligence powers our government is given in order to protect the United States from foreign enemies using those powers to actually monitor the opposition campaign. They would think that its against all odds and when they one that investigation, basically as a monitor on his administration to tie his hands and try to undermine his administration and make him unelectable which is the main goal. Just so you get the progression, i think what happened here is you have these counterintelligence powers, and they were used as a pretext to conduct. The criminal investigation was done as a pretext to spawn an impeachment come and be impeachment chatter is a pretext for what is the real agenda. That is what this was about at the beginning and the political narrative from the beginning. What was i so wrong about . Erica was good enough to mention eons ago i was a federal prosecutor. Towards the end of my tenure as a federal prosecutor, i started to handle National Security cases. It happened not out of any planning whatsoever. The planning was done by the geologists. They carry out the bombing of the World Trade Center in february of 1993 and it cost all of us flatfooted on the government decided to treat the National Security challenge as if it were a crime wave, and instead of the marines at the front line, what you got was me. Which is why we didnt do so hot for the first number of years. I had been a prosecutor for never worked for National Security cases. None of us have because they are not cases generally speaking. When you hear the National Security case and hear the expression for an in counterintelligence, these are not powers that we use generally speaking to create criminal cases, to develop evidence that you can present in court. The reason those powers are there is to protect the United States from threats and potential attacks by foreign powers and the idea is to allow us to monitor the threats and try to stop bad things from happening. I am from Law Enforcement and in Law Enforcement what happens, it doesnt happen in the trump russia investigation but what is supposed to happen in the country is a crime gets committed. We usually dont say there is a person like donald trump go out there and try to find a crime on them which is pretty much what he saw from the last number of years. So i knew nothing about how counterintelligence worked. And i barely kne knew him even though id been a prosecutor for the better part of the decade that the fbi actually has a nice job aside from being our premier Law Enforcement agency, the fbi is also our domestic security agency. Now what does that mean . In a lot of countries, there is a role that has to be carved out for Government Agencies to protect the homeland against foreign threats and those threats can come from outside attacks were people who are foreign agents working on behalf of the foreign Power Operating inside the United States. The idea is we are better off separating the Law Enforcement function from the National Security function of protecting the country against foreign threats. In our country what we have always fought is the best way to handle the challenge of the threats to security is to have those the wall enforcement and National Security mission housed in the same agency and the fbi so they have one side of their agency is the criminal Law Enforcement side coming into the other side is what is known as counter foreign intelligence or National Security. The reason we do it that way is the idea is the two missions can actually leverage each other. One of the best ways you can get intelligence for people is by developing criminal cases on them the cause and if you like they might be prosecuted, that gets them to talk. Sometimes the criminal prosecutions can help our Intelligence Mission and it can work the other way as well. We treated terrorism is eventually as a criminal justice problem. But that never made the National Security component of its go away or the National Security mission. And the reason thats important for what we are talking about tonight is on the National Security side we have a whole different set of powers of the criminal Law Enforcement and prosecutors commonly used. When i was a prosecutor if he had a mafia case and i needed to get a wiretap for my investigation working with the fbi, we wouldve used the criminal statutes are available. The reason its important to use the criminal statute is because we are dealing with the american criminal Justice System mainly dealing with americans and nonamericans. We are all presumed innocent. And our criminal Law Enforcement laws that congress has enacted account for and build in and assume all of our Due Process Rights as americans. There are protections builtin for people in the criminal justice rules. The National Security powers in the counterintelligence are different in the sense that the concentration on foreign counterintelligence is not americans. The concentration is the foreign power that may be a threat to the United States. And very often even when youre dealing with agents of foreign power that work here in the United States, they are not americans working for a foreign government, they dont have the same rights. So, one of the things that would have been in the eight years interim that i mentioned was when an investigation started, the fbi and Justice Department would try to figure out right at the beginning is this going to be a criminal case that we are going to try to do in court, or is this a National Security case where we are just going to try to collect evidence for the country, and that went on for a long time and it really shouldnt be the kind of thing that is a paralyzing decision to make. We should be able to go back and forth until everybody is acting in good faith. But one of the things the clinton Justice Department started to get very nervous about, with a kind of run their hands over was the specter, the hypothetical possibility of abuse. And what kind of abuse did they have in mind . They imagined a situation in which you had a rogue agent or set of rogue agents who didnt have enough evidence to make a criminal case. So rather than drop the case which is what you do in the Justice Department, we have lots and lots of cases if you dont have enough evidence you usually move onto the next one. Theres not enough time to do the stuff that they were worried about. What they were worried about is what if you had rogue agents that didnt have criminal agents and then rather than drop the case, in order to continue investigating because they felt like the people they were investigating were worthy of investigation or maybe corrupt reasons they wanted to take the case on them that rather than drop the case, what they would rather do this fabricate a National Security angle so that they could exploit the governments former and conduct it was a criminal investigation without a criminal predicate under the guise of the National Security powers. The worry that they had that that could happen which theres no evidence of it ever happening before, that resulted in something that a number of people im sure a lot of people in the room would remember were notoriously known as the wall. People remember the wall. This is a long time ago. All the rage in a big controversy in the big 1990s, but it was a set of regulations that the Justice Department interposed between the criminal investigation sid cited the fbis house and the intelligence side which made it impossible for those two sides to cooperate and compare evidence and it was a catastrophe. It probably led to the failure of our intelligence agencies including the fbi to detect the 9 11 plot before it happened. Im not blaming the government for the terrorist attack. But our failure to detect it and to do efficient intelligence collection and analysis we put this Administrative Law and was a disaster for americans in terms of our security because we couldnt get the full measure of what they call the threats mosaic a lot of people died. When the wall was established there was a lot of controversy in the Justice Department, and it pitted a number of people that were working the ticker was in cases like myself that rejected to it at the time and for one reason, the objection was on the basis of our honor. Basically you are saying that if we have these powers to protect the United States at our disposal we will use them pre textually. If you assumed i thought it was absolutely absurd to think that a rogue agent no matter how bad whatever export counterintelligence covers to fabricate a criminal case. The reason i was so confident about that wasnt because i think everybodys an angel and nobody would ever do something they shouldnt do. To use the National Security powers, they are not easy. You have to get a ton of approvals. So, from where i sat and this was somebody working day today with the people doing these cases, if you had a rogue agent and prosecutors would be easier for them to fabricate evidence to use the criminal procedures what i said again and again as that would be crazy to do because the bureau would never let anyone get away with it i was absolutely certain that it couldnt happen because he would have to give too many approvals. So, why was i so wrong . But i fail to assume is that there could be a case where the adult leadership to do the investigation themselves. The idea in the Justice Department and fbi has a very good idea is that we want investigations to be conducted in the places where either a threat to the United States exists or where the crime happens tha that is entirely consistent with the constituti constitution. The people that are closest to the event are always going to be the most efficient and gathering the evidence. They are going to have the best context. For the investigations to have an independent of the politics of washington, if the fbi headquarters does an investigation, they are right there in the thick of all of the politics. So, the idea is we want to insulate investigations from those kinds of considerations. So, for that reason with the fbi likes to do and what the Justice Department likes to do is have investigations carried out in the District Office where the relevant crime happened and then the fbi and the Justice Department headquarters can play the traditional role to of headquarters is supposed to play which is they are the leadership, they are the guardians of the standard, they make sure that everybody stays on the straight and narrow. There has never been a prosecutor as guilty of this as anyone who ever specified when you are working on an investigation especially if youre dealing with someone like terrorism or violent crime, you become convinced that your bad guys are the worst in the history of bad guys. And you rationalize and want to cut corners. You want to say why do i have to satisfy this threshold because what im dealing with is a problem with really bad people. And even if i dont have all the evidence i need, if we get a wiretap, we will get the evidenclook at the evidenceand. This is the higher calling, the better way to deal with it. And because we are all human and because we are all subject to that temptation, we need to have supervision which is detached in which tells us know, we dont do that kind of stuff. We dont take an Opposition Research from somebody that is working for a political campaign. They say for example if you want to go to the foreign Intelligence Surveillance courtt urges thwhich is the court thats National Security cases you must verify the information before you submit an application to the court. And while that is always important. In the fbi investigations, what we are allowed to do is monitor people for the government says there is probable cause not that they committed a crime necessarily, but that they are agents of the foreign power and operating on behalf of the foreign power in the United States they are publi called agr building the criminal investigation. You know why thats important . Criminal investigation keeps people honest. In the criminal investigation, its true that if i want to get a search warrant or i went to get a wiretap, or i went to get some other source of information where there was something in the law that allowed me to go to court and get an order tha to cl somebody to surrender the evidence to me it is true that i was allowed to go to the judge with my agent by myself. No defense lawyer, no defennt, no suspect, just us and the judge. But, in a criminal investigation, everybody operates under the assumption that eventually is going to be a trial. Eventually theres going to be a prosecution. Eventually the reason we are giving this as they are going to file an indictment and arrest people and when we arrest people, all the representations that we make to the court in order to get a sense are going to be turned over to the defense and the defense lawyers and they are going to go over every single line of every singles should see if we mislead the court. The court applied the best evidentiary hearing standard . Every single motion attacking the underlining basis of the evidence is going to be flushed out. So thats wha what people do itk in the criminal law are more honest than other people. They know what is in their selfinterest to be straight with the court because if they are not, someone is going to find out about it down t