Tonight Hannity had Andy McCarthy on, along with Sara Carter. Quite frankly, McCarthy shocked me. I never thought that Andy would get this far out in front of the news. But he "went there." Here's the partial transcript--Andrew McCarthy: Counter Intelligence Investigations Are Done for the President -- Obama KNEW:
Sean Hannity: Does that mean Obama had to know?
Andrew McCarthy: Sean, what I’m saying is not that the president sits there and directs that there be counter-intelligence investigations. What I’m saying is that, unlike criminal investigations, counter intelligence investigations are done for the president. The only reason to do them is to inform the president with the information he needs to protect the United States from foreign threats. They’re not like criminal investigations in that regard. So, in principle, the information from a counterintelligence investigation is for the president. And here we know at various junctures, we have actual factual information, that this investigation was well known to president Obama.
Sean Hannity: So, if he knew, and this is all happening, he had to know about it from the get-go. Doesn’t that also imply that he would have been updated on this? If he’s the one that needs it for national security decision making?
Andrew McCarthy: Sean, if things were working properly the president should have been alerted about it and informed. It was a very important investigation. If they actually believed what they were telling the court that it was a possibility that Donald Trump was actually a plant of the Kremlin, it would have been derelict on their part not to keep the president informed.
After Sara agrees that Obama had to have known, the colloquy continues:
Sean Hannity: ... Is there any way we can get to the full truth without interviewing and interrogating or asking Barack Obama what he knew and when he knew it?
Andrew McCarthy: Well, I think, Sean, that that's the last thing you would wanna do. You wanna get all the other information, just like we said when the issue of interviewing President Trump came up in the other investigation. If you wanna interview the president of the United States you should hafta be able to show ...
Sean Hannity: He's not president anymore.
Andrew McCarthy: We're talking about activities that happened when he was president and that he still has some privileges with respect to under American law ...
Sean Hannity: Why do I suspect he won't be as forthcoming as Donald Trump ...
...
Now, what happened in 2016, as we follow the story, and John's right, this is what we're now gonna have revealed, step by step, day by day, throughout the fall. Now, seemingly, all this done at the direction, if you listen to what Andy's saying, can't have a counterintel investigation unless the Obama-Biden administration, well, in fact, that would represent the biggest abuse of power scandal in American political history, because they wanted to impact the outcome of an election, they spied in multiple ways, overseas and through the FISA process, by premeditated fraud on the FISA court ...
All this also fits in with a Trump tweet from June that GP reproduced:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
“Someone should call Obama up. The Obama Administration spied on a rival presidential campaign using Federal Agencies. I mean, that seems like a headline to me?” @TuckerCarlson It will all start coming out, and the Witch Hunt will end. Presidential Harassment!
11:28 PM - Jun 11, 2019
Trump seems to have an excellent idea of where this is all heading and he appears to be satisfied with the progress that's being made.
You have to have a little sympathy for McCarthy- in the early days he went on record time and again proclaiming certain things about the investigation and the people running it that he was forced to retract, over and over, as the truth dribbled out.
ReplyDeleteRight. And during the Libby case he never retracted a thing, defended the same people up and down the line. So this surprised me.
DeleteIn fairness, McCarthy is a stand-up guy, and assumes others are too--until evidence to the contrary arrives. And maybe to a fault does he bend over backwards to give the other the benefit of doubt--when they work for a security service or in a high office.
ReplyDeleteI must say, I've thought Obama has known all along. Clapper, Comey, Brennan, Lynch, Rice, Power, all dipped a toe (or foot or leg or were up to their neck) in the hoax/coup effort. I can't see how people whose job is to keep the president informed, didn't in this instance.
And I can guarantee that when the news breaks that Obama knew, the NYT, WaPo and other legacy media will say, of course he knew, so what? And collectively shrug their shoulders...because Orange Man Bad.
Exactly--Orange Man Bad. I hope they find the leaker re this Greenland thing. If you haven't read about that, here's a good article--it's all about China:
Deletehttps://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/aug/21/buying-greenland-trump-haters-mock-the-idea-but-ch/
Re McCarthy, he's been an apologist for his SDNY buddies for far too long. Comey didn't suddenly go bad. There were people who knew that and said so, and he defended him anyway.
I take your point re: McCarthy defending his SDNY buddies. I hadn't thought about those relations as he's been gone from that office for so long.
DeleteI'd forgotten that Comey came out of SDNY, as he was USA for NOVA when he got picked for DAG. IIRC. (I used to know his sister, married to a friend of mine.)
Greenland: Thule AFB is pretty important geostrategic location vis-à-vis Russia and China.
He was probably being a loyal friend, not realizing that some of this friends are scumbags.
ReplyDeleteI think he knows better, now. And to be fair to him, it'd be tough to find out a friend is a cretin. It speaks to his character that he was loyal, at first.
And this comes from me, a former fan of McCarthy, until he twice wrote articles defending misconduct by the FBI.