Best of the Program | Guest: Andy McCarthy | 4/19/19

Welcome to the podcast.

It's Stu in for Glenn, who was sadly indicted in the Mueller Report.

If you missed that, you'll have to catch up on another station because we're too embarrassed to talk about it here.

A terrible, terrible crime he committed, and I'll just let you discover it yourself.

Either that or he's sick.

Glenn is going to be back on Monday, but today we had the podcast to kind of go through and talk about the Mueller Report.

Where were we?

Where are we?

And where are we going?

And I think, you know, you'll see a good portion of where the Democrats are going to go here.

What are they going to chase?

What are they after?

And we'll get into that on today's program.

We have Pat Gray joining us as well.

He goes over his take on the Mueller Report.

And his,

I think he has a very common, common plea

for us to be able to move on from this and a common realization that it's just never going to happen, is it?

We have another update about the Mueller Report with Jason Buttrell.

He'll be on.

We have Glenn's annual Easter essay, his Easter message.

So for, this is a great thing if you are a person of faith and you want to bring this out and maybe have your kids listen to it.

If you have maybe a little older kids that can, you know, that care and you want to kind of let them have a little bit of an intense telling of the Easter essay.

It's a great piece.

We've run it for years.

It's one of the most requested things we do every single year.

And Andy McCarthy from National Review and the New York Post has a take on the Mueller report.

I don't think you've heard anywhere else.

It's really interesting.

We go through that, a bunch of audio from the media, and the secret plan of the Soviet Union back in the day to write letters from the KKK to African athletes, along with the creation of the myth that AIDS was created by the U.S.

government.

They were involved in that.

We'll tell you the story on today's podcast.

You're listening to the best of the Blenbeck program.

So the spectacle of the Mueller report

happened yesterday, and what a spectacle it was.

Very proud of the way our nation handled this whole last couple of years.

It's worked out very well.

We had the big reveal at the press conference with Barr yesterday.

Then he put the Mueller report onto C Ds.

And then it was transferred to cassettes for the congressmen to listen on their Walkman.

Then each congressman's individual beeper would go off, and that would indicate that the floppy disk copies were ready.

And once the floppy disk copies were ready, they were uploaded via 5600 Baud modem

via America Online to make sure they could get onto the interwebs.

And finally,

the technologically advanced congressmen could read the entire thing on their palm pilots, which is pretty great.

It really worked out well, and it wasn't an embarrassing procedure at all.

This is an incredible kind of thing because you had two parts of this.

Part one, collusion.

You're not hearing much about that.

There's a couple things in there that the left is trying to hang on to.

There's a couple of incidents here and there where they're trying to make it seem as if there was something there.

Some of it is just interesting to see what the Russians attempted to do.

Some of it you can kind of see an inexperienced campaign maybe not handling things the right way.

Maybe they should have just gone to the FBI with some of these things.

Whether they realized them or not, I mean, Mueller quite clearly says there was no intent to do anything wrong here.

There was no intent to collude with Russians, which is, again, the title of the report, which you'd never guess.

Is the title of the report,

how do we figure out if Trump Screwed Up?

Is the title of the report, hey,

you know who's awful is Donald Trump?

How do we figure out how to get him out of office?

Stunningly, that's not the title of the report.

The report is Report on the Investigation into Russian Interference in the 2016 presidential election.

And we found that.

We have a lot of examples of it.

We're going to go through some of those and also some crazy historical examples of when Russia actually did do this and they were caught.

And it's incredible.

And they've been doing it the entire time.

They've spent billions and billions of dollars.

The estimate is in 1980, so go back to the Soviet Union, in 1980, they were spending $3 billion on these practices.

Back then,

I mean, there's been some inflation since then.

Not to mention,

it's a lot easier to do these things now.

You don't have to spend $3 billion.

You can spend a lot less.

But they were trying to influence the election.

The Mueller report captured that very well in multiple documents.

Really, the interesting stuff on that part of the investigation came in the indictments of the 25 Russians that came out earlier.

But this turns now into a political issue because you have the collusion thing, which is pretty much dead, but you have the obstruction thing, which they're going to try to keep alive.

They're going to try to get as much fuel out of this as possible.

And they have this difficult line to walk as Democrats because they have this realization that they want to impeach Donald Trump very badly.

They want to remove Donald Trump from office very badly.

They realize no matter how badly they want that, they don't have enough to actually achieve it.

And the reason they don't have enough to achieve it is the Mueller Report quite clearly does not even think obstruction of justice rises to these levels.

They didn't exonerate him, but they didn't convict him.

They're in the middle there, and we'll get into that a little bit.

Andy McCarthy is going to be joining us later, and

he's got the,

you know, the...

the legal background to be able to kind of break this down for us.

But basically, you look at this and you say he kind of fell in the middle, and it's not a good place for the Mueller report to land.

And we'll get into that a little bit later on.

But the Democrats now have to figure out politically what they're going to do with this.

And you know what they want so badly if they could just get it is impeachment.

They and people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are not going to be able to hold themselves back.

The problem here is you're not going to be able to get it through the Senate, even if you wanted to.

So you might be able to impeach Trump in the House.

It's going to go to the Senate.

It's going to fail in the Senate.

It's going to become very unpopular.

And it's the type of thing that could derail their entire campaign.

There's a sect of the Democratic Party that understands this, right?

The Nancy Pelosis of the world,

you know, she's got a million flaws, and she tries to cover most of them with Botox, but a lot of them still exist.

And the idea that she can come out and understand the fact that this would be unpopular and probably hurt their electoral chances chances in 2020.

She's on that bandwagon.

But you have the Ilan Omars, you have the Rashida Talibs, you have the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

You have all of them who are going to come in here and say, I don't care if it's good electorally.

I want to go after him anyway.

Just like they wanted to kill the Amazon jobs, right?

Like, that's not a good position for anybody.

People in New York believed that this was, Amazon coming to New York City was a great thing.

And she

helped kill the Amazon deal because

she doesn't care about that.

You know, she's in a safe district.

As Nancy Pelosi correctly pointed out, a cup of water could run in that district and win.

So there's no risk there.

What they want is impeachment badly.

And you know what they're going to do?

They're going to come as close to it as possible without actually doing it.

This is what they want.

It's like if

you are told

the thing you can't do is eat this box of donuts, but you really,

really

want this box of donuts.

You know you can't have them.

You know you can't eat them, but you got the giant box of donuts.

There's 12 of them in there.

They're perfectly glazed.

You know what it looks like when someone opens a box of the Krispy Kreme and they're just, just they just look perfect and you just want to eat all of them.

And many times you do.

But in this instance, you can't.

So what are they going to do?

They're going going to get in their car.

They're going to drive to Krispy Kreme.

They're going to go through the drive-thru.

They're going to buy the donuts.

They're going to bring them back home.

They're going to open the box.

They're going to look longingly at this box of donuts.

They're going to sniff each individual donut.

They are going to lick the outside of the glaze.

of the donuts.

They are going to nibble at the edge of the donuts just to get a little taste.

They're going to shake the box and then they're going to take their finger and lick it and they're going to slide it around the bottom of the box and pick up all the excess glaze and they're going to taste the excess glaze.

They're going to take a bite of the doughnut.

They're going to chew the donut and then they're going to spit it out.

What they want the American people to come away with here is that, number one, they absolutely could impeach this president because of the terrible things he's done.

And number two, we're just, you know what?

It's time for voters to decide.

We're so close to the election and we have way, we have plenty to get him out of office, but it would be an extended process.

And we know those Republicans, we know what they would say.

So we're going to get really close to these donuts that we want.

We might even, might even get into the bathtub naked and cover ourselves in donuts.

But the one thing we're not going to do is eat all the donuts.

We're going to stay just outside of that area.

The one thing we're not going to do is consume the donuts.

And if they do decide to eat the box of donuts, in this case, impeachment, that is when

they get fat, right?

This is when they are going to pay a price with the American people because the American people see this for what it is.

If it was a criminal action, they would support.

impeachment.

If they caught Donald Trump, you know, texting and saying, you know what, Vlad, honestly, like, can you just come over here and

give me a flash drive?

I'll plug it into the digital voting machine myself.

We'll win this election.

If they had that, if they had something that convinced the American people,

the American people would come along.

I mean,

we are pretty much in our silos here, and most people are not going to change their mind because of the Mueller report.

But they're really not going to change their mind because of this Mueller report, because of the fact that there's nothing there that's overwhelming or convincing.

we know that

there were some actions that were taken by the Trump administration that I think in retrospect they probably would have done differently.

And we're going to go through a lot of those today.

But the way the press is handling this is just utterly insane.

There's a story in the New York Times about this today.

And

the lines they draw and

the way they cover this.

is incredible

and also exactly what you would expect.

So, Robert Mueller releases this report, and the New York Times gets to work.

And this is, it was interesting to see how everyone covered this.

Everyone jumped into like

the mode of this is the biggest breaking news story of all time.

And obviously, it's very, it's very, it's been on the top of the news cycle for a long time.

I expect them to cover it.

A lot of resources expended here to do this all in one day.

Story comes out today that Mueller reveals Trump's efforts to thwart Russian inquiry in a highly anticipated report.

It goes goes through some of the basics here.

Mueller laid out how his team of prosecutors wrestled with whether Trump's actions added up to criminal obstruction of justice offenses.

They ultimately chose not to charge Mr.

Trump, citing numerous legal and factual constraints,

but pointedly declined to exonerate him and suggested that it might be the role of Congress to settle the matter.

I like the phrasing there.

When you don't have the information to convict someone, you could say they didn't do it.

You could say, look, maybe they did it, but we don't have enough evidence to show that they did it.

The New York Times calls it factual constraints.

Factual constraints?

What is the?

I mean, there are some parts of this that are talking about how, okay, it's the president of the United States.

There are different considerations here.

Obviously, he has constitutional power to do a lot of these things.

And so if he has constitutional power to do them, well, I mean,

is it a crime?

Could it be a crime?

crime?

But no, they say factual constraints were one of the issues.

Then they say this, and I love the wording of this.

Every once in a while, one word makes a difference.

You know?

The difference between like and love

is really significant, isn't it?

I like you, honey.

I love you, honey.

Those are two big, different things.

They make a big difference in the way you say them.

And that's the case here.

The report laid bare that Mr.

Trump was elected with the help of a foreign power.

Now, that is...

That's a pretty amazing statement, isn't it?

And the actual answer to that question is no.

It's not an amazing statement at all.

Listen to it very carefully.

The report laid bare that Mr.

Trump was elected with the help of a foreign power.

They're not saying he was elected because...

of the help of foreign power.

They're saying he was elected with the help of a foreign power.

Now, we do know that Trump posted a lot of, or the Russia posted a lot of social media thing, campaigns.

They did obviously go after Hillary's emails.

They did things believing that their interactions with the Trump administration would be better than their interactions with the Clinton administration.

And they go through a lot of the details here.

And this is not something that is new.

It's been out there for a very long time.

It wasn't exclusively to help Trump, their efforts by any means.

There was a lot of

efforts on both sides just to cause chaos.

But some of the things they did, you know, theoretically could have helped Donald Trump.

They're not making the case that these actions did help Donald Trump.

They're saying he was elected with the help of a foreign government.

It's like saying the Golden State Warriors won the NBA championship with the help of the fan in Section 342, Roe W.

Seat 11.

Right?

Like...

Yeah, that guy was clapping pretty loud, but that didn't make the difference.

It was Kevin Durant nailing those threes, right?

It's Steph Curry pulling up on a fast break and making shots.

And it had nothing to do with the clapping in Section 342.

And there's no evidence whatsoever.

And again, this goes through the Mueller report.

There's no evidence that this had any effect on what actually occurred in the election.

It's an important thing.

Everyone knows this, I think.

With the exception of people on the far left.

I even heard, I mean, I heard James Clapper on CNN yesterday saying, the Mueller report shows that the social media outreach from the Russians reached 123 million people.

Like with this idea that you're supposed to say, wow,

really?

They've reached 123 million people.

That's incredible.

That shows that they swung the election.

That is not what it shows at all.

Every every, I mean, come on.

We all know this.

People, people with picture, with photographic evidence, with non-stop scientific studies over multiple decades don't change their mind on social media.

You think Russian propaganda changed anybody's mind on social media of who to vote for?

And

it had nothing to do with whether they changed anybody's mind.

It has to do with that they changed the mind of about 80,000 people in three states.

And

the answer to this is obvious.

You're never going to know for sure.

You're never going to be able to interview every single person and see

all of their

social media interactions and go back and retrace their mindset.

But the bottom line is, it is very difficult to change people's mind on an election like Trump versus Clinton.

There weren't a lot of of undecideds there.

It wasn't like, oh, wow, you know what?

I really believed in socialized medicine, but wow, this Russian bot just said, I mean, that doesn't happen.

These are not things that occur.

Later on in the New York Times story,

it's amazing.

Immediately after learning that the special counsel had been appointed to lead the Russia

investigation, the report said Mr.

Trump became distraught and slumped in his chair.

This is

the most prominent piece of the Mueller report.

I'm about to read you both the most prominent piece, the most widely distributed line in the entire report, and also the

most misleading line in the entire report.

Trump said, quote, oh my God, this is terrible.

This is the end of my presidency.

I'm effed.

How many times did you see that yesterday?

It was the headline, and I can all but guarantee you when you read it, if you read it in the mainstream media, it stopped right there.

Right after the big F-bomb, I'm Fed.

This is the president admitting he did something wrong.

He's caught.

But that's not the context of it at all.

If you read three or four sentences later in the Mueller report, it says this.

The president returned to the consequences of the appointment and said, everyone tells me if you get one of these independent councils, it ruins your presidency.

It takes years and years, and I won't be able to do anything.

This is the worst thing that ever happened to me.

Now, you may have heard that last line.

This is the worst thing that ever happened to me, but did you hear the lines in between?

Because they're pretty important.

He wasn't saying he was effed because he was caught in this Russian scandal or that he did, committed all these crimes.

He was saying

it was going to derail his presidency because it was going to be the only thing he was going to be able to deal with the entire time.

He says, I won't be able to do anything.

He's not going to be able to get his agenda passed.

He's not going to be able to get anything done because he's going to be constantly talking about Russia all the time and dealing with that.

It had nothing to do with him admitting guilt, but that's the way the media portrayed it.

The best of the Glenn Beck program.

Like listening to this podcast?

If you're not a subscriber, become one now on iTunes.

And while you're there, do us a favor and rate the show.

We know groupthink is a thing in the media.

We know that that's true.

But how does the Mueller report actually affect the political situation that we're looking at right now?

Because we can all sit here and look at this and say, well, I think he's guilty and I think he's innocent.

But the bigger question is, how does this play on a wider scale?

There's basically three groups of people here.

You've got people who

love Donald Trump and aren't going to change their mind no matter what.

I mean, you could, the Mueller report could say, we interviewed Melania Trump.

Melania said that Trump and Putin held puppy puppy clubbing parties on alternate Thursdays for the past three years.

She actually was there at them.

She saw them.

She witnessed them.

And she videoed them.

So here's the video.

And you could see Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump clubbing puppies over and over again.

We have it right there.

In fact, Melania said in the middle of the interview, she interrupted and she said, You know what?

One's going on right now in the Oval Office.

And she walked the interviewer down the hall into the Oval Office.

And Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin were wearing diapers and clubbing puppies.

I don't know where the diapers thing came in.

It just seemed like that was going to be part of it.

If that was in there and Melania then went on TV and said, yes, I said those things.

And here's the video I'm showing you right now.

There is a percentage of the population that would be like, ah, you know what?

I think Trump didn't do that.

I don't think there's any evidence and it's a hoax, right?

There is that part of the population.

I doubt that's you as a listener.

But there's the other side of this, and you know that this is true as well.

If the Mueller report said that we found there was absolutely no collusion whatsoever.

In fact, there was no contact between the Trump administration and the Russians.

And by the way, Trump has no knowledge of the country of Russia.

He's never heard of it.

We quizzed him over and over again.

We were able to get into the genetics of his mind.

And we were able to see the electrical pulses and realize through an MRI that he has no knowledge of the country in Russia.

In fact, incredibly, Donald Trump has never seen Rocky IV.

He has no knowledge of Ivan Drago.

He has no knowledge of the entire plot line.

In fact, he was personally responsible, and we did not know this until the Mueller report.

He was personally responsible for tearing down the Berlin Wall.

That's how against the Soviet Union and Russia that Donald Trump is.

There is a percentage of this population.

that would still say, you know what?

He's guilty.

I know he's guilty of collusion.

I know it.

There's plenty of people on twitter you're going to find that have blue check marks next to that name that fine fall into that category and then there's this other category and i feel like a lot of times we think these these people don't exist they are widely represented in this audience which are people who actually wanted to see what the truth was on something like this they certainly as as i do uh suspect that there are political sort of motivations behind a lot of this to try to get out a Republican president.

But if Donald Trump really did do something wrong, I would want to know about it, and I know the audience would want to know about it.

I know you'd want to know about it.

You're driving to your car.

You're trying to do your job.

You're trying to make a living.

The economy's good.

You like a lot of things that are going on right now.

But if the president of the United States really was engaging in this sort of behavior, you'd want to know about it.

And those people are not.

They're the persuadables at some level.

Even if you have a leaning, you're at least persuadable.

You're open to hearing the facts.

You're open to call balls and strikes.

You know, there's a, right now, Donald Trump, 51% of the American people approve of Donald Trump's handling of the economy.

And you could say you think that should be higher.

You can say you think that should be lower.

But Donald Trump, if you look at the way he's portrayed on media,

on the media, you'd say, no way he's got a positive portrayal there.

But people realize that the economy is good.

Those same people, when asked, because I think he's plus eight on the economy, he's minus 15 on tariffs.

The same people, the same questions, they ask them, hey, do you approve of him on the economy?

Yes.

Do you approve of the way he's handled tariffs in the trade war?

No.

There's a chunk there.

What is it, 10, 15, 20% in the middle?

Not in the middle politically, but in the middle of

engagement, right?

People who are there reading this stuff every day and actually care and can say their side does things wrong sometimes.

And the other side does things wrong sometimes.

And I want to know what the truth is.

And those people actually do exist.

And that is the question as to how this is going to to be handled.

You look at this report, and of course, the media is going to blow it out of proportion and be crazy.

We know that's going to happen, and they are doing that.

But when you look at the obstruction section, which is section two, if you're scoring at home, if you flip to page 147,

one thing you'll notice is all of the problems that Trump could have out of this.

First of all, they're not criminal.

They're not.

There are some nuanced explanations as to why they're not.

There are things you'll hear in the media, people saying, well, he would have been convicted if, well, if didn't happen, if isn't reality.

We are in reality.

He's not convicted of these things.

He did not do anything that rose to the level of

Mueller recommending, not even convicting him, but recommending that people go after him.

He didn't do that.

But not everything there is wonderful.

And all the problems that that Trump has there are largely self-created.

And they all flow from the same issue.

The issues that have

Trump's problems kind of associated with them, they constantly surround Trump's,

I'd say, unfortunate and unnecessary view that the press issue of the day is his highest priority.

And

there are more important things than that.

And I swear that if Trump was instead focusing on things he could get done and things that

could actually improve his own standing when it comes to policy, rather than whatever the media is saying about him on a given day, things would not only be better for the country, but better for him.

In a way, it allows the media to control his narrative.

And one of the things we like about Trump, I think, as people who are friendly to conservatism generally,

one of the reasons he got elected was because he's fighting back.

People like that he's fighting back.

And that is, generally speaking, I think a good instinct.

You don't want someone who's going to sit there and get his teeth kicked in over and over and over again.

But there's a limit here to this.

And, you know, there's been so much fighting about the Mueller report all of this time.

It honestly could have been avoided all of this time until we actually got the information.

Well, now we have the report.

We can talk about it or whatever.

We can go down those roads if we must.

But Trump loves that.

He loves fighting with the press, and he views it as a day-to-day sport.

It's the slog of summer baseball.

Every day there's a new game.

Every day you got to worry about what the result of that game is.

And every day, Trump, I think unfortunately, makes choices based on what wins that day instead of what long term.

There are times in here where he is, I mean, blatantly caught saying things that are untrue.

However, Over and over and over and over again, when asked to comply with investigators, he tells the truth.

He turns over the documents.

He acts accordingly

as to how he should.

But he treats the media and the general narrative as a completely different animal.

He'll say whatever he has to do to get through the day to the media.

And that instinct at times works.

It serves him well.

I don't like it, but at times it does work.

At other times, this sort of stuff happens.

And so now you have situations where

because he was,

he did things

that helped him get through the day of media, it winds up burning him later.

And now he's got to deal with this because this is never going to end.

Again, in the Mueller report, it over and over says when faced with Congress, like as far as turning over

documents to Congress, he complied to those things.

He didn't use executive privilege in an excessive way.

They didn't redact too much of the report.

They didn't do all the things that were predicted that he was going to do.

But instead of just coming out, and he's advised over and over again by people close to him.

I'll give you a good example: the letter or the statement from Donald Trump Jr.

that Donald Trump kind of helped craft about the meeting in Trump Tower.

He was advised by people close to him, very smart people who come off great in these reports and still have very good relationships with Donald Trump.

You know, people very close to him, like Hope Hicks and others.

Just get out in front of this.

Like, this email is going to come out.

Release it.

Just release it.

You get out in front of it.

You control this.

Just come out and be honest about it.

Look, someone said they might have some things that might help us in the election.

We didn't know who they were.

They came into the office.

They didn't have anything.

It was over.

It was nothing.

Instead, they tried to manipulate it to make it sound like it was primarily about, in fact, the initial wording was it was about adoption, which was only a small part of the meeting.

And then they wind up getting in trouble for it later.

And that trouble was unnecessary.

It didn't help them, and in the long term, it winds up hurting.

And so, I think that instinct is something that the president, because he loves that media battle so much, gets caught up in.

It's an emotional thing, and it's honestly understandable.

I mean, Barr listed those

sort of explanations for some of this behavior.

He said he was in the middle of an unprecedented situation.

He was under mass news media examination.

He was frustrated.

He was angry.

He was annoyed at the illegal leaks.

And he had non-corrupt motives in all of these things.

And I think all of those are completely true.

And I think all of us would be in the same situation.

All of those same emotions would hit us.

But you, you know, there were people around him that stopped some of this.

And in other places, he stopped himself.

And in those circumstances, he's much better off.

The ones where he just let himself get it, go with it and just fire away.

At times, the problems were caused there.

This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.

This is the Glenbeck program.

It's Good Friday.

Today, we're going on a journey.

They say that time itself does not exist as we know it,

as we understand it.

It only really exists as something called space-time.

It's really only a point on a giant map.

Something that we can use to find out where we are, where we've been, or where we're going.

So let's unfold space-time and trace our way back.

First, maybe just a couple of years.

Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world.

The United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Lad, leader of al-Qaeda.

On my order, the United States military has begun strike.

People who knocked these families down

will hear all of us soon.

Now back even further.

Princess Diana died right now.

I did not have this vast right-wing conspiracy.

He is O.J.

Simpson.

He is armed with a gun.

Mr.

Gorbachev tears down outside of his appliance.

Elvis Presley died today.

Well, I'm not a crook.

Because of what has happened in Munich during the past 40 years.

Eight or nine terrified living human beings are being held prisoners.

A second shot, the third total shot, hit the president's head.

Ladies and gentlemen, the Beatles!

Dr.

Martin Luther King has been shot to death in Memphis.

A short time ago, an American airplane dropped one down on Hiroshima.

Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces,

began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.

December 7th,

1941,

a date which will live in infamy.

Back farther still, even before Marconi, when the air was silent.

Back past the signing of the Declaration of Independence, past the age of enlightenment, before Martin Luther hung his protest on the church doors, before Columbus rediscovered the fact that the world was round.

We go past Newton, Galileo, the Dark Ages, the Crusades, back to a time before books, when most of the world couldn't read or write, and history was oral.

We leave this world now, where we can hear and see a lone protester standing in front of a tank in a country on the other side of the planet and we can see it live to a world seemingly simple yet brutal beyond our understanding where news was spread from mouth to mouth.

We stop here

at approximately 29 of the common era.

We stop at a small walled city in the Middle East.

It's around 10 o'clock at night, just a couple of days before Passover.

The meals are being prepared, the night's meal had already been eaten, and most in the city are asleep.

One man, however,

is not.

It's strange.

He's younger than I am.

He's about 30.

He's awake and alone in a garden.

His friends who have been with him for several years are just a few yards away.

They slumber underneath the star-filled sky.

They still don't know that even though they sleep, the world is about to wake.

Eleven of twelve men sleep beside a hill.

One man, awake.

He couldn't sleep, for

he knew.

He was in a garden.

In prayer, praying so hard about what he knew was about to come, praying so hard that blood actually dripped from his pores in the place of sweat.

Back at the hill, when he returned, he begged his friends to wake and pray with him.

They didn't know how serious his request really was.

They had no idea what was just to come.

He pleaded with his friends, why will you not rise and pray with me?

He asked this again before returning to the garden alone.

He knelt there on rocky soil, his hands clasped, his head bowed.

Twilight dew draped his neck, the horizon still in black.

He prayed.

He prayed even harder, for the sky would eventually turn purple than light blue, and he knew what awaited him.

Back to the hill once more, his friends asleep.

He begged his friends, rise, rise and pray with me.

I need you now more than ever.

They said they would, but shortly after he left, they fell asleep again.

The dawn was even closer, and he knew his time was running out.

Now over the hill, they marched like flowing lava burning in the night's solace.

The eleven are surely awake now.

They have sworn their faith to him, but he knows, he knew this wasn't true.

They'll weaken, and he'll be forsaken.

Forsaken by the same men who just swore their undying devotion.

The torchlights grow brighter, the hourglass running low.

The clanging of the metal swords and spears, the sound and the vibration of the march deep down from their feet to their spine, creating a shallow vibration, leaving them quivering.

The soldiers soldiers approach.

The one is grabbed and kissed.

Betrayed with a kiss.

A kiss wearing the mask of loyalty.

One of the men leaps forward, draws his sword, cutting the ear off one of the soldiers.

He raises his hand.

No,

peace.

Take me now in peace.

For this is my purpose.

This is my being.

This is the reason I came.

Now, one of them, Peter, strays.

While his friend is being persecuted for crimes he didn't commit, he stands by a fire, denying any relationship he has as he tries to blend in with the common people.

A woman approaches.

Didn't I see you with him?

Peter says, surely I don't know him, but you're from Galilee.

For the third time, Peter says, I do not know this man.

Now Jesus is pulled back and forth between the two who will determine his fate.

They can't see any crime, but they still question, scourge, and mock him.

Aren't you the king?

Silence.

Then here is your crown, says one as they give him a crown of thorns and press it into his head.

He stands before the judge, who could condemn him for no crime, but it is Passover.

He says to the crowd, You, you can choose.

One I will release.

Him as the king of the Jews, or...

Jesus, standing silent, his eyes to the ground, is condemned to death.

Jesus now carries his cross through the stone-clad streets to the place known as the skull, the place where he will soon die.

His back torn, his head bleeding beneath his thorny crown, the women cry out loud as he passes.

He pauses for a moment and comforts them.

Do not weep for me.

Rather, weep for yourselves.

His mother looks on as huge nails are driven through his hands and his feet.

They raise the cross and slam it into the ground.

It is at this point that all four writers of the gospel struggled with a description of the crucifixion, as I have.

They described with the only words that I could use.

And

they crucified him.

He now hung on the cross as the soldiers bid lots on his clothing below.

Next to him, two criminals hang, but they are simply tied to the cross.

One of them says, You're the son of God.

Save us now.

Save all of us.

The man in the middle does nothing,

for he had a purpose.

The afternoon passes.

His skin stretched.

He wept.

He begged for water, and they gave him a sponge on a reed filled with vinegar.

In a moment, where he showed us that he was truly human, he cried out and said, My father,

my father, why have you forsaken me?

The sky began to grow dark.

It was approaching three o'clock on a Friday afternoon

when Jesus, the carpenter from Nazareth, spoke once more

and only once.

His last words,

it

is finished.

So today,

people all over the world

do as I do now.

I thank that lone carpenter for dying.

Dying on that Friday afternoon.

So I

may live.

You're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.

Hi, it's Glenn.

If you're a subscriber to the podcast, can you do us a favor and rate us on iTunes?

If you're not a subscriber, become one today and listen on your own time.

You can subscribe on iTunes.

Thanks.

All right, Andy McCarthy joins us.

He's from Nashville Review, also writing for the New York Post on a really interesting column.

Andy, welcome to the program.

Stu, great to be with you.

How are you?

Really well, really well.

You had an interesting perspective here, and I think it's different than everyone else I've read so far on this case.

So far, let's kind of start at the beginning before we get into

the specifics of the legal case here.

Kind of the two positions you see thrown about is basically the Mueller report came out and it proves he did everything wrong,

and the Mueller report came out and it proves that Trump did nothing wrong.

So, right off the right off the start, where do you fall in that little

range?

Well, maybe it's because I was a prosecutor for a long time.

I

think that it's always a mistake when

we read

either like a social phenomenon or a political phenomenon as a legal problem to be resolved by a prosecutor.

Because

if that's what you're going to impose on, a prosecutor has basically one of two decisions to make.

There's either enough evidence to charge or there's not.

And when you decide that there's not, that doesn't mean that somebody's been exonerated.

It might.

You know, sometimes you do an investigation and you find not only that the person you were investigating didn't do it, but that somebody else did.

So you know to a certainty that the person is not guilty, right?

And then there's other times when you don't charge because you know in your bones that the guy did it, but you just can't prove it.

You don't have enough evidence.

So you never, prosecutors, unlike Mueller's report, which I regard in this way as more of a...

a spin document than a prosecutor's document.

Prosecutors never say things like we won't exonerate him or we don't exonerate him.

You either charge or you don't charge, and everything else is gray area.

So I wouldn't run with a prosecutor saying, I didn't find enough evidence to indict.

I wouldn't run from that and say I've been exonerated.

And when you look at what's in the reports, Due, I don't know, you know, a lot of that is pretty unsavory behavior.

Now, none of it's been proved,

and it's really against the normal protocols of the Justice Department and prosecutors' offices at every level to publish the information about somebody that you don't charge.

Because the rule of the road is if the government's going to charge someone or the government's going to accuse someone of wrongdoing, you have to do it formally so that the person then has the full array of protections that you get under the Constitution to defend yourself.

So when the prosecutor goes out and says, here's all the terrible things I know that he did, oh, and by the way, we're not going to charge him, You've really smeared the person and not given them any opportunity to defend themselves.

And that's not normally what's done.

It was done here.

I guess politically, this report had to come out because there was no alternative.

But I don't think it, you know, I think if

you're Trump, you want to say thank you and move on.

I wouldn't be running around saying I've been exonerated because there's some icky stuff in there.

Yeah, and you get into some of that in your column for the New York Post.

It's titled Mueller Completely Dropped the Ball with the Obstruction Punt.

And I want to get into how he dropped the ball.

You mentioned

Trump's interactions, first of all, on the negative side with things like the McGann situation where he

tried to get him fired and then even went beyond that to try to convince him to lie about that he had called him to fire.

He tried to get Mueller fired.

Yes.

You have that.

And you also have

some interesting perspective on the other side of this because, and I think this ties to the most prominent thing that's come out of this as far as the media goes, which is this statement that Trump makes at one point where he says, this is the end of my presidency.

I'm effed now that there's a council.

And you point out that the president's frustration wasn't over fear of guilt.

That is a really important part of this.

And I feel like most people have completely ignored it.

In fact, cutting that out of the quote that has been proliferated so widely.

Yeah, well, you know, it's it's funny with obstruction cases, you hear a lot

in the commentary

that

if you have an obstruction, that you can't have an obstruction case unless there's an underlying crime, right?

We've heard that again and again for the last few days.

And that's, you know, with due respect to some of the people peddling that, it's just wrong.

You know, the classic example is

Bill Clinton, right?

He didn't lie lie about what went on in the Oval Office because it was a crime.

He lied about it because it would have been embarrassing and politically devastating for it to come out, right?

So people lie for all kinds of reasons.

But in certain factual contexts, it is true that if there's no underlying crime, then there doesn't really make much sense for why you would want to obstruct the investigation.

And this, I think, was one of those situations.

And what Trump was concerned about here

was not that he would be found to be involved in an espionage conspiracy with Russia involving hacking of Democratic email accounts.

I think he was obviously pretty confident that that hadn't happened.

But he was concerned about being portrayed as an agent of the Kremlin and about the fact that

when you have a president who's under a cloud of suspicion, it becomes very hard to govern.

It becomes hard hard to recruit good people into the government.

Who wants to go work for an administration?

You're going to have to lawyer up the next week.

You know, it's pretty expensive stuff.

So he's compromised in trying to assemble administration.

He's compromised in dealing with Congress, foreign governments,

you name it.

And it's very frustrating.

And we all know, I mean, the Lawrence Walsh investigation, that thing went on for about eight years.

So we didn't know when this started that Mueller, I think to his credit, was going to wrap it up in 22 months.

And I don't know that, because a lot of people, first of all, have been complaining that it was too long.

I mean,

it's not long for one of these investigations, is it?

I mean,

these special counsel, special

prosecutor sort of investigations go on a lot longer than this sometimes.

Yeah, you know what it is, though, Stu?

While it's going on, it always seems longer.

And it's more vicious now than it ever was before.

I mean,

the stuff that gets said,

I have to say,

prosec I was a prosecutor for 20 years

beginning in the 80s.

And

the media was there was a certain tenor in the media and there was a certain tenor in public discourse and it can get it could get nasty.

But

I never have witnessed it as sort of cavalierly vicious as it is now.

And I think the result of that is everything seems like it takes longer because you just want it to be over.

Everything seems like it takes longer than than it actually does.

So

as you compare Mueller's investigation to other independent counsel investigations,

I think he wrapped it up pretty quickly.

I still think he should have, since it was, it had to have been clear to him, I think, by probably autumn of 2017 that there was no collusion case.

And I think he would have gotten a lot less bad behavior from Trump if they had just put out an interim report at the end of 2017 and said, you know, look, this steel dossier, we've looked at it, we can't corroborate it.

We don't really have anything else that indicates there's this dark conspiracy.

So we're going to let you know that the president is not a suspect in a collusion conspiracy case with Russia, but we're going to continue to investigate.

Russia's interference in the election.

I think he would have gotten a lot less bad behavior from Trump.

That's not to say that Trump has any excuse for behaving badly, but

I think you would have given him less of a motive to be a jerk.

Yeah, probably a lot more goodwill from the American people, too.

I think that it wound up dragging on to most people for so long, and it wound up, I think, just frustrating people.

I know that when this thing came out, I was like, oh, finally, this is going to be over.

And you realize it's not even close to over.

This is going to go on forever.

It is.

So let me take a quick 60-second break here, Andy, and come back with you.

And I want to get to the part where the biggest way that Mueller dropped the ball in this, this is a fascinating way of looking at this, and it really is changing something fundamental that I think is not only changing in this particular report, but it's changing across our society.

Speaking with Andy McCarthy from National Review and New York Post, he's got a great column.

Mueller completely dropped the ball with the obstruction punt.

And Andy, if I understand this right, and I'm sure I don't,

there are three hurdles essentially you have to clear to make an obstruction claim real, which is an obstructive act, the nexus to an official proceeding, and the intent.

Do you have to clear all three of those hurdles for a claim to qualify?

Yes, those are what you would call, in the prosecutor biz, essential elements of the crime, and they're the things that have to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt to convict someone.

So two of them are pretty self-explanatory.

Obstructive act, you got to do something that looks like obstruction, and you got to have the intent to do it to obstruct something.

Can you do a quick minute on what do they mean by nexus to an official proceeding?

Yeah, it's actually pretty complicated.

In the laws, do

a

an FBI investigation is not an official proceeding.

Official proceeding is like an adjudicative matter.

The most common one is a court proceeding.

And that's why we always mention, we talk about, we don't just say obstruction, we say obstruction of justice, right?

The reason we say that is we're talking about judicial proceedings.

So the reason that when you obstruct an FBI investigation, it can be obstruction of justice is because derivatively you pervert the judicial process down the road.

You know, if you

pressure a witness to lie or you destroy evidence before the Bureau, the FBI

can grab it.

It's not that you're perverting their proceeding.

That's not what's cognizable under the law.

It's that the eventual judicial proceeding can be frustrating.

That's why it's obstruction of justice.

And it seems like throughout the Mueller report, they didn't get there on all three, on most of these instances.

There's a couple they seem to leave open.

But this doesn't get to the real fundamental biggest problem here that you point out in the column.

And it has to do with burden of proof.

A real change that I think is not only happening here, but happening all over the place.

Can you walk us through what you found?

Yeah, you're right about it's happening all over the place.

I mean, just listening to Jerry Nadler's, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee yesterday, this is what he homed in on to,

and

in a way that

suggested that this was proper, which is that it was somehow it's somehow the

suspect's burden to prove that he

is innocent rather than the government's burden to prove that you're guilty.

What Mueller was

he marshalled what he tells us up front, which I think was really wormy on his part,

is that he's not going to make what he called a traditional prosecutorial judgment, which he says, you know, so quaint.

He says, that's this binary judgment where you either charge or you don't charge.

So he's going to do something new and innovative.

He's going to lay out the evidence on both sides and then dump the matter in the Justice Department's lap.

And, you know, I thought

that was really

a derelict on his part

because

he was, by the time he came into the case, I think it was already pretty clear there was no collusion case.

I didn't think we needed a special counsel, but you can only have a special counsel when the Justice Department is conflicted and obstruction is the only thing, arguably, you needed him to resolve.

So what did he do?

He didn't resolve the main question he was brought in to resolve, and he dumps it in the lap of the Justice Department, which is supposed to be too conflicted to decide it, which is why we have him in the first place, right?

The whole thing is just

wrongheaded.

But what he does is he says, I'm just going to marshal the evidence on each side, and then at the very end, in what I think is a really

I want to say partisan,

but it's certainly not prosecutorial use of language.

He says that

we're not confident that there's no crime here.

We're not going to charge a crime, but we're not confident that there's no crime, and we're not going to exonerate the President.

Well, that's not what prosecutors do.

Prosecutors either tell you there is enough evidence to charge, in which case you charge, or

you at the most say we're not going to charge, or you say nothing.

But if you've basically made a decision not to charge, then

you have no business going on to say, but that's not an exoneration.

It's for the public to decide whether it's an exoneration or not.

That's not the prosecutor's business.

But by doing that, what he does is he says,

we're not confident that there wasn't a crime here.

And it's his job to prove that there was a crime.

It's not President Trump's, no matter what you think of President Trump, it's not his job in in a legal context.

Now, political context is different, but it's not his job in a legal context to prove his innocence.

And I think you're quite right to say that this is something that we see seeping into

the society more broadly.

This is not just about President Trump.

There's kind of a conceit out there that

the government can now make serious allegations,

whether it's in a regulatory context or whatever context they decide to make it in, and then it's somehow the burden on the citizen to prove that he's not guilty of wrongdoing.

And I think that's a dangerous road to go down.

Yeah, I mean, certainly you see it all the time in the court of public opinion, which I know is different, but it's sort of this Kavanaugh standard where it's like, well, we can't prove he wasn't at this party that we can't name where it was.

So therefore, you should probably assume he's guilty.

And Trump here, I think, really is the victim of this at some level.

I do kind of wonder, though, Andy, how does this this work?

Let's just say Mueller does his job correctly.

Did he do his job correctly, let's say, on part one, which was the actual collusion, where he pretty much exonerates him of any criminal activity there?

Is that what he should have done with part two?

Leave all that evidence in there, and then at the end just conclude we did not have enough to charge him, therefore

he is clear of this particular crime?

Or does he just not release all of this detail for everyone to have their political fun with?

Yeah, see,

there's a limit, I think, to how much I I'm not a fan of the investigation.

I'm not a particular fan of Mueller, although I think he's a scrupulous guy, notwithstanding what I've said up till this point.

Well, no, I mean, I think in general, he's had an admirable career.

I don't agree with the way he handled this.

We have a 30 seconds here, Indeed, real quick.

Yeah,

the idea, Stu, is you're supposed to give a confidential report to the Justice Department, and then they decide how much of it to release.

But this certainly reads like it was meant for release, and I think it's meant as a roadmap for Congress more than for the Justice Department.

Andy McCarthy, the column is in the New York Post.

Mueller completely dropped the ball with the obstruction punt.

Thanks so much for coming on, Andy.

I appreciate it.

The Blaze Radio Network

on demand.