Andrew McCarthy, former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, joined SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Monday morning’s Breitbart News Daily to discuss his latest column for National Review, “Democrats Know the Election Was Legitimate but Persist in a Dangerous Fraud.”
McCarthy said that from the Democrats’ point of view, “the narrative that they want to have accepted generally, and certainly the narrative that they’ve internalized, is that notwithstanding the result of the election, as they tell it, they won the election by over three million votes.”
“By a quirk of the Electoral College, if just 80,000 votes – which is, you know, like half a percentage point of the electorate – shifted, we wouldn’t be talking about a revolutionary type of presidency and a big upset. We’d be talking about how a pillar of the establishment won a comfortable electoral victory,” he explained.
“Even though we have the sense not only that we have a new administration, but that we have sweeping change that needs to be made in order to set things right again, from their standpoint they think they should have won. They think they’re not far away from being back in control again. The strategy that has worked for them historically, certainly for the last ten to 20 years, is to delegitimize their opposition. When you have the media as the wind at your back, it becomes a lot easier to do,” he said.
McCarthy said that to his knowledge, there is no evidence Russia “hacked” the 2016 election, “nor could there be because of the way our elections are structured.”
“There is some evidence, although I must say it’s certainly not overwhelming or convincing, that they may have – and I’ll even stipulate this: they probably did – hack Podesta’s email and the Democratic National Committee’s email,” he continued. “The evidence on Podesta is not particularly compelling. It was really his own poor security practice, more than anything else, that kind of made hacking into him pushing on [an] open door.”
McCarthy felt it was important to highlight the absurdity of believing Podesta’s exposed emails changed the course of the 2016 election.
“My contention is that if you ask any ten people on the street who John Podesta is, if you got one of them who knew, that would be phenomenal,” he said. “And yet, what they would have you believe is that Podesta’s emails made all the difference, and Hillary Clinton’s emails, which they told us for 18 months were no big deal, had no impact on the election. To me, that’s nuts.”
He said Democrats “lost the election because the powers-that-be in the party ran a lousy candidate that everybody thought was a lousy candidate.”
“Everybody with an IQ over 11 remembered that she would have been President of the United States if she could have gotten to over 40 percent with Democrats back in 2008,” he contended. “They didn’t want her then, and the only difference between her in 2008 and 2016 was that she had Benghazi and the email scandal hanging around her neck, making her an even poorer candidate. They ran a lousy candidate, and they’ve lost touch with Middle America. I suppose those are big enough problems that if you don’t want to come to grips with them, you’ll use anything to rationalize it.”
“What they’ve decided to go with is this idea that Putin did it. I think there’s two big problems with that,” he said. “One is, as you’ve pointed out and as we’ve covered, there’s very little evidence of that. And from the national security perspective, the other big problem is, Russia really is a big problem. They really are a hostile regime to the United States. They’re a murderous anti-American regime. We should obviously be very concerned with any action that they take, across the gamut of actions that could be detrimental to American interests.”
“And yet, the media and the Democrats have set up a situation where to buy into taking a hostile anti-American power seriously, you’re supposed to buy on to this lunacy that they hacked the election. They’ve forced a situation where if you contend that they didn’t hack the election, because there’s no evidence of that, you’re almost in a position of being Putin’s defense lawyer,” McCarthy lamented.
In his National Review article, McCarthy wrote that Russian President Vladimir Putin was “smiling” over a situation where “if you buy the left-wing Democrat-media complex narrative, he has caused great tumult in the electorate, and he’s created a situation where people have less trust in very important American democratic institutions.”
“It’s put the Republicans in a position of trying to paint him as not such a bad guy and not such a nefarious actor, so he gets the benefit of that, as well,” McCarthy added.
“In the meantime, if you look at what Russia’s actually doing, it’s wreaking havoc across the globe in a lot of places that are of great importance to us – not least their close relationship with Iran, which has gotten closer over the last two or three years,” he said. “Which is very destabilizing for us. I think, frankly, we’re in a situation where, to the extent that we can, that President Trump is open-minded on these issues and we can push him in a particular direction, it’s important to highlight the problems that arise out of the Russia-Iran partnership.”
“I get very nervous when I hear people in the administration suggest that maybe there’s some things we can work together on with Russia, in terms of anti-jihadism,” McCarthy said. “My only response to that is that Iran is the chief state sponsor of jihadism in the world. It doesn’t matter if it’s Sunni or Shiite jihadism. The only ticket to the dance they require is that you be anti-American and anti-Israeli.”
“I really think it’s delusional to think that we could partner in a meaningful way with the Russians on counter-jihadism. The sooner we recognize the Russians for who they are, the better our security will be, and, frankly, the better President Trump’s term will go. But it makes it very hard to do that when we have this moronic debate that we’re having over whether they hacked the election, which is obviously not true,” he lamented.
McCarthy said the tidal wave of leaks pouring from Washington after the 2016 election are a “deep concern” but said he was “a little leery of the term ‘Deep State,’” even though he admitted to using it himself on occasion.
“It really comes out of the Nazis and the situation in Turkey, for example, and I don’t think we’re there,” he explained. “It’s a little bit dark.”
“But at the same time, the concept is absolutely sound, which is they have seeded their ideological people not just in political positions throughout the government – which, by the way, there’s still a lot of them in political positions because the nomination process is being slow-walked, we’re not getting enough people nominated, and the Democrats are slowing the process down, so it’s hard to get the thousands of people the president needs to nominate in those positions into them,” he said.
“But what the Obama administration also did was push people into the civil service jobs – which are very hard, by the way, to terminate people from. They’re like the permanent bureaucracy. No matter which party is in power, the civil service stays there,” McCarthy continued.
He warned it was dangerous to “get ideological people in those positions” and have them do “the kind of really insidious stuff that they’ve done,” such as lowering the standards for “unmasking” Americans picked up in foreign intelligence collection, and lowering the standards for “how raw intelligence gets disseminated across the intelligence community.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.
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