https://www.theepochtimes.com/anti-trump-legal-expert-reveals-real-motives-in-mar-a-lago-case-its-a-dynamite-story_4754384.html?utm_source=epochHG&utm_campaign=rcp
It’s with regret and some trepidation that I take issue on a legal matter with someone whom I like and respect as much as I do Andy McCarthy, the prominent legal affairs commentator and contributor to many publications, websites, and television programs. But like many other intelligent and otherwise convivial people I know, he’s unfortunately incapable of speaking or writing rationally about Donald Trump.
McCarthy has a particularly baneful influence on the discussion of Trump-related issues because he naturally brings to it the gravitas of his legal expertise and apparently authoritative articulation. But this is the same McCarthy who wrote to me five years ago that he had taken a “deep dive” into a lot of confidential material and concluded that Trump was guilty of serious misdeeds in his relations with the Russians.
And, as with other intelligent and otherwise likable people partly propelled through each day by an almost pathological hatred of the former president, when the Russian argument evaporated without a trace, not a word of remorse, embarrassment, or even inferable acknowledgment of a mistake followed. It was briskly on to the next conjuration of Trumpian outrages and delicts.
On the National Review website on Sept. 24, McCarthy fired the most unrigorous and imprecisely directed broadside that I have seen from him on this subject. He wrote that Trump was obviously guilty of an indictable offense in the document controversy that led to the FBI’s ransacking of his Palm Beach home.
It wasn’t precisely stated what offense he committed, but it seemed to be willful noncompliance with a subpoena requiring the production of certain documents that had been wrongfully removed and about which the former president was allegedly trying to clear himself from such a charge by a defense imputed to him by McCarthy of determining in his own mind that the relevant material was declassified because he wished it so and in accordance with a doctrine of automatic declassification of certain matters that he had promulgated among his staff but of which staff members were, according to McCarthy, unaware.