Andrew McCarthy: Special Counsel Mueller Should Investigate Leaks, ‘One Prosecution Would Do the Trick’
by JOHN HAYWARD
BreitBart.com
19 May 2017
Former assistant U.S. attorney and National Review senior fellow Andrew McCarthy discussed the fallout from the firing of FBI Director James Comey and the appointment of a special counsel with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Friday’s Breitbart News Daily.
McCarthy said there was little more than a semantic difference between the terms “special counsel” and “special prosecutor,” with the latter dating back to the Watergate scandal.
“What they tried to do after that was really institutionalize it with kind of a constitutional monstrosity that was known as the independent counsel statute, which was an unconstitutional arrangement because it allowed the court to pick a prosecutor, and they put other limitations on executive power,” he recalled.
“The Democrats loved it until Bill Clinton got into its crosshairs, and then they decided they didn’t like it so much anymore, so they let the independent counsel statute lapse in around 1999,” he said. “What we’ve had since then is what’s called ‘special counsel.’ The reason they dropped the word ‘independent’ is to make it clear this lawyer is not independent of the executive branch. It actually answers to the Justice Department and can be fired at will by the president, just like any inferior officer in the executive branch.”
Marlow said the “Comeygate” fallout from the FBI director’s firing has largely obscured the core question of whether Comey was a competent director, and has completely derailed President Trump’s legislative agenda.
“I’ve known Comey for 30 years, so I have a personal relationship with him,” said McCarthy. “I disagree strongly with the way he handled the Hillary Clinton investigation but I kinda think, Alex, that he’s been the same guy all along. It’s the political expediencies and whirlwinds around him that have changed perceptions of him.”
“They loved him in July when he cleared Mrs. Clinton. They hated him in October when he reopened the investigation. He was given Satan status in November when they counted the votes. And now he’s Eliot Ness all over again because he’s pitted against Trump,” he said of the Democrats’ attitude toward Comey.
“To me, he’s the same guy all along. He hasn’t really changed. He does now the same sort of stuff he’s done all along, for good or for ill. What’s changed is whatever is politically expedient to say about him or to use him. That’s what they do,” McCarthy said.
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