Special Edition SFR with Andy McCarthy

FRANK GAFFNEY: Welcome back! It’s the high point of my week; it’s our visit with Andy McCarthy. The terrific federal prosecutor turned terrific pundit and multi-media phenom, as a matter of fact, these days. He is to be found on the pages of National Review Online, PJ Media, he is frequently on Fox and so many other outlets it’s hard to keep straight. Andy, welcome back, it’s always good to have you with us, sir.

ANDY MCCARTHY: Frank, thanks so much for having me.

FRANK GAFFNEY: I’d like to start with, namely, what happened when the ACLU and other leftists and Islamists as I recalled, joined forces to take down the New York Police Department’s surveillance of some of the most serious threats we’re facing internally to the city, and I would argue to the rest of us as well. Give us a sense of what’s going on there, Andy.

ANDY MCCARTHY Well, I think what happened Frank, basically, is that a new administration is now running New York City and the New York City Police Department and they caved where the prior administration did not, and as a result, I think it’s probably as bad a time as you can imagine. If you look at the ascendant jihadist threat in San Bernardino, in Paris, in Cologne, in cities across the West, and realize that New York City has always been, and I think remains the number one target of the jihad of what they’ve essentially done is put blinders on the eyes of the police and the investigators who specialize in counterterrorism. Essentially they’re doing the same thing the Obama administration imposed on law enforcement intelligence and military intelligence in the federal government. That is, they are restricting what they tend to learn and apply regarding Islamic supremacist ideology on a theory, a cockamamie theory if you ask me, that radical Islam has nothing to do with Islam.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Andy McCarthy, we have a new book coming out of the Center for Security Policy shortly that will document how what you’ve just described is unfortunately, not unique by any means, to the NYPD, that this has really been in practice now, particularly in federal agencies, both law enforcement and other national security agencies for some time. And I just, you know, as a man who’s been in the system and who has had to take advantage of the insights that are gleaned from effective law enforcement and surveillance and the cases that you can build upon such, you know, collection, give us a flavor of what this, well, you’ve popularized as much as anybody, this ‘willful blindness’ is likely to translate into in terms of additional threats to our country.

ANDY MCCARTHY: It will undoubtedly create the opportunity for additional attacks because basically what the theory is, that if we show an adequate amount of what the government officials call respect to the Islamic communities, if we stop the police from proactively going into those communities and beating around the bushes and the places where we know the threats are because we have our ear to the ground, and instead we allow our, as the Obama administration puts it, our partners in the Islamic-American community by which they mainly mean Islamist organizations, many of which are tied in some way or another to the Muslim Brotherhood, but if we allow those organizations to be our eyes and ears in the community, they’ll let us know if there is anything to be worried about and all will be well. I think that’s a real roll of the dice with people’s security.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Well, sadly, if it were a roll of a dice that would be one thing, if it’s a roll of the loaded dice, you’ve done so much in your writings to really expose the agenda of these Muslim Brotherhood front organizations and based on what you know, for example, on the Council on American Islamic Relations or the Muslim Public Affairs Council or Muslim Advocates or the Muslim American Society or the Islamic Society of North America, I mean these are the go to folks in the Obama administration’s outreach program. Are we dealing, in fact, with people who would be exceedingly unlikely to be helpful in stopping Islamic supremacism as they are part of that program?

ANDY MCCARTHY: Yeah, yeah, Frank, as you mention that it occurred to me that as you go through the litany of these Islamist organizations, who obviously have very different agendas from the United States of America in national security, it occurred to me that it’s really not different in principle what they do in the domestic side as they do on the foreign policy side. You’ve got a catastrophic foreign policy based on a fantasy that Iran and the United States essentially share the same interest and that they have as much of an interest in stability as we do, so we can treat them more or less like an ally and that will improve security. And it’s just a fantasy because they don’t have the same agenda and they don’t have the same interest and domestically the same thing is true here. We have an interest in security and stability, they have an interest in Sharia encroachment which is the accommodation of Islamic law in Western societies including ours, and you know, the problem here, in a nut shell, is that even the Islamic supremacists who are not themselves terrorists have an agenda that is advanced by the atmosphere of intimidation that is caused by terrorism. So they simply don’t have the same incentive, and the same need that we do for security because in many ways the lack of security actually creates the atmosphere that they profit from the most.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Yeah, it’s that civilization jihad as you’ve described in your book, The Grand Jihad, so elegantly. Andy, what you’ve just said is really important, in addition to popularizing the phrase, if not actually coining the phrase ‘willful blindness’ in this context, you’ve also introduced us to this concept of national security fraud and it seems to me that some of this goes way beyond just not quite getting it or having sort of fantastic illusions. It seems as though the administration has to know better, whether it’s with respect to the people they’re closely dealing with in the Muslim community here or whether it’s with Iran or whether it’s, you know, God only knows how many instances you could point to, from Russia to China to Cuba and on. But when you look at this, again, from the perspective of a guy who’s been seriously in the business of prosecuting fraud among other things, criminal activities, in a previous life at least, how do you think the next president is going to have to contend with the cumulative effects of what’s been done in the way of damage under very much false pretenses?

ANDY MCCARTHY Well, a lot, I think Frank, can be undone in fairly short order. That is to say, to the extent that the new policies are based on policy pronouncements by the President, Executive Orders, and the people that the national security agencies turn to for consultation and advice and the like, that can all be changed fairly quickly, where you come in, you undo those policies and those policy pronouncements, the executive orders, that you have a different set of consultants. What’s going to be very hard to unwind, I think, is career bureaucrats who have bored into the government, and who are very difficult to remove in the government and who are now placed in pretty important policy positions. And so it’s going to be hard to marginalize those people in the short-term. It can be done in the long-term, but that’s the part I worry about the most.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Some of whom themselves may have ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, we’ll see. Andy, we have to pause for a second, you’re very graciously giving us another segment of your time. We’ll be right back with more of the great Andy McCarthy, right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Welcome back, we’re joined once again by Andy McCarthy, one of our regulars here at Secure Freedom Radio, a man I admire immensely and have learned extraordinary amounts from, as I think have all of us, thanks to his writings in the periodical literature notably at National Review Online and PJ Media, his myriad appearances in various other media platforms, but also his terrific books and I can’t do justice to all of them, but Willful Blindness, we’ve been talking a lot about that, The Grand Jihad, another favorite, and also most recently, Faithless Execution. You can find a series of his pamphlets, as well, at Encounter Books. Andy let me turn to another piece of all of this, the broad portfolio you’ve covered. You have actually come to the conclusion that there is willful criminality in what’s involved with what was going on with Hillary Clinton’s e-mails. That’s a still unfolding story, of course, but talk a bit about what prompts you to reach that conclusion, and whether you think the Department of Justice might do the same.

ANDY MCCARTHY: Well, I think Frank, from the beginning, I have strongly suspected that there would be criminality because I thought, you know, given the level at which the Secretary of State operates, the Secretary, former Secretary Clinton, initial claim, that no classified information had ever passed over or been stored on her private e-mail system, seemed highly, highly, implausible to me, because, simply because of her very, very, high ranking position, one of the two or three top positions in government, in national security. It seemed impossible that the Secretary of State could do her job exclusively, systematically, on a private system, and not deal with classified information. And sure enough, in short order, Mrs. Clinton had to change her talking points to ‘No information marked classified ever came over my e-mail system,’ precisely because there’s plenty of classified information on her system. You know what people don’t generally understand about how this all works, is that the government official who has security clearance, hears classified information at a briefing or reads about it in a classified document, and goes out and writes notes, or writes a memorandum based on the classified information, that thing that you’ve written is itself classified, even if it doesn’t have markings on it because it’s derived from classified information. So, that’s illegal too. You’re not allowed to do that under the law. But we know that the situation is even worse. The latest reports indicate that there were actual physical documents that were doctored in a way that purged their classified markings that actually found their way onto Mrs. Clinton’s system and we have at least one e-mail communication, where she told an aide to do exactly that, to remove the marking and send as non-classified, so that’s not inadvertent and it smacks of something that is quite intentional.

FRANK GAFFNEY: That would be called, in your business, as I recall, a smoking gun, would it not?

ANDY MCCARTHY: Yeah, well, certainly, if the guy acted on it, it’s a crime, but even if he didn’t act on it, in a pattern of behavior it certainly shows Mrs. Clinton’s knowledge and intent. And again, I would stress, this is the thing that I gave her the benefit of the doubt on, at the beginning, because I know how hard it is, it’s very difficult, to move something from the classified government system to the unclassified system. They’re not interconnected; you actually have to make a real effort to do it. But evidently it has. So in other words, let’s say, you and I, I tell you to do something illegal, let’s say you don’t do it, but I’ve done everything I can do to bring about the crime, I have committed attempt, even if you don’t carry out the orders. If you’re dealing with a statute that doesn’t have an attempt provision, and not every one does, then whether that’s a crime or not really depends on whether or not you follow through with what I’ve told you to do.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Among those who apparently did that sort of cutting and pasting, Andy McCarthy, that was necessary to overcome both statutory prohibitions and the physical barriers to moving classified information and let’s be clear, some of this was exceedingly highly classified, the sorts of things that could really compromise sources and methods of intelligence perhaps, or Special Access Programs, and even cost lives, was a woman by the name of Huma Abedeen, who has been a focus of your critical eye for some time. What do we know about her e-mails, about her conduct and about possible culpability in this kind of criminal behavior as well?

ANDY MCCARTHY: Well, I think, to its credit, the FBI is conducting a professional investigation, which means, what they know, we don’t know. A lot of it hasn’t made its way to the press, and that’s as it should be. We do know that press reports at least, that the focus of the investigation has come down, not just on Mrs. Clinton, but on her three top aides, who were, as I understand it, both very knowledgeable about the private e-mail system, and as we know from this e-mail between Clinton and Jake Sullivan, who was one of the three top aides, Mrs. Clinton casually gave them directions, in this instance, to remove markings and send things that were classified as if they were unclassified. There are indications that Ms. Abedeen, when pushed by the government officials, that Mrs. Clinton ought to have a State Department account, rather than be working on a private account, Ms. Abedeen apparently said ‘No, no, no, that’s not going to work.’ At least that’s what’s been reported. So there’s certainly had a lot of knowledge there. We also understand she had a number of e-mails, perhaps thousands of them, over the system that haven’t been released to the public yet and that may happen imminently, and then I think, we’ll know a lot more.

FRANK GAFFNEY: We’ll be following that closely, as will you, Andy McCarthy at PJ Media and National Review Online, among other outlets. Speaking of Huma Abedeen, she is apparently a starring feature of a new movie about her and her husband, shot largely in the context, apparently of his rather unseemly, shall we saw, and ultimately, failed candidacy for the mayor of New York. Andy, I want to go back though to something that you talked about before the break I think. And that is, our efforts to work with Muslims who share our values and who are not a threat, and it seems as though, and I think you agree, the dividing line between them and those who are a problem is basically adherence to Sharia. Would you just talk a little bit about the Institute for Muslim Minority Affairs, the Muslim Brotherhood established organization with whom the Abedeen family, all of them, have been associated with for quite some time, and it’s roll in basically promoting within Western societies, like ours, that wrong-headedness in Muslim communities rather than the right.

ANDY MCCARTHY: Well, as I understand it, Frank, this journal with which Ms. Abedeen was associated for a number of years, I think some twelve years, was a journal, and actually I think still is a journal, her family, her mother I believe now runs it. But was meant to promote Sharia supremacism, I mean I think it, as benign as sounding a way as was possible for something that travels under an academic journal, but the thrust of what we discussed earlier as the civilizational jihad, is to integrate without assimilating in the West. And the idea is to create enclaves that are operated essentially under Muslim law and that resist Westernization. As I understand it, that was a major part of this particular journal and again, it undisclosed the need for us to do a better job not of resisting the idea of outreach to important Muslim groups, but to make sure that the people we’re cooperating with them, and turning to for consolation, are the right Muslims, which means a pro-Western, assimilated Muslims who you know, who’s first agenda item is the national security of the United States, not the promotion of Islamic law.

FRANK GAFFNEY: Yeah, and taking down, among other things, the national security of the United States. Andy, your insights on all of these issues are simply indispensable, certainly to us and our audience, and I think to the wider world. Keep up the great work, my friend, and come back to us very soon. And I hope the rest of you will be back tomorrow, same time, same station.