Going back to immediately after the 2016 election and President Trump’s victory, the left began its rumor that the Russians had colluded with President Trump to beat Hillary Clinton.

Just to beat a dead horse, the question arises: Was there collusion in that election?

Author, columnist for National Review and former assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Andrew McCarthy says the answer is a definite “yes” but the collusion was not between Russia and Trump but rather between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration.

He says former President Obama put the national intelligence and law enforcement apparatus in the service of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

McCarthy has written a book, “Ball of Collusion: the Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a presidency,” to back up his claims.

Daniel Davis, commentary editor of The Daily Signal and co-host of The Daily Signal podcast, interviewed Mc-Carthy and here are some of the things he talked about:

Real Collusion Involved Obama Administration

Davis said: Right now the president (Trump) is embroiled in the controversy over potential quid pro quo with Ukraine … but not just six months ago it was a different story. (Then) it was about collusion between Trump and Russia and you argue in a new book, “ Ball of Collusion,” that the real collusion crisis wasn’t between Trump and Russia but between the Obama administration and Democratic goals. Can you explain what you mean by that?”

McCarthy said:

“  Well, what I tried to lay out in the book is that there was collusion in connection with the election, but the essential collusion was the Obama administration putting the intelligence and law enforcement apparatus of the government in the service of the Hillary Clinton campaign. There was no small amount of collusion in that endeavor to take help, in the way of information from foreign intelligence services, also toward that end. It was obviously for the political purpose of trying to win the 2016 election, and when that failed, to hamstring Trump’s presidency.

“But it was clearly doing what Trump is actually being accused of doing now, which is basically taking your government power and exploiting it for political purposes.

Evidence Cited

Davis:  And what would you say was the biggest piece of evidence pointing to that?

McCarthy:   “Well, there’s a lot of evidence. Probably the most interesting evidence and what I hope Congress will cover closely when we finally get to the point of having public hearings about this is the day before the intelligence agencies briefed then President-elect [Donald] Trump at Trump Tower about the Russian interference in the election based on an assessment that the intelligence community, mainly under the direction of John Brennan, who was then the CIA director, had done.

“So the Trump meeting happens on Jan. 6. On Jan. 5, there’s a meeting in the Oval Office between – on the political side – President [Barack] Obama, Vice President [Joe] Biden, and Susan Rice, who was then the national security advisor. On the law enforcement/intelligence side, Jim Comey, who was then director of the FBI, and Sally Yates, who was then effectively the acting attorney general. “That meeting involved a discussion about what information should be withheld from the incoming Trump people in connection with Russia.

“It’s a very interesting meeting in that Susan Rice actually papered it with what we often refer to as a CYA memo. But interestingly, she was intent enough on doing it that she actually wrote the memo, not contemporaneously to the meeting, but 15 minutes after she was out of power, although she still had access to her White House email. In other words, on Jan. 20, she wrote her “contemporaneous memo” of this meeting that had happened on Jan. 5. Of course, by then we had had a tumultuous two weeks, in which the briefing of Trump at Trump Towers was followed… by first, the leaking of the Steele dossier and then the publication of the Steele dossier and all hell breaking loose in that two-week period. I think that’s a very interesting chapter of it, but it shows President Obama in a hands-on way talking about holding information back from the Trump administration.”

When asked by Davis if there were legitimate grounds to begin an investigation on the Obama-Clinton collusion

Is There Basis for Investogation?

McCarthy replied:

“We don’t know yet. What I’ve always tried to do with this is not take wild swings that we can’t justify, because it doesn’t help anyone, and it certainly doesn’t help my credibility.

So I’ve always tried to look at this as I tried to look at things when I was a prosecutor. Now, you’re at a disadvantage as a journalist on the outside because the prosecutor always knows things that nobody else does, right? You’re always making judgments a little bit in the blind, because you don’t have the information available to you that’s available to them. But what I’ve always tried to do is stay within what we knew and, therefore, draw inferences that were based on that rather than get too extravagant and too far out in front of what we know, to the point where I think it’s a fair criticism that I’ve made mistakes along the way, mistakes that were based on this conservative approach.

Faux Intelligence Reporting

“To be more concrete about that, probably two and a half years ago when the Steele dossier first emerged, this set of faux intelligence reporting by this guy, Christopher Steele, who had been a British asset, a British intelligence officer who was working, as it turned out, for the Clinton campaign and the [Democratic National Committee] through an outfit called … Fusion GPS.

“When the stories first emerged that he had cooperated with the FBI and given these reports to the FBI, people instantly theorized that the FBI had taken this information and run to the foreign intelligence surveillance court to get warrants based on it. At the time, I told them I thought that was nuts, because in my experience what the FBI would have done with any information it got was pick out the five or six facts that it needed to make out probable cause that someone was an agent of a foreign power, and then do an FBI investigation on those facts.

“By the time they got to the FISA court, you would never have had to hear Steele’s name. They would have documents and independent witnesses. In other words, by the time they got there, it would be an FBI investigation.

Did Exact Opposite

“It turns out I was wrong about that. They did exactly the thing I said they wouldn’t do.

“So you do the best you can on the basis of the finite amount of information you have and what you think you can logically deduce from it, but it’s a crap shoot when you don’t know everything you should know.”

McCarthy followed that by commenting that the Mueller investigation was appalling, adding:

Mueller Outside Regulation

“I think, first of all, his appointment was outside the regulations. I always want to say illegitimate, but that’s a loaded word because the regulations actually have a provision at the end of them, the ones that pertain to a special counsels, that basically say there’s nothing in these regulations that’s actionable. Meaning the Justice Department is saying, “If we violate our own regulations, you can’t do anything about it. You can’t take us to court. You can’t enforce it.”

Commenting further on the Mueller actions, McCarthy said:

“The regulations say that you’re only supposed to have a special counsel if you have a factual basis to believe a crime has been committed, so in other words, as a basis for a criminal investigation, and secondly, a conflict of interest that’s so profound that the Justice Department can’t handle the case in the normal course. What you judge the conflict on is whatever the factual basis for the criminal investigation is.

“Here, with respect to President Trump, they never had a factual basis for a criminal investigation in the nature of a cyber espionage conspiracy between Trump and Russia, so you never even would get to the question of whether there was a conflict that required the Justice Department to get out of the case.

Foreign Elements

“But you know there wasn’t, because when Mueller returns these indictments that he returned, what he did was he basically parceled them out to different components of the Justice Department, which you couldn’t do if there was a conflict. The other thing Mueller did was he recruited from the upper levels of the same Obama Justice Department that had been investigating Trump. So if DOJ is conflicted, why are you grabbing staff lawyers from the conflicted DOJ?”

McCarthy said later in the interviews that the biggest lesson learned from the Mueller investigation is that first, Americans shouldn’t want the FBI and Justice Department involved with politics.

“And the second thing is, we worry about the Russians, we worry about the Chinese, worry about all these foreign elements, the biggest threat, and the framers knew this, the biggest threat to our elections comes from within, not from without.

“And if our government exploits its law enforcement, and intelligence authorities in a way that undermines our political process, that’s much more threatening to us than the Russians are.”

Question: If there’s not something very fishy about the House’s “impeachment” hearings, why are they being held in secret?

A little sunshine would go a long way in providing a smidgeon of veracity to the hearings.

If you want to listen to the entire interview, The Daily Signal podcast is available on Ricochet, iTunes,  Pippa,  Google Play, or Stitcher. All of its podcasts can be found at DailySignal.com/podcasts.

Inhofe backs tax cuts

U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe stood up for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 by voting against the Democrats’ attempt to roll back parts of the first comprehensive tax reform in 30 years.

“The historic tax reforms of 2017 gave Oklahomans and families across the country a tax cut, but Democrats want to dismantle it. Why? High tax, liberal legislators are being forced to realize the consequences of their astronomical state and local property tax rates. Rather than adjust local rates and spending priorities to be competitive with low tax states like Oklahoma, they want yet another giveaway from the federal government...   

“This is the second effort in as many weeks by the Democrats to repeal effective, positive parts of President Trump and the Republican agenda. It’s sad and revealing that they would rather play games than consider meaningful legislation to ratify modern trade agreements like the USMCA or fund the government and provide for our common defense.”