Commentary
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, 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 Andy 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 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….