Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

by Andrew C. McCarthy

The real collusion in the 2016 election was not between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It was between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration.

The media-Democrat "collusion narrative," which paints Donald Trump as cat's paw of Russia, is a studiously crafted illusion.

Despite Clinton's commanding lead in the polls, hyper-partisan intelligence officials decided they needed an "insurance policy" against a Trump presidency. Thus was born the collusion narrative, built on an anonymously sourced "dossier," secretly underwritten by the Clinton campaign and compiled by a former British spy. Though acknowledged to be "salacious and unverified" at the FBI's highest level, the dossier was used to build a counterintelligence investigation against Trump's campaign.

Miraculously, Trump won anyway. But his political opponents refused to accept the voters' decision. Their collusion narrative was now peddled relentlessly by political operatives, intelligence agents, Justice Department officials, and media ideologues--the vanguard of the "Trump Resistance." Through secret surveillance, high-level intelligence leaking, and tireless news coverage, the public was led to believe that Trump conspired with Russia to steal the election.

Not one to sit passively through an onslaught, President Trump fought back in his tumultuous way. Matters came to a head when he fired his FBI director, who had given explosive House testimony suggesting the president was a criminal suspect, despite privately assuring Trump otherwise. The resulting firestorm of partisan protest cowed the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel, whose seemingly limitless investigation bedeviled the administration for two years.

Yet as months passed, concrete evidence of collusion failed to materialize. Was the collusion narrative an elaborate fraud? And if so, choreographed by whom? Against media-Democrat caterwauling, a doughty group of lawmakers forced a shift in the spotlight from Trump to his investigators and accusers. This has exposed the depth of politicization within American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. It is now clear that the institutions on which our nation depends for objective policing and clear-eyed analysis injected themselves scandalously into the divisive politics of the 2016 election.

They failed to forge a new Clinton administration. Will they succeed in bringing down President Trump?

Genres: Politics, History, Nonfiction, American History, Audiobook, Political Science, Current Affairs

472 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 1, 2019

Reviews

[L.A. Starks · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a political book, readers will either find this of interest or not, so it is not my intent to argue the politics.

McCarthy has written a superb, chronological account--interpreted throughout with legal detail (excruciating at times, but exact and credible) of the steps taken by those at the FBI and the CIA to get Hillary Clinton elected president and then, failing that, to get Trump impeached.

McCarthy fills in all the details, names names, and most helpfully, explains which issues are legal, which are political, and what various phrases mean.

For readers who like real-life political conspiracy, McCarthy's book can't be topped.

PS: for anyone reading on Kindle, be aware that the text is about 2/3 and the end notes are 1/3.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to wait a few days before writing a review to be sure I gave this a fair shake. With the current partisan political climate, I wanted to look at the information in this book from an objective standpoint and not a "choosing a side" point of view. I typically approach current-event books with a "grain of salt", since many tend to be "opinion" and "theory" no matter which side of the political debate you find yourself. However, Andrew McCarthy has filled this book with FACTS and footnoted each one to direct the reader to their source. This, I found, quite compelling as well as the general, investigative tone of the book.

Whether you voted for President Trump or passionately dislike the man, we should all find the information in this book unsettling. The players involved with this "Russian Collusion" narrative were solely pursuing political advantage with no regard to legality. The entire "Russia/Trump" accusation was built on a false report (the Steele Dossier) which was compiled on second-hand (and sometimes third or fourth-hand) information and NO CONFIRMATION. This is scary. The fact that political operatives used misinformation to push an investigation of this scale is appalling.

The country wasted 3 years and millions of tax-payer funds on a political "scheme", and that really is all it was, based on the facts. It was a "the ends justify the means" situation. The whole thing can be summarized like this: "Let's dig up dirt on our political rival. When we don't really find any, let's speculate and take some second-hand accounts and create a scandal. When that second-hand info is confirmed as false or has no basis, we'll omit that and press for a warrant to find information that will confirm that we need to begin an investigation (which we've already started). When the investigation proves inconclusive or down right wrong, it won't matter because the 'created dirt" will already be thrown."

The depth of the information, Mr. McCarthy provides, is like peeling that proverbial onion layer by layer. The scope of the players involved is what I found truly frightening. What started as a political campaign searching for "dirt", spread to the CIA, FBI, NSA and the DOJ. I cringe to think of the waste of money and resources. And I am not choosing a "SIDE", I would be disgusted with EITHER political party going to this level of deception, all for damaging their opposition.

The book read like an Espionage Thriller and keeps the reader engaged. I did find some of the 'jumping around from scenario to scenario' a little confusing, but Mr. McCarthy would reel everything back in and show the connections. This book was written well and should be encouraged for ALL to read to get the FACTS of the "Russia Collusion" story, instead of the misinformation fed to us by the media. Again, from a neutral position, I highly recommend this book.

[Gretchen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mr. McCarthy wrote a clear, concise, well-documented book that gives a decades long background of the D.C. swamp dwellers. This led into the scandals and criminal activities of the Obama administration assisting Hilary Clinton in her unsuccessful second bid for the presidency. Mr. McCarthy clearly shows how the Obama, DNC, Clinton group politicized our premier law enforcement agencies to destroy Trump and his administration. With the help of the MSM the Obama criminal activities and scandals were kept hidden from gullible citizens.
Mr. McCarthy clearly points out how the Trump presidency has had its many challenges because of his lack of political prowess and hiring deep state actors who do not have the interests of the American people at heart. Perhaps after the Trump presidency we will no longer have the fear of Obama’s politically manipulated intelligence to control opponents. I’m an optimist.

[Audrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5 stars



Andrew McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor. He is not a fan of Trump but is a fan of justice and honesty. Here, he examines the entire case for Trump-Russia collusion: how and why it came to be and the shady actions behind it.

He does a good job at remaining disinterested (impartial) and has no problem pointing what Trump, Obama, and others did wrong or right. This is a tough topic to make interesting, and McCarthy makes it as engaging as impossible, not bogging the writing down with legalese. There are a full hundred pages of notes at the end; it is well documented.

There are tons of people mentioned. I had to make a list to keep them all straight. (If this were a fiction novel, I’d accuse the author of having too many characters.) After hearing about these people and events in bits and pieces over the course of a year, it was helpful to have all the information together in one place. This is the kind of book that may become dated quickly, but I think it will remain important in a historical context.

It contains some occasional odd editing errors, probably not noticed by non-editors (e.g., continuous to mean continual, entitled to mean titled, comprise to mean compose).

Clean context except a couple swear words used in quotes.



Book Blog

[Spectre · Rating 4 out of 5]

This modern day ‘conspiracy story’ starts slow, names names, and accelerates by Chapter 16 as the author builds his case. He sums up his argument in the last paragraph of the book: “… counterintelligence as a pretext for a criminal investigation in search of a crime; a criminal investigation as a pretext for impeachment without an impeachable offense; an impeachable inquiry as a pretext for rendering Donald Trump un-reelectable; and all of it designed as a straightjacket around his presidency.” Before deciding whether he succeeded in making his case, you, the reader (aka jury), should consider his points in your ‘personal deliberations’.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you know how hard it is to write a review when trembling in anger?...Full disclosure: during the 2016 election cycle, I wasn't a Trump supporter, in fact, I as an Iowa Caucus Captain for Ted Cruz, but I held my nose and voted for Trump, to avoid a Clinton Presidency...So where does this anger come from?...It comes from Andy McCarthy's writing a clear, concise, well-documented examination of the Obama Administration, Mainstream media, DNC, Clinton Campaign and even foreign interests efforts to 1st exonerate Hillary Clinton of her crimes to make sure she's elected...Failing that, the 2nd phase, to disrupt & derail the Trump presidency and its populist efforts to end many facets of the "New World Order(The Swamp)...And failing that, phase 3, the removal of Trump and his threat to "The Swamp's" side hustles...This week we've had the IG report, which seem to support many of McCarthy's allegations in spite of the House moving forward with their articles of impeachment...Mad, Damn Right!!!

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is infuriating.

Andrew C. McCarthy reviews the last three years and puts together the history of the Media/Democrat Russian Collusion hoax. He finds collusion, but the collusion is between Democrats and Russians or between Democrats and Ukrainians. Along the way, he explains and puts together the various threads of gaslighting and backpedaling that have been presented as Truth. For example, he reminds us that the New York Times presented two different origin stories for Crossfire Hurricane - FBI's investigation of Donald Trump - which (a) contradict each other and (b) were generated within months of each other (c) without any effort to reconcile or explain the two.

The Ministry of Truth could not have managed it any better.

Along the way, Americans were defamed as Russian agents by the most callous and corrupt kinds of betrayal. Hence, Papadopoulos and Page were both befriended by English academics with long ties to British intelligence in order to induce them to say things that could be used to charge Trump with collusion with Russia.

There are several factors that support Andrew C. McCarthy's account in "Ball of Collusion": first, McCarthy is not a Trump supporter. He didn't support Trump in 2016 and he is willing to call out Trump's silly expressions of support for China. Second, McCarthy is clearly in the foreign policy hawk camp and, so, is naturally opposed to Trump's movement toward a kind of isolationism in American foreign policy. Third, McCarthy was a career federal prosecutor and so can sniff out the normal procedure from the ad hoc and extraordinary. Fourth, recent developments in the release of previously redacted or concealed information has proven that McCarthy's inferences and deductions - based on his experience as a prosecutor - have been exactly correct.

For example, McCarthy wrote last year that the FISA court had been hoodwinked by the FBI's misrepresentations into granting surveillance on Carter Page. This was at a time when the mainstream media was still buying the claim that the court had been told everything it needed to be told. Yet, lo and behold, this year - 2020 - the FISA court has explicitly said that at least the last two FISA warrants lacked legal support and in late 2019 it clearly identified the lies in the FBI application - including the failure to share the known fact that the Clinton campaign had created the data the FBI was using - as the reason for granting the warrants.

Similarly, McCarthy repeatedly implies that British intelligence was intimately involved in the setting up of low-level, uninvolved, innocents like George Pappadopoulis and Carter Page. In mid-March 2020, this role was supported with more evidence, but still something less than an admission.

Finally, there is this:

"There is absolutely no chance any of the Russian officials charged will ever see the inside of an American courtroom. The indictment is an artifice by which the special counsel hoped to accomplish two objectives. First, Mueller wanted to put to rest the question of Russia’s guilt, because if that is in question, many Americans will rightly demand to know why the country was put through a two-year investigation of the president on suspicion of abetting the Russians. Unfortunately, as we’ve just detailed, the best that can be said about the Kremlin’s culpability has already been said—and not completely convincingly—in the intelligence agencies’ assessment report. Mueller hoped, however, that by having a prosecutor reaffirm the intelligence assessment in a court proceeding, its conclusions would assume the gravitas of judicial findings—i.e., he hopes you won’t notice that he hasn’t actually proved anything, that no one has been or will be convicted. Second, the special counsel wanted to justify his superfluous investigation. It is “superfluous” in the sense that there never was evidence of a Trump–Russia conspiracy and, again, we already had a report about Russia’s clandestine activities, so what did we need a prosecutor’s investigation for? Answer: prosecutors are there to indict, so now we have an indictment—woo-hoo!
Often, no harm comes from publicity stunts.
That can’t be said here. Look at how farcical Russia-gate became: In announcing the indictment of Russia’s intelligence officers, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein asserted, “In our justice system, everyone who is charged with a crime is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.”10
So we have to think of the Russians as innocent? After the president of the United States has been a suspect for two years for purportedly conspiring with them?"

Lo and behold, this month - March 2020 - all of the indictments against the Russians were dropped. The whole thing was what McCarthy predicted it would be.

There is a lot of information in this book. It is worth keeping as a reference. Any time anything is said that is near this subject, use this book to fact-check. For example, in one of the debates, Joe Biden explained how he had gone to the intelligence services to warn them about Russian meddling.

I immediately remembered this book and I knew that it wasn't true:

"By late October, the Russian “cyberespionage” effort to meddle in the election was well known. In the same debate in which Clinton rebuked Trump for refusing to concede the election’s legitimacy, she attacked her rival as “Putin’s puppet” and cited the finding of government agencies that Russia sought to interfere in the election. Clinton was not at all concerned that Putin’s shenanigans would have any actual impact on the election. She invoked them because she thought it was helpful to her campaign—an opportunity to portray Trump as ripe for rolling by the Russian regime. And how could she have taken any other position? None other than President Obama himself observed that there was nothing unusual about Russian scheming to influence American elections, which he said “dates back to the Soviet Union.”39 Obama deftly avoided mentioning that past scheming had never gotten much media traction because the Soviets had been more favorably disposed toward Democrats. While he blamed the Putin regime for hacking emails during the 2016 campaign, Obama described this as “fairly routine.” He acknowledged, moreover, that it was publicly notorious well in advance of the election—which, of course, is why Clinton had been able to exploit it in a nationally televised debate three weeks prior to November 8. What happened here is very simple: Russia was unimportant to Democrats, and was indeed avoided by Democrats, until they needed to rationalize a stunning defeat. Prior to the election, Democrats had little interest in mentioning “Russia” or “Putin.” Of course, they sputtered out the words when they had no choice—when, not wanting to address the substance of embarrassing emails, they had to shift attention to the nefarious theft of those emails."

Of course, we know this is true because we were there, but we are often confused by gaslighting and big lies, such as the one that Biden told in the middle of that debate, which was never fact-checked by the media.

Get this book and read it. It's about more than the temporary phenomenon of "Russia Collusion." It is documentation that shows what is dysfunctional about our democracy.

[joel · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want a front row seat for a tour of the swamp, look no further.

[Clara Roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the most complete account to Obama's surveillance of Trump and his associates. McCarthy does not soft peddle that Trump is "narcissistic, crass, mendacious and with a propensity to surround himself with shady characters." But the mendacity of Simpson and Steele, Clinton, Clapper and Comey , and others makes the whole thing a Royal Mess. With seventy-five pages of footnotes McCarthy shows that Obama set out to destroy Trump before Trump even was sworn into office. Obama had the cooperation of the Washington establishment to help him achieve his goal. This book will be used in researching this scandal in years to come. McCarthy is not a partisan but was a career attorney in the Justice Department. He is pained by the behavior of many of his former associates. This was a slow read because McCarthy gets into the minutia of the situation.

[Robert Jacoby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Title: Oh, what a tangled web we weave...

Oh, what a tangled web we weave... And it takes us nearly 300 pages to get there.

Who knows if we'll ever get the real, unadulterated, and complete story about the Trump-Russia collusion narrative. But this book seems like an excellent start. Since Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, the Trump-Russia narrative has grown to mythic proportions. Ask someone what they know about it, and you're likely to get a different story from every person you ask, depending on where they fall along the political spectrum, how closely they've followed the story, and what sources they're reading. That's a real shame, as the facts are the facts are the facts. And, boy, does Mr. McCarthy lay out the facts.

McCarthy is a former prosecutor and a meticulous journalist. His reporting here is of a very high quality. And he cites numerous investigative journalists who have done yeoman's work to bring the DNC-Deep State-Legacy Media-HRC conspiracies to light, including John Soloman, Peter Schweizer, Stephen Hayes, Thomas Joscelyn, Lee Smith, Sharyl Attkisson, and The Epoch Times, among many others.

The book covers the generalities of the story of what most people likely already know about the Russia collusion narrative spun by the DNC (HRC)-Legacy Media-Deep State triad: that the Obama administration weaponized its intelligence agencies to spy on the opposition party's presidential campaign; that high-ranking Obama officials (CIA Director Brennan, Deputy Director of FBI McCabe) routinely leaked intelligence material to a willing press; that Obama's DOJ and FBI concealed from the FISA court the fact that the Clinton campaign had funded the Steele dossier; and on and on. That's what most people already know. McCarthy digs deeper, though, and unearths and ties together pieces of the Trump-Russia narrative worthy of the best detective stories. You'll feel like you need a wall-sized board with multi-colored lines of yarn pinned and drawn to illustrate all of the connections. It's quite dizzying!

But, in the end, McCarthy brings clarity to the entire mess:

"Russia-gate in a nutshell: no rumor is ever dismissed because, when it comes to Trump, it is no longer the FBI's obligation to verify information; it is somehow the suspect's burden to show that the suspicions are wrong. And no one is ever exonerated because, when it comes to Trump, it is no longer the prosecution's burden to prove guilt; the accused must establish his innocence" (p. 258). 
"The Trump-Russia investigation was conducted under the guise of counterintelligence, but it was always a criminal investigation--a probe of a suspected espionage conspiracy--for which investigators lacked an adequate factual predicate (p. 267). Read that quotation again. Now read it again. And now understand what the Trump-Russia narrative is; which is...it's a fiction. It's made up.

And: "...the Clinton campaign and the DNC used a law firm [Perkins Cole] as a cut-out to conceal their roles in generating anti-Trump research (possibly in violation of campaign finance disclosure requirements)" (p. 275).

If this is your first foray into the world of the Deep State, you are in for a rude awakening. It's like Alice in Wonderland here. Nobody in Washington is clean, it seems, and Swamp monsters abound. McCarthy carefully crafts the picture (sometimes in excruciating detail, because that's where the Devil is) of a rogue Obama administration doing whatever it wants to do to remain in power and (try to) ensure its continuity through its assumed predecessor administration (HRC). The details are welcome, because they're necessary; and I can forgive him the snark and snipes at Democrats because of their subterfuge.

Notice I didn't say "treason." The word "treason" is being thrown around a lot these days, and it really shouldn't be, because it devalues the seriousness of that word and the weight carried it with; after all, a charge of treason can bring with it the death penalty.

McCarthy does a great job of documenting his work, too. The most recent end note I saw was from May 2019, so it's very recently sourced. In other words, if you want to find out all there is to know about Russiagate, and by extension, spygate, and how the deep state operates, get this book, and read it soon.

Before you do, though, you should actually go see the Steele dossier for yourself (on documentcloud.org). It's a central piece of the Russia collusion narrative, after all, and if you haven't read it yourself, you need to do so now. It really is a startling piece of work to see. And I mean that literally: you actually see the pages on which the information is typed. Which makes the Russia narrative all the more a house of cards, because the Steele dossier looks like it was written by a high school sophomore as a 4chan prank. It reads in part like one, too. In McCarthy's words: "By any objective measure, the dossier is a shoddy piece of work; the stories are preposterous." (p. 155). Interestingly, McCarthy doesn't call it what it is until he's out of the chapter detailing the dossier; that is, the Steele dossier is a work of fiction.

It would have helped if McCarthy had dug a bit deeper below the surface stories. For example, he mentions a few times that the mainstream (Legacy/Operation Mockingbird) media doesn't do a good job of reporting on the scandals of the Obama administration, but he never says why. The "why?" comes in a multi-part answer, but it is well worth exploring, or you'll never fully grasp the magnitude of the problem here.

McCarthy details several scandals of the Obama administration, including Uranium One, Benghazi, the Clinton Foundation, Skolkovo, "Five Eyes" spying techniques, spying on the Trump campaign, the Iran deal; spying on U.S. citizens, foreign nationals, and the Senate Intelligence Committee; harassing and investigating political opponents (he mentions the IRS scandal, but fails to mention that the IRS was asking U.S. citizens about the content of their prayers--which is what the NAZIs did--so are Democrats NAZIs?); monitoring and intimidating journalists; and bullying state and local police departments. (But then he leaves out such high-cost/high-stake Obama scandals as Pigford and the Google Transparency Project. Perhaps McCarthy doesn't know about these?)

Other times he fails to dig deeper into the material he's presenting. For example, when he talks about how the Democrats didn't think Hillary could lose because of her strong polling numbers, he fails to mention that the polls were sometimes manipulated to get those results by over- and/or under-sampling voter populations. McCarthy also poo poos the idea that illegal voting took place in the 2016 presidential election, when, actually, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that voter fraud happened, and is still happening (interestingly, the U.S. is the only major nation that doesn't have a national voter ID law).

In other instances, it's curious to me why McCarthy skates over issues and events.

For example, he claims that Trump was caught off guard, time and again, during the Russia narrative debacle, but he never shares that Trump has always had his own private security and intelligence force, so it's highly unlikely that Trump ever was *really* and *truly* caught off guard; or that Trump has been an FBI informant since the early 1980s. Both interesting facts I'm sure McCarthy knows, but why not share it in your book when it's relevant information?

Another example, he gives a wink and a nod to HRC's involvement in Benghazi without providing key information, such as why the U.S. had a CIA annex not far from its State Department outpost in Benghazi, "the presence of which was never explained..." (p. 56). Really? That's an easy one. Just google "benghazi cia annex arms movement". There's your explanation right there. Why wouldn't McCarthy report this? Americans have a right to know what their tax dollars are supporting. Even more curious: McCarthy wrote an article in the National Review detailing this information, but it's not in his own book talking about this issue? Hmm...

Also, for me, McCarthy is too in love with the FBI. Time and again he writes how the FBI is an admirable institution, but I'm not seeing it. And in other instances, when officials in the Obama administration make official statements about such and such, McCarthy swallows them agreeably. Like when Clapper and Jeh Johnson announce they're "confident" the Russian Government hacked the emails. So, in McCarthy's mind, the FBI can be riddled with underhanded, treasonous people, but other parts of the Obama administration are not? In addition, Obama knew about this supposed Russian hack, but he did nothing about it. Why?

Speaking of the hack: McCarthy is dogged and determined to blame Russia. He does provide some counter theories, such as data analysis suggesting that the DNC emails were downloaded locally to a thumb drive (FAT Anomalies In Leaked DNC Emails Suggest Use Of Thumbdrive, DisobediantMedia.com, February 16, 2019.) McCarthy dismisses this theory outright, though. I have to say: the DNC staffer Seth Rich might disagree on the matter, if we could speak with him, but we can't, since he was murdered. On the streets of Washington, DC. Which is the most heavily surveilled city in the entire world. And his murder remains unsolved. And there's a Podesta email where Mr. Podesta writes: "I'm definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it." (Wikileaks email ID #36082) Hmm...

Curiously, McCarthy never discusses the contents of the hacked emails; but he does quote Obama saying that "there was not anything particularly illegal or controversial about" the emails. Very curious. Those people really do enjoy their spirit cooking and pasta and walnut sauce and pizza: "Hi John, The realtor found a handkerchief (I think it has a map that seems pizza-related. Is it yorus?" (Wikileaks email ID #32795)

So, the other thing McCarthy misses is the "why?" of the matter. Time and time again he drops into the text how high-level officials in the Obama administration hated Trump, abhorred Trump...but in the end one must really ask "why?" To me, their actions during the entire spygate scandal smacks of something much deeper. Much much deeper. Which I think we may catch glimpses of, soon.

The coming weeks and months will likely bring declas, which will show once and for all the wide-ranging treasonous activities of key players in the Obama administration, including former president Obama himself and Hillary Clinton. Maybe only then will it all come out, in multiple investigations, including those on the Russia narrative, Uranium One, illegal spying and deception of the FISA court system, illegal leaks to and collusion with Legacy Media, but also the Awan-DNC server matter, China's involvement and access to Hillary's classified emails, and more. 

My sense is that there's a storm coming...

I loved it/It was amazing
5/5 Goodreads
5/5 Amazon

[Wendell H Howell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Chalk Board Time Line

In order to follow this story with comprehension I should have had a chalk board time line. So many details to follow. Still clear enough to show how much visceral hatred the democrats and others have for Trump. They shamefully used third world country tactics. Very well researched as indicated by the extensive notes. I thank the author for this telling historical fact.

[cool breeze · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is well worth reading, although it is a bit of a mixed bag.

On the positive side:

McCarthy has good credibility. He is the former federal prosecutor who led the prosecution of the “Blind Sheik” for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He is not a Trump supporter cheering for his candidate; he really dislikes Trump. He clearly admires the FBI, Comey in particular. So when McCarthy lays out his devastating case, proving the FBI is rotten to its core, you can be sure that he has been forced to that conclusion against all his instincts and desires.

The book is meticulously documented. There are 74 pages of endnotes.

McCarthy is good at explaining the inner workings of the FBI, DOJ and other agencies, and their institutional procedures, roles and constraints. He is good at explaining some of the relevant Byzantine intricacies of Ukrainian politics, which has frequently-shifting pro-EU and pro-Russia factions. He is good at providing background on many of the second- and third-tier players involved.

Despite his prejudices with regard to numerous participants in the book, both for (Comey, the FBI) and against (Trump), McCarthy makes a real effort to be fair to everyone throughout. He does a good job of exposing Rod Rosenstein as the self-serving little weasel that he is: “Rod Rosenstein spent the days that followed grappling with the matter of most urgency to the United States of America: how to restore the reputation of Rod Rosenstein”.

He is willing to follow the evidence to the conclusion it inescapably leads – that Obama’s FBI, CIA, NSA, Justice Department and State Department engaged in a conspiracy with the Democratic Party and the mainstream media to “rig an election and destroy a Presidency”.

On the negative side:

McCarthy is an insufferable FBI jock sniffer, despite the abundant evidence of its utter corruption throughout its history, including Hoover, Whitey Bulger, Waco, Ruby Ridge, LaVoy Finicum, the numerous Clinton coverups and the fake “Russian collusion” conspiracy. When it hasn't clearly been corrupt, it has often been incompetent, including Hanssen, 9/11 and Parkland.

Yet McCarthy writes of Strzok’s “insurance policy” text, “This is such a damning comment – a shocking one for those of us who revere the FBI”. After almost 200 pages of documenting massive misconduct pervading the FBI’s highest levels, he drops this non-sequitur: “[FBI agent’s] opinions frequently deserve more respectful attention than the average person’s because they tend to be better informed and more-community-minded – patriotism, fidelity to the Constitution and service to their fellow citizens being ingrained in the FBI’s DNA”. McCarthy tarnishes his own reputation by being a toady to such a loathsome organization.

McCarthy also has a bromance with Comey, saying “I have known, worked with, liked, and admired Jim Comey for 30 years”. Teenage boy band groupies have more objectivity (and shame) than McCarthy does about the FBI - it is embarrassing and disgraceful, like the FBI itself.

McCarthy criticizes Trump, his actions and his positions repeatedly throughout the book, which is fair enough as long as it is relevant. But this frequently devolves into McCarthy preening about how much smarter he is than Trump, with a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking, and how much more enlightened McCarthy's policy positions are than Trump's.

By implication, that means those who voted for Trump's policies. This smacks of the same smug elitism and sense of entitlement to ignore or overrule the election results that led to the Russian collusion plot. McCarthy's preferred policies are the same lame GOP establishment policies as losers Bush, Dole, McCain, Romney and Ryan (and which Republican primary voters emphatically rejected from losers Jeb, Rubio, Kasich and the rest of the field). Exactly zero people voted for McCarthy for President.

Yeah, Putin is a bad guy. But if the EU isn't willing to pay its full share of its own defense through NATO, f*ck 'em at this point. The US taxpayer shouldn't have to underwrite the EU welfare state by funding a huge proportion of its defense budget. Particularly when the EU interferes with our elections to protect that rotten arrangement, treats Britain disgracefully in Brexit and imposes unfair trade barriers. Angela Merkel is nearly as bad an authoritarian as Putin, and is in many ways worse because of her dangerous cluelessness, bordering on encouragement, of Islamic threats. The average Russian oligarch is less corrupt and far less dangerous than George Soros and many of the elites swilling champagne at Davos.

McCarthy repeatedly asserts, without providing evidence, that Russia was responsible for hacking the DNC emails. Among the numerous instances of this, he concedes only once that many reputable people, including left-leaning Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, have a credible case that it was an inside job, not the Russians. He breezes over the competing claims in a few paragraphs with “Cyber analysis is not my area of expertise, but I’m inclined to believe our agencies”.

Yet he admits that the assessment that it was the Russians is not that of the agencies, but rather that of “CrowdStrike, a private DNC contractor that had deep ties to the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration” and “a deeply Democratic firm”. Shockingly, his revered agencies were never allowed to examine the evidence and made no attempt to use their clear powers to do so. The book does not contain a single reference to disillusioned DNC staffer Seth Rich, who is the focus of the competing theories, and who was murdered under very suspicious circumstances, a purported street robbery in which nothing was taken. Whether the Russians or someone else hacked the DNC is a central and controversial assumption of the book, with a credible alternative explanation, and McCarthy provides no evidence for his position.

McCarthy repeatedly asserts, without providing evidence, that Julian Assange is a “willing agent of Russian intelligence” and “a witting anti-American tool of Moscow”.

These examples stand out because McCarthy is so meticulous about documenting so many of his other assertions.

Overall: 4 stars. Prosecutor McCarthy proves his case beyond a reasonable doubt, that Comey, Brennan and Obama are guilty as charged of an attempted coup.

[Annabelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Outlines the corruption of government departments, investigators, politicians, lobbyists, foreign agents, etc., etc. involved in the Trump/Russia investigation. Depressing.

[Deacon Tom (Feeling Better) · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF -47%.
Not fair or balanced.

[Gordon E. Castanza · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mueller report exposee

This book is what the Mueller Report should have been. Instead it turns out to be a thorough exposee of all the fundamental flaws of the report. It is amazing that this author had the insights and research acumen to ferret out all the Byzantine connections. A landmark in the Canon of political history.

[Patrick O'Hannigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I think this book will age better than many others in the Political Science genre, because McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is meticulous about the way he marshals details that didn't make it into most news stories about the greatest political scandal in U.S. history (when the Obama administration weaponized and politicized the tools of intelligence gathering for the twofold purpose of exonerating Hillary Clinton and sabotaging Donald Trump).

The book is oddly entertaining, even though McCarthy sometimes parses phrases to within an inch of their lives. I found myself frustrated by McCarthy's continuing regard for former FBI Director James Comey, although he (McCarthy) remains objective enough to note where Comey played fast and loose with the truth for partisan ends.

I would have liked the book more if it parts of it hadn't read like McCarthy was pulling his punches. There's no mistaking that this is a careful indictment of people who think they're above the law, but it's ultimately a clinical and dispassionate work, except for occasional sarcasm that's inevitably telegraphed by McCarthy writing "ya think?"

[Drtaxsacto · Rating 5 out of 5]

The impeachment narrative is one which has many threads. Andrew McCarthy, a former Federal prosecutor and author for National Review has written a helpful book in understanding the complexities of the story. Many on the left will declare that the book is a whitewash of clear evidence of wrong doing by Trump and his allies. That simply is not true. This is the third book I have read on this set of issues including Michael Isikoff's Russian Roulette and Greg Jarrett's The Russia Hoax. I also read the Mueller Report, which in my mind raised more issues that it solved. McCarthy's book is yet another in this trail.

One is struck by the amateurish nature of both campaigns in 2016. Trump’s campaign seemed to hire a bunch of neophytes and sleazy characters almost without regard to winning the election. Those may, as the democrats alleged, be a sign of deeper problems or they may simply be that Trump ran this as an ad hoc exercise. My suspicions suggest, from watching a couple of seasons of the apprentice, that Trump’s supreme confidence (in my opinion an inordinate level of confidence) in his own ability blinded him to the complex nature of electoral politics. On the democrat side, the Hillary campaign for all the professionals that were supposed to be running the show, also had signs of amateurism. The slapdash way that key figures like John Podesta, got hacked into releasing confidential emails from their server, is mind-boggling. Neither side seems to have cared much about accountability.

As I was reading the book, I was struck that there are at least three types of people integral to the story - the reprehensibles (sorry the deplorables was already taken), idiots, and the good guys (and there are precious few in this story). I will focus on the first two groups because from McCarthy’s telling there are precious few of the third types. But there are also some clear questions of unfinished threads.

Reprensibles - on both sides of this issue there are some people who one would not want to ever encounter. Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen come to mind immediately. But so do Joseph Brennan and Peter Strzok and James Comey who clearly wanted to put their thumbs on the scales for the dems. I would add into that group Lisa Page and Andrew McCabe. Christopher Steele is clearly in this group. Each of them has a hand in the story. Some because they tried to enrich themselves in spite of the political outcome. (Notably Cohen and Manafort seem to be “players” in that set of games, Their political allegiances were up for grabs.) Steele also seems to be in that group, he like Cohen and Manafort was highly compensated for doing shoddy work. In this case the work was at the behest of one campaign (Clinton’s) but was also used by opponents of Trump (notably Senator McCain whose brand of politics seemed to revolve around his own personal narrative).

But there are also what the conservatives have called “deep staters” people who are so committed to the continuing role of the permanent class in Washington that they would do anything to oppose any effort to reduce their influence. Comey, Strzok, Page and McCabe are in that group so they might have done the same nefarious acts against a liberal who wanted to reduce their influence. They are quite similar to the class of Department of State employees who during the impeachment hearings substituted their judgments about policy for the elected officials.

Idiots/Hangers on - The Keystone Cops nature of both campaigns seems comic. People like George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, and Carter Page seemed to be simply were too far above their pay grade to be competent. As you read about their activities it is hard to understand why the Trump campaign allowed them to even be considered in the first place.

Unfinished Threads - There are several parts of the story that seem to have been overlooked or have not come to even a preliminary conclusion. A couple of them involve potential serious violations of laws (which the Justice Department’s counsel may begin to resolve). I wonder why no one in Washington took a serious effort at the claim the server that Hillary Clinton had housed in her house (contrary to every State Department and USG guideline) was legitimate or that they did not have a need to recover the server before it was destroyed. I wonder why the FBI did not force the issue of reviewing the DNC server which to understand exactly who hacked the server.

I also wonder why the threads about the payments from Russian Oligarchs to Bill Clinton directly and to the Clinton Foundation were not probed more deeply. The relationship between the deal with Uranium One, the Skolkovo Innovation Center and payments to the Clintons should be or interest. I wonder why the FISA process accepted almost without review the Steele memorandum as a legitimate document.

The Mueller Report did a couple of odd things - even though they were able to indict or convict a number of figures in the saga (VOX did a summary of all the convictions from the investigations - https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politi...). First, while the clear finding of the report was that the Trump campaign did not involve itself in colluding with Russia on the election, it established a bizarre standard for reporting those questions from the original request where there had been allegations but not enough evidence to propose further action(s). In the American standard of jurisprudence a person under investigation is accused if there is enough evidence to suggest a prosecution. But as McCarthy points out Mueller’s standard for the alternative conclusion was not innocent until proven guilty but “we don’t have enough clear evidence to make an allegation.”

McCarthy’s book does a good job of presenting the issues in a coherent manner. He argues that a good part of the heat on these issues comes from a desire by some in the permanent government and some in the democrat party to void the results of the 2016 election.

[Linda Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Definitive Account

Before reading "Ball of Collusion" I had grown to respect Mr. McCarthy and his straightforward and intelligent analysis of political events, even when I may have disagreed. After reading his book, my respect for Mr. McCarthy has grown exponentially. While I have not read all that's been written on the Trump Russia collusion narrative, this has to be the definitive account of events. In addition to the detailed history McCarthy set forth, I really enjoyed his writing style which includes a running commentary and laugh-out-loud sarcasm. To find the humor in the telling of the sickening and grotesque manipulation of the American justice system for the purposes of political gain at any cost must surely be a literary feat. Thank you, Mr. McCarthy, for this impressive and painstakingly crafted account of what I believe political history will consider one of it's lowest points.

[Dav · Rating 4 out of 5]

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Ball of Collusion:
The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

• By Andrew C. McCarthy (Pub. 2019, over 400 pages)

OVERVIEW:
The real collusion in the 2016 election was not between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. It was between the Clinton campaign and the Obama administration.

The media–Democrat “collusion narrative,” which paints Donald Trump as cat’s paw of Russia, is a studiously crafted illusion (aka, a HOAX - a malicious deception).

Despite Clinton’s commanding lead in the polls, hyper-partisan intelligence officials decided they needed an “insurance policy” against a Trump presidency. Thus was born the collusion narrative, built on an anonymously sourced “dossier,” secretly underwritten by the Clinton campaign and compiled by a former British spy (Christopher Steele). Though acknowledged to be “salacious and unverified” at the FBI’s highest level, the dossier was used to build a counterintelligence investigation against Trump’s campaign.

Miraculously, Trump won anyway. But his political opponents refused to accept the voters’ decision. Their collusion narrative was now peddled relentlessly by political operatives, intelligence agents, Justice Department officials, and media ideologues—the vanguard of the “Trump Resistance.” Through secret surveillance, high-level intelligence leaking, and tireless news coverage, the public was led to believe that Trump conspired with Russia to steal the election.

Not one to sit passively through an onslaught, President Trump fought back in his tumultuous way. Matters came to a head when he fired his FBI director (the deceitful James Comey), who had given explosive House testimony suggesting the president was a criminal suspect, despite privately assuring Trump otherwise. The resulting firestorm of partisan protest cowed the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel (the infamous and floundering Robert Mueller), whose seemingly limitless investigation bedeviled the administration for two years (culminating in Mueller's sham report).

Yet as months passed, concrete evidence of collusion failed to materialize. Was the collusion narrative an elaborate fraud? And if so, choreographed by whom? Against media–Democrat caterwauling, a doughty group of lawmakers forced a shift in the spotlight from Trump to his investigators and accusers. This has exposed the depth of politicization within American law-enforcement and intelligence agencies. (edited)

•

The author, Andrew C. McCarthy, is a former federal prosecutor and respected author and commentator on political and legal matters. He's also no fan of D.J. Trump and makes a point of that in this book Ball of Collusion. He is very supportive of the FBI and related federal agencies which seems to make him hesitant in believing agency officials could be so corrupt they'd collude in the scheme to ruin President Trump, but that's exactly what happened. And it's an on going attack now focused on subverting the 2020 re-election of DJT.

"It is now clear that the institutions on which our nation depends for objective policing and clear-eyed analysis injected themselves scandalously into the divisive politics of the 2016 election..."

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Mostly well done and documented.

The author seems genuine in attempting to convey the facts concerning the attempted coup d'etat against Trump.

He (McCarthy) reveals his own level of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS: an irrational dislike of President Trump based on negative reporting, disliking his persona, etc or the fact that he was elected POTUS instead of HRC). However, McCarthy seems to offset it by pursuing the evidence, even when it besmirches his beloved FBI official and others.

In various reader reviews, committed Leftists jointly hate the book and their comments reveal their own TDS. The Dems and their propaganda arm (the MSM) have effectively poisoned the minds of the opposition party.



• Some details & highlights:

Reviews the Clinton Foundation millionaire-making scheme and Hillary's gross negligence and criminal acts.

Obama's scandal-ridden administration: Fast and Furious; illegal spying and misuse of the FISC, etc.

Gives all the details of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Also presented are various abuses of this Court and abuses of FISA warrants.

The Russia-gate narrative pushed by CIA director John Brennan and others.

Carter Page: the book gives a brief biography, including his Naval service, extensive education, dealings with Russia and volunteering to work for the Trump campaign. (He was illegally spied on by the FBI and lied about in the Steele dossier).

2016: the Clinton-Campaign Collusion with Ukraine.

George Papadopoulos: framed to promote and justify Russia-gate.

Christopher Steele; ex-MI6, a hack and a spy for hire. Fusion GPS and the faux intelligence report (the Steele dossier) sponsored by the Clinton campaign and featured multiple hearsay stories and nonsense.

Julian Assange, WikiLeaks and the published, hacked DNC emails.

Russia-gate: "There was never a shred of evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin...Zip, zero, nada."

Peter Strzok, his paramour Lisa Page, the "insurance policy," James Comey, etc: the FBI plot to exonerate Hillary and implicate Trump (code name: Crossfire Hurricane).

Covers the aborted plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow and Don Jr's brief Trump Tower meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya.

Russian campaign meddling was actually inconsequential and historically routine: having no effect on the outcome of the election.

The vindictive investigation farce against General Flynn.

May 2017: the collusion "insurance policy" is moved to the Mueller investigation, now hunting for obstruction to fulfill the Democrat's obsession to impeach.

2019: the smear campaign proved effective. After the Mueller report revealed no Trump-Russia conspiracy, opinion polls showed about half of America still believed the collusion nonsense.

Deputy attorney-general Rod Rosenstein, in a weaselly, vindictive act appointed Robert Mueller special counsel.

" That is the Ball of Collusion: counterintelligence as a pretext for a criminal investigation in search of a crime; a criminal investigation as a pretext for impeachment without an impeachable offense; an impeachable inquiry as a pretext for rendering Donald Trump unreelectable and all of it designed as a straight jacket around his presidency.

Will it succeed? ."


..



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[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ok

[Mark Scheel · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be perfectly candid, this book is not an easy read. It's extremely well researched and detailed and documented; however, it might have profited from some editorial cutting to rid it of redundancy. McCarthy is well versed in his topic and quite articulate in relating his subject matter, but the reader had better be prepared to be immersed in a morass of political intrigue and maneuverings and possess a passionate interest therein because that's what is revealed. If that's the case, the reader will be amply rewarded in the end because the author leaves nothing out, even utilizing 74 pages of footnotes.

McCarthy delineates beyond any doubt whatsoever how a plot was hatched from the absolute top (Obama White House) on down and through the CIA, FBI, NSD, the Hillary Clinton campaign and various other ancillary operatives to deny Donald Trump the presidency and, following his unexpected victory, to then render his administration ineffective and force him from office. A narrative was created and fed to the anti-Trump media via a concocted "dossier" that Trump had conspired with Russia to "steal" the election. Trump, however, in spite of his well-known personality peccadilloes, proved a formidable foe and refused to acquiesce. So the pressure was increased with the appointment of a special counsel, Robert Mueller, to bedevil the president for another two years. That scheme also resulted in failure to drive Trump from office. The book concludes prior to the initiation of impeachment proceedings, which, it might be added, were also unsuccessful in ridding Washington of Trump.

The author is no particular fan of Donald Trump; however, he gives the "devil his due" in fortitude and shrewdness. Few individuals could have withstood the continuous assaults to undermine his position and smear members of his administration. The tragic takeaway, in my view, is the awesome extent to which corruption had permeated the top levels of so many departments of the U.S. government, tantamount to the staging of a coup. A Washington swamp, indeed!

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig and Election and Destroy a Presidency by Andrew C. McCarthy is loaded with factual information exposing a faulty dossier and political intrigue at the highest levels of what are supposed to be our most trusted and non-partisan agencies. The author is an experienced former Federal Prosecutor, recipient of numerous awards including the Justice Department's highest honor: The Attorney General's Exceptional Service Award. In other words, he is quite knowledgeable when it comes to proper and improper means for conducting an investigation! He points out numerous irregularities about how the investigation and findings with respect to Mrs. Clinton's handling of classified information on her home server with plenty of factual evidence of crimes committed was unlike any previous investigations the author had experienced; aka lots of special consideration and treatment. Contrast that with pursuit of a crime without any evidence in the case of President Donald Trump and you will begin to see what real collusion looks like. Reading this book should scare any open-minded American about how fragile our democracy is if a determined number of deep state actors can tie up our government with investigation after investigation paid for by the taxpayers looking for a crime that doesn't exist in an attempt to overthrow a duly elected candidate. This puts us in the same league as the so-called banana republics of South America. At the same time they ignore facts about actual crimes that have happened for political purposes. I find it astonishing that with all of the known crimes exposed here and in previous news stories and books, why has no one been indicted and convicted and imprisoned instead of looking into the President's kindergarten records for an unknown crime! Every American should read this book and then pray for our country!

[Wanda Keith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love the way Andrew McCarthy writes and I was not disappointed with his most recent book. Having followed McCarthy through his articles I wasn't surprised at any of the contents of this book. Also, having read 'Russia Hoax' by Gregg Jarrett, I found that a lot of what is covered in this book had been covered very well by Jarrett. It was nice to sit down with a full book by one of my favorite journalists, however, and get his views on so many topics during the Obama administration and through the present day Trump Presidency. McCarthy lays out how the Obama Presidency had many problems and scandals, even though they will tell you endlessly that they were scandal free...they were not! He shows you how the Democrats were so certain that Hillary was a sure winner but that they had to have something in place as it got close to the election just in case. Remember the "insurance policy" mentioned by Strozk and Page in their emails? Trump survived the election but not without a conspiracy perpetrated by Obama and Hillary Clinton along with the FBI, CIA, and several other groups that were in sync with them. They never thought their deeds would see the light of day and they would not have if Hillary had won. My favorite line, which sort of sums up the whole book: "Political outcomes are for voters to decide, they are not the business of prosecutors and FBI agents." Wow! McCarthy nailed it with that line.
#Amazon

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Right, Left, or Center, everyone who wants to make a claim about Trump, Russia, and impeachment should expose themselves to a variety of perspectives, not just the ones that they are most likely to accept. This is the best book on the topic that I have read, and should be read by people of all political persuasions.

McCarthy, a former prosecutor from the Southern District of New York, not only knows many of the players in this drama, but is an expert on each institution, it’s proper role, and what constitutes a violation of procedures or an abuse of power. His narrative is not only backed by 100 pages of end notes, but is compelling because McCarthy seems adept at assessing the motivations of the players, and enriches the narrative with an understanding of where people have made ethical lapses in addition to legal ones.

To summarize McCarthy’s assertion, as he does in the book’s final paragraph: the Ball of Collusion is that a counterintelligence investigation (full of its own abuses of power) was a pretext for a criminal investigation in search of a crime. A criminal investigation (the Mueller appointment) was used as a pretext for impeachment without an impeachable offense. An impeachment inquiry (happening now) has been used as a pretext for rendering Donald Trump unelectable. All were designed as a straitjacket around the Trump presidency. Obama himself plays one of the many roles in enabling this, although much of the malfeasance was carried out by members of his administration and other players within its orbit. This is a disgusting abuse of power that should never happen again, and has no doubt caused massive damage to our institutions and our nation.

[Mike Cheng · Rating 3 out of 5]

3/5 stars. Andrew McCarthy is an excellent writer, and his newest book describes in detail the efforts and various cover-ups by the Obama administration and Clinton campaign, and to some degree, the complicity of the media. Whether you lean left or right, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in really understanding the Trump-Russia narrative AND shares the desire for truth (btw, I'm certainly not unequivocally endorsing this book as "truth") instead of remaining content in their echo-chambers. Make no mistake, Mr. McCarthy is no Trump apologist, and despite his conservatism (he writes regularly for National Review) I applaud him for calling balls and strikes here. No matter how much disdain you have for 45 (most of those close to me can't stand him), it would be fallacious to assume that previous presidents and administrations are any different in kind (or perhaps even degree) with respect to their own political machinations. Here Mr. McCarthy is bringing to light what most of the mainstream media often sweeps under the rug about the Obama administration. Sunlight is a great disinfectant.

[Terence Gallagher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Andrew -McCarthy does a creditable job trying to assemble the strands of the "plot to destroy a presidency" into a coherent narrative. It's not an easy job: it's hard to make sense out of nonsense.

The major strengths and weaknesses of the book spring from the same source, McCarthy's background as a federal prosecutor. He understands what is correct and what incorrect, he knows many of the principals, and he does an excellent job explaining the differences between a counterintelligence investigation and a criminal investigation. On the other hand, he remains, I think, a G-Man at heart, and he extends too much credit for good intentions to the FBI in general and to James Comey in particular. Also, he very much espouses the anti-Russia, anti-Iran line that is customary in his circle, and I think that this view colors his judgments.

Perhaps the book's greatest strength is its placement of the blame for the plot to destroy Trump's presidency squarely where it belongs, with the outgoing Obama administration.

[Bob Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

One day there will be a college level Master's level class studying the Trump Administration. This book will be one of the texts studying the attempted coup to remove him from office. Everything you need to know about the coup is in this book: the players, the relationships, the dates, the events, the motives and the role of certain media players in advancing an perpetuating the stories spread by the conspirators and especially, the history of Ukraine and its corrupt dealings with US politicians of both parties. Recently (Feb 2020) we learn that John Bolton received a $115,000 speaking fee from a Ukraine oligarch.
McCarthy is an attorney, the prosecutor who brought the so-called "Blind Sheik" to justice after the first bombing of the World Trade Center. Its a very readable book, although the extent of the details make it difficult to read quickly. There are also 75 pages of footnotes that accompany the text. A "must read" for anyone interested in the political events in the past three years

[RoadVersion · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book contains 350 pages detailing the history of the “collusion” story around the 2016 campaign, election and then the Presidency of Donald Trump. I like his writing style, A lot of work had to have gone into writing this book. If you are interested in the inside story, this book gives substantial detail of the events.

From the first page of the Introduction, “This is a story about what happens when those we trust to be guardians of our system anoint themselves the masters of our system.” It is about (from page 350), . . . “counterintelligence as a pretext for a criminal investigation in search of a crime; a criminal investigation as a pretext for impeachment without an impeachable offense; an impeachment inquiry as a pretext for rendering the Donald Trump un-reelectable; and all of it designed as a straitjacket around his presidency.”
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THE COMPLETE BOOK REVIEW IN pdf FORMAT CAN BE DOWNLOADED from my FilesAnywhere account HERE:
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https://personal.filesanywhere.com/fs...

[Timothy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would suggest having a pen and paper nearby while reading this book. There are just too many names (most of them Russian or Ukrainian) and dates and departments of government to keep straight in your head. Even with all those Ruski's names flying around, McCarthy does a great job of detailing how insanely corrupt our Intelligence and Justice Organizations where during the final moths of the "previous administration" (don't wanna name any names here....wink-wink).

*Side note; whoever McCarthy paid to edit this book stole his money.
There are there are way too many too many mistakes like this like one I'm typing now typing.

[Opa · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me a long time to finish this book. Many times I just got so angry that I had to put it down. Andrew McCarthy wrote this in such incredible detail that over one-third of the book is footnotes and references. He describes in excruciating specificity the corruption he found surrounding the coup attempt on President Trump culminating in the impeachment process. McCarthy offers no solutions to keep it from happening again, so the book ends with the reader feeling hopeless. If this journalist can find and reference all these facts, why can't our so-called justice department (DOJ) bring anyone to trial or punishment? So sad.