Andrew McCarthy on Potential Upcoming Hunter Biden Indictment: “I’ll Believe it When I See it”

Andrew McCarthy, Fox News Contributor, Former Assistant U.S. Attorney For Southern District Of NY, Author of Ball Of Collusion: The Plot To Rig An Election And Destroy A Presidency, joined the Guy Benson Show to discuss the new expected Hunter Biden indictment. The pair also discuss the Trump Trial mess, the lengthy January 6th sentences, and the lack of coverage of Hunter on mainstream media. Watch the full interview below.

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Guy Benson: We now once again say hello to Andy McCarthy. Fox News contributor, former assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. He was a federal prosecutor and a bestselling author. Andy, as always, it’s great to talk to you.

Andy McCarthy: Guy. Great to be with you.

Guy Benson: So I want to just get your reaction to my analysis to this development about the announced intention of the special counsel in the Hunter Biden case as relates the judge to pursue this felony gun charge with an indictment, they say by the end of the month is the goal. I went on TV last night on Special Report and sort of raised some red flags just about what this looks like to me, how this smells to me overall. I just spent the last half hour really explaining and spelling that out in detail. And I recognize fully that it’s an extremely cynical read on the situation. I wonder, given your expertise and your experience, what you make of my reaction?

Andy McCarthy: Well, I’m probably going to end up being more cynical than you because my reaction is I’ll believe it when I see it as far as the indictment is concerned. This is the easiest criminal case of all time. You know, it’s an open and shut case of a false statement on a gun. The only interesting thing to me is that I think there were two guns, not one. You know, he lied on a form and in connection with a revolver. And if you remember the pictures from the New York Post of him waving a gun around the lap times after that. Yeah. That gun is a Glock. It looks like it’s not a revolver. So it looks to me like there’s at least two guns. That, to me is more interesting than the case. The case is open and shut. The guy’s even written the book talking about how he was, you know, out of his mind on cocaine at the at the time. So the reason I point that out is it would take about ten or 15 minutes to present a case like this to the grand jury. And the indictment is about a paragraph long. So why talk about indicting it? Why not just like, say, go to the grand jury and indicted? Why do you have to give a status report to the court about what your future intentions are when you can simply go indict the case? So it would be so easy to indict this case and it should have been done years ago. But why He’s still talking about what he’s planning to do before the statute of limitations runs is beyond me. And I think the only reason he made any announcement at all yesterday is not because he wanted to make an announcement, but because the judge held his feet to the fire.

Guy Benson: Right. The judge had the deadline. That’s obviously what happened. And just to remind us, Sandy, when was this lie on the background check form? When was the crime committed?

Andy McCarthy: October 18th of 2018.

Guy Benson: 2018, like half a decade ago. This happened and it’s a ten minute indictment process. And we’re only this is my point. We’re only getting apparently, supposedly an indictment coming in the next few weeks on this open and shut gun case because it’s the new I keep saying the new bare minimum. The previous bare minimum was reflected in the efforts that they came close to executing on the previous plea deals, one of which fell apart internally after the whistleblowers came out. The other of which the next one fell apart publicly in open court, facing those back to back embarrassments. The new bare minimum is they got to do something. All right, let’s do the gun charge because it’s walled off from the Biden family business. There’s an addiction component to it. And so we can do the whole compassion thing. That’s how I view it. And. Until. I mean, until David Weiss does something, some serious move on everything else. Fara, tax evasion, all this money and alleged money laundering. Until that is again in the crosshairs in a serious way and people are allowed to investigate in a robust way, not having their wings clipped constantly. That’s when I might, too, might start to reformulate an opinion of this man and his investigation. My whole point, though, is I don’t think we’re going to see that. I think we’re going to see this as the terror. Here’s a new charge. Here’s the accountability. It doesn’t come anywhere close to Joe Biden. And then we’re done. That’s kind of the prediction. I’d like to be proven wrong. I’m open to changing my mind. That’s just what I think this looks like right now.

Andy McCarthy: Yeah, well, I think his wife has already accomplished his most of his mission. And you have to think, you know, he is called a prosecutor now, called a special counsel, even though he’s not eligible to be one under the special counsel regulations. But, you know, my point is that his job has not been to prosecute this case. His job has been to disappear. This case. Yeah. And because he’s never charged it already, the most serious evidence involving or implicating Joe Biden that’s been dug up by the House committee is obviously the evidence of what happened while he was vice president. And they were trading on his political influence and millions of dollars were coming into the Bidens. Those any charges related to 2014, 2015, 2016 are gone because of the way that Weiss has handled this case. The statute of limitations has run on all that stuff. And remember, this scheme only went into, you know, late 2018 or early 2019, because once Biden decided that he was actually going to run for president, then they had to rein this whole thing in in a serious way. So, you know, there’s only only so much we’re now in 2023. How much of this case is really left to actually prosecute? Almost none of it. But all of the all of the most damning stuff is gone.

Guy Benson: If the bribery component can be proven because we have that FBI informant, the 1023. Document that has someone alleging in and I guess Viktor Shokin, the fired prosecutor, was on with Brian KILMEADE recently. He said he thinks this is true as well. The allegation from this FBI informant is that John Hunter Biden were each bribed by $5 million a pop to get Viktor Shokin fired, which of course Joe Biden did get that prosecutor fired. Viktor Shokin, which is what the paymasters at Burisma. Hunter Biden’s company wanted. They’re paying him $1,000,000 a year and they got what they wanted is the bribery statute. Does that have a longer for for public officials that have a longer. Potential statute limitations where if that could be proven, it could still be viable or is that lapse to five years?

Andy McCarthy: So it’s lapsed. Now, here’s something that is important, guy, in terms of political accountability, even if and I’m not saying, you know, look, Biden can’t be impeached, he can’t be removed given the Constitution of the Senate, they would never vote to convict him. But I would point out that, you know, people say all the time, well, you can’t have high crimes and misdemeanors with respect to something that the guy did, no matter how heinous when he wasn’t president, because high crimes and misdemeanors is supposed to be about like abusing presidential power. Now, that’s an that’s a I don’t completely buy that theory. In fact, I don’t really buy it at all. But it is a legal theory that’s out there. And the reason I pointed out is bribery is a separate category of impeachment from high crimes and misdemeanors. What the impeachment clause says is treason, bribery and high crimes and misdemeanors. You don’t have to show that somebody was bribed by a foreign power at a time that the person was actually president. Because what the framers were worried about was foreign powers buying the awesome powers of the presidency. So they would be just as concerned if they own the guy before he became president than while he was president. So it would it would qualify as an impeachable offense. But that’s cold comfort when you can’t actually impeach and remove. It’s not practical.

Guy Benson: Yeah, I do wonder and this could be grasping at legal straws as a non-lawyer, but given the fact that Joe Biden is still lying about the nature of his involvement in this scheme, could that be considered an ongoing conspiracy because he’s still lying about the cover up? I don’t know. Just just putting that out there. That might be a stretch, Andy.

Andy McCarthy: Yeah. The problem with that is that, you know, number one, it’s not a crime to lie to the American people. If he if he told an actionable lie, like in a courtroom or on an official forum, that would be a different thing. But the other thing is the concealment phase of conspiracy doesn’t extend to conspiracy. So the law basically says once the object of the conspiracy is obtained, the conspiracy is over. And if the objective was to get a bribe from the Ukrainians, once they got it, that would be the end of the conspiracy.

Guy Benson: Meanwhile, there’s a new CNN poll out that has a lot of very interesting nuggets in. It will probably get into some of that on tomorrow’s show. The political side of it, the election side of it. But one of the questions that was asked by CNN is whether the American people believe that Joe Biden had any involvement in his son’s business. Of course, he has said no, I’ve had none. That has been chipped away at and exposed to be a lie. And they’ve moved the goalposts time and time again to try to parse it out, to make the previous lies seem less egregious. And 61%, a super majority of the American people believe that Joe Biden had at least some involvement in his son’s business, which is obvious. They’re putting him on speakerphone with these people. He’s showing up to meetings with them. Hunter Biden’s on Air Force Two flying around the world doing business in China and elsewhere. I think 12 different countries. I saw over the eight years that his father was vice president. We also got the the emails that came out this week. We talked about this yesterday where you had Hunter Biden’s associates mail or e-mailing, talking points to the Obama administration, to the vice president’s office when Joe Biden was V.P., giving them basically quotes and talking points to hand to the press about Hunter Biden’s involvement with Burisma. And the White House writes back from the vice presidential office, Kate Bedingfield, at the time, she responds, you know, basically got it, quote, VP signed off on this. We also know that some of the Alias email addresses Joe Biden was using and operating under they would CC Hunter Biden on relevant Ukraine policy and other personnel related matters. I mean Andy there’s there’s just no way in my mind no avenue left for them to continue to deny that this was to some extent an act of business partnership that involved Joe Biden himself. The evidence, I mean, is just now all over the place. I saw James Comer, the Oversight Committee chairman, was on TV at a very funny line. He’s like tracking this is like following a bleeding polar bear in a blizzard. Like it’s just a trail of red. It’s very easy to see. It just seems like a lot of folks in our line of work and in the media, they’re just not interested in looking at what Republicans are putting in front of them almost on a daily basis. It feels like.

Andy McCarthy: Yeah, and I would just add one thing to that guy, which is the emails that you just referred to, where, you know, they’re basically sharing talking points with the White House and the Vice President Biden’s office gets back to them and says that he signed off on it. He’s proved the kind of statement that they’re going to make if there are inquiries. That’s not in a vacuum. That happened on December 5th, I’m sorry, December 4th of 2015. That is the same day that Hunter Biden and Devin Archer meet in Dubai with the two Ukrainian heads of Burisma. Right. And they put Joe Biden on the phone with.

Guy Benson: Them and they and they’re like, hey, we and we know this from the investigation that the Republicans have done no thanks to the special counsel, David Wise. They just have ignored all of this. But the Republicans have found evidence that the Burisma leadership at that company, they’re like, hey, we’re paying you $83,000 a month, $1,000,000 a year. We need Washington, D.C., wink, wink on the phone right now. And there was an enormous amount of pressure being brought to bear on Hunter Biden to help take care of their problem at Burisma, the problem being Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor investigating them and freezing assets. And then don’t you know, the phone call happens. These emails are flying back and forth about the VP signing off on some talking points. As you point out, the exact same day that that phone call from Dubai was placed and within, what, a couple of months, within within weeks, Joe Biden is in Ukraine. And within months Viktor Shokin goes away because Joe Biden made him go away using $1,000,000,000 of U.S. aid as leverage to force the Ukrainians hand. I mean, Eddie, it’s not conspiratorial weirdness to connect some dots here.

Andy McCarthy: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It was. The meetings that we’re talking about with the emails are December 4th, December 8th, four days later, Joe Biden is in Kiev.

Guy Benson: Right. There’s a few days he showing up.

Andy McCarthy: Right, four days later. And that’s when he, by his own account, told them that he wanted the prosecutor fired or they were going to withhold $1,000,000,000 of American aid. Now, to to just fill out the picture, unlike what Biden said, because Biden notoriously exaggerates his role in everything. They didn’t actually fire Shokin that day. Remember, he said that, you know, my plane leaves in 6 hours. Right. He’s either fired or he doesn’t get. That’s not how it happened. Shokin was fired four months later in April. And probably what what pushed that over the edge was that Marie? I’m sorry, Legarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund, which is backed by the U.S., threatened to withhold $40 billion unless Shokin was removed. Among other things, they wanted from the Ukrainians. And it was only then that the Ukrainian regime removed shokin. But there was a lot of pressure brought to bear by Burisma on the Bidens at the same time that Biden was pushing for Shokin to be fired.

Guy Benson: And they said we’re going to withhold $1,000,000,000 in aid unless you do this. And within months that thing was done and the aid flowed and Burisma got what they paid for. And we’re supposed to just pretend like all of this is a total coincidence. The timing of those emails is a total coincidence. Don’t worry about the VP signing off on Burisma talking points. He had nothing to do with Hunter Biden’s business whatsoever. Never discussed it. Don’t worry about the in-person meetings. Don’t worry about Air Force Two. Don’t worry about the phone calls on speakerphone. They were just talking about the weather and fishing. That’s their story. And the media is wall to wall on Trump. And I understand Trump’s another story here. It’s not fake news. It’s all real. But there is a very serious scandal that is engulfing the Biden family and a bunch of lies are coming to light. And again, the interest from many of our colleagues in the press to even cover any of it is is virtually nonexistent, which is why we spend an outsize amount of time here doing it because others won’t. And we do so with the help often, and we appreciate it. Andy McCarthy, FOX News contributor, former federal prosecutor. Andy, thank you very much.

Andy McCarthy: Thanks so much, Guy.