Ball of Collusion Quotes

“And obviously: If they had a sound reason, grounded in real evidence, for suspecting a presidential candidate was in a corrupt conspiracy with a foreign power, they should not only be able to tell us what it is; they should be anxious to tell us what it is.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The Obama administration exploited every tool in its arsenal (surveillance, informants, foreign-intelligence agencies, moribund and constitutionally untenable criminal statutes) to try to make a criminal case on Trump—the candidate Obama deeply opposed—despite the absence of incriminating evidence.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“There was never a shred of evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with the Kremlin. Not to commit espionage. Not to violate any law. Zip, zero, nada.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The investigation was built on a fraud.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“Turk texted Papadopoulos as soon as he arrived in London, to invite him for drinks. Clearly, the fact that Turk is alluring and was quick to be social was meant to beguile Papadopoulos—to put him at ease to discuss incriminating topics he might otherwise be unwilling to touch on.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“This underscores a major and abusive flaw of the Trump–Russia investigation: In the absence of a solid factual predicate for a criminal investigation, foreign-counterintelligence powers were used as a pretext to dig for criminal evidence that would support a hoped-for prosecution.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“As this book goes to press, the Obama administration’s decision to use informants is under scrutiny by the Justice Department’s inspector general and prosecutors.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“That means the onus is on government investigators to consider beforehand whether the tactics they contemplate using are appropriate. They should not be heard, after the fact, to complain, “How dare you ask me that?”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The United States government’s claim that Russia is responsible for the hacking, while credible and probable, cannot be proved beyond a reasonable doubt. In the absence of sufficient evidence to establish Russia’s guilt in court, there was no way Special Counsel Robert Mueller could ever have proved Donald Trump, his campaign, or anyone else conspired with Russia.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The Obama administration simultaneously ignored Clinton contacts with Russia, or assumed they simply must have been good-faith contacts, because it saw the Clintons as bien pensant transnational-progressives. The Obama administration bent over backward not to make a criminal case on Hillary Clinton—the candidate Obama heartily endorsed—despite a mountain of incriminating evidence.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The Obama administration, notoriously political in its intelligence assessments and law-enforcement actions, used Trump contacts with Russia as a rationalization for a counterintelligence investigation because it saw Trump as a Neanderthal degenerate.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“Critically, the absence of proof was just as patent in the summer of 2016 as it is today. They had nothing. There was no evidence of a “conspiracy of cooperation” between Trump and Putin to hack Democratic emails in order to influence the election.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The blanks were filled in by unverified tales from the unidentified sources of Christopher Steele, a British spy who perfectly reflected the transnational-progressive pieties of his Fusion GPS collaborators, his Obama-administration admirers, and his global network of current and former spooks.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“That is to say, a month before WikiLeaks on July 22 began leaking thousands of hacked DNC emails to the press on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, the Clinton campaign–sponsored dossier reports had already framed the collusion narrative into which all subsequent developments would be fit.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“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.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“There is no evidence, including in the 448-page Mueller report, that Papadopoulos was ever told that Russia intended, through an intermediary, to disseminate damaging information about Clinton in a manner designed to hurt Clinton’s candidacy and help Trump’s.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“Long before the hacked DNC emails were published, the Obama administration was speculating—whether out of partisanship or predisposition about Trump—that the Republican nominee was in a corrupt conspiracy with Russia to sabotage the election. When the hacked DNC emails were published, Obama officials distorted Papadopoulos’s gossipy statements to an Australian diplomat—which the diplomat himself had initially dismissed as nonsense—into the formal rationalization for commencing a counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that they had already been conducting.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The investigative theory on which the FBI formally opened the foreign-counterintelligence probe code-named “Crossfire Hurricane” on July 31, 2016, held that (a) the Trump campaign knew about, and was potentially complicit in, Russia’s possession of hacked emails that would compromise Hillary Clinton; and (b) in order to help Donald Trump win the presidency, the Kremlin planned to disseminate these emails anonymously (through a third party) at a time maximally damaging to Clinton’s campaign.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“Starting from that premise, the foreign ministries of the United States and Australia, through mendacity or incompetence, erected a fraudulent story that warped the Trump campaign’s purported foreknowledge of Russia’s perfidy into a potential espionage conspiracy.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“Chicanery was the force behind the formal opening of the FBI’s Trump–Russia investigation. There was a false premise, namely that the Trump campaign must have known that Russia possessed emails somehow related to Hillary Clinton before WikiLeaks caused the dissemination of hacked Democratic National Committee emails to the media, beginning on July 22, 2016.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The statute elaborates that such activity involves intentional subterfuge, the commission of crimes at the direction of a foreign-intelligence service, using false identities on behalf of a foreign power, or such heinous activities as sabotage and terrorism.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“FISA also instructs that to justify surveilling an American citizen, there must be probable cause that the person is knowingly engaged in clandestine activity on behalf of a foreign power.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The government conceded that Obama-administration national-security officials had been aware of the broad scope of the problem since at least January 2016 when the NSA’s IG report was issued—a report that itself had been triggered in early 2015 by the NSA’s awareness of widespread compliance issues.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“At the hearing, the government confessed to various irregularities, most notably that it had for years been unlawfully gathering intelligence on Americans—specifically, using U.S. person identifiers to query the upstream database, in violation of the prohibition that had been in place since 2011.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“Meanwhile, the NSD and FBI obtained a FISA surveillance warrant against Carter Page on October 21, after Carlin’s departure and before the FISC was alerted to the Section 702 irregularities.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The Obama Civil Rights Division, it should go without saying, will be best remembered for refusing to enforce the civil-rights laws on behalf of white victims; for pushing the administration’s narrative that the nation’s police departments suffer from endemic racism; and for inflaming tensions in such tinderboxes as Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of Michael Brown (Brown had robbed a store and attacked a police officer), and Sanford, Florida, after the shooting death of Trayvon Martin (during a fight, Martin was beating the shooter—a Hispanic man the press labeled a “white Hispanic” in order to stoke the racism storyline).”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The “Fast and Furious” scandal involved a blatant Obama administration politicization of law enforcement: to wit, a “gun-walking” investigation in which thousands of firearms were allowed to be transferred illegally to Mexico. This cockamamie scheme was designed to serve a political narrative about the evils of American gun commerce, concocted to promote the progressive agenda of restricting Second Amendment rights.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“Moreover, Holder authorized a search warrant targeting the emails of reporter James Rosen, then of Fox News, in a leak investigation. To get the warrant, the Justice Department represented to a federal court that Rosen could be guilty of a felony violation of the Espionage Act for the unauthorized handling of classified information. Yes, the same Espionage Act that the Obama Justice Department chose not to invoke against Hillary Clinton—who was not a journalist with constitutional free-press rights but a public official with a sworn duty to safeguard classified information.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“The administration monitored journalists. Attorney General Eric Holder approved the seizure of personal and business phone records of Associated Press reporters en masse (i.e., not a particularized search targeting a specific journalist suspected of wrongdoing).”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency

“With great indignation, President Obama, the beneficiary of the malfeasance, publicly railed that the IRS conduct was “outrageous,” and that wrongdoers would “have to be held fully accountable” since there was “no place for it.”
― Andrew C. McCarthy, Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency