This is CBS Eye on the World. I'm John Batcher. John Durham's report is available everywhere.

I recommend CNN. You can see the manuscript and read through more than 300 pages.

A lot of footnotes, a lot of transcripts. And what we come to is lessons learned from the 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020 upset of the

allegation that the President of the United States Donald Trump had been recruited and was actively working for the Cremlin, not just the Cremlin, but Vladimir Putin himself.

This is before the Ukraine war, so it wasn't quite as mind-bending as it appears now in retrospect.

I'm joined by two men who helped me through those years of trying to measure what to make of the allegation against the President and then the former President.

Andrew McCarthy of the National Review Online, and Thaddeus McArthur of American Greatness.

And I begin with you because you have a new piece at NRO. I highly recommend about the word predication.

This is a law enforcement word having to do with the basis for an investigation. It is used carefully, however, because the FBI has guidelines about predication.

And this speaks to the report that the Inspector General, Mr. Horowitz, delivered in the course of the upset over the allegations against the President of the United States.

What does predication mean and how is it specifically applied to the doubts and questions about the Russia-Gate matter? Good evening, John.

Thaddeus, nice to be with you again. As we said, long ago and far away, the investigation here was opened on false pretenses.

And what predication is about is specifically that the basis, the factual basis, the evidentiary basis for opening an investigation.

Here, a counterintelligence investigation, although the Bureau has maintained, and the Justice Department has maintained, that it was opened, Russia-Gate, the Trump-Russia collusion investigation that the Bureau-Cotening Crossfire Hurricane was opened on both basis, they say.

However, the facts that they offered for opening it were casual remarks that were made by a young, unpaid Trump campaign advisor named George Papadopoulos, that were so incomprehensible, even to the people who were made to,

which was two Australian diplomats in a bar in London, that in describing them in a memorandum, a couple of months before the FBI relied on them to open an investigation, they basically described it as a suggestion of a kind of suggestion.

That is an intuition, apparently, on the part of Papadopoulos, that the Russians might have compromising information about Hillary Clinton that they would release during the campaign.

And I would only say about that, not only can you not tease that out of what Papadopoulos said in any way that's suggestive of espionage, but was not terribly different from what the FBI itself was saying, given that Komi, who was then the FBI director, in his famous press conference about Hillary Clinton on July 5, 2016, which was a couple of months after the Papadopoulos,

after the Papadopoulos meeting with the Aussies, but Komi had been writing this statement for a long time, in the statement, he says that basically the bureau assessed that Clinton's email system had been hacked by unfriendly governments, clearly including Russia, because they had information that she had actually contacted President Obama over the non-secure service system from Russia,

while she was overseas.

That is you have a question for Andy.

Because Andy, we know this was a dirty trick launched by the Clinton campaign.

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