Hey everybody, welcome to another Thursday episode.

I went a little long, or maybe some would say I went a lot long with that series.

A question for Andy McCarthy, but do not let your hearts be troubled.

There are more questions and more importantly more answers in the second half of our conversation.

So let's get started.

All right, let me ask you a hypothetical which I hate, but you have a head full of classified information

because of your your time as an AUSA in the nature of the cases you prosecute.

You have a head full of it.

Let's decide that or let's assume Penguin Random House decides to pay you a lot of money to write a book and you lay it all out.

And you're charged and your defense is why I had dinner with President Obama or I played golf with President Trump and they declassified all of that.

I mean, can you and every future prosecution can the defense say, well, I president declassified that.

Let me call him as a witness.

If you don't have to memorialize it, then to me that makes the president the witness on whether or not that material remain classified or maybe that maybe I'm wrong about that.

I think you're right. It may be that my recollection of how the legal test on this works. I did happen to run a case one time where the defense tried to call a lot of top officials, not the president, but I think the attorney general and maybe even the secretary of state.

The legal test that applied were it was a high test of relevance to begin with.

But also if there was some other alternative to calling the top official that would give you the information that you needed, then you would have to continue with that.

And I think I agree with with what you're suggesting, which is that if there were not a requirement of compliance with the presidential records acts of that there would have to be some documentary proof that something got declassified.

You could get down to a situation where the only possibility of proving my defense would be to have the president come in as a fact witness in the case.

Now there might be, you know, there could be a chain of people in the middle that were possible witnesses, but there you and I can sit here and imagine all day the objections to that kind of testimony.

So that could be the kind of case where where that would have to happen. Now interestingly, try and connection with the with the capital riot.

I just your question suggests this to me and I think it's a point worth making. There are a number of defendants who wanted to call president Trump as a witness in those cases to make the argument that he was either complicit or that he had put them up to it or whatever.

I would just note that the justice department uniformly objected to those requests and prevailed in court.

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