Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American

politics and the Trump presidency in 2017. I'm Freddie Gray and I'm deputy editor of The Spectator.

I'm joined today by Daniel McCarthy, who is editor-at-large of the American Conservative,

and we're going to be discussing whether special prosecutor Robert Mueller can bring down the Trump presidency.

So, Dan, we learned today that special prosecutor Robert Mueller has been using a grand jury in his

investigation into Donald Trump's Russia ties. What does that mean and how significant is it,

do you think? Well, it's not totally

surprising. So what this means is that there's a grand jury which can issue subpoenas. It can

force testimony from just about anyone. And it can ultimately issue indictments if it finds that,

you know, it has grounds to believe that crimes were committed or, you know, that it wants

to go after somebody.

Grand juries are notorious for taking a very long time to get results, which means that

the Mueller investigation, which I think all of us were already expecting to take a very long

time, is now pretty much certain to take months, if not years, as it continues

to basically go on a fishing expedition. Grand juries have very broad powers to investigate

all kinds of things. As you say in your excellent piece this week, it's driving Trump crazy.

I mean, it seems to be driving Trump crazy or crazy a maybe. Well, that's the problem. He's really,

I think, exacerbated the whole problem.

And he did it first by firing Comey.

He subsequently dug himself a deeper hole by speculating on the possibility of firing Robert Mueller.

There's nothing he can really do that is not politically suicidal to derail the investigation.

So the investigation, one way or

...