This is Eli Lake, and you're listening to the re-education.

Today's show is a little different because it's about a story that's very much the news cycle.

It's about Monday's FBI raid against former President Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago compound

and why I worry for the democratic legitimacy of the FBI and the Justice Department.

My guest is former U.S. attorney Andy McCarthy.

As listeners to this podcast know, I do not carry any brief for former President Donald Trump.

I supported his second impeachment.

I think his conspiratorial ravings about the 2020 election that he lost are poison to our politics.

He deserves the blame for ginning up his supporters who rioted at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

And his failure to do anything to call off those riots that day

is downright despicable. I don't support the Democrats, but I will never support a man who has

demonstrated he will not abide by an election that he loses. Now, all of that said, the FBI's raid at Mar-a-Lago on Monday

looks like a debacle to me. Now, we haven't seen the search warrants, and I suppose it's

possible that there is a serious crime that the Justice Department and FBI believed they would

find evidence for a Trump's Florida estate. But based on the reporting in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, that seems incredibly unlikely.

So what are the facts, as we know them now?

Well, it appears that all of this stems from a dispute between the former president and the National Archives.

There is a law

passed in the wake of Watergate called the Presidential Records Act that bars presidents from

destroying or altering documents from their administration after they leave office. The last

major dispute on this involved Richard Nixon and the courts did not sort out that dispute until

after he died. And then there may be among these documents that are being wrangled over with the National Archive,

...