Welcome to the McCarthy Report, the podcast where our fearless leader,

Rich Lowry, usually chats me, Andy, up on the legal and national security and

baseball and the whole Po-Pourri that we usually bat around here, those kinds of issues.

Rich is, well, you know, look, it's summertime.

So, Riches away.

And I thought about maybe taking the week off myself as well, but I actually

am heading out on something of a vacation myself.

It's probably a longer one than I've taken in many years.

So we probably won't have another podcast until, you know,

sometime in August, we'll figure it out and there'll be information on the website about it.

But even without Rich, since most of you seem not to mind too much when I flew solo a couple of weeks ago.

He's given me the dispensation to try to do that again, which means that our peerless producer, Sarah Shuddy, has to do the impossible today, which is not only make me sound better than I deserve, but sound comprehensible.

So we'll see how we make out with that.

Obviously, I think the big thing that we need to talk about is this,

what's being sort of retailed as a new story,

but is actually a very old story and one that I know better than, I think

better than most people, but certainly better than most stories I know because I wrote a book

about it. The book was called Ball of Collusion, The Plot to Riggin Election and Destroy a

presidency. And it came out eight years ago.

I wrote most of it in, I guess, 2017 going into 2018, while the Russia gate, what became the

Russia gate scandal was at least a controversy back then, and it became more

scandalous as we knew more about it. But I wrote the book while that was all unfolding,

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