This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 9th, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Defenders of the President and Opponents of the Special Council now investigating allegations

of Russian meddling in the last election say that much if not all of the

evidence that Robert Mueller has gathered is tainted and won't be useful when and

if further charges are brought. Cato Institute adjunct scholar David Post says those claims are pretty

much precisely wrong. We spoke last week about whether or not Mueller's evidence is

fruit from the poison tree. The reason we're talking is because Chris Farrell, who is one of the

president's defenders when it comes to the Mueller investigation, recently tried to delineate this idea of the fruit of the poisonous tree,

and in doing so, tried to make the claim that evidence that Mueller has gathered in his investigation of

Russian interference in the U.S. election is it's all a whole lot of it is tainted because it all came

from similar sources and if I understand your argument correctly it is that even if we did suspect that strongly

now would be the completely inappropriate time to make a judgment about

whether or not that evidence is appropriate.

Yeah, I think there were two sort of two prongs to that to the argument I was trying to make. One is that I think there was a misrepresentation

in Farrell's argument about how the exclusionary rule and the fruit of the poisonous tree, how these doctrines of

criminal procedure actually work.

It's not true that unlawfully obtained evidence, if there was unlawfully or improperly obtained

evidence, that such evidence cannot be used in a subsequent criminal proceeding and the fruits of that

evidence cannot be used. That is anything that is derived from that improperly or obtained evidence cannot be used.

His argument was that because of various things,

the dossier, Peter Strach's bias, other claims that were not clear to me, but the whole, the mess in the

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