Conservative Legal Analyst Andy McCarthy Delivers Scathing Assessment of Trump’s Tactics: ‘If You Are Trying Not to Get Indicted…’

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Conservative legal pundit and Fox News contributor Andy McCarthy blasted Team Trump’s offensive in response to this month’s FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

On Monday’s Hannity, pro-Trump commentator and Just the News founder John Solomon, who is serving as a liaison between Trump and the National Archives, revealed a letter from acting Archivist of the United States Debra Wall to Trump’s legal team that he purported contradicted the Biden administration’s claim it didn’t know about the raid ahead of time.

Solomon’s claim backfired in that the letter didn’t show that the White House knew about the raid, rather it stated that President Joe Biden declined to invoke executive privilege over the documents Trump allegedly took with him to Mar-a-Lago when he left office in January 2021. The letter accuses Trump of not handing over all documents, especially those that are classified. Trump’s alleged taking of the documents would be a violation of the Presidential Records Act.

In a National Review piece on Wednesday, McCarthy blasted Solomon’s conduct:

Clearly, the purport of Solomon’s news report was to bolster the Trump narrative that Biden is using the Justice Department as a political weapon in hopes of eliminating Trump as his potential 2024 opponent. Okay . . . but the problem is that Archivist Wall’s letter shreds Trump’s claim — most recently proclaimed in a lawsuit filed with great fanfare on Monday morning — that he has been completely cooperative and transparent in dealing with the FBI and the Justice Department, and therefore that the forcible search of his Florida estate was an unnecessary, inexplicable abuse of power.

The letter, to the contrary, details Trump’s stubborn determination to block the FBI from examining boxes of records containing documents marked as highly classified, which Trump had grudgingly returned to [the National Archives and Records Administration] in January 2022. Further, Trump triggered Biden’s necessary involvement (under the PRA) by dubiously invoking executive privilege. That is, Trump’s self-absorbed priority was to frustrate the FBI’s examination, rather than to support the government’s patent need to assess the possible damage caused by his mishandling of top-secret intelligence.

McCarthy wrote that “Wall’s letter not only lays out the scope of Trump’s recklessness to the extent it was known by May 10.”

He continued:

It further invites consideration of the events that followed: Trump’s blocking the FBI’s access to the records that had been returned to the archives; the June 3 representation by Trump’s lawyers — in writing, in the context of responding to a May 11 grand-jury subpoena, and after representing that they had thoroughly searched records retained at Mar-a-Lago — that there were no more documents marked as classified on the premises; the subsequent surrender, also by Trump’s lawyers, of Mar-a-Lago surveillance-camera video that reportedly showed people breezing in and out of areas where Trump was storing his presidential records, apparently moving boxes around; and, finally, the seizure during the August 8 search of a significant amount of additional, highly classified information.

These revelations are condemnable. They provide a solid basis for Trump detractors to argue that the Mar-a-Lago search, though stunning and unprecedented, was justified — or at least not unreasonable.

McCarthy concluded his piece by dropping the hammer on Team Trump: “If you are trying not to get indicted, the best defense is usually not a good offense. And it is never an offense that backfires.”

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