# Andrew C. McCarthy Conservative legal commentator and former federal prosecutor. He is in this wiki for a specific reason: he spent years making the most detailed legal case that the [[Mueller Investigation]] was a manufactured scandal, and then in October 2026 called for congressional hearings into the president's conduct toward Russia. That makes his position a useful instrument — an objection that cannot be dismissed as partisan, because its author's prior work rules the dismissal out. ## Career - **Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney, Southern District of New York.** Led the terrorism prosecution of Omar Abdel Rahman — the "Blind Sheikh" — and eleven co-defendants, a case covering the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a plot to bomb New York City landmarks. Also contributed to the prosecutions arising from the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. - **Commentary.** Contributing editor at *[[National Review]]* and senior fellow at the National Review Institute; weekend columnist; co-host, with *NR* editor in chief [[Rich Lowry]], of "The McCarthy Report." Also a [[Fox News]] contributor and an occasional contributor to *The New Criterion* and *The Hill*. - **Books** include *Willful Blindness* (2008), *The Grand Jihad* (2010), *Faithless Execution* (2014) and *Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency* (2019). *Ball of Collusion* is the load-bearing one for this wiki. It is the book-length argument that the Trump–Russia investigation was a political operation rather than a counterintelligence necessity, and it supplied much of the legal vocabulary the right used to discredit the Mueller inquiry. ## October 2026: the call for hearings On **October 17, 2026**, McCarthy published in *National Review* a piece headlined **"Congress Must Investigate Trump's Aid and Comfort to Putin,"** arguing that both parties should treat that week's developments as a breaking point and demanding immediate hearings. The week in question ran from the October 9 diesel arrangement through the October 14 satellite restriction during a Russian barrage to the October 16 executive order waiving sanctions Congress had just enacted. See [[Putin Trilateral Summit Proposal 2026]] for the sequence, and [[Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026]] for the waived statute. The chosen phrase carries weight. "Aid and comfort" comes from Article III, Section 3 of the [[Constitution]], which defines treason as "levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort." A former chief assistant U.S. attorney putting that language in a headline in the magazine that has anchored American conservatism since 1955 is making a legal allusion, not a rhetorical flourish. > [!warning] Scope of what is recorded here > This page records that McCarthy published the piece and what it demanded. It does not adopt a view on whether the conduct he describes meets any legal standard — no charge has been brought and no hearing convened. ## See Also - [[Putin Trilateral Summit Proposal 2026]] — the October 2026 sequence that prompted the piece - [[National Review]] — the magazine - [[Tom Nichols]] — the parallel objection from the national-security right - [[Mueller Investigation]] — the subject of *Ball of Collusion*