 This is Mises Weekends with your host Jeff Deist. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again to Mises Weekends. Our guest this weekend is none other than our own Ryan McMakin. Many of you know him as the editor-in-chief of Mises.org. A ubiquitous editor-in-chief of Mises.org who writes quite a bit of daily content for us, quite a bit of blog posts, and also deals with many, many, many Mises.org submissions from people around the country and around the world. Ryan, with that welcome, how are you doing today? Hello, it's great to be here. I'm good. Well, we're talking about federal prosecutions run amuck, and federal criminal agencies run amuck while we're at it. So, Ryan, as a bit of background, we're going to post a link to an article Bill Anderson wrote for us a week or two back called Federal Prosecutors Are Running Amuck. But I wanted to just talk to you a little bit about some of the history here. I think a lot of people don't recognize that the Constitution lays out very few federal criminal matters. If memory serves, there is treason, counterfeiting, and piracy on the high seas. So, the idea that we need a huge justice department, and then later in American history around 1908, a federal bureau of investigation to sort of police things on the federal level is actually not original and somewhat modern. Yeah, it's a totally invented thing that didn't really come about until the late 19th century. That was when they started talking about it. And then there was a lot of resistance to that because Americans had been brought up with the idea that you don't want federal government agents snooping around in your community that local policing is sufficient. And so, the FBI then kind of had to be on its best behavior in its early years, at least as far as the public was concerned. They created this idea of this bureau that's highly professional, that is uninfluenced by local politics. All the agents wear suits all the time. And they're not like that, you know, that Irishman on the corner who might beat you up who's maybe a drunk. These are FBI agents. They're something special. Right. Well, you mentioned in an article, you wrote a couple months back about defunding the FBI, that this idea that we did a national police force because small regions can't handle sophisticated or complex investigations and prosecutions is bunk. And as you point out, smaller jurisdictions internationally, like Switzerland, don't have more crime than bigger ones. Right. I mean, Norway's got five million people. But like the U.S., they're a high income country. They don't have a crime problem because they don't have a huge Europe wide police force of some kind. They have Interpol like the rest of the world, but that's just an information sharing agency. And they don't have agents that can run around arresting people. Their budget is a tiny fraction of the FBI's, which you've got of these countries, some of which only have five to 10 million people that have a police force that's equipped to deal with organized crime and other issues. And they do it. They don't have these problems that we're supposed to believe would then just overrun North America if we got rid of the FBI. But I'm not sure Americans grasp the degree to which the FBI is powerful and lawless. I recall Harry Truman famously said in his biography that he regretted having created the CIA because of what it became. I suspect Teddy Roosevelt would not regret having created the FBI, just because he's a bastard. Just give us your sense of the FBI and what it is today and its budget and how large it is. Well, from day one, the FBI was really what we're accusing it now of being, which is a politicized organization that goes after political enemies. Now, of course, they had originally justified the agency on the idea of, well, we're going to stop criminals like Bonnie and Clyde who go state to state doing this sort of thing. But there's never really been a sophisticated justification for it. I remember Paul Cantor in his book about the X files talked a little bit about the FBI and he had quoted the FBI story, which was this Jimmy Stewart movie and the whole explanation they gave for why we need the FBI is well little Jimmy or whoever he was talking to. The country is growing and crime will grow with it. So now we need the FBI. This is as sophisticated as they ever got for audiences in the middle of the 20th century. People thought, oh, yes, of course, that's it because otherwise we'll have gangsters. So you get the FBI even though there's no constitutional justification for it. We now have this huge federal police force. Their budget, of course, grows all the time in spite of all of their failures. It's now I believe seven billion dollars was what I posted in a recent article. And of course, that's that seems like, oh, no big deal compared to, like, say, you know, the Pentagon. But if you then look and compare that to like state police forces, it's a huge number. And we're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars that are being taken out of the states to go the FBI that could be used, of course, on local police forces. But this isn't a new thing. If you look in Tim Weiner's book called Enemies, which is about the FBI and Weiner, even though he kind of soft pedals, whether the FBI is good or not. He has all kinds of good info in there. He talks about how by 1923, the FBI was already being used to investigate and blackmail US senators who the Attorney General, a guy named Harry Doherty, suspected of being too communistic. There was they were talking about recognizing the Soviet Union in terms of diplomacy and putting an embassy there and that sort of thing. And he didn't want that to happen. And he said he was considering voting for that. He started breaking into their offices and rating them and surveilling them and that sort of thing. And this is only right like about a decade after the FBI started to really kind of come into its own. And so then of course, J. Edgar Hoover was just starting out then. But by the mid 20th century, Hoover's got his own personal empire. He's blackmailing congressmen and senators left and right. He's doing whatever he wants to do. And so there was no golden age for the FBI at all. Almost from the minute it was created, it was used as a political tool to intimidate blackmail. Well, of course, one of the worst things about all this is the usurpation of criminal law by the feds. In other words, criminal matters other than those three I mentioned earlier are supposed to be handled at the state level under the 9th and 10th amendments and especially with drug laws. We've seen where that's got us. Let's fast forward a little bit to what's going on with the FBI and federal prosecutors more recently. I want to just read to you or summarize for you a Glenn Greenwald tweet from the other day, which I think captures the situation with Comey and Mueller and the federal office of special counsel prosecutor and everything that's going on right now with Trump and Russiagate. This is paraphrasing Glenn Greenwald. He said, well, before the Russia-Putin investigation, Comey and the FBI had advocated their duty to the American people and cost Hillary the election. But now the FBI is above reproach and Comey as a resistance hero. So it all goes to your point about how all prosecutions now are seen as just inherently political and neither side is ever satisfied unless it wins. Well, that's, of course, one of the great things that's happened with Trump coming is that the deep state, as we call it, has become so unhinged and so self satisfied that now it doesn't even try to hide its intervention anymore. And of course, the fact that we're even talking about the deep state as a thing is this new development. It used to be, if you talked about that, you sounded like some kind of crazy conspiracy theorist. But now this is in the mainstream press, right? The deep state is all these bodies of national defense and other permanent government people. It's just a thing. It's there and they have their own interests and they work in their own interests. But now with Trump coming in and the fact that all of these intelligence agencies have hated him because he's an unknown person and that they weren't sure what he's going to do. He didn't have any pre-existing loyalties and so on. So they always wanted to undermine him. And so now it's been bringing to the fore the fact that these are essentially political organizations that that will work to undermine a democratically elected presidential administration. Well, it is interesting in deep state. Of course, from our perspective, it doesn't necessarily necessarily imply secrecy or covert action. It just implies administrative agency personnel who don't come and go with various administrations digging in their heels and saying, no, we're not going to follow the Trump party line or whoever happens to be present. Glenn Reynolds, many of you know him as Instapundit.com talks about this resistance movement in the administrative agencies and what a threat it is to democracy. Now, as libertarians, we don't necessarily care about threats to democracy. But it's interesting, Ryan, that the same people who gush about this endlessly, aka Hillary Clinton for one, you know, all of a sudden are promoting resistance, outright resistance in the administrative agencies. Well, I think maybe that's been part of the key here in showing just how political these organizations are is that one minute we're supporting the FBI, the next minute we're not. One minute we want this guy in there. The next minute we want another guy. So, of course, what we were told for decades was, oh, it doesn't matter, right? These guys just keep their nose to the grindstone and they do their job in a non-political manner. But the fact that different elected officials are not even bothering to hide anymore that they have obvious preferences among who's in the FBI or in the CIA or whatever has been making it clear that, yeah, these organizations are in fact used to screw over your enemies. Right, and it also goes to the larger point that I hope people are starting to get, which is not only does your vote not matter, it really doesn't matter because even if your guy or gal wins, there's no telling what the administrative agencies will actually do. I want to talk a little bit about the Mueller investigation that's going on right now. And so far there's been a couple of targets. Paul Manafort, who is a former campaign official with Trump, that turned out to be nothing but tax evasion that is related to his previous life as a lobbyist, apparently working for Ukraine. But the more recent indictment of Michael Flynn, who was the National Security Advisor to Trump, you know, first of all, it has turned into somewhat of a nothing burger because basically they didn't find any collusion with Russia. Before Trump was actually president-elect, but what they did find was collusion with Russia to help Israel by having Russia as a member of the Security Council in the U.N. veto resolution against Israeli settlement. So that's coming back to bite both Democrats and Republicans in Congress, both sides of which are reflexively and rabidly pro-Israel government, not pro-Israel in my view, pro-Israel government on all things. But one of the things that struck me about the Flynn indictment was this charge of lying to the FBI. And I know you've talked about that in the past. What a ludicrous charge. And why should this be a crime? It's truly a non-crime, right? Because it doesn't even rise to the level of perjury where you're under oath and you're speaking in a formal situation. This can occur during just an informal interview where they're claiming they're just fact-collecting and you're not consulting old documents, you're not trying to make sure everything you're lining up. You're just saying, oh, yeah, this is how I remember it. And then what the FBI comes back later, if you do remember it differently later and then say you do testify under oath and you're like, well, I'm under oath, I better make sure I get all my facts straight this time. So you then go on the stand, you testify under oath, this time you got it right. Yeah, but what you said six months earlier and some casual conversation with the FBI, well, that was different. So now the FBI comes back and charges you with lying to them. And so it's a total nonsense charge. But though what the benefit of it is, is that once they can nail you on that, then, oh, it's very easy to talk you into testifying again somebody else that the FBI really wants to nail. Well, some of you probably know the name Jonathan Turley. He's a law prof at George Washington University in DC. And he talks about these phishing expeditions that federal prosecutors go on. They're designed to ensnare you in something in anything, whether that could be tax evasion or something from your past, even lying to a prosecutor lying to the FBI. And by going on these phishing expeditions, they're essentially chilling conduct. They're making people hesitant to even do their job. So I really recommend to people that they check out Jonathan Turley's work. Ryan, I want to just wrap this up by going to sort of the bigger picture, which is who police is federal police? Who prosecutes federal prosecutors? It seems a bit odd to have Trump or any president as the chief executive of the administrative agencies and also have a prosecutorial agency under him that works for him somehow charged with being independent and investigating him and the people around him. It doesn't seem independent. If we're going back to our third grade understanding of the Constitution, that was what federal courts were for, to sort of police the administration and administrative agencies. So how did we come up with this idea of independent prosecutors but housed under the administrative branch? Well, it's largely a pipe dream is what it is, of course. I mean, it's based on this idea that we can have human beings in these positions that will act free of political pressure. And this is something, of course, this is a fiction we've been foisting on our children for decades, right? That people at the Federal Reserve because they're unelected are not subject to political pressure. And then we say the same thing about the FBI. So we can put these people in there and they'll have tons of integrity and they'll just do the right thing. Now, what the people who wrote the Constitution did, however, they had a different idea. They recognize that there's a difference between political solutions and legal and judicial solutions. So legal is not the same thing as political. And that's why they built in things like congressional sanctions, like impeachment. The idea was if you had an administration that was truly abusing its power, then you could simply impeach the president. And then, of course, a lot of the original framers on that imagine that impeachment would be something that could be used frequently if a president abuses power. You didn't need 18 layers of federal courts and agencies to run some sort of legal operation. Simply if Congress was worried about the president, they would impeach him. But of course, now we've been fed all this stuff for decades about how elected officials are sacrosanct and you can't impeach them and that sort of thing. And so now we've got to come up with a roundabout way. And of course, this then works to the advantage of the deep state itself is, well, we can't convince Congress and at the same time, the voters to put people in who are going to impeach Trump. So we'll just come up with a bunch of lawsuits that maybe we can destabilize the administration. But as you noted, the best thing they got so far is this lying to investigators thing. And that doesn't seem to be going very far. Well, I'm sure we can assume that both Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were adequately represented by some very expensive lawyers. But for the average person being charged or even investigated by a federal agency is likely to be ruinous to their pocket. But we aren't all Mark Cuban who was charged by the SEC with insider training. We don't all have 10 years and millions of dollars in legal fees to fight back. So for most people, they are, you know, the judicial remedy to executive overreach is an illusion. They can't fight back against a federal agency. Oh, yeah, it's terrible, especially at the federal level. There is still at the state level some constraints on prosecutors and on state police agencies to engage in endless multi-year prosecutions. They can't put dozens of attorneys on cases the way federal prosecutors can. So yeah, if you're faced with federal charges, it's just a matter of them outspending you until you just straight up run out of money and can no longer deal with their army of attorneys. And that's just another argument against them having these huge federal agencies that can come down on you because there's essentially no limitations on the Treasury. They can employ to come after you. And then never mind, of course, the fact that the prosecutors are friends with the federal judges that you're going to be going in front of and that it's all this nice little incestuous world where these are all government employees on one side, the judge included. And then there's just you on the other with access to far smaller amounts of resources. Well, to be certain, there are three branches of government and one form of government paycheck. So that ought to disabuse most of us of any fantasy ideas about that. Ryan, thank you so much. And I'll leave people with your dictum that we discussed off air, which is never, ever, ever talk to anyone, even an underling from the FBI without your attorney present. They are infamous for taking notes rather than having a recording device during interviews and later changing those notes perhaps in a way that could get you charged with lying to the FBI. So with that, Ryan, thanks again for your time. Have a great weekend.