In This Story
Andrew McCabe joins other professors from the Schar School’s national intelligence program tonight (Tuesday, February 20) at 7 p.m. for an “ask me anything” open forum at Mason Square’s auditorium in Arlington, Virginia. Details are here. He may even discuss the podcast described below.)
If it’s true “the truth is in the details,” then Andrew McCabe and Allison Gill are speaking the truth and nothing but the truth, for an hour or more each week for a podcast audience of some 250,000 unique listeners at 150,000 downloads at a time.
Meet “Jack.”
“Jack” is Jack Smith, the battle-hardened special counsel appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to lead the independent investigations addressing Donald J. Trump’s 91 federal felony charges in jurisdictions around the United States.
Each week McCabe, a Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, and Gill, a PhD-brandishing San Diego-based podcaster, train their savvy-but-gimlet eyes on a topic they know well from personal experience—Trump—but specifically the federal legal proceedings he faces each week.
They are nearing 70 episodes, with no end in sight.
The show is a fast-moving and easily digestible breakdown of court filings, courtroom strategies, letters, emails, confiscated texts, and anticipation of what might happen next in the election interference case in Washington, D.C. (four felony counts) and the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case (40). Occasionally details of Trump’s state-level trials are discussed, including the Georgia election interference case (13 felony counts) and the porn star hush money-falsifying business records case in Manhattan (34).
For those fascinated by the first-time indictment of a former U.S. president—who happens to be the front-runner of his party’s current presidential campaign—“Jack” is a must-listen podcast as the two hosts and an occasional guests deliberate the facts issued from the courtrooms, without rendering verdicts.
While McCabe, the former deputy and acting director of the FBI, earns his legal bona fides with a law degree from Washington University, Gill, who is fluent in legalese, says she’s a self-taught legal eagle. “I always joke that I taught myself guitar, so I taught myself the law,” she says with a laugh. “But there’s so much I don’t know, obviously.”
The lack of a JD from a tony law school didn’t stop her from creating her first politics-law oriented podcast from taking off: Her podcast, “Mueller, She Wrote,” which began in 2017 and documented special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of the 2016 election and Trump’s dealings with Russia.
As it happened, Gill, who has a University of Phoenix PhD in public health, was a ranking official with 12 years at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs in San Diego—yes, she was a federal employee—while she was airing the tribulations of her putative boss—Trump—to a growing number of fascinated listeners. She tried to broadcast anonymously—she may be one of the rare federal employees remaining who are mindful of the Hatch Act—but Trump administration and VA officials fired her after a messy investigation and implied infractions.
Lemons to lemonade: These days her MSW Media company produces “Jack” as well as Gill’s own “The Daily Beans,” a left-leaning take on the day’s news. It’s not what she was doing previously at the VA, helping families of veterans find health care, but she’s happy to be doing it.
Gill is a veteran of the Navy. Her short term in the service actually changed a Pentagon policy on abortion travel; read it here but take a breath first.
For McCabe’s part, the professor was famously fired in 2018 from his position at the FBI by Attorney General Jeff Sessions just hours before McCabe was set to retire with full pension benefits. It was the final ignominy the Trump administration could manufacture after McCabe, who continued to investigate Trump’s Russia dealings after being warned not to, stepped into the job after Trump’s firing of the previous FBI director, James Comey. (A 2021 lawsuit for wrongful termination successfully restored McCabe’s pension.)
These days, in addition to his Schar School position, McCabe is a crime and legal analyst for CNN.
Gill and McCabe, who had appeared as a guest on “Mueller, She Wrote,” were acquaintances whose paths crossed frequently. “About a year ago Allison reached out and said, ‘I have this idea for a new show and I was wondering if you would do it with me,’” said McCabe. “I thought it was perfect and said I’d love to do it.”
Podcasting technology makes the two sound as if they are at the same table as they record the show, but in reality, Gill is in her home studio on the West Coast and McCabe is…well, he’s cautious about saying where but previous locations have included Morocco, Thailand, and Vietnam.
“Wherever I am on Friday afternoons we figure out time differences and connect and we knock it out,” McCabe said. “I normally don’t say where I am unless I’m going to leave the next day. I don’t like to put out exactly where I am. It’s one of the hangovers of my former interactions with the Big Guy.”
The “Jack” podcast is edited by MSW staff and uploaded each week to a distributor called Simplecast that makes it available to the various platforms listeners tune to for their downloads. The distributor inserts advertising. Gill said she and McCabe can “veto categories or certain companies if we want,” which is why you most likely will not hear an ad for My Pillow on “Jack,” although it would be amusing. There’s also a Patreon subscriber option.
It’s not as if there is no competition in the field of Trump Trial podcasts. For instance, there’s “Clean Up on Aisle 45,” with Gill again and Pete Strzok, the former deputy assistant director of the FBI’s counterintelligence division. Strzok also was fired by Trump as he supervised the Hillary Clinton email and Russia investigations; he ran afoul of Trump when leaked texts were interpreted as “inflammatory.” (His wrongful termination suit is still in court.)
Strzok and Gill study the nonfederal cases against Trump. “Anything that’s not Jack Smith,” Strzok said. “Essentially, the continuing unfolding of the criminal and civil process of the last administration.”
Podcasts such as these, Strzok said, fill a void traditional journalism can’t, given today’s state of journalism. With layoffs at major media outlets such as the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal, “that’s being replaced in part by podcasts,” he said.
But the problem with that, he added, “it’s a lot easier to self-select your podcast. At a local newspaper there’s an editorial process, presumably some level of journalistic rigor, and there’s some objective fact and truth to it. But a podcast? It’s the Wild West, right? You can get whatever your particular flavor you’re interested in even if it’s untethered to reality.
“I think pocasts are taking on a new role in how Americans get information, and maybe not always for the better.”
Meanwhile, at least one knowledgeable guest on the show believes Gill and McCabe are imparting accurate facts and truth.
J. Michael Luttig shared with us a note he sent Gill and McCabe following an appearance on “Jack.” A former conservative federal judge now a distinguished fellow at the University of Virginia, Luttig coauthored a 2022 69-page report refuting claims of election fraud in 2020 and has championed the opinion that Trump is not qualified to run for president due to his involvement in the January 6 riot at the Capitol.
“The two of you were masterful,” he wrote. “You were so knowledgeable on these two most pressing and historic constitutional issues of our times that you were able to draw me out, and deeper and deeper, with every question that followed my every answer. You have obviously mastered the art of the interview that very few ever master, because they lack the knowledge and understanding, the wisdom and patience to listen to the interviewee, and the quickness of thoughtful response that is only possible for one who has the knowledge and understanding, and the wisdom, and the patience.”
Given that both McCabe and Gill were terminated by Trump officials, one could conclude that their weekly takedown of Trump’s miseries inflicted by Jack Smith is a case of, perhaps, sour grapes.
“Maybe,” Gill said with a shrug. “But I mean, when you’re right, you’re right.”
“That’s a really good question,” McCabe said after a brief bit of soul searching. “I never thought of it that way. I guess people could draw that conclusion but I don’t see it that way. I see it as kind of an extension of the work I’ve been doing on television. I feel like I have a unique perspective on not just court cases and the legal side of it, but the investigative side of these things, and Donald Trump just happens to be wrapped up in more investigations and court cases than anyone I've ever known.”