Politicizing Military and Intelligence Agencies

HEWITT: Morning glory, America, from the West Coast, ReliefFactor.com studio. I am Hugh Hewitt. It is the last radio hour of the week on Friday. It's getaway day. But we all get you up to the weekend by going up to 30,000 feet with the Hillsdale Dialogues. We've been doing it since 2013. An hour devoted to big picture, big issues, sometimes current events, but mostly, they've got to be important and huge issues for us to deal with them.

My guest this week, as he is most weeks, Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College. All things Hillsdale, collected at hillsdale.edu. That's where you go, by the way, to sign up for the absolutely free Imprimisspeech digest, which will be delivered in the mail the old fashioned way for you to read the old fashioned way in paper and print, although you can get it online as well. And you can get online all of the wonderful courses that Hillsdale uses to enrich your life at home via the web, including Dr. Arnn's course on Churchill, which I'm going to be referring to today, including many other wonderful pieces there.

All of the dialogues collected at hughforhillsdale.com. Good morning, Dr. Arnn. How are you?

DR. LARRY ARNN: Good morning, Hugh. How are you?

HUGH HEWITT: I am terrific. I have a big issue for which I completely left you unprepared.

DR. LARRY ARNN: OK.

HUGH HEWITT: Why change now, right?

DR. LARRY ARNN: Yeah, that's it.

HUGH HEWITT: I want to go Churchill on you, because we have the president in a fight with a former head of the intelligence community, John Brennan, into which a dozen former heads of the intelligence community have waded, and the very estimable former admiral of the military McRaven. First of all, about former military members, Kori Schake, a friend of the show, head of the London Institute for Strategic Studies, implored me and everyone to always refer to them as former admirals and former generals, because of the necessity of maintaining the apolitical nature of the military, which I believe was begun by Washington.

Now am I right about that?

DR. LARRY ARNN: Yeah. Yeah, so step one-- so there's our baseline. George Washington did very great service for his country, including in war. And then when the war was over, and he won, he would resign and go home. Did the same thing about the Presidency.

And there is this story, and it's likely true, but it can't be proved, but it's accepted, let's say, because it's so perfect. The King of England is supposed to be talking to the prime minister, and you know it took forever after Cornwallis surrendered in Yorktown, to get a peace conference together. And the prime minister reminded the King that they needed to do that. And the King looked up and said, “George Washington will not know how to be a king, and they will want me back.” And the Prime Minister replied, “I understand he has resigned his commission and gone home.”

And the King, the assumption of the King is, if you conquer, then you rule. The King stirred himself and said, “if he did that, he's the greatest man alive.”

HUGH HEWITT: And that resonates with us why?

DR. LARRY ARNN: Because government is supposed to come in our way of understanding, in the classic way, too, but our way, especially sharp, it's clear, no human being, that kind of thing, may rightly be governed, except with his consent. Of course, horses and dogs can be governed without their consent. They're not capable of giving their consent.

And so that means then that all of the powers of the government-- and government has a monopoly on force, see? And it has to have, or else you'll have chaos. And this strongest element of force that it has is organized into a force, the military. And so above all, you should have the culture that people who serve in the military, but by extension also the cops, and the FBI, and the CIA, must be especially dutiful about staying out of politics.

HUGH HEWITT: And indeed, we have a long history of that being the case, and we know the exceptions, one of them being George McClellan, about whom I've been reading. Unfortunately, he is from Ohio. I've been reading about him recently. In his early engagements in the Civil War, [he established] the brand for which he would become famous and then [entered] into politics, because he clashed with Lincoln. He's one of the exceptions, where generals became high profile political actors, and it didn't work out well.

DR. LARRY ARNN: That's right. And I've just read a very good biography of Grant, Ulysses Grant, who succeeded three times removed McClellan. And if you study Grant and McClellan, you'll see the generals have to be politically astute, because Churchill writes at the summit, “true politics and strategy are one.” And so in what way do they use rightly their astuteness?

Of course, George Washington was a very politically astute man. There are just wonderful stories about how good he was at getting power without saying anything. And the day they were going to pick a commander, George Washington, who was very tall and a very handsome man and looked really great in a uniform, showed up at the Continental Congress, wearing his uniform. He didn't normally do that, you know. And everybody went, oh yeah, that guy's a soldier.

So McClellan, he was really good with the troops. He was very organized. He took care of them. They had enough to eat. And he was careful with them in battles to the place, where although he was a very skilled maneuverer, he would have down in Yorktown, the same place where the war ended, he would have five or six days maneuvering against Lee and never get anything done.

And Lee didn't destroy his army, but he didn't really take on Lee very hard. And of course, by the views of the Union, the Southerners have taken a bunch of our land out of our Union. And we got to get it back. So McClellan was popular. And then, you know, the guys who followed him were, you know, mostly useless, because there's nothing so bad for an army than to go into a battle and lose it with the feeling it was because they were badly led.

HUGH HEWITT: Right. And the guy who was perhaps the worst was [Joseph] Hooker, and that was because on the one occasion when he chose not to be drunk might have been the occasion when he would have won had he been drunk and acted with reckless abandon in the prosecution of the offensive. But let me go back to Washington for a second. I'm on Meet the Pressthis weekend, and if I am successful, I will be able to mention that George Washington did not want to attend the Constitutional Convention originally, because the Society of Cincinnatus was meeting there. And that when he finally did attend, he said nothing.

And these are both important to his greatness.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Yeah, that's right. There are details there. So the Society of Cincinnatus, which Washington loved, and it was named after the Roman statesman who was a great general, and then retired and went home, and bowed to the Republic, you know, the officers of the American army, Washington's army formed this society to keep their relations alive under the title of a man who had this military power to the Republic.

And then it was attacked in the press as an aristocratic society. And Washington was embarrassed by that. He didn't like that. He didn't like that to be said. And so he told them he wouldn't attend their meeting. And of course, that was a crushing blow to them. And then he was afraid that if he then went to the Continental Convention, they would be further offended. The Society of Cincinnatus would be further offended.

HUGH HEWITT: Right.

DR. LARRY ARNN: And so James Madison got on his horse and rode to Mount Vernon and talked him into coming, because Madison and [Alexander] Hamilton had written to each other that they didn't know if they could actually get the convention together without him.

Then he was appointed chair of the convention by acclamation. And then he sat there through the whole thing and said nothing until toward the end, and I can't remember what he said. But what he said was he would-- for his own part-- adjust one point. Then he named some point. And then he said, “but overall it is an excellent document.”

HUGH HEWITT: And there is so much in that example. He also upbraided them once about secrecy. But I don't believe that was in his position as chair of the convention. I believe he did that outside of the convention. But there is so much in that example of not speaking, Dr. Arnn, that a lot of people who have been in the government previously could learn from.

DR. LARRY ARNN: That's right. And you know, if you know, these guys, you know, who are making money and having a career on CNNnow, having been connected to the military, the intelligence service, that's not the standard, right, and you should do that if you're going to do it-- you know, there have been several generals elected president of the United States. You can go into politics. But you're supposed to do it in a certain way.

HUGH HEWITT: Right.

DR. LARRY ARNN: That way-- and so you know, Ike, it was unclear which party Dwight Eisenhower would run for when he was deliberating about running. And they both recruited him hard. And then when he ran, you know, his famous statements, if you think what they are, they're all kind of above politics. He didn't run as a partisan. And he had a kind of stature, because of his military service to do that, because that's for all of us.

HUGH HEWITT: And that is by the way, George Marshall as well, the same sort of standard, the same sort of respect. And when we come back, we're going to talk about what has happened in the collision between former senior members of the apparatus of state security, the CIA and Justice, and Donald Trump when we return. Don't go anywhere.

22 minutes after the hour, America, from the ReliefFactor.com West Coast Studio. It is the Hillsdale Dialogue with Dr. Larry Arnn here on the Hugh Hewitt Show, playing Aretha Franklin in honor of the first lady of soul who passed away yesterday and a Michigander herself. And so Dr. Arnn, we tip our head to Aretha Franklin in passing.

I'm constructing today's dialogue very carefully. We began with the history of how the military and the intelligence agencies of force in the United States act vis-a-vis the politics. Then we turn to the content-- I'm going to get to Brennan in the next segment. But first, Kimberley Strassel has written today in the Wall Street Journalabout a former senior member of the Department of Justice under President Obama, under Loretta Lynch and Eric Holder, he's still at the DOJ, his name is Bruce Ohr. But he is no longer an Associate Deputy Attorney General.

And she is raising questions about his role in the Christopher Steele dossier, questions which are uncomfortable, because they suggest-- they do more than suggest. They actually prove up a good prima faciecase that DOJ and the FBI were involved in politicking in 2016.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Yeah. I thought, you know, when I-- James Comey was amazing to me when he appeared as a national figure, in part, because he would dance around the question of the independence of the FBI. And the Federal Bureau of Investigation is empowered to use lethal force. And so independent, and I talked to one man in the FBI of some significance, and I said, “independent of what?” And you know, he said to me, “nobody ever asked me that question before.” I said, “wow.”

But you know, the powers of the government flow from the people to elected officials who serve at their pleasure. And everybody in the federal government, every FBI agent, every soldier, everybody takes an oath to the Constitution of the United States. The political people have a larger authority, because they have direct contact with the sovereign, which is the constitutional majority and because their terms are limited. They're out of gas. They have to go back to the people soon.

And so if you don't have that relationship right, then you have consent of the governed breaking down. And the Justice Department itself is under the management of the president of the United States or else it's not under management. And those powers are checked and balanced of the president are checked and balanced in a wonderful way with the powers of the Congress. And so are the powers of Congress as against the president and the courts. We're talking about civil servants in the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which has very great powers. You know, they can do a lot to people, including shoot them. If they're unclear about that, then that's a problem. And you know, the FBI used some documents from a partisan source from Fusion GPS, a British firm hired by first some Republicans and then the Democratic Party.

HUGH HEWITT: It's an American firm hiring Brits, to be specific. It's an American firm.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Is that what it is?

HUGH HEWITT: Yeah.

DR. LARRY ARNN: It's an American firm, OK.

HUGH HEWITT: But it hired Christopher Steele, who's a Brit.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Who's a Brit, former MI5 guy.

HUGH HEWITT: Yep. MI6.

DR. LARRY ARNN: MI6. See, I got everything wrong. If you would warn me, I would know things. But the provenance of this portfolio about Trump's doings and purported doings in Russia is political opposition, campaign research.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.

DR. LARRY ARNN: And then that's given to the FBI. The FBI has hired this guy, Steele, to work for them.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.

DR. LARRY ARNN: And so they used information he gave them before the FISA court, before the secret surveillance court invented in the the Patriot Act, I think.

HUGH HEWITT: Yes. It goes back to '78, but it was reinvented in the Patriot Act.

DR. LARRY ARNN: There you go. And so they used that information to get warrants to surveil people in the Trump administration, starting with Carter Page, and they don't disclose to the court the provenance of the information ever.

HUGH HEWITT: And when we come back from break, we're going to talk about how even after he was fired, as Kim Strassel points out today, they found a cut out of the Department of Justice to continue to funnel this political opposition research, as Dr. Arnn called it, to the court. Stay tuned.

33 minutes after the hour, America. It is the Hillsdale Dialogue. We normally play classical music, but we're honoring Aretha Franklin today. Passed away yesterday at the age of 76. Dr. Larry Arnn is my guest, president of Hillsdale College. All things Hillsdale are collected at hillsdale.edu. And even though we're in the ReliefFactor.com studio in the West Coast, I'm headed back to the East Coast tonight. I hope Dr. Arnn is headed back to Michigan for the start of school soon.

We are talking about John Brennan losing his security clearance and the reaction in the intelligence community to that. But we're doing so-- it's so unusual for context to actually be provided to this story by talking first about Washington, then McClellan, then setting up the fact that in 2016, the FBI and the DOJ ran an intelligence operation against Donald Trump's campaign. Whether or not it was justified will remain to be seen. But that when the FBI cut off Mr. Steele because he broke the terms of the agreement, Mr. Steele continued to provide information to the FBI through a man named Bruce Ohr, who was the subject of a Kimberley Strassel column today in the Wall Street Journal, and will be in front of Congress within two weeks, all of which suggests, Dr. Arnn, does it not, a politicization of the intelligence community and law enforcement, that is, if it has precedent in the United States, it's got very few precedents.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Yeah. Well, government's always messy, and there have been precedents of things like this. But you know, you should, when you get close to a presidential campaign, and you know they, apparently they were eager to get close to a presidential campaign, then you should be walking on eggshells.

And if you find something wrong, then the Constitution says what to do about a president who misbehaves in office. Other politicians formed now into a judicial process, the two houses of Congress, are the ones empowered to do something about that. And so one thing they should do is they should tell the Congress, you know, they should get to a politician soon, right, because they're not qualified to make judgments affecting elections.

And especially leaking is so common now, that Kimberley Strassel in her article has an instance in a text from Peter Strzok, now fired for partisanship, in the FBI, where he says, another leak, to his friend, Lisa Page-- he says another leak from BO in The New York Timestoday, exclamation mark. And BO is apparently this Bruce Ohr, who was Associate Deputy head of the FBI, right?

HUGH HEWITT: Yes.

DR. LARRY ARNN: And so they're playing politics. And, you know, I thought James Clapper and James Comey, both while they were still in office, said things about Donald Trump and about the presidential campaign that were improper for people in their positions to say. And, you know, if you find out that somebody is an agent of an evil force running for president of the United States, you do have to disclose that. But you should disclose it as quickly as you can to some people who are elected to political office.

HUGH HEWITT: And in fact, Elise Stefanik asked Mr. Comey, unprepared though he was, she asked him, why did you not brief the intelligence committees? And he, blah, blah, blahed, and basically admitted that he didn't want to do it. And he didn't do it in a timely fashion. They did the exact opposite of the constitutional process, which brings us to Mr. Brennan, who upon leaving the CIA, has begun, and has continued, an almost uninterrupted fusillade against the president, as is his right.

But the president, as is his right, has revoked his intelligence clearances. And today we get this letter, which I want to read in full for the benefit of the audience, a statement from former senior intelligence officials. “As former senior intelligence officials, we feel compelled to respond in the wake of the ill-considered and unprecedented remarks and actions by the White House, regarding the removal of John Brennan's security clearances. We know John to be an enormously talented, capable, and patriotic individual, who had devoted his adult life to the service of this nation.

Insinuations and allegations of wrongdoing on the part of Brennan while in office are baseless. Since leaving government service, John has chosen to speak out sharply regarding what he sees as threats to our national security. Some of the undersigned have done so as well. Others among us have elected to take a different course and be more circumspect in our public pronouncements.

Regardless, we all agree that the President's action regarding John Brennan and the threats of similar action against other former officials have nothing to do with who should and should not hold security clearances and everything to do with attempts to stifle free speech. You don't have to agree with what John Brennan says, and again, not all of us do to agree with his right to say it, subject to his obligation to protect classified information.

We have never before seen the approval or removal of security clearances used as a political tool as was done in this case. Beyond that, this action is quite clearly a signal to other former and current officials. As individuals who have cherished and helped preserve the right of Americans to free speech, even when that right has been used to criticize us, that signal is inappropriate and deeply regrettable. Decisions on security clearances should be based on national security concerns and not political views.”

And it's signed by William Webster, Robert Gates, George Tenet, Porter Goss, General Hayden, Leon Panetta, General Petraeus, James Clapper, John McLaughlin, Steve Capus, Mike Morell, Admiral Haines, and David Cohen. I have a reaction to this, but I'll let you go first.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Yeah, well. First of all, those are-- some of those people are good people.

HUGH HEWITT: Very, very, very good people.

DR. LARRY ARNN: And there's one thing I don't like in it. When they say that claims of wrongdoing by Brennan when he was in office are baseless, they're actually setting out to prove something that would be extremely difficult to prove, right?

HUGH HEWITT: Number one, they have no way of-- I have no proof that he did anything that was wrong, but they have no way to make that allegation. They can prove positive that he did many good things, but they can't prove negatives. That's not logically possible.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Yeah, so that’s a little bit too sweeping there, gentlemen. And so they're setting out to make a point. And the point about free speech is everybody has a right to say what they want to say within the limits of libel and slander and such as that. But everybody doesn't have a right to security clearance. That's a privilege.

HUGH HEWITT: This is point number two. I teach constitutional law. There is no First Amendment issue here. None. Zero. No one's speech is being suppressed, because no one has a right to a security clearance.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Years ago, a bunch of the students at the college got into a dispute between some libertarians and some others about the first Iraq war. Some of them liked it, and some of them didn't. And they were putting posters up around the campus. And then they started tearing each other down, and it was a big brouhaha.

And so I made them take all the posters down and said “forget about this. You guys got work to do, and who cares what you think about the Iraq War, and for that matter, who cares what I think of the Iraq War, right?” And one young man, friend of mine today, getting his PhD in economics, he said, “you're interfering with my freedom of speech.” And I said “no. I hear you in my office talking on.” And he said, “but you took down my poster.” I said, “you put your poster on my wall.”

HUGH HEWITT: On my wall. Well, there is this fundamental confusion about what the free speech-- the government may not interfere with you and me saying what you and I want to say right now. We can call Donald Trump the worst President in the history of American politics, and they may not interfere with that. We can call him the best President we've ever seen. And they may not interfere with that.

But there is no government action involved in the withdrawal of the security clearance whether or not it was because he didn't like John Brennan's tie. It doesn't matter.

DR. LARRY ARNN: That's right. And you know, Brennan, if he did anything about-- one of the things, under the scholarship, for example, of Cass Sunstein, University of Chicago law professor, we think freedom of speech has to do with how many people hear you, and we can qualify your speech if too many are, and the point is by that standard, to which I do not adhere, John Brennan's freedom of speech has been increased by this thing, because he's all over the news.

HUGH HEWITT: Well, that is actually what Eli Lake has argued, I think, quite perceptively is that the President is seeking not to stifle Brennan, but to elevate him. He wants to make John Brennan, the face of his opposition, because John Brennan comes out of the intelligence community, whose conduct is compromised by virtue of the Strozk, Steele, with which there is no, yet, obvious connection to Brennan. We don't know that the CIA had anything to do with this yet. But he's trying to elevate Brennan to that in a political move. So if you're going to play politics, don't expect not to get tackled.

DR. LARRY ARNN: You know, the great-- we honor people in the CIA, many of whom have given their lives for their country. And one of the things we honor about them is their silence. They do heroic deeds, and nobody ever knows. And they compromise. They change things about their lives to preserve anonymity. And so that's kind of the opposite impulse, isn't it, of-- you know, and Brennan has a political career. Right, Brennan was an appointee in the Obama administration. And Brennan has, you know, he was a political appointee, the head of the CIA.

HUGH HEWITT: He was also a political appointee of George W. Bush. He's a career guy.

DR. LARRY ARNN: That's right.

HUGH HEWITT: I mean, he's a career intelligence official.

DR. LARRY ARNN: He's picked a side here, and that's his right to do so. But even then, in my opinion, back to the example of George Washington, which is, by the way, so high an example that it's hard to deploy, because it's almost beyond. But even so, wouldn't you be demanded by your former office to comport yourself in a certain way?

And, you know, there's a retired general, I won't say his name, but he was a three-star general who had lots to do with intelligence. And he had kids at Hillsdale College, and he's a friend of mine. He's retired now. Before he was retired-- and you know, he and I agree about things in general. Before he was retired, I'd say, “how's it going?” He'd never say anything except, “it's a target-rich environment.”

HUGH HEWITT: There you go. My larger point, and I hope I get to make this point, is that what Mr. Brennan and Mr. Clapper are doing is without precedent. They are politicizing the position of former director of CIA and former director of NIA. And that has not happened before. There have been-- George H.W. Bush ran for president, but he did not use his position as director of the CIA to criticize Jimmy Carter after he left that job when Jimmy Carter was obviously in the process of creating the most malignant state on the globe today, the Islamic Republic of Iran, by doing nothing.

And yet George H.W. Bush said nothing.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Yeah. And that's better, right? In other words, when you get to know the secrets of the nation, you have to accept a discipline. So I was led to answer a hypothetical from somebody in authority one time. What if I gave information to the Congress, and I knew that they would abuse it, and my agents would be compromised, and they would be killed, do I have to give it? And I said, “yes, you do.”

And he said, “wow.” And I said, “but think, you know, the Constitution protects you, too. If they demand something like that, then you can resign and make a stink about that point.”

HUGH HEWITT: You bet.

DR. LARRY ARNN: An intelligence committee is contrived so that members of Congress can get secret information, and they may not disclose it. Right, and there's leaks from the intelligence committee, and Congress should do something about that, because that, too, you accept a sort of code. You're representing the rest of the Congress knowing things that must not be generally known. And so they're an obligation to the rest of the Congress.

HUGH HEWITT: Hang on to that. I'll be right back. Dr. Larry Arnn, the Hillsdale Dialogue continues. We're doing this methodically, and we will conclude it methodically. So welcome back, America. 51 minutes after the hour from the ReliefFactor.com West Coast studio. I'm concluding this week's Hillsdale Dialogue with Dr. Larry Arnn. Not surprisingly, once again taking the position in the conversation that is at odds with the dominant media elite.

But I remind people that I had on earlier today Attorney General Patrick Morrisey of West Virginia, where the President's approval rating is 65%. 65% of West Virginians approve of the president. And so there is a vast number in the millions of Americans who wonder why is it on every media outlet I turn on, everyone agrees John Brennan has been done wrong, when I don't feel that way? And Dr. Arnn, and that's what I wanted to conclude with. We now have a unanimity of opinion in the major networks of America, which is very dangerous to the very First Amendment values we were talking about, which is why you don't hear a contrary opinion.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Yeah. Well, Hugh, I'm going to take your testimony as your word for that, because I don't watch that. But I read the press, and a different-- they just rain the changes on this day after day in the written press, and you know, except Kimberley Strassel or people like that, right?

And you know, the facts are here that there's a process for assigning security clearances, and it's a privilege to get one. And Donald Trump certainly has the power to take Brennan's away. And Brennan is a bitter enemy. And so I don't-- you know, I don't know. Do I think he should have done that? I don't know. I bet he did it, as you say, to elevate Brennan.

And I think Trump understands-- he's acting like a man who understands he's in an argument, and it's a serious argument. They want to take him down. And so--

HUGH HEWITT: You know, stop there. That is exactly what many people don't realize is that Donald Trump understands-- they want his scalp, right? They want to Nixon him. This isn't about beating him in 2020. This is about taking him out before then.

DR. LARRY ARNN: That's right. And you know, if you could step back and look, like, there's a lot of things to cover here. And you know, it may be part of the artfulness of Donald Trump that he exacerbates all this stuff that's going on right now, because you know, from-- there's no evidence of which I know that Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the election in 2016.

HUGH HEWITT: Agreed. As of now, there is no public evidence of that.

DR. LARRY ARNN: I don't see any of that. And you read Mollie Hemingway, who's been writing about this a lot, and there's even some admission in filing from Mueller's office, that they don't have any of that. So if-- so then what is this about? And it is a fight unto the political death. Thank God we don't have the other kind in America.

And so he's fighting it like that. But also, I wonder, because they're doing a lot. You know, I mean, there's been the tax cuts and the famous big public things. But there are regulatory reforms underway in the government that have a sharper focus on what the law actually empowers the agencies to do, and also a recognition, at least among many officials-- I don't know Donald Trump, but at least among many people who work for him, because some of them are students of mine, and I talk to them.

They understand that in the end, the legislative power is given to the Congress, which today makes about 10% of the laws in America. And they see that that should be curbed, that we should have accountability back to the lawmakers, and that, you know, because then we can get other ones. Maybe we're about to get other ones in the fall elections.

And so those are some fundamental things. And they're going on with a purpose across many agencies. And I haven't seen anything like that since the Reagan years.

HUGH HEWITT: There are forces at work which are so much beyond the average commentator's grasp. And you do have to go back to the beginning of the republic and you do have to come forward through the conflict in the Civil War, and you have to get up to the World War II. And I didn't get to Churchill. So I wanted to close there. How did Churchill get along with his intelligence community, which was so effective, right? Give us a minute.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Well, nobody knew who they were, C, a guy named Menzies, who, you know, Bletchley Park, little village outside London swelled up to 25,000 residents. And they were all working. Nobody in town knew what they were doing, but they were breaking code. That's where the Enigma code was broken and regularly then translated and revealed.

HUGH HEWITT: Key phrase. Nobody knew who they were.

DR. LARRY ARNN: Nobody knew. And Churchill-- there were seven-- I might get this number wrong. There were a small number of people who had access to the information and its source. And Winston Churchill kept the key to the box that it came in on his person at all times. And so nobody knew. Nobody knew there was such a thing. And the code name for the guy was C, and years after the war there was no knowledge of who he was.

HUGH HEWITT: Isn't that-- see, that is the takeaway from the day. Sometimes, even though I lack a producer, we elegantly produce a Hillsdale Dialogue that makes the point in the last minute. Larry Arnn. Always a pleasure, Dr. Arnn. Hillsdale Dialogues are all collected at hughforhillsdale.com. And everything at Hillsdale is at hillsdale.edu.