Here's a partial transcript of John McKay's interview with bloggers and newspaper reporters at the Mainstream Republican conference yesterday. Complete audio here. [13MB]. (Other participants and their reports listed here. Audio of McKay's breakfast speech to the conference audience, here). I'll post some commentary later. Meanwhile, these portions of the interview stand up well on their own.

[photo: Mark Gardner]

[1:00] McKay: [Regarding Washington state's 2004 election and aftermath] At the time, my view was I didn't like what I was seeing ... and I remain today concerned about what occurred in that election. And yet there needs to be a pretty clear understanding about the difference between incompetence or serious errors or systemic problems associated with the election and all of those things may have been present. But to our knowledge to today, there was not a crime committed and that was my conclusion. I think it was a reasoned conclusion. I did look at everything that was available at the time that I had to make a decision. And actually, the truth of it is, someone could still come forward and say they participated in a conspiracy associated with the 2004 governor's election. And that's why I didn't say anything while I was in office about it. Because you don't like to be in the position of saying there was no crime. Well, I don't know. There could still have been a crime that we didn't find and that no one came forward. Normally what would happen in a situation like that is, and this is often the case in election investigations, if you look at them. Someone comes forward because often people get dragged into them or campaign workers that came to work on a campaign, they didn't come to commit a crime. But they found themselves sitting in a room, usually in Chicago ... and they participate in a conspiracy. I called the last case agent in the FBI who handled the last major investigation in Chicago in an election case while I was considering what was happening here in the state of Washington. And in that particular case in the wards of Chicago, they said things like "all right, the goal here was 90% vote for the Democrats and we only got 62%." So you know what they did, and they did this throughout this particular incident. They took the ballots and went fmmph into a garbage can and they filled out new ballots. And they were able to make that case in which a number of aldermen went to prison ... contrast that with what we saw and found in the 2004 governor's election and there's a big line that goes down the middle. I also called other federal prosecutors. One thing, I didn't go into all the detail here but the thing I was very concerned about was the felon voters in that case and if felons were voting and they were casting ballots on federal officers, there was arguably federal jurisdiction. And I was interested in prosecuting felon voter cases if we could make the cases, so we put together a task force, below the radar, people didn't know it was going on, involving federal prosecutors from Spokane and Seattle, and elected prosecutors at the state level and we considered I think we took about 100 of those cases and looked at them very carefully. And it was the unanimous recommendation of everybody on that task force, which I set up, that we couldn't proceed. And the main reason was, the state sent them ballots. You have to prove intent and willful disregard of the fact that you don't have the right to vote before you can convict someone of that crime. It was not a clear decision by the way, that it could be federal, but I was certainly willing to pursue it. So in the felon voter cases, there you had maybe the best example Because these were illegal ballots. And if there was a crime that could be prosecuted I wanted to prosecute it. But none of us ... I wasn't involved on the task force until the recommendation came to me. But none of us could see ourselves in front of a jury trying to make a case against a convicted felon, when the state sent him a ballot and if he voted, he was probably violating the terms of his parole if he was on parole. So what jury's going to believe that that person put themselves in jeopardy to vote. Not to rob a bank, but to vote. And the unanimous recommendation was that we didn't have a case to bring because of the willfulness part of that requirement. That was felon voters ... There are a number of steps that we took including, frankly you did not ever have in this case an informant who came forward who said "here's the conspiracy. Here's what it looked like". That is the normal way to proceed if we have some tip of illegal activity that we had some absolutely convincing forsensic evidence, which is what [BIAW Executive] Tom McCabe thinks he had ... I don't have any doubt that he thinks he does that and [Evergreen Freedom Foundation President] Bob Williams has sent about a hundred letters. I read the first few and they're all repeats of what he had to say and he's got zip in terms of a crime.

Neil Modie: Did he literally send a hundred letters?

McKay: Lots and lots of letters. And it turns out he was sending them to the Department of Justice. And I think people in the Department of Justice, for reasons completely unconnected with anything in the state of Washington were receiving those differently from what I was receiving.

[other questions]

[8:16] Sharkansky: Can I show you the evidence that I came up with?

McKay: No. Not right now.

Sharkansky: What do you mean?

McKay: You can talk about it, and I'll decide if I want to go down that road, but I'm not going to look through documents here.

Sharkansky: Let me just tell you where I'm coming from. Judge Bridges in the trial -- and I sat through closing arguments and I sat for his ruling here in the courtroom and I listened to the whole thing before that. And I went through a lot of the stuff that was coming out -- he did rule there were between 1,600 and 1,700 illegal votes. That is what he found. There was also another phenomenon, a mystery that the trial did not solve. That is the fact that there were more votes than voters.

McKay: I understand that. I find that troubling.

Sharkansky: It's troubling. Unfortunately the Republicans didn't have an explanation for that. [Former King County Elections Director] Dean Logan said "there were clerical errors scanning the poll books". That was his only explanation. And nobody else had an alternative explanation. And why was that?

McKay: And I find that troubling. Very troubling.

Sharkansky: And so I spent literally two years after the election investigating the question "why were there more votes than voters"? It took that long for me to get responses to my public records requests.

McKay: Oh really?

Sharkansky: Yeah. Seriously. Public records requests that I made before the trial, weren't satisfied for months and even a couple of years afterwards. So I went systematically and I got data records that I processed that the litigants did not have access to. Because I don't think King County was fully compliant with its discovery obligations. So there was all kinds of evidence of illegal votes that help explain why there were more votes than voters.

McKay: So when you say illegal votes, as a prosecutor, I'm not thinking that a crime's been committed in association with that. Illegal, as what the judge was talking about, is votes that were not in compliance with the law, doesn't mean that a crime has been committed. We need to be clear about our language here. And just as he found that were 1,000 illegal felons votes, approximately, when tasked, prosecutors from the state and federal level convened with agents to look at that issue, the conclusion was we didn't have a crime here. That was the conclusion. It wasn't a crime and it would have been wrong for us to proceed with a criminal case against even those felon voters let alone the few that [King County Prosecutor] Norm Maleng pursued, which is if you'll recall, involved stuff like old lady votes her husband's ballot even though he's dead, because she knew how he wanted to vote. And we know how those things worked out.

Sharkansky: Right, but they looked into those and they decided that yeah, there were so many felon votes and you discussed those and you analyzed the pros and cons and you used some prosecutorial discretion but you looked at that. Similarly, and I found, and I will show you a few things. I found evidence of nearly 500 illegal votes and of different categories [interruption] and again, I don't know if a crime occurred. I know at the very least it was negligence in the elections office that you'd want somebody to look at.

McKay: Without even looking at that, I can tell you I'm sure I don't disagree with you.

Sharkansky: So you got two absentee ballots from the same voter [example presented]. Dozens of these. You have an absentee ballot and a provisional ballot from the same voter [example presented]. Dozens of these, and where the provisional ballot envelope is marked "absentee ballot returned" on this date ...

McKay: You're right where I ... this is not information that I had, but this is the kind of thing that caused me serious concern. The question for me is: should the FBI be looking at those ballots? One, is it a federal issue, which is not a clear decision. And in fact, as I said today, I actually overruled the section of the Department of Justice that said to me "don't move forward with this" because it involves an election for governor of the state of Washington. That's a state election. I overruled them on the basis of what I said in there, which was, if there was fraud, then they probably committed fraud on the election involving the President or members of Congress and that is federal jurisdiction. That is not a small question, which is whether or not the federal government has a role in it.

Sharkansky: Here's another example. You asked if there was an informant who came forward with a conspiracy. Here's an example where I found hundreds of provisional ballots that were counted from voters who were not registered to vote. And in many of these cases there's a category, I actually wrote an article about this for The Stranger in October 2005, where there's what's called "fatal pends". That means a voter submits an incomplete registration form. For example, they don't sign their registration form. If they cure that defect before the certification deadline, their ballot is eligible. If they don't, they're not an eligible voter. Based on all kinds of both documentary evidence and from confidential informants who worked on that election, but for fear of career retribution would not come forward, but told me in confidence ... is that that they were instructed by senior elections staff to count these ballos from unregistered "fatal pend" voters even though everybody in the room knew it was not proper. So these are the kinds of things that have taken me two years to piece together. And various categories of illegal activity ... if people vote twice, that's against the law, whether it's a crime or something that a prosecutor can take to a jury, that's not something that I understand.

McKay: And you're right. Those are very different issues that do involve a determination of what sort of case you would have.

Sharkansky: And I do know that some of this information was presented to federal officials, whether it was the FBI, or...

McKay: The problem is there are many alternative explanations to what occurred, even to what you've laid out, that are alternatives to a crime occurring. And it's different from the person who comes in and says I sat in the room and we figured out how to steal the election from Dino Rossi. And frankly that's the kind of evidence that you look for. You want conclusive forensic evidence of a conspiracy, a crime involving a federal election. That was my role, a pretty limited role, but an important one I took seriously. I presided over meetings of FBI agents and federal prosecutors who looked at all the evidence that we had. We called for and I think really, any prosecutor with significant discretion, which is what happens in the federal system, we have a lot of discretion, limited resources, but a lot of discretion, is, you look at that evidence and you say, is there enough here to move forward with our limited resources in the post-9/11 world to investigate an election. The last thing I wanted was a squad of FBI agents doing the work that the state of Washington should be doing, to determine what, if anything, went wrong in this election. The first question is, in my opinion, just my opinion, because I wasn't an official of the state of Washington, is that you want to look carefully at the administration of the election. What went wrong? How serious was it? Did anybody in that process have proof of a crime? If there was a crime, was it a state crime, or was it a federal crime? If it was a federal crime, we would expect to be notified. That's the normal process by which a federal investigation would begin. We went further in this case, which was to call for evidence in this case to be submitted directly to the FBI or to the U.S. Attorney's office, on numerous occasions. The one set of documents that we got and the one set that was later deemed to be confidential, was what Tom McCabe sent from the BIAW. He was contacted. He had an opportunity to supplement it. He didn't do so. It was completely unpersuasive and ... not the quality of what you have here. And I think that's very troubling stuff. But let me ask you this - who in there would you send to jail? Who's going to jail for that?

Sharkansky: Election officials.

McKay: Which one? Name names.

Sharkansky: I could speculate ...

McKay: No, who do you want to go to prison? Right now. Don't speculate. You can't speculate about who gets handcuffed and sent to prison. Who is it? I don't want to put you on the spot, but just tell me, who it is? I mean where's the evidence of a crime? Who participated in it? Where are the allegations upon which we could investigate a crime?

Sharkansky: Well, clearly these ballots should not have been counted. There were 170 of these from unregistered voters.

McKay: Okay, and you think the person who counted them should go to jail? And you think you have proof of that, that they committed a crime?

Sharkansky: I was told by someone who worked on this election and was very close to what happened is that they were given specific instructions

McKay: To count illegal ballots?

Sharkansky: To count illegal ballots.

McKay: Did that person go to the FBI?

Sharkansky: This person is afraid of retribution. This came to me and I put it in the newspaper. That's a start.

McKay: Well, that may be the way that the public are going to look at the problems associated with that election. Again I think that's meritorious. But look, it's 129 votes ... the creepy stuff's going to come out. And it's creepy and it's bad and it should get fixed. And we should take advantage of that.

Sharkansky: What about non-citizen voters? Is that a federal crime if a non-citizen registers and votes?

McKay: Again, it could be ... really, for the federal government to do it there would have to be a conspiracy to organize illegal voters and they would have to be organized for the purpose of affecting a federal election. And you would have to have proof of those things before you could investigate it as a crime. You have to have an indication that that crime occurred.

Sharkansky: And this even made it into trial briefs. The judge didn't consider the non-citizen voters because by our state contest statute you cannot use a non-citizen voter, somebody who was not properly registered and not challenged before the election, even if they voted illegally, you cannot consider them an illegal vote for the purposes of overturning an election. But nevertheless, it did make it into trial briefs that we found evidence of two non-citizens who were registered and then voted and only after the election they wrote letters asking to have their registrations cancelled because they were non-citizens. Presumably they were advised by an immigration lawyer to clean that up.

McKay: From a federal stand point that would be absolutely viewed as a state problem, because there's a state law about whose ballot is going to be considered and in an election contest how to consider that. Purely a state question and actually, the prohibitions on the federal government of being involved in elections are pretty huge. People don't want the federal government... You didn't see FBI agents go flooding into south Florida in Bush v. Gore. They didn't seize the ballot boxes. You didn't have federal agents standing there with arms folding and 9mm pistols at their sides. That didn't happen. Part of the concern and I didn't even announce ... I felt during the recount it was important not to even mention a federal investigation. Technically it would only apply in the election itself and not the recount, but I was concerned that if the federal government weighed in that it was in an investigation ... it could influence the recount in some way, so we were very quiet about what we were doing, which was reviewing any evidence that came in and when the lawsuit over here started, to be involved in every single piece of paper that came in to look at it. I personally reviewed the transcripts to read [Republican contest trial attorney] Dale Foreman's comments about that and that's his issue, I'm not castigating Dale, but I'm saying he did say in his opening statements that he had proof of ballot stuffing. So on the theory that we may not have seen everything that Judge Bridges saw, and we concurred with him. He found on a civil standard that there was no evidence of fraud. He specifically rejected that and we agreed with him, on what we saw of the evidence and it was carefully monitored by us. So when I read Foreman's comments, I thought well maybe he has stuff, unlikely as this was, that he didn't try to put in at trial and we didn't really want to hear later that he had evidence that didn't go into the trial. We were really viewing the civil trial as an opportunity for any facts relating to potential criminal activity to come out. And I think that's a reasonable investigative choice to make. And that's what the FBI did as directed by my office. And closely coordinated like I said. I said five federal prosecutors, I was the fifth. But there was an assigned AUSA, supervisory AUSA, the criminal chief, the first assistant and myself and we convened regularly to look at what we were doing with the FBI, the acting special agent in charge, the supervisory agent, and the case agent, who I asked to be assigned to investigate the election.

[Modie asks about Foreman's statement on ballot stuffing]

McKay: He said he didn't really mean that. When we heard "ballot stuffing", we thought he was talking about a conspiracy, a crime to influence the election. He said that the upshot of his comments to the investigators was, what he meant was that the accounting analysis, he had expert witnesses put material in there, you could conclude that the reason there was a disparity, for example and I don't know if he gave this example, but in the number of registered voters vs. the number of ballots cast that was higher, that that could mean ballot stuffing. That's not what he said. What he said was that he would introduce evidence of ballot stuffing. So all we did was give him the opportunity to show us the evidence. Because we hadn't seen any. And you can't look at that analysis of the experts and conclude that there was a crime, if was ballot stuffing. And he, I think, went to great pains to tell us that he really didn't mean ballot stuffing as a crime.

[Modie asks about Foreman's evidence of fraud in general]

McKay: We felt that in following the trial that we heard everything that he wanted to say, except on the issue of ballot stuffing. We expected in his opening statement to see his evidence on ballot stuffing. That there'd be a witness or forensic evidence or something, which didn't happen. So when the trial ended we went to see him to say "where is this"? ... The main thing we wanted to make sure of was that he wasn't holding on to evidence that would be evidence of a crime.

Sharkansky: How do you define ballot stuffing?

McKay: It wasn't important how I defined it, but I think the common usage ... ballot stuffing to me is someone who has conspired to influence the election by creating ballots that are illegal ballots and submitting them.

Sharkansky: Here's a scenario. Let's say you're a clerk in the bowels of the elections office and you're going through provisional ballots. And you see this provisional ballot, it says they already cast an absentee, but I see they're from a Seattle precinct and it's an elderly woman, so I'll guess they probably voted for the Democrat so I'll stick it in the do-count pile and nobody will notice.

McKay: What do I think of that? I think that if that person wants to incriminate themselves and testify what they did, I'd be interested.

Sharkansky: And if they don't incriminate themselves?

McKay: How do you know they had the thought they must be a Democrat and that's why they put it over there?

Sharkansky: I don't.

McKay: Well that's the issue. Because in criminal law, we have to have criminal intent. And so, really a major demarcation here is criminal intent. And in election cases, the most common federal election cases ... of the kind that influence the outcome of an election, we're talking about criminal conspiracies. And I don't limit it to this, don't get me wrong, but what I'm talking about is a criminal conspiracy to impact the election, you have an informant who was going to say I was there. I sat in there. I was serving the coffee or I was part of it. I regret it. But you know, I was part of it and our objective was to make sure that a certain political party won that election no matter what. No matter how people voted, we were going to deliver the election to a person or party in this fashion. And those are the cases where people go to prison.

Sharkansky: Now I'm no lawyer, but isn't there something ... res ipso loquitur, where there's something that's so obviously wrong ...

McKay: No, that's civil law. Res ipso loquitur doesn't work in criminal law ... that means "the thing speaks for itself" There's powerful evidence of a crime, it could be circumstantial, it could be direct. Things don't speak for you, we have to show what your intent is.

Sharkansky: you mentioned "circumstantial", you mentioned "circumstantial" a couple of times in your talk. Wouldn't seeing circumstantial evidence that a certain number of ballots were illegally counted, shouldn't that at least prompt an investigator to say "well, maybe we should ask some of these election workers what happened? Why were these ..." and somebody might choose to say something in the course of the investigation.

McKay: Well you could, but in the first instance, you'd want to see a state or county investigation as to why that happened. And what normally would happen if the federal government became interested, we'd have the whole issue of federal election as part of that. Major issue. You have to overcome that before the federal government could become involved. But there are many explanations for what that person in the bowels of the office could have done. And what would typically happen to spark a federal investigation would be in the course of the state investigation, or the administrative review, somebody comes forward and says I threw them over there, because I was told by somebody that I had to identify likely Democratic voters and count them and exclude the Republican voters and that person ordered me to do that And now you're off on something that's worth looking at preliminarily, but you don't send federal agents down to interview an election worker who based on your review of records, counted two ballots twice. That could be a mistake, it could be incompetence, it could be a lot of other things, but we don't send gun-toting agents with federal IDs down to do that investigation. If in the course of the state investigation it's revealed, that somebody came forward with a conspiracy or someone came forward with proof that there was an effort to affect the outcome of the election, then you'd probably see some further action by the federal government. That's the distinction and it's an important one and it is confusing. It's not a clear thing. But from our standpoint, almost all of the ... it's not that all of the questions were answered but the idea that there would be this civil lawsuit where everyone had every incentive to bring forward all of the bad facts, sufficiently after the election, except I agree with you over the question of you getting the FOIA [sic] and the appropriate responses. But from the federal government's standpoint, the fact that somebody hasn't delivered records over under state law to you, is not my concern. That's a problem for the state, the counties, for you.

Sharkansky: But it wasn't only delivering public records to me. I think the county was deliberately sandbagging discovery requests and people weren't fully forthcoming in depositions.

McKay: And I'm not going to fight you on that. And there's a reason why I felt I didn't like what was happening in that election. We have to be careful about our language. As a citizen I could say, someone could say, "hey, the election got stolen from Dino Rossi" As a federal prosecutor, I don't use language like that, because that means there was a crime and I'm careful about besmirching people's reputations or implying that a focus of the FBI or the federal Department of Justice is going to be on a certain person, in which they are in jeopardy, so I'm very careful about that and even as the former prosecutor, always be careful about that. But as a citizen, and someone who watched it, I didn't like it and the politicians are going to characterize it and some don't like it that I'm pointing out that there wasn't evidence of a crime, of a federal crime. That's a fact, I'm not going to change that. It's a fact. I didn't like what happened at all. And through incompetence, through mistakes, whatever it is, I didn't like the way the election was handled. And now that I'm no longer in office, I can say it. I hope Dino Rossi runs for governor again, I hope he gets elected. And if he runs, I'm going to support him. I can do that now. I wouldn't ever do that while I was U.S. Attorney.

[other questions]

[31:28]: Mark Gardner: The evidence that Stefan has, it's troubling to me. Who should properly look at this type of evidence? Is it the county prosecutor? There are obviously individuals that may have willfully ...

McKay: I think that Norm Maleng looked really hard from the King County standpoint. I think he looked really hard at it. He took a few cases. You know, his office, he has a very professional ... his criminal chief, Mark Larson. These guys are pros and if there was evidence of a crime that needed to be brought, they'd bring it. And I think they did bring a couple of cases, but no one's found, to my knowledge, no one's come forward and we don't have evidence of a criminal conspiracy in the 2004 governor's election.

Gardner: at the county elections office you don't, but there might have been individuals, activists out there, who might have thought "hey, I could throw a couple more votes". Is that a crime?

McKay: Yeah, but you know the problem is, if at the state level, Norm Maleng, he pushed hard and worked with the Sheriff. You have to have investigators. One of the things in my mind and I ask myself, do you want, do I know enough to have a squad of FBI agents doing what Stefan's been doing? And the answer to that, in all cases, is no. And what I didn't want was 8 FBI agents, or 5 FBI agents sitting around, looking through, fishing through documents, trying to find out if a crime occurred. That's not how we do business. It is investigated preliminarily somewhere else or someone comes forward and says I sat in the room, I heard the conversation. And then you can do it. Otherwise, 5 FBI agents who should be prosecuting bank robberies and potential international crimes and terrorism are sifting through documents. So in the first instance, it's those who are responsible for administering the state election, whether the state or the county and they need to get in and look at it. And the law, which is in the opinion of a lot of people, less than perfect in a lot of different ways associated with elections, in my opinion, all state laws, probably didn't serve us very well. You have a kindred spirit in all of that. That is what I think. I hope you hear my point, which is there's a really important line that gets drawn and it takes people in office to say hold on a second you can say "illegal". It means something in your context. In my world it means handcuffs go on, you get arrested and someone's going to prison. And we don't send squads of agents out to find crimes like that. We investigate where we see real crime. And we don't have enough resources to go out and do that thing. So to me, the analysis should have been done. I was very comfortable with the idea that a serious full-blown trial was going to go forward here in Wenatchee and that was worth watching closely from Seattle, which we did.

Gardner: If Stefan's source had come to you or the FBI ...

McKay: Different story.

Gardner: ... and said what Stefan says was said to him, that might have ...

McKay: I think investigators would have a lot more questions to ask that person, and they would. And they'd be interested in knowing was this an isolated incident, because to prove it up on one or two ballots would be difficult, but if it started to look like a real conspiracy in there, that would have been of real interest to the FBI. But I can tell you right now. No one came forward with any evidence like that to the Bureau.

Gardner: If that person came forward now?

McKay: There is no bar against a criminal case proceeding if there was a crime. And so, if someone has that kind of information, take it to the FBI. Special Agent Joe Quinn is still the case agent. There is still a case on this election.

Sharkansky: So if I were to meet with Special Agent Quinn and show him my CD full of stuff. Here if you want to take it...

McKay: I don't want it. Believe me man, I don't want it. I can't do anything with it anyway.

Sharkansky: Just for your own edification.

McKay: No, thank you. I appreciate it. But it's not my job anymore. I'm going to watch it like a citizen now, but no, it doesn't interest me enough, but I appreciate your work and I hope someone will look at it because I think it's important. If somebody comes forward ... I think you're at the place where I was, you glean this stuff, I was gleaning, there's no doubt in my mind there were a lot of stinky, nasty things about that election. And it was my job in the end, which I gladly accepted, to decide whether there was evidence of a crime and there wasn't. There may be, and if there is, move it forward, but we had all the things we needed in place to make a reasonable decision on that, including investigation by the FBI, formation of task forces, review of information, interview of the one person who said he had evidence of a crime, after a civil case which was like a dream, if you're trying to investigate something in which everything should have come out. And I'm not saying that's perfect, but that's a dream when you don't have an extra hundred FBI agents to turn loose to try to find a crime, which we don't have. So I'm very confident of what I did and the decision that I made. I don't regret it. I think it's absolutely right and I don't rule out that there are other facts out there that could yet be developed. And I've said that within our circle while I was U.S. Attorney. This case isn't over. And I'm not going to say publicly anything that would say "there was no crime committed". And you've never heard me say that. What I said was, "we didn't have evidence of a crime".

Sharkansky: I've talked to so many people to bring this forward and again some of this stuff I've just found out about in the last couple of months, because it's taken me that long to get responsive records.

McKay: I congratulate you, because this is stuff that should be done. I really do.

Sharkansky: And I hope somebody at the elections office will ... and I don't trust the current leadership, but somebody should have been doing a review of the processes that allowed this kind of break down to happen ...

McKay: I totally agree with you.

Sharkansky: ... whether it was misbehavior or simple negligence.

McKay: No question about it. In my opinion, no question about it. As a federal official, I could never say that, but I'm telling you now, I don't have any doubt that you're right about that.

Sharkansky: But if I were to try to see if in the new information that's come out since the most active part of the investigation you led two years ago, who would I bring this to?

McKay: Bring it to the U.S. Attorney, bring it to Jeff Sullivan. Or bring it to the FBI. I think Joe Quinn's still there. Special Agent. And Joe, by the way, is really one of the best FBI agents there. And I asked for Joe Quinn on this case, because he has a very analytical mind and a document case is something that he thrives on and this is what this case could well be. Joe's a tremendous special agent. The best guy they had and he was the case agent. I think he still is.

Sharkansky: But politically, is it too late?

McKay: No. There's no politics in there. If what you have in there, and again, I'm not looking at it, but if what you have in there includes proof of a conspiracy, or no other conclusion but that somebody was committing a crime, then they're going to look at that. If that's what you got. If you don't, I'm not going to tell you what to do, but I would be pursuing this, and it should be and I'm assuming the state has a great interest in trying to ensure that their elections work. And I'm speaking about the state as a non-entity that's supposed to pursue the common good, right?

Sharkansky: Ideally.

McKay: That is what's supposed to happen. But it takes people pushing to get government to do the right thing. That's always sadly the case in my opinion. I do commend you for it. I really do.