Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy is urging partisans on both sides to calm down and lower expectations of what Attorney General Bill Barr is likely to find about how the 2016 probe of the Trump campaign got started and says Americans might be shocked at how tough it is to hold Julian Assange accountable for his alleged crimes against the U.S.

This week, Attorney General Barr told House and Senate lawmakers he did plan to investigate how government officials in the intelligence and law enforcement decided to launch a probe into possible conspiring between Russia and the Trump campaign during the 2016 elections.

Barr also admitted the government was "spying" on the Trump campaign, an assertion that was already well-established but Democrats still howled that Barr is simply doing Trump's bidding.

In the podcast, McCarthy explains what the Barr investigation is likely to include, why Americans should neither assume that the attorney general is executing a political vendetta on behalf of Trump nor that lots of figures who investigated Trump will wind up facing charges.

However, McCarthy is scratching his head over how many Trump critics are apoplectic about Barr suggesting that the government was "spying" on the Trump campaign when we've known about electronic surveillance and human intelligence efforts for months. He says Democrats are being "hysterical" in response to Barr's testimony.

"As a prosecutor for twenty years, in my cases the government informants were always called spies by the defense lawyers and we always called them informants. They always called them snitches, and we always called them witnesses for the state. Nobody in the jury every fainted when any of these terms were used," said McCarthy.

He also explains why despite the big headlines over Julian Assange's arrest, that the Wikileaks boss is unlikely to face much prison time in the U.S. - and may never see a courtroom in this country at all.

Listen to the full podcast here.