Former federal prosecutor and Fox News contributor Andrew McCarthy explained why he believes that the Justice Department's now-dropped prosecution of General Michael Flynn was part of a larger strategy to "hamstring" President Trump and make him a "one-term president."

"People in the FBI, the people in the bureaucracy, the people in the Obama administration never thought that Donald Trump would win the election in November... Once Trump won -- the problem that they had was manifold," said McCarthy, in a wide-ranging conversation on Fox Nation's "Deep Dive" on Monday.

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"In 10 weeks, he was going to be sworn-in as president, which meant that at that point he would have access to all of the intelligence files of the government," McCarthy continued, arguing that Trump's critics then had two main goals.

One, they sought to prevent Trump from learning about "Operation Crossfire Hurricane," the FBI code name for the counterintelligence operation launched in July 2016 to investigate Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Two, they wanted to impede his administration.

"The other thing was they hoped to keep his administration as hamstrung and as short as possible," said McCarthy. "If they could impeach him, they would impeach him. But certainly, they wanted to make him a one-term president."

McCarthy contended that the DOJ and the bureaucracy sought to continue the investigation into the Trump administration until they could make a case against him.  But, according to McCarthy, they had to remove any new administration officials, who may stand in their way.

"Probably the biggest obstacles that they had were that Trump had people who were trusted Trump people in the national security pipeline," said McCarthy. "One was Mike Flynn, who was a sophisticated intelligence actor, former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency. The other was Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department."

"They would have been in a position to know about and to stop the continuation of the investigation and to find out what had been done up to that point. So I think they both needed to be marginalized, at the very least pushed out of the Russia stuff, if not removed from office and in Flynn's case, ultimately prosecuted."

In a November interview on Fox Nation's "Maria Bartiromo's Insiders," Flynn's attorney Sidney Powell made similar claims, saying that the Obama administration may have been out to get her client because he was investigating the so-called "Deep State."

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"So who is the mastermind of all of this?" Bartiromo asked, "On the government side -- was it the CIA? Was it John Brennan? How far up the ladder does this go in the Obama administration?"

"It couldn't have been done without Susan Rice," said Powell. "And I don't think it was done without the knowledge of President Obama. It was probably run most by Mr. Brennan and Clapper. And, of course, Comey and McCabe had their prominent roles in it, along with the assorted agents that were involved. But, yes, it was a very high ranking group of people."

To watch all of this episode of "Deep Dive" and "Maria Bartiromo's Insiders" go to Fox Nation and sign up today.

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