Clay and Buck Break Down the Mar-a-Lago Affidavit

BUCK: We’ve got the Mar-a-Lago affidavit. Clay and I are both staring at it right now. It just got released, and it is very thoroughly blacked out. It is 38 pages in length. And, Clay, let’s just work through this, you and me together, for everybody across the country in some phases here because we are able to do a quick scan of it. And then there are also at the end seem to be correspondence between Trump — looks like Trump lawyers — and the National Archives on this or the government on this. Here’s what we’ve got. Introduction and agent background.

This is the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida, and it says, “Affidavit in support of an application under Rule 41 for a warrant to search and seize. The government’s conducting a criminal investigation concerning the improper removal and storage of classified information in unauthorized spaces as well as the unlawful concealment or removal of government records. The investigation began as a result of a referral the United States National Archives and Records Administration sent to the DOJ on February 9, 2022.

“This referral stated that on January 18, 2022, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act, NARA, National Archives and Records Administration,” I guess we’ll just call it NARA, “received from the office of former president Trump 15 boxes of records which had been transported to Mar-a-Lago — the premises is a residence and club — and then after an initial review of the NARA referral, the FBI opened a criminal investigation to, among other things, determine how the documents with classification markings and records were removed from the White House and came to be stored at the premises,” Mar-a-Lago in this case.

Okay, Clay. Let’s stop. We’ll go back into this, right? So, there’s the national security redaction component of this, which I can speak to you from experience, and there’s the legal bringing an affidavit forward, justifying the warrant. So we can handle different pieces — or bring two pieces together here onto this. But I think the biggest takeaway for everybody is, this really does seem to just be about classification and documents and the storage thereof.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: And there was an ongoing legal process about what should be returned and what should be kept in former presidential custody here. What are you seeing?

CLAY: Yeah. So, it’s 38 pages, the affidavit, which I think is significant. It’s not like we’re dealing with a three-page affidavit.

BUCK: It could be very… I thought it was gonna be pretty short, but it’s not.

CLAY: Yeah. 38 pages. I went through all 38 pages rapidly, just scanning. About half, I would say, maybe 60% of this overall document is redacted, and as I was reading the unredacted aspects of this, I think the most significant fact is much of this has already been reported because of Department of Justice leaks to the New York Times and the Washington Post. So I would say here, this is, based on what we can see — again, there could be redacted elements here — almost exclusively an investigation into documents that ended up at Mar-a-Lago that the federal government believes should be in possession of the National Archives.

And let me just say this, Buck. CNN had a story yesterday. I don’t know if you saw it, but they actually specifically referenced the Kim Jong-un letters that the National Archives was requesting. And they said, “Can you please FedEx these to us?” This from the National Archives. You are an expert in documents, classified, Top Secret, all these things. Does it feel like this is extremely important if the National Archives would allow Donald Trump to FedEx these documents?

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: Could you FedEx documents?

BUCK: That’s an excellent point. And depending on the level of sensitivity of documents — and I dealt with law enforcement sensitive documents too, which is different —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — and there’s a whole —

CLAY: You would get in trouble if you were FedExing regularly, like, classified top secret documents of incredible importance to the government?

BUCK: I sat in the cafeteria once at Langley with a female colleague who could not stop crying because she thought she had misplaced — inside of Langley — a Top Secret document.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: So, yes, you would not… Turns out she actually found it. It was like stuck behind a page in office, but she was completely freaking out. She’s like, “Did I leave it in my car?” You know, she was absolutely apoplectic, freaking out about it. And the notion that you would… Let’s just say, here’s the thing. They could classify… Classification has to do with the sensitivity of the information, but also generally it’s really about how the information was acquired, a lot of the time.

So you can have, because of the acquisition of information, the actual data gathered could be, you know, what some foreign terrorist had for lunch that morning, but how we got the information, meaning does somebody have his phone tapped? Did somebody, you know, break into his email? Whatever. How you get the information can be about the sensitivity of it. But also, there are disputes even within, you know, if a president’s having a conversation with a head of state, is this information that is necessarily sensitive, or is this information that the parking lot could then decide unilaterally to say, “Look, this is what we talked about,” right?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: If he sits with Kim Jong-un, you might have somebody in that room who says, “Well, I’m gonna mark this top secret because it deals with the sensitivity of, you know, red lines around nuclear weapon use.” And it might have been Trump saying, “If you nuke us or try to, we’re gonna obliterate you.” Like, that’s not something that’s a surprise to anybody, but you might have that marked at a very high classification level. If the president then walked out, Clay, and said, “This is what I said to Kim Jong-un, “ that’s his prerogative as the commander-in-chief, right? So to your point about FedEx, if it were super-secret stuff, if it were like the schematics for the F-22 Raptor, which is the most amazing plane platform really in the world, fighter plane, you would not FedEx that. No, you would not.

CLAY: Would the National Archives even get super-secret, Top Secret government documents?

BUCK: Honestly, I thought the National Archives… Here’s the thing.

CLAY: That’s what I’m saying. Why would you want it?

BUCK: If this stuff was so sensitive it should be in the custody of the originating agency.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: So it should be with the NSA. It should be with the CIA, the DOD.

CLAY: Just give you an example, if we had, for instance, an assassination plan that the CIA had tried to put in place with Soleimani, right, when he’s killed in Iran, do we want the National Archives to have those documents, wouldn’t that information about how that raid was conducted…? I’m just asking that question for everybody. Let me just also hit this, Buck, because the probable cause I think goes into the essence of this. I’m reading from page 7 and 8. This really does appear to be entirely a dispute between the National Archives and Donald Trump.

BUCK: Yes, and the National Archives is… I just want to be clear. I Googled this. And this is from Archives.gov. As I said, the joke was always it was internal Archives, not the National Archives, but if someone got sent to the Archives, it was like this person is… It’s like when Milton Waddams gets sent down to the office in the basement.

CLAY: Office Space, yeah.

BUCK: It’s like you don’t want to get sent to Archives. The Archives and Records Administration is “an independent federal agency that preserves and shares with the public records that trace the story of our nation, government, and the American people.” So that, to me, leaves two things as possibilities. You’re either keeping it at the Archives — I’m just reading the mission statement — ’cause I never thought of the National Archives once when I was in the CIA. Like, this is not something we were talking about or thinking about.

CLAY: Do you think of it as like a super secure place? Because I don’t.

BUCK: No. Absolutely not. Unless Nicolas Cage is dangling from the ceiling trying to steal Constitution.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: So the National Archives is supposed to share information with the public, or they’re supposed to preserve information. But why would you have the National Archives preserving something that is super sensitive? That doesn’t make any sense.

CLAY: That’s my question in general.

BUCK: Why? If this was a danger to fall into mean hands, wouldn’t it be kept with the originating agency and not with NARA? The National Archives doesn’t know the full sensitivity. The National Archives doesn’t know really what the CIA —

CLAY: This is my question for you from the get-go. And when I read that CNN story and they were like, “Hey, just FedEx it to us,” and again I’ll hit you with the probable cause. CNN reported that the National Archives told the Trump people, “Hey, just share the tracking number with us and send it via FedEx,” and I’m thinking to myself, no slight upon FedEx. But if it’s really that important to national security, would the National Archives be, like, “Hey, just go ahead and put it in the FedEx box”?

But I’ll read this probable cause document — page 7 and 8, give you a little bit all of sense; it’s not redacted, obviously — when we come back. But just in the back of your mind I want you to think, does National Archives trust FedEx enough that the documents are so secure there that they can’t… They’re worried about it falling into enemy hands and there’s nobody in spy agencies elsewhere who could track a FedEx package? I just… This doesn’t ring true to me.

BUCK: Doesn’t make any sense. Another question. I’ll just put this out there; we can come back to it later . Why did Trump…? Assuming he wanted these boxes or anyone around him wanted these books, why? ‘Cause I do have people that have raised with me the possibility that he wanted custody of some documents relating to Russia collusion and the lies therein?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And he wanted that and maybe wanted his people to be able to go through it so that when he runs again, he can actually be the one who would have custody of documents to say, “We can prove it; we know that they colluded”? Anyway, that’s a theory.

CLAY: No, I think that’s a fantastic question.

BUCK: It’s a theory. It is not proven. But I do think, why do you want these boxes? I didn’t want to keep anything when I felt the government.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: Probably 60% of this affidavit justifying the raid on Mar-a-Lago is redacted. So we can’t analyze or discuss that in any kind of significant way. But under the probable cause section, this is a little bit of detail, Buck. I’m gonna read from it. On February 9, 2022, they say that they got 15 boxes of this material from Trump at Mar-a-Lago, and it says, and I’m reading directly from it, “A preliminary review of the 15 boxes indicated that they contained newspapers, magazines, printed news articles, photos, miscellaneous print-outs, notes, presidential correspondence, personal and post-presidential records, and ‘a lot of classified records.’

“Of most significant concern was that highly classified records were unfoldered, intermixed with other records, and otherwise unproperly (sic) identified.” The archivist of the United States… Again, this is the National Archives said that they were upset about what they had found in those documents and wanted to have access to other of those documents. And then there’s tons of things redacted which presumably is a recitation in some way of what those documents that were classified might have contained. But again, Buck, based on everything that is in this 38-page filing that we can read, it appears this is entirely a dispute between Trump and the Archives.

Now, it’s also possible that this was used as a mechanism by which to enter Mar-a-Lago and they actually were serving for other things as a part of this search, right? We know they took, for instance, the passports which they weren’t entitled to. Maybe there are some other documents that they were in an effort trying to obtain. But to me, the idea that you would break 240 years of precedence of not doing an FBI raid or a criminal raid on the former president for this is, frankly, staggering to me.

BUCK: There’s also the problem here of the “trust us” line with all of this.

CLAY: Yeah. Certainly.

BUCK: Meaning the FBI, the DOJ are telling us all, “Look, the stuff that they have is super sensitive in a real way. Trump didn’t — even though he was president and commander-in-chief when he took the documents, or when he set them aside — have the right to declassify them,” which that’s also a point of contention, and ’cause I do know… I mean, we use talk about in the CIA, presidents, whether by custom, whatever else you want to say, we called it “real time declassification,” which is when a president walks out and says, “Yeah. That drone strike that just happened? We called for that,” at a press conference or whatever.

That, you know, could have been marked the top secret until that moment and then when the president comes out and says it, no one’s… He’s the commander-in-chief. It’s executive branch information. He has that prerogative. And they’re asking us to trust them that this isn’t overclassified information, meaning stuff that is marked sensitive but really isn’t. I mean, where I used to get my cheeseburger at lunch was classified in the CIA. I mean, they just… They would overclassify all the time. Is it stuff that actually we would read and say, “Uh, you really shouldn’t have that at Mar-a-Lago under the circumstances”?

I find that very hard to believe, and they’re saying, “You’ve gotta believe us,” because we can’t see. All the blacked-out stuff in the affidavit — and there’s a lot of it — is what this actually pertains to, what kind of information we’re talking about here. If it’s stuff about Trump’s state of mind or his conversation on a phone line with a head of state, probably not a big deal at all. If it’s, for some reason, the crown jewels of the intelligence community, that would be not so good. They’re telling us basically that’s what we’re looking at here, and I don’t believe ’em.

CLAY: I just am thinking here, it is staggering. We talk all the time about threats to democracy because that’s the number one thing that Democrats want to make the entire Trump regime and in fact the justification for why Biden’s in control now. How is raiding your top political opponent and the guy that you just ran against for the first time in American history not the largest direct threat to democracy that any of us have seen in our lives, Buck?

BUCK: Absolutely. A hundred percent agree. I would also throw into the mix here, Clay, if this is all true — they found the documents, they found these things — charge ’em. Let’s see what you’ve got, right? Like, they’re forcing themselves into a corner here because they’re making this claim, they’re going to this extent. So how can they not charge him? Right? I mean, it’s like, where does this leave us? It’s either they say this is so important; so sensitive they had to do what you said, which is very destabilizing, or it’s not. So what are they gonna do?

CLAY: Let’s talk more about this at the top of the next hour because I think that there are kind of painted into a corner —

BUCK: Yes!

CLAY: — to your point, and I don’t know how you get out of that corner, which is why I’m so stunned Merrick Garland did this.