Does This Banana Republic, Third World Bullcrap Strengthen Trump?
CLAY: Buck, I gotta say this might be the most unprecedented, blockbuster day show that we have done since we took over, over a year ago now. The raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, where you and I were with the president in February doing a live show — we obviously were with the president a couple of weeks ago at Bedminster, another of his properties. And we laid out sort of our thought processes, the legal analysis of the warrant itself, which I would say needs to be released.
The analysis of legal scholars like Dershowitz and the top guy at CNN, even Andrew Cuomo agrees with us that this is an unprecedented attack. And I think what it lays bare is we’ve never seen a situation like this, where a former presidential candidate, who is preparing to run again as president, has the FBI raid his home with the pretense out there that his top opponent, the man who he just ran against, might try and charge him with criminal violations to keep him from running for president again.
This is banana republic, Third World-level intrigue. And so, Buck, two things come to mind here — and I think I know the answer to this for you — do you trust the FBI to conduct a fair and impartial investigation of Donald Trump? I do not. And, Buck, I hate to say this. As a lawyer, I worry, based on the failures of the previous warrant, whether this warrant is legitimate.
I also don’t trust the FBI now to even handle whatever evidence they are seizing. And I hate to say that. I hate to be in a position where I have so much distrust for the FBI’s fairness as it pertains to an investigation like this. But after what we saw to occur in Russia collusion, Buck, how can anyone out there feel like the FBI is anything other than a stooge organization at the beck and call of the Democrat Party?
BUCK: The people involved at the very highest level of a massive soft coup attempt against the duly elected president, President Donald Trump — the people at the FBI, at the CIA, in the intelligence community more broadly, at the DOJ — they were rewarded, in fact. Some of them received minor slaps on the wrist, but those were undone and then they got book deals, CNN contributorships, MSNBC gigs.
They were treated by their side as heroes. And the right never really got any justice or satisfaction for that effort against Trump. If anything, they were largely but not entirely successful because it was the primary means of opposition against Donald Trump during his four years — until covid came along. The thing that they were digging in on more than anything else to oppose Trump was the complete and utter lie of Russia collusion.
And so why would anyone expect that the system has changed on radically in the interim? I’ve seen a lot of people say as if this is some great burn, “Donald Trump appointed Christopher Wray, so that means that this has to be fine or it’s Trump’s fault or whatever.” George Washington appointed Benedict Arnold to be a senior military governor at one point before he took over West Point, right?
You work with the bureaucracy that you have. Imagine if Trump had tried to upon the appoint some — I don’t know — radio host who supported him as the head of the FBI, right, without any background or experience. They would have completely lost their mind. Of course, he’s gonna bring somebody in from within the FBI banks ranks. Now, clearly Wray was a mistake. I’m not disagree with that assessment. But to put that on Trump and to say this is somehow his fault because he should have known better than to elevate Wray, okay, well, who?
CLAY: Yeah, you made the point that Trump’s biggest failure in your mind. We’re not uniformly refusing to ever criticize anybody — everybody’s worthy of criticism — was some of the choices that he made.
BUCK: 100 percent.
CLAY: It was his biggest flaw. I think he would acknowledge —
BUCK: Even he admits that, ’cause he doesn’t come from that system. He doesn’t know, right? When I sat down with Trump in the spring of 2020, parts of the conversation were for the record, parts of it were off the record. Some of the off-the-record was, “You know this person, you know that person from within the system?” And I shared my thoughts with him about people from within the system.
Because he’s not actually at that level where he’s gonna have had either not just experience personally but even know the people who know who the political hacks are inside these institutions. And so, Christopher Wray is an institutionalist for the FBI at best. And they go along… These guys, they go along with whoever is calling the shots from the very top. It’s very rare to have somebody from within that system who is going to stand up to a White House that is full of activists and partisans.
CLAY: Okay. Neither one of us trust the FBI.
BUCK: Nope.
CLAY: I gotta a poll question up now. You can go vote in it. Not surprisingly, 91% right now of you do not trust the FBI to fairly and impartially conduct an investigation of Donald Trump. I think that’s the accurate take. Does this actually strengthen Trump? Let’s play it forward. Immediate reaction, “Oh, my goodness. FBI is investigating Trump!” Buck, the immediate outpouring of people who are saying, “This confirms everything that Trump has been saying, that the deep state is allied against him, that they are terrified of the disruptive influence he has on our federal government, that this is why he needs to be president in the first place,” the political calculus on this — and we’re gonna talk with Jim Jordan some at the end of this hour.
BUCK: We’ll talk with Andy McCarthy about the procedural, legal part of this in a few minutes.
CLAY: Yeah, which I’m fascinated. And Andy McCarthy, for people who are not familiar, was Southern District of New York.
BUCK: He was a assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York for over 20 years and prosecuted the blind sheikh in the first World Trade Center bombing. The guy knows federal law.
CLAY: So when you… If you’re out there right now and you’re like, “Hey, I want to really hear from an expert,” you are going to love that conversation that we’re gonna have in about 14-15 minutes here, okay? But I think this strengthens Trump. Because I’ll be honest with you. I would love the opportunity if Trump were on the ballot in the midterm to be able to go into a voting booth and push the button for Donald Trump right now. I was gonna do it anyway if he’s on the ballot as the Republican nominee.
But I think there’s an eagerness. This crystallizes for many people out there who support Trump, and for those of you — and I know many of you out there are — in the camp of, “Trump was too much of a bull in a china shop for me. He created too much controversy and tempest and turmoil. He’s not my top choice.” I think even those people…
Those people, I think, Buck, are even rallying around Trump today because they’re standing up for the principle of, a former president of the United States shouldn’t have FBI agents storming the gates of his private residence and trying to throw him in cuffs in front of a federal judge with charges prosecuted against him by his top political rival. That’s just wrong, period.
BUCK: And I think you can pull together a few data points here. So they just had a raid. Notice how they’re trying to control language? Have you seen this?
CLAY: They’re saying it’s not a raid.
BUCK: A lot of Democrats say, “It’s not a raid.”
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: That is the terminology we use for a sudden surprise FBI descending on a private home and seizing stuff.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: You know what happens if you tell them “no”? They kick in your door.
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: You know what happens if you get in their way? They throw you face first on the ground and handcuff you. So, yes, it is a raid. If this was going after —
CLAY: If this happened to one of us, Buck — if we came on and we’re like, “Hey, you know what happened? In the middle of the morning in predawn, FBI was backing on my door,” would it be like, “Oh, it wasn’t a raid?” “No, they have a warrant.”
BUCK: It was “a duly constituted investigative act signed off on by a federal judge.”
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: They’re playing these games. We will all know… It was obviously a raid. But so they raid a former president. The same week that we’re being told they’re hiring 70,000, give or take, IRS agents with this new bill they passed?
CLAY: 87,000 IRS agents. Football stadium full.
BUCK: And this comes after we’ve seen they have a total willingness — the exact same people who are cheering the raid on Trump, the exact same people who are either voting for or supporting the hiring of 87,000 IRS agents are also entirely pleased with the decisions made during the pandemic to arrest people for refusing to wear a mask in a restaurant or to arrest people for having a church service because the government said so. My friends, the Democrat Party is authoritarian at its core. This is who they are, and until we all understand that, we won’t be able to really face up to the challenge ahead.
CLAY: Yeah. I think that’s totally well said, and I don’t think we can understate how radical and unprecedented this move really is, because it’s very rare. Buck, you and I are both history nerds. It’s very rare you can point to something and say, “This has never happened.”
BUCK: Yeah, truly unprecedented.
CLAY: It’s not hyperbolic bombshell trying to get news coverage. Credit to Fox News who didn’t even go to commercial for, like, five hours after this happened. You were on. I was on. That’s how… That doesn’t happen very often, right, that there’s… But this has truly never occurred in our nation’s history. And the fact that Christopher Wray and the fact that Merrick Garland and the fact that Joe Biden…? None of them are talking about this. The fact that we still don’t know what was in the warrant because it was sealed? his is a real threat to our representative democracy. And you said in the first hour, and I think it bears repeating: The people who tell you all the time that our democracy is under siege and under threat just got a warrant to investigate the private residence of the number one political rival of their party.
BUCK: Right. It’s not even… To call it a former president really understates it.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: The likely future president, folks. Let’s be honest about this. Not only the likely candidate, likely to defeat Joe Biden if he ran against him again, given the trajectory of the Biden administration. So, this isn’t even comparable, in a sense, to Nixon and Ford ’cause Nixon’s done, right? This is a whole other thing.
CLAY: Yep.
BUCK: This is someone stepping in and saying, “You won’t be able to run again.” And, Clay, one question that you and I keep going back and forth on. Maybe we can address this a little bit and then bring it to Andy’s attention, Andy McCarthy, when he joins us in a little bit here. What could possibly…? For a rationale, fair-minded person, who could they possibly either be looking for or have found that would justify this kind of an act?
CLAY: Yeah.
BUCK: If they think it’s — and, by the way, they do have Trump derangement syndrome. So, my theory of the case so far is they’re gonna say, “Well, he had some documents that the National Archives claims are secret and necessary to be part of the National Archives record, and the law is the law.” I think we’re gonna get some total malarkey like that from these guys. But what even theoretically would be sufficient for them? He gave them 15 boxes of records at the beginning of the year. Why couldn’t they just ask for another 15 boxes of the records?
CLAY: It’s the exact question we had privately when we talked as soon as this news broke. I said, “Who signed the warrant and what could they possibly be looking for?” Those are my first two thoughts as soon as this news broke. We’ll talk about that more and we’ll get that sense maybe from Andy McCarthy and certainly from Jim Jordan about where we’re going. And then Senator Tim Scott, already made some interesting comments about this investigation. A lot of Republican senators — let’s be fair — are not very outspoken. Has Mitch McConnell said a word about this? Not that I’ve seen. A lot of them laying back and letting the FBI go to town.
