Garland Ices Out Clay and Buck, Delays Press Conference

CLAY: We are still waiting for Merrick Garland’s press conference, which was initially scheduled for 2:30 Eastern. Coming up on 20 minutes late for that. It’s possible that we’re not going to get any of that for you, in which case we’d encourage to you keep hanging on for Sean Hannity coming up next on many of these same stations, as we wait to see what, if any, information of any consequence Merrick Garland is going to give us. We think that it’ll be mostly bland. Will he take any questions? I guess the answer would be, no. Mostly bland, blaming people for being angry about this raid. But maybe we’ll actually get some form of news.

BUCK: I think you’re gonna get boilerplate about how, “We do our job without fear or favor, and the Justice Department operates without political consideration,” the usual smarmy, Merrick Garland razzle-dazzle, you know, the usual two-step. I think that’s what you’re gonna see. But they know that this whole, “Oh, yeah, they just raided a president’s home on Monday,” that’s not gonna fly. You don’t just do that and then act like it’s business as usual.

Really…. Miranda gave us some really interesting context, Miranda Devine just now, about how they went when it’s so low-key. You know, in terms of time of the year, Mar-a-Lago is basically shut down now, Trump is up at Bedminster where we were hanging out a couple weeks ago. And so did they really think that they could sneak this one under the radar? Was that really the plan?

CLAY: That’s what we started talking about yesterday, Buck, because, remember, Trump was the one who broke the news that this raid has happened.

BUCK: But there’s basically nobody there. I was thinking… I forgot. Mar-a-Lago, Clay, usually has members everywhere, you know, some of our buddies are hanging out down there. I mean, last time I was there I was high-fiving Mike Lindell. Like, you see people, right? Nobody was there this time.

CLAY: Yeah. And the fact that they made the Trump attorney stand out — reportedly, had to stand out — in the parking lot as this nine-hour-plus raid was going on, I just… I feel like somehow, some way, the bureaucracy overrated how quiet this was gonna be, or in some way didn’t recognize how significant what they were undertaking was. And that’s why the most interesting part of this, to me, could be if Merrick Garland walls himself off and said, “I’m not…

“I wasn’t involved in the decision. The FBI made the choice, that they had evidence that they needed to procure.” That would be interesting because it would suggest that this was such a mess, such a mushroom cloud that people are trying to start to scurry to avoid being caught up in this explosion. I don’t know that we’ll get that. And again, I find it hard to believe that Joe Biden didn’t know, that Merrick Garland didn’t know. Certainly, we know Christopher Wray had to know.

BUCK: So then who made the decision? Are we gonna believe that a relatively low-level, like head of the Palm Beach FBI? I guess would be in West Palm, wherever it is, field office, Palm Beach County FBI?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: No way.

CLAY: It seems highly unlikely that somebody that far down the food chain could decide to do this. Again, we’ve talked about this. You would have to have high-level contact with the Secret Service in order for this raid to take place.

BUCK: Yeah, and that’s not even —

CLAY: I can’t imagine incidents occurring at the highest possible level.

BUCK: And that’s not even reassuring in its own way because, as I said, this is so politically volatile for the whole country, that it should be… You should have the attorney general looking at this and saying, “Guys, if we’re going in there, there has to be an ironclad reason. It has to be 100% by the book and it has to be explainable to the American people.”

CLAY: It can’t just be, “We’re gonna try to get Donald Trump over classified documents that are still in boxes inside of Mar-a-Lago,” because, again, there’s no way that the intent, if it’s random boxes… I mean, I used as an example if you’ve ever moved, how often does it take forever to even know where anything is packed? Trump was not involved in packing the boxes that were packed up to leave the White House.

BUCK: Yeah, and if anything, they should just have a different process than for the exit of a former president to make sure that there’s somebody body to identify them. I’m sure they’ve already looked over this stuff. You know, about this not something that has any… The boxes of possibly classified documents for obvious reasons have no criminal implications for Donald Trump himself, as a matter of holding and holding national defense information in violation of the Espionage Act. If that’s their game here — and, Clay, I don’t know, maybe it is. If that’s their game here, the DOJ’s credibility’s in for a world of hurt beyond what we’ve already seen. People are gonna say, “You just can’t trust these clowns at all with anything.”

CLAY: And think about how far we would have fallen down the criminality floodplain here. We would have gone from, “This guy had direct interaction with Vladimir Putin, who stage a default coup to allow himself to be elected president,” to, “Well, some of the boxes that had random paraphernalia from inside of the White House were classified and shouldn’t have been still locked up in a closet at Mar-a-Lago.” It’s a pretty big difference in criminality.

BUCK: The government, as a matter of course — and I know this firsthand from being a classification originator — massively overclassifies tons of stuff. They are constantly marking things in a way that goes way beyond whether there’s actually any sensitivity, you know, ’cause a lot of it becomes a judgment call. “Does this create sensitive issues for government relations? Classified!” You know, they’ll mark that “confidential” or they’ll mark that “secret.”

Well, what does that even mean, right? Obviously, super sensitive information about the capabilities of, like, the F-22 Raptor? Yeah, that’s classified; so, we don’t want our enemies to know what our planes could do, for example. But, you know, Trump sitting down and having a meeting with a foreign head of state where everyone knows what was said in the room or where everyone took photos together, and there is some handwritten note from Trump about it? They might say that’s classified, but that’s over-classification, is the point. So that happens all the time.

CLAY: Not only that, remember we had Kash Patel on in May.

BUCK: Yeah, and he’s a classification authority. Trump himself. Not to interrupt.

CLAY: Right. So, yeah, there’s the possibility, the defense, one, could be that the warrant’s not valid because of judge-related issues because potentially the warrant was not specific enough; the warrant shouldn’t have been granted, as we’ve seen happened in Russia collusion. But also, there’s a pretty strong defense here that Trump didn’t know about the documents that were involved and also that some of these may have already been declassified.

That’s what Kash Patel came on and told us is a large extent of the issue. The president has the ability to declassify documents. Sometimes there’s a conflict over whether that occurred or not. This is just a really messy case in general to be getting the amount of attention that it’s getting. And evidently, now we’re gonna have Kash Patel on, by the way, on Monday. Buck, you’re gonna be out tomorrow. And it looks like Attorney General Merrick Garland is going to be at least a half hour late now to his own press conference, and we’re not gonna get to talk about what he says.

BUCK: He’s gonna ice I tell you, out here? I know he knows.

CLAY: You think they were waiting?

BUCK: “Clay and Buck’s gotta get off air because Merrick is not gonna do well if Clay and Buck are on.”

CLAY: “Those guys are too powerful. We can’t allow them to immediately handle what we say and dissect everything, and so we’re gonna wait ’til right after they go off the air.” So, I’ll be talking about it tomorrow. Buck, you’re gonna be out on Friday; you’ll be back Monday.