CLAY: There’s a lot of discussion last week, Buck, about the ridiculous attempt to memorialize January 6th by the Democrats. Really Kamala Harris coming out and saying it was 9/11 and Pearl Harbor to her was maybe the headline that got the most attention, ironically, of all of this. But one of the questions that has lingered as the January 6th event has been investigated in many ways for political purposes to allow it to continue to fester as a story while not paying attention at all to the summer of riots, effectively, that occurred all over this country, is there’s been a lot of questions — I think good ones — about who are all the people that were involved in these riots.

And in particular was the FBI — was your own government — involved in helping to foment in any way this incident that occurred at the United States Capitol? So Ted Cruz decided to go after the FBI over these issues — this just happened in testimony in the Senate — and ask whether or not the FBI was in any way involved in either the rioting or potentially in violent acts as a part of the rioting. Listen to this clip.

.@TedCruz: “How many FBI agents or confidential informants actively participated in the events of January 6th?”

Simple question—wonder why the FBI refuses to answer!pic.twitter.com/GpkHI8KXYw

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) January 11, 2022

BUCK: Okay, Clay, I know this game pretty well because in the CIA you have sources and methods, and the FBI has sources and methods. But how hard is it, and what are we supposed to think the real accountability will be here? How hard is it for the FBI to just come out and say this publicly, for the purposes of restoring faith in that institution — for which, we have to remember, faith has plummeted in recent years and rightfully so after Andy McCabe and the deep state and James Comey and the bad actors?

And we’ve now seen through all the reports. We have the information. Remember Lisa Page and Peter Strzok and the texts back and forth, all of the stuff, the “insurance policy” against Donald Trump. The FBI is at probably its lowest level of public trust in living memory, at least in my living memory, and now would be a time the FBI should say, “Hey, just for the purposes of clarity, we had absolutely nothing to do with this. We had no confidential informants, no undercover agents, nobody involved in the pay or at the behest of the FBI on January 6th.”

The fact that they won’t say that — I don’t even just mean in this one hearing, this one circumstance where she’s doing the sources-and-methods game, “Can neither confirm nor deny” (I know this game) — shows you that something is funky here. Something doesn’t smell right. There was a guy on video — we’ve all seen it — being pointed out that they were yelling, “Fed, fed, fed,” saying, “Go into the Capitol.”

We also have to remember that the “plot” against Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan. Remember Donald Trump was blamed for it ’cause he was still president? Well, then when it actually came out who was really involved there was someone working at the behest of the FBI who was pushing this along in a way that did look like entrapment. It did look like an FBI, not agent as in the employee of but someone working as an informant for the FBI was pushing along a plot that might not have gotten very few otherwise. So where are the answers here? We need to get them.

CLAY: Not only that. We have an entire committee that is ostensibly investigating January 6th that will not ask any of these questions, and I think that goes to the lack of public trust that exists in general surrounding this entire investigation and this entire incident. Buck, you’ve done intelligence. You were at the CIA. When you hear these answers — and, by the way, the answers were coming from…

Let me make sure we get the woman’s name right at the FBI. That was Jill Sanborn who was testifying on behalf of the FBI. Doesn’t it raise some wildly interesting questions about what exactly was going on? If the media were really doing its job, this would be something that they would almost immediately follow up on, right? Because there are so many intriguing aspects associated with those answers.

BUCK: Yeah and also, there isn’t actually a sources-of-methods issue unless sources and methods, in intelspeak, are at issue, meaning that if I ask an FBI agent, “Have you deployed an undercover to Clay Travis’ home in the last five days?” The answer, if they haven’t, is pretty easy: “No, we haven’t done that,” right?

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: So it obviously raises suspicion here because if they had nobody there — if they had no — no person working in any way tied to federal law enforcement — they could easily say, “No, that’s not us.” Occasionally, whether it’s the CIA or the FBI (one of the three-letter agencies), they will come out for the purposes of public clarity and say look, “Guys, this wasn’t us,” or, “We didn’t do this.” Whether you believe them or not, by the way, is an entirely different issue but they will at least address it.

It is not enough for the FBI to try to hide behind sources and methods on an issue of absolute paramount public concern here. And I think that what you have to remember is that this is an FBI that is tainted as an institution by what was done to Donald Trump. The people who said, “Oh, there’s no deep state! They would never try a palace coup against the president from inside the federal bureaucracy”? They were wrong.

The people who said that they tried to overthrow a duly elected president by concocting a Russia collusion narrative that was a pure fabrication of the Hillary Clinton campaign, the Democrat-aligned media, and deep state Democrat actors within the FBI? They were right, and we can’t forget that now. We can’t unlearn the things that we’ve seen.

CLAY: I think the other question this raises — at least for me — in addition to why aren’t more questions asked about this is, “What’s the goal,” right? Take a step back. You well know this, Buck, but everybody out there listening, think about it. Why do you usually have an informant, right? Why is the FBI inside? Let’s take it outside of January 6th or anything political. Why might the FBI have someone working inside of a drug ring undercover?

BUCK: Because laws are being broken. That’s the basic reason.

CLAY: And they’re trying to catch people the best way that they can by getting the evidence from inside, right? So what’s the goal of this incident? You just mentioned the guy that we saw on tape saying, “Hey, why don’t you go into the Capitol?” It seems entirely political in nature, right? In other words — and this gets into an interesting sort of criminal law discussion of when you are trying to encourage — and I think this is a big part of the governor Gretchen Whitmer story as well.

When you’re trying to see encourage someone to commit a crime that they would otherwise have not done but for your actions, it raises a lot of questions surrounding entrapment, right? “Hey, you were trying to create a crime that otherwise would have never occurred,” and that’s what I think you wonder about as it pertains to FBI involvement on January 6th.

BUCK: This is where you see Senator Ted Cruz, I think, continues to have his best moments is when he’s in prosecutor mode —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — when he’s able to push somebody who doesn’t want give answers on an issue like this. And think of what the broader context of all this would be. We have a clear law enforcement gap in security and failure on the January 6th day, right? During that riot, crowd control was, as everyone understands — if they were really looking into this, that would be a discussion.

CLAY: That is the number one question.

BUCK: That would be a huge part of this because everyone else who was involved has already been tracked down by the FBI, they’re prosecuting them. There’s not a lessons learned from, “Hey, we got this guy who broke a window in the Capitol who shouldn’t be there,” other than okay, that person is now facing punishment — and as we’ve discussed here, in some cases facing solitary confinement for months on end for nonviolent crime.

But there was a failure of preparation that day that is suspicious in how inept it was, right? We’ve seen the video of what looks like the rioters being let in. They’re just kind of being told to enter. They moved the barricades. I’ve seen the video many times; you probably, folks, have seen it. Tucker’s show has shown it many times. So that’s one part of the conversation.

But then also there seems to be no interest in finding the would-be pipe bomber, the guy that left pipe bombs outside DNC and RNC headquarters. Very little interest in this Ray Epps character who keeps coming up and the video of him. And also, the possibility that if the FBI had people who were in any way involved in this… You know, what was the huge distinction? How did this go bad?

It went bad because some people… How did it become a riot and not a protest in part? Some people decided that they were going to actually breach the Capitol and go inside. And that’s wrong and that was illegal. But where did that why start, where did it come from and who was pushing it? We should know that. That should be something that is public record now.

And I think it also goes to, Clay, why we don’t have all the footage released from Capitol Hill that’s out there. There are a lot of things they don’t want to talk about. All they want to make sure is that all Trump voters are insurrectionists and Donald Trump can’t run again. That’s really what this is about.

CLAY: It was their fevered dream. This was the dream of the left-wing industry was they wanted Trump to do something that they found to be so outside the bounds of acceptable democratic behavior. And up to January 6th, there had really not been anything and in fact — and I’ve been arguing this for a long time and I think you would agree — but for covid, Trump would have won against Joe Biden, and it wouldn’t have been remotely close.

So they got on their meteor, so to speak, streaking across the night sky that struck the United States political fabric. But it was totally something that Trump was in no way responsible for, and then they tried to blame him for everything associated with covid, and that was enough to pry away independent suburban women voters and independent voters in the suburbs overall. January 6th is their attempt to ensure that he never runs again and they’re trying to continue to blow that up as best as they can without giving us a full accounting of what truly went on that day.