DOJ Source to Newsweek on Trump Raid: “Spectacular Backfire”

CLAY: Mar-a-Lago. We’ve been talking a lot about the raid. I don’t know if I necessarily believe everything in this story that I am about to share with you because it’s from Newsweek. And, Buck, I don’t remember the last time that Newsweek broke a story that mattered. Do you? Like, when? I remember back in the day Newsweek even during the Clinton impeachment trial and I think Michael Isikoff, as I remember —

BUCK: My friend Josh Hammer runs their editorial page now. They’ve gone a little… They’ve moved away from crazy left; so, I don’t know if they’re breaking news stories quite yet, but I do know their editorial page has gotten some sanity.

CLAY: Yeah, I met Josh, he was down at the Sunshine Summit, I think.

BUCK: That’s right.

CLAY: Good dude. All right. So, I am reading from Newsweek. This story came out earlier today, right before we went on the air. And it says — and the headline is: “Exclusive: An Informer Told the FBI What Docs Trump Was Hiding and Where,” and it says, “The raid on Mar-a-Lago…” This is the opening the paragraph from the Newsweek story: “The raid on Mar-a-Lago was based largely on information from an FBI confidential human source, one who was able to identify what classified documents former President Trump was still hiding and even the location of those documents, two senior government officials told Newsweek.

“The officials, who have direct knowledge of the FBI’s deliberations and were granted anonymity,” which makes sense, “in order to discuss sensitive matters…” They say that, and this would be a colossal miscalculation if these FBI idiots really thought this. They say that they believed that by doing the raid while Trump was not at Mar-a-Lago and while he was at New York, that they would keep the raid, quote, “low-key,” and that instead, it turned into a “furious response.”

The Justice official that they quote anonymously here says, “What a spectacular backfire.” He’s a quote from that Justice official, Buck: “I know that there is much speculation out there that this is political persecution, but it is really the best and the worst of the bureaucracy in action. They wanted to punctuate the fact that this was a routine law enforcement action, stripped of any political overtones, and yet [they] got exactly the opposite.”

BUCK: This is what I’ve been telling you everybody, Clay. Do not assume the other side has some strategic genius making these decisions. Joe Biden is the president, everybody. Look at who runs the Democrat Party. They are delusional about Trump. They have terrible judgment about anything involving Trump. And there may be an effort now to blame on the bureaucracy, another thing we have to keep in mind, what was really a politicized decision from the top.

In essence, oh, it’s not that Merrick Garland and Biden and other senior officials at the DOJ wanted to do this to send a message against Trump. It’s that now that it’s backfiring on them, it’s, “Hey, it’s just a bureaucracy doing its job, man. No big deal here. Nothing to see.” So, that is a narrative I think we have to be aware of as a possibility. But here’s something you want to know. You’re asking, bringing up, “What if it’s a letter from Kim Jong-un?” Okay.

CLAY: I was just trying to give an idea of something that we knew existed that they want in the archives. Yeah.

BUCK: Here’s what you could see something. ‘Cause there’s really two possibilities here: Something that is politically devastating for Trump that they found in these boxes which I think the chance of that is the chance of me getting into the press box and calling the whole game for Alabama v. Texas — or UT Texas, right? UT Austin. That’s not gonna happen. The other possibility, though, ’cause they kept saying this in the initial phases, is the classified information piece of this.

Now, it may be the case that in these documents… It’s very easy, by the way, to… You’re moving that volume of documents from the White House, it’s very easy for some things to get in there that might have been marked classified that are declassified by Trump but not marked that way. Remember, he has real-time declassification authority. Hillary Clinton did not, as secretary of state, which is an important —

CLAY: Didn’t we also have…? Sorry to cut you off, but didn’t we have one of Trump’s top assistants who said that most of these documents had been declassified in the paperwork?

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: He came on our show, if I remember correctly.

BUCK: So, what they may have here… We’re talking about Kash, when Kash Patel came on.

CLAY: Kash came on.

BUCK: I could reach out to Kash and ask him about that.

CLAY: That would be good to have that conversation again with him.

BUCK: But let’s say there is one document or a handful of documents that are legitimately marked let’s say top secret and are not being held in the proper storage. The Democrats may decide to dig in on that is, “This is a felony, this is a violation of the Espionage Act,” that is the only thing that I could see them… Now, I don’t think that’ll play, really, because, first of all, this stuff’s under lock and key at Mar-a-Lago. The Secret Service is there. It’s not on a server where someone can hack into it. No one got access to this. And then the issue becomes, Trump isn’t going through this himself. Hillary Clinton was —

CLAY: — really hard to prove. Every crime, Buck, requires mens rea and actus rea, by and large. You have to have the intent to commit the crime and you have to have done an act in furtherance of that crime. Do we really think that Trump was trying to subvert American democracy by hiding classified documents?

BUCK: No. And the difference with what I was saying with Hillary is that she was looking at and operating that email account personally. She was the one reading the emails and engaging in the reckless attempt to hide from public scrutiny her email communication. She didn’t have a classified email address at the State Department. And this is crazy. But Donald Trump isn’t in charge of reviewing personally 15 boxes of documents? Does anyone think for one second Trump is there like, “This probably classified; this probably not classified”? No. So —

CLAY: There’s no way he’s packing the boxes when they’re leaving the White House.

BUCK: Yeah. This is what I mean. Even if there’s something that’s classified in these boxes, that would actually be a White House transition bureaucratic mess-up. They might try to say, “Oh, but Trump is ultimately responsible.” Give me a break. So, that’s where I think they may try to take this to cover up the fact that it was an intimidation raid.

CLAY: So, this Newsweek article… I got one more quote and then I got a theory I want to get your reaction to. Quote from the Newsweek article: “They were seeking to avoid any media circus. So, even though everything made sense bureaucratically and the FBI feared that the documents might be destroyed, they also created the very firestorm they sought to avoid, in ignoring the fallout.”

Okay. Let me ask you this. If Trump doesn’t release the statement that he released on Monday evening that his place had been raided by FBI agents, that they even broke into his safe, remember they had previously gone to Mar-a-Lago and examined these documents, Trump himself even walked by and said “hi,” they say. They locked — padlocked the basement door. Does this raid even become a story if Trump doesn’t put out his statement Monday evening?

BUCK: Wait. There are 30 people there; so, people would have known about it.

CLAY: What I’m saying is, we didn’t know… I don’t remember the story being written about that they had federal agents and people go and visit Mar-a-Lago before to look at these boxes and these documents. In other words, what I’m asking is, did Trump own the story in a way that they thought Trump would not by putting out that statement about the fact that this raid had occurred, and they were thinking —

BUCK: In their minds it was, “Hey, just business as usual, sending 30 FBI goes to Mar-a-Lago to go through stuff.” See, Clay, I worry that this is now the after-the-fact narrative that they’re gonna try to push. We didn’t think this would be thermonuclear in politics. We didn’t think this would be DEFCON 1. Like, how dumb can they really be?

CLAY: I think they’re really dumb.

BUCK: — asking, how low can they go?

CLAY: Well, the reason why I’m asking it is, Trump broke the story that this happened. CNN wasn’t sitting there at the front gate running cameras when the FBI agents arrived. MSNBC didn’t break this, the New York Times didn’t break this, the Washington Post didn’t break this. Trump broke this story when he put out his statement on Monday evening. So, my question is just, did Trump outsmart the FBI and the Department of Justice and the apparatus by doing something that they didn’t anticipate he would do in going public and attacking them before anybody at…?

Remember, there was no other story out there. Think about how often we know — to your point, every time — when they showed up at Roger Stone’s place with guns, oh, CNN was miraculously there at 5:30 a.m., like they were tipped off. There’s nobody tipped off that this raid was happening. This news didn’t get broken by a Biden-friendly source. It was Trump putting out his statement that set off the raging conflagration of a story.

BUCK: There are a couple things. It is very interesting, actually, how this went down with regard to the timeline and who found out about it and when. As you and I recall, Mar-a-Lago, the members there, guys walking around, you’re used to seeing Secret Service and everything. So, unless you were really aware of what they were doing, very unlikely; so, the only people that are really gonna know what’s happening with the search in that, ’cause it also is in the private quarters. It’s not… You know, there weren’t throwing over the tables where the guests are sitting and saying, everybody, you know, hit the deck.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: So, they wouldn’t have necessarily said anything. And the media wouldn’t be close enough ’cause they’re not gonna be allowed into the actual area, there’s a big — there’s a checkpoint there. So, they wouldn’t get close enough to actually show anything. And I think on this one they probably recognize that a tip-off in advance of this would then make it impossible to run the, “We’re just law and order. There’s no politics here” narrative. I think they realize the Roger Stone raid was Democrats loved it, but it was a blunder, it was a blunder. It showed their hand.

CLAY: So, I just want everybody out there to think about it. All day long those agents are conducting the raid at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t find out about it, if I correct, Buck, until around 6:30 Eastern when Trump put out his statement on TRUTH Social.

BUCK: So, they were there for all day. No one actually knows it’s going on, and my question for you out there — and I think it’s worth thinking about is, did Trump totally snow them under and take advantage of their stupidity in a way that they didn’t anticipate? Just tossing it out there to think about because he broke the story.