Don’t Be Like Mike: Hayden and Pence Become Tools of Democrats

BUCK: We’ve got a little more on in law enforcement angle to discuss with you right now where first of all, the CIA director, former CIA director was trending on Twitter this morning. I said, “What happened now?
What did Mike do?

CLAY: Are you of the opinion, too, when you see someone that you’re kind of paying attention to that you know trending and you’re like, it’s probably not a good thing?

BUCK: Oh, yeah.

CLAY: For what we do, if I ever see your name or if I ever see anybody that I know’s name in media, I’m like, oh, somebody’s come after them. What have they done now?

BUCK: Yeah. The only way you’re gonna trend as a former CIA director right now is basically if you end up trashing Trump and Republicans — and sure enough, I was just a little underling at the CIA writing my memos in my cube — did deploy to a couple war zones but, you know, just as an analyst. And I was working for Mike Hayden at the time, as in he was the director at the CIA. He also was the director of the NSA. So he ran two of the three-letter agencies. He was an Air Force general, I believe, before that. And here is what happened. Here’s why he’s trending.

“Former CIA Director Michael Hayden on Wednesday agreed with a British journalist’s contention that Republicans were more ‘nihilistic’ and ‘dangerous’ than extremists groups and dictatorships around the world.

“‘I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career,’ tweeted Financial Times columnist Edward Luce on Thursday. ‘Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.’

“Among those who agreed with Luce’s contention was former CIA Director Michael Hayden, who tweeted: ‘I agree. And I was the CIA Director.'”

Couple things here. First of all, there are plenty of people who are world class jackasses who have had very fancy jobs, very against a titled in government. It means nothing. Want everyone to understand this. Prestige bias is real, meaning, oh, well, that person has an MD, Ph.D., MA, MPH, MPC, LMNOPQRS; so I better listen. No, false. They may be a total moron who got the job for reasons that have nothing to do with competency or judgment. Start with that.

Can’t you just feel all the healing, Clay? Remember we were told there’s gonna be all the healing by Biden? But you and I as Republicans, more dangerous than Al-Qaeda, more dangerous than the head choppers of ISIS, sir. Kim Jong-un’s nukes have got nothing on us because we think that men can’t become women. Et cetera.

CLAY: This is, Buck — I gotta say, when we finished show the, the first hour, what did I say? I said Democrats are better at getting Republicans to talk about the topics that they want, Democrats do, to be talked about, than Republicans are. I think you have to admire it. Democrats attack far better than Republicans do. And I’ll just give you an easy example. And part of it is because they have the media in their back pocket and on their side. But also I think a lot of Republicans are afraid of what we just talked about. “Oh, I might trend,” if I say something that is negative. And this is why I think Ron DeSantis and, frankly, Trump, I think Trump changed Republican politics in many ways because he was so combative.

I’ll give you an example right now — I’m watching the Karine Jean-Pierre come out and talk at the White House press conference, and I think we have this audio of Mike Pence coming out and saying conservatives can’t say “defund the FBI.” A tiny percentage of conservatives are saying it. We’ll talk about it in a sec. But, Buck, listen to this audio from Mike Pence. This is going to run like crazy. It is going to take root, the idea that every Republican wants the FBI disbanded because some people have made that argument. Listen to this.

PENCE: I also want to remind my fellow Republicans, we can hold the attorney general accountable for the decisions that he made. Attacking rank-and-file personnel at the FBI. (applause) The Republican Party is a party of law and order. Our party stands with the men and women who serve on the thin blue line at the federal and state and local level. And these attacks on the FBI must stop. Calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police.

CLAY: Okay. I don’t disagree with anything Mike Pence said there. The problem is as soon as he said that, Buck, you know it’s gonna become a huge talking point. The White House is already saying, Joe Biden disagrees with calls to defund the FBI just like he disagrees with calls to defund the police. And so this is going to take root, the idea that every Republican wants the FBI to be gone. No.

Look. I speak, I think, and I think you do too, Buck, for the vast majority of the reasonable, rational people. What we want is for the attorney general who is the top law enforcement official in the land not to be investigating Joe Biden’s primary political opponent and trying to knock him out politically. That’s different than saying the entire FBI shouldn’t exist. But soon it’s going to become a default talking point of Democrats that all Republicans want the FBI gone.

BUCK: It’s also very different. I actually do disagree a little bit with Mike Pence here insofar as, one, don’t help the enemy right now, sir.

CLAY: That’s what he did.

BUCK: Don’t help the Democrats with the lies and the — ’cause no one’s really saying that — when I say no one, no person of following and —

CLAY: No statewide elected official in the entire Republican Party.

BUCK: But I mean do I think that there should be an absolute housecleaning of the FBI, where effectively certainly anybody who has any kind of a political appointment began to also a lot of senior officials should be cashiered? Yes, I do. Do I think that everybody who made every decision at the CDC, for example, should be fired and there should be a radical rethink of that organization?

CLAY: They should all be —

BUCK: Yes.

CLAY: — replaced by the Great Barrington Declaration signees.

BUCK: Yes, I do. Do I think that there should be far greater accountability and the only way to get that with a lot of federal organizations is to cut them down to size dramatically? Yes, I do. And also, we all understand this, right? You defund the police, you get mobs beating people to death in the streets in cities across America, full of criminals who have been arrested dozens of times. You know, you start cutting back on the funding for the FBI — there are a lot of other federal law enforcement agencies. There’s the ATF, there’s — Fish & Game has its own SWAT teams, a lot of federal law enforcement.

CLAY: Do you see the video of the IRS enrollees?

BUCK: People also forget that the Secret Service has, as a part of its mission investigating —

CLAY: Counterfeit.

BUCK: — counter — thank you — currency issues. So there’s a lot of federal law enforcement agencies out there. Point here being, though, the FBI being used as a weapon of one political party destabilizes the entire government, in a sense, it destabilizes the trust of the American people in this, and it comes after what we saw with Russia collusion. This is not a first offense for them. This is not the first strike. And so that’s why, yeah, I mean, we should be more careful with language when we say things, okay, “Defund the FBI.” Well, what are you gonna do with federal law? Because without federal law enforcement, you don’t have federal law. You know, for example, what we have at the border. Federal laws that aren’t enforced ceases to be real. So I think that Mike Pence is unfortunately playing into the hands of the other side at a time when that’s very unhelpful. And why is it that we always have to calm everything down. You ever notice that?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Calm your side down. They have their leftist lunatics burning down police precincts. They had BLM and anti-Trump terrorizing not in rhetorical terms, my own neighborhood in a presidential election year. Was anyone going around to Nancy Pelosi, “Do you condemn it?”

CLAY: They were bailing them out.

BUCK: Nancy Pelosi was kneeling with a kente cloth around her neck. That remember?

CLAY: Oh, yeah. And, Buck, it’s not only that. I mean, think about the — we got the hearing going on for the affidavit. I was reading yesterday the AP said, oh, there’s dangerous attacks now from the right wing on federal judiciary over the decision to grant the warrant to raid Mar-a-Lago.

Excuse me. Just the last couple of months someone showed up at Brett Kavanaugh’s house trying to assassinate him. They shared widely all of the addresses of conservative Supreme Court justices and said, go show up outside of their homes and scream and yell and protest. And they didn’t enforce the law to prevent that from happening in Maryland or Virginia. And suddenly again it goes to the point, what they are so good at, so good at, Buck, is deciding what they want the story to be and then, through a disciplined fashion, delivering it over and over and over again so that they direct the direction that every discussion takes place under.

BUCK: And also — I’m gonna say this too — it may not be that popular with everybody, but I think it needs to be said. Because we as conservatives, as people that believe in law and order, not just as some general principle, I want people to be safe, and I want us all to be obeying the same rules and laws ’cause it makes us a better society, right? Everybody’s subject to the same rules and laws. But the thing of, well, “I don’t blame the rank-and-file,” yeah, of course. You shouldn’t be, you know, yelling at some random FBI agent and certainly shouldn’t be threatening anybody who had nothing to do with the Mar-a-Lago raid. That’s insane, and it’s insane, illegal, and counterproductive on every sense. But we just went through a year, Clay, where people lost their jobs in the military because they didn’t want to get a shot.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: We went through — and a lot of those people, it was solely on principle. It wasn’t even they were worried about their health. They were saying, I’m sorry. This is tyrannical. They were right, by the way. This is tyrannical. I’m not gonna get the shot. I’m gonna lose my job as a nurse, I’m gonna lose my job as a cop, I’m gonna lose — and by — we did — I advocated for them. I said, “Look. I can’t tell you to do that one way or the other, but I want you to be able to feed your family, I want you to be able to keep your career going. I’m not gonna speak hypocritically about this.” How many FBI agents, in all the Russia collusion stuff, in everything we’ve seen with Mar-a-Lago, how many have said, I’m out. I can’t do this anymore. Really?

CLAY: Not that many.

BUCK: Uh, zero. Zero right now. So I do think that’s pretty interesting. We’ve seen falsification of documents to get FISA. We’ve seen people in text messages colluding against the future president of the United States, the insurance policy between Lisa Page and Peter Strzok. Peter Strzok, who is now — guess where? — appearing on TV every five minutes to trash Trump as a law enforcement expert. Any FBI field agents say, “This is gross, I can’t be a part of this?” I’m just saying. Not a lot, as in zero.

CLAY: But get ready. Because of that Mike Pence quote and because of what we just saw happening in the White House, it would not shock me at all if you wake up tomorrow morning and you turn on your local news or you grab your local newspaper and there is a front-page story saying, Republicans want the FBI defunded and this is a major point of discussion going forward, and it allows Democrats to pivot away from their actual public pronouncements from many elected officials that the police should be defunded and say, we’re actually the party that supports law enforcement. That’s the pivot. That’s what they’re gonna say. That’s what’s coming.

I think that Mike Pence was very inarticulate in the way that he attacked his own party, his own party, over this, as opposed to just making his own statements of principle. And as a result, he has opened the door to a massive narrative pivot. Get ready for it.