BUCK: Welcome back to Clay and Buck.

*sad trombone* pic.twitter.com/qrQeBFH3ZI

— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) May 22, 2019

BUCK: He’s also about to be a prisoner for four years, folks. We have to remind you of what a debacle that whole era was under the Trump administration of the journo lib media, the fake news, elevating Michael Avenatti. We just played it for you. “He’s a contender to be president! He’s Trump’s worst nightmare, he’s amazing, he’s a hero.” Well, breaking news, folks, Michael Avenatti just got a four-year prison term for stealing, defrauding from his client, Stormy Daniels, whom he represented in his battle with Donald Trump.

Four years, Clay. That’s a serious sentence, right? Clearly, he did some real wrong. He’s obviously disgraced, disbarred. But it’s not so much… Everybody looked at that guy and thought he gave the slimiest lawyers a bad name. Like, the lawyer jokes about the difference between a catfish and a lawyer: One’s a bottom feeder and the other is… He’s worse than those jokes. Democrats said he should be president, Clay.

CLAY: Well, also it’s funny to think about, didn’t 60 Minutes interview Stormy Daniels? Wasn’t it like their big expose one night when her story, allegations against Trump came out? If you could go back in time and set odds and say, “Hey, somebody’s going to prison over this Stormy Daniels situation,” everybody who is a left-winger would have been like, “See! I told you it’s gonna bring Trump down.”

It was actually her lawyer. Stormy Daniels… People have basically forgotten with Stormy Daniels. That story obviously had a lot of salacious details and received a massive amount of attention, but there were a lot of people who argued that Stormy Daniels was going to bring down the Trump presidency as a big part of because of Michael Avenatti who was her lawyer, and now he ends up stealing from her, according to the courts and is going to jail multiyears.

BUCK: Can we just also remember, there was such a desperation… I always tell… You know, we talked about the emoluments clause and the hamburgers for diplomats at Trump hotel yesterday. The real theory of the case with Stormy Daniels was “hush money” that he paid as a nuisance payoff to Stormy Daniels wasn’t listed properly on a campaign finance form and so maybe he could be prosecuted and then of course removed through impeachment because of, what was it, like a $150,000 in hush money that wasn’t listed on a campaign… It was a campaign expenditure. Just to remind everybody, all these people you see in the fancy suits on TV, on CNN and NBC News and every, these people are morons, folks. I mean, honestly.

CLAY: A lot of them are.

BUCK: Not a lot of them, but the ones that were saying this.

CLAY: A huge percentage, yes.

BUCK: I mean, like 90% of them, and the ones that were saying that Michael Avenatti… Clay, I remember when people were interviewing this guy. This is the slimiest, most grotesque, self-advancing, unethical scumbag human being, and he was the single most — this was true, the most — frequent guest on CNN’s air for I think a two- or three-month period.

CLAY: Even bumping Dr. Fauci off.

BUCK: This is pre-Fauci.

CLAY: Yeah, right. But what is crazy here, as you break all this down, is, to your point, most media don’t have original thoughts. So the great lie that is often propagated in media is often the derivation of people being not confident enough in their own opinions; so whatever someone else says, they decide to jump on. You could hear all those different names who have their own television shows.

They were actually just buying into that hype. They weren’t doing their research or analyzing any of the facts. You know this, Buck. The number of people who… I’ve always said, from a lawyer perspective, the most important thing when you argue a case are the facts, the facts, the facts. Right? Because ultimately that’s going to determine the outcome to a certain extent. A lot of people don’t even bother to read the source documents of things that they’re incredibly opinionated about.

BUCK: Of course.

CLAY: And that’s how so often you can talk about Duke lacrosse, you can talk about the Johnny Depp trial that just happened, you can talk about the Nicholas Sandmann. So many of these stories that build and grow — Ferguson, frankly, George Floyd — the underlying details of the stories are far more complicated and nuanced than the public persona and discussion of those stories. And so Michael Avenatti and the Stormy Daniels mess is to me a perfect representation of that because so few people ever understood anything associated with it to a large extent.

BUCK: And they acted like —

CLAY: And if you were anti-Trump, Trump was great Satan, and you were basically Jesus if you were anti-Trump in the minds of many people in the media.

BUCK: Well, this is also, actually… It’s interesting you brought up Fauci, ’cause the origins of Fauci worship were really a combination of few things. One, the mass panic induced largely by the Democrat media ’cause Trump was president at the time. The first month, I get it. We were scared. We saw Italy and it looked really bad, but month two-month three it was clearly this was being politicized and used as a weapon, and Fauci became — even under a Trump presidency — an anti-Trump. There was such an obsession with any figure who would be that person that would just destroy Donald Trump, and the whole idea was so absurd and laughable. It was something… We can sit here and talk about a lot of the —

CLAY: I just think it’s so funny, like, to the point on Trump, what if Trump back in February and March had become a big mask guy? Like, if you just want to play this out, if Trump had said, “Hey, you know what? I think everybody should wear a mask, Fauci says no, but I think it makes sense.” Now the mask is basically an anti-Trump totem in many ways. It’s a far left wing symbol. If he had said, “I’m a big mask guy,” what actually ends up happening?

BUCK: And I’ll tell you I opposed masks even under the Trump administration, and if Trump had been a big mask guy, I would have said, “Sir, I think you’re wrong on this.” The one thing when I shook his hand at the end of talking to the president in the Oval Office in May of 2020, and I said, “Sir, no more lockdowns, right? Like, we can agree that was a bad idea,” not saying (impression), “Anything you do is great, sir, fantastic,” no, of course not, right? And this is the thing.

I mean, even early on it became so clear that for some people once the political decision was made, the science followed that. For me it was always, this is really dumb, right? When you have the most famous public health official in the country change his mind entirely on something in two weeks based on nothing other than the polls and the political need, not the data, you know you’re being lied to. Fauci was the one that set me on the path of discovery and reality early on, Clay, ’cause I’m like, “This little jerk is a liar.”

CLAY: I legitimately question whether masks would have ever become a thing, because I do think a lot of Republicans would have said, “Ah, it’s not really my thing,” if the president wants to wear ’em. There’s no way left wingers ever adopt the mask if Trump is saying, “Hey, I’m a big mask guy. I’m a germophobe. I’m gonna wear a mask,” what would things look like today? It’s really kind of fascinating to think about because the mask is such — at this point, totally worthless, but it’s such — a symbol of political respect that it’s become a big deal.

BUCK: I was gonna say, everyone sees my mask with my Biden-Harris 2024 that has, like, holes in the mask and they know I’m serious about the science.