CLAY: Buck, this January 6 thing, prime time, Thursday night. I love the baller move here. Fox News just said, “Yeah, we’re not going to cover it. If there’s real news that comes out, we’ll cover it during the course of the show. But we’re not going to take Tucker off. We’re not going to take Hannity off. We’re not going to take Laura Ingraham off.” A hundred billion percent, Fox News is going to dunk on all of the ratings for these networks that are sharing this same show. They will be the highest-rated network of the night — I would bet a massive amount of money on that — Thursday night.
BUCK: I think there’s no question. I think that they actually may have… I think MSNBC, for example could… We’ll see. CNN’s ratings have been very up and down; obviously, mostly down. I think it might be worse for them, even on those channels, to run it. I don’t think people care enough.
CLAY: I think there’s a very strong case to be made that people don’t care that much about it. And I also think that there has been an expectation built up. This feels a bit like, to me, Buck, the Mueller report. Do you remember how many days Rachel Maddow went on and said, “Robert Mueller is going to get Donald Trump! When this report comes out, he’s finished! We’ll have him dead to rights on Russia collusion!”
And then the Mueller report came out and everything that the left-wing had been selling to their audience about the Mueller report for years blew up in their face. And I feel very similar about what happened on January 6. They’ve been selling this idea that there’s going to be some great reveal.
By the way, I don’t buy it, because if they had any real smoking gun, proverbially speaking, in this investigation, they’ve leaked everything to The Washington Post, to CNN, to MSNBC, to all their compatriots in the media. You really think they’re holding something that they’re going to reveal for the first time on January 6 in prime time? I just don’t buy it. Do you?
BUCK: No, of course not. The Mueller probe, for example, was all sizzle and no steak, as they say. It was all, “Oh, we got somebody who…” I mean, what was the real moment, the pinnacle of the Mueller probe? When they sent 30 guys with long guns from the FBI in to arrest, forgetting his name, you know what I’m talking about.
CLAY: Roger —
CLAY: It’s not good when we both freeze for a moment trying to remember a name.
BUCK: I don’t know what happened. I had a freeze frame on Roger’s name. It was the moment we all said, “Oh, my gosh,” they were prosecuting him because they were talking about witness tampering. You saw it. It was ridiculous, the actual text messages. I think it was DMs on Twitter, it was ridiculous. There was nothing there. And the other part of it was that they had the 10 possible counts. Remember that, the 10 possible counts of obstruction?
You know this, Clay. You dealt with cases. I guess defended people, not prosecuted. If you have something really good you lead with it. If you’ve got somebody, that’s what you nail them on. You don’t lay out, “Here’s 10 possible things you could argue theoretically could be construed as obstruction.” That was the best Mueller had. I don’t want to say it was a joke because it was unfortunately an effective weapon — just the process was a weapon — against the Trump White House. But it was absurd. It was absurd.
CLAY: I remember in law school a criminal law case, my professor at the time, Don Hall who was at Vanderbilt Law School forever, walking around saying, “What do you do if you don’t have the goods on somebody that you really, really badly want to get? You charge them with a conspiracy.” The number of people who get charged with conspiracies to commit crimes is always, to me, kind of a red flag in terms of whether or not there’s a legitimate crime that has been committed.
BUCK: It’s the most malleable of prosecutorial tools.
CLAY: That’s exactly right. And it’s not a surprise that the dumbest people on television and media, the people at The View, well, they’re expecting for everything to come together. This is Sara Haines. Is she a new member of the crew? I don’t remember seeing her name very often.
BUCK: Is she the fake conservative among them? Is there a fake conservative? I don’t even know.
CLAY: I don’t even know who Sara Haines is. She said she hopes it’s amazing TV. It’s also, it sounds like, what she’s expecting on Thursday night. Let’s listen to the dumbest ladies in all the world of The View discuss.
BUCK: No.
CLAY: I’m going to watch it; you’ll probably watch it, Buck, because we’ll talk about it. But I’m telling you, the next morning the inflation numbers are coming out. And I don’t know who scheduled how they chose what day they were going to put it on. I honestly think… The NBA Finals are Wednesday night. And I think they know they can’t put… I’m not even joking about this.
I think they know they can’t conflict with the NBA Finals because people would watch that, and they can’t get on ABC otherwise. And they’re looking at Thursday. They don’t want to be Friday because people go into the weekend. But then they’re looking at it and they chose the day before the inflation data comes out for their prime-time event, where…
Buck, I’m just telling you. They’re going to do their prime-time event. People are going to go to sleep. And when people wake up the next morning, inflation is going to be 8-plus percent, whatever it’s going to be. And everybody, including us, is going to be talking about the failures of inflation in the month of May. Nobody’s gonna care about January 6.
BUCK: Let’s say inflation number is 8.0. Let’s say it ticks down, maybe even 7.9. It will be fun to watch the people at CNN be, like, “Oh, my gosh, Biden’s an economic genius! Worst inflation in 39 years!”
CLAY: (laughing) “We told you. We told you that this brilliant plan of Joe Biden’s to bring down inflation from…” What was the top, 8.5, 8.3%? If it goes down to 7.9, they’ll say it’s an incredible number. It’s still a 40-year or high.
CLAY: It might even go up with the price of gas having gone up as much as it has. I’m not an expert on economics, but it doesn’t feel like there’s been a fever break where suddenly things are not costing what they did before.
BUCK: Apparently neither is Janet Yellen, so there’s that.
CLAY: Well, that’s true. You and I were better assessing where inflation might go than the head of the Treasury Department, sadly.
BUCK: Yeah. We got it right; she got it wrong. There is that.
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