Imagine If Trump’s DOJ Raided Biden’s Home?

CLAY: We’re breaking down, frankly, unprecedented the raid on President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. And there are a lot of legal analysts who are weighing in, many of them, to their credit, making an awful lot of sense. And, Buck, you know this guy from CNN. I’m not familiar with him that much in terms of what he’s been capable of or what he said in the past.

BUCK: He reminds me of an era, Clay, where there were not necessarily people who were right or left. There were just people that were somewhat reasonable on CNN, and then Jeff Zucker purged them all during the Trump years, and now they’re trying to bring ’em back. This is CNN legal analyst Paul Callan, and he’s laid out… This is on CNN’s morning show. The host asks him about this FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago. Listen.

CLAY: So, Buck, I mean, that’s a pretty aggressive, straightforward credit to this attorney, who may well be on the CNN payroll, where they want him to say, “Yes, of course the Department of Justice is justified here.” But this ties in, to me, with Andrew Cuomo where, where I think if you are a lawyer who is truly committed to the principles of the law, right, the principles of the law as opposed to the political nature of the law, what you immediately have to think here is…

I always go to hypotheses and just flip the script. And we talked about this a little bit earlier in the show, what would Democrats be saying today if Joe Biden had been raided by Donald Trump’s FBI and Department of Justice? They would be saying that Trump was a dictator attempting to use the Department of Justice to eliminate a contender for the presidential office against him, that this was the darkest day. They’d be saying this, Buck. They would be saying, “This is the darkest day in the history of American democracy.” That’s the argument they’d been making. Many of these same people are cheering this raid.

BUCK: Yes, obviously. There is no limit to the bad faith that they have applied to Trump all along; and therefore, you really can’t… The people that are saying “trust the system,” the system has been abused against Trump clearly and on the record repeatedly. They’ve already weaponized FISA. Clay, FISA was a big deal. When I was in the intelligence community, the notion of falsifying stuff for a FISA court to look at a presidential campaign foreign policy adviser…

We’ve almost become numb to it because it went on for so long. They did that against Donald Trump. That is a matter of record now. They had to reckon with this because the facts finally came out. And so, people are now saying, oh, well, we have to see and we have to trust the process. What if someone called in…? I mean, you know what swatting is, right?

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: What have you, someone calls in and says, “Oh, there’s an imminent threat at Mar-a-Lago,” would it be okay for the FBI to send in tactical teams to go raid Mar-a-Lago because some guy called in an anonymous tip? Of course not, right? But if you want to use bad faith, you could justify that, say, “Oh, we got someone who called in and said Trump’s holding hostages!”

CLAY: When the FBI has already been proven to have lied on documents to obtain warrants saying, as many people are today and were last night, well, a judge signed off on the warrant, there has to be some legitimacy to it, has already been proven false. So, I’m sorry. I’m not willing to presume, especially when it’s not released, that everything in this underlying warrant is accurate.

Buck, as a lawyer in much less serious cases, I have looked at warrants and challenged their legitimacy based on whether it’s reasonable and particular enough in nature, based on whether there was probable cause to grant that warrant. So, everybody out there saying, “Well, this judge agreed that this warrant was valid,” well, first of all, they’ve already failed in granting warrants, we know, related to Russia collusion and Donald Trump before.

I’m not willing to presume that this warrant — and the other question I have which nobody seems to be asking, Buck, is, “Was this the only judge they went to?” Sometimes you go to multiple judges trying to get a warrant signed off on. Why was this judge in particular chosen? What was it about him that led to this warrant being granted? There’s some stories out there that he may have been connected to Jeffrey Epstein.

BUCK: Yeah, he was an Epstein defense attorney at one point based on who they believe, the lawyer — and he’s a big Democrat donor — and all the things that you would expect for a judge who would sign off on something like this. I do think that as we watch this play out and people are gonna be talking a lot about process, it’s so important to remember that we already got a preview of this with Roger Stone.

They sent in FBI tactical teams to arrest Roger Stone in his silk pajamas at 5 o’clock in the morning, they tipped CNN off to it so they could get some embarrassing footage and have all the Russia collusion truthers freaking out with how amazing it was. Clay, they could have just called them and said, turn yourself in tomorrow. Everyone knows that. They wanted to make an example out of him and to threaten him with tac vests and long guns aplenty. This is who they are now. This is who the Democrats have become.

CLAY: The only thing I’m surprised by is that CNN wasn’t there with the cameras rolling when they actually went through the gates at Mar-a-Lago.

BUCK: It’s a private club so they could stop them from a distance. But, anyway, yeah.

CLAY: Yeah. But even just standing outside in the street being like, “Oh, my God. Here comes the FBI. They did a predawn raid.” We didn’t find out about it ’til Trump notified everybody in the evening and this story blew up as it did.