CLAY: I want to start today with the front page of the New York Times. And the headline is: “Three hundred documents taken by Trump were classified. Volume raised alarm. Request for Mar-a-Lago’s security dates shows inquiry continues.” This is a front-page story in the New York Times — came out last night. Some of you probably saw it. There are four different New York Times reporters that are listed as the authors of this piece.
And all of those authors, significantly, have been well sourced for years in United States government’s decisions to investigate Donald Trump. And so, the significant aspect of this story coming out is, I don’t want you to miss what’s going on. The Department of Justice under Merrick Garland right now is arguing this information is far too dangerous for you, the American public, to even be able to see the affidavit under which we instituted the unprecedented raid of a former president of the United States by the current existing president of the United States, who may well be running against Donald Trump in 2024 and has already run against him in 2020.
Here is the opening paragraph of the story. This story, by the way, we don’t know if it’s true. We know it’s true as the Department of Justice wants it to be true because they are leaking like crazy. I guarantee you that Donald Trump and his legal team read this article and got more information from this New York Times article than they have been able to get from many of the details surrounding the warrant. This opening paragraph is:
“The initial batch of documents retrieved by the National Archives from former President Donald J. Trump in January included more than 150 marked as classified, a number that ignited intense concern at the Justice Department and helped trigger the criminal investigation that led F.B.I. agents to swoop into Mar-a-Lago this month seeking to recover more, multiple people briefed on the matter said.”
“In total,” I’m reading from the New York Times, “the government has recovered more than 300 documents with classified markings from Mr. Trump since he left office,” and so this is what is going on. What I believe is taking place here is the Department of Justice is simultaneously placating all of their left-wing allies by leaking to the New York Times while telling you that you can’t be trusted to know what was inside of Mar-a-Lago.
They haven’t even given Donald Trump an accurate accounting of what was taken from inside Mar-a-Lago; so his staff is not even aware of what has been seized. But do not miss the larger context under which this investigation is taking place. Namely, this is a pretty strong sign that Merrick Garland recognizes he has nothing on January 6th. And I think we’ve kind of, in covering this story, missed a big detail here, which is, look how quickly the Donald Trump hate apparatus out there — the media, the politicians, the left-wingers who are driven insane by Donald Trump.
Look how quickly they pivoted from January 6th is going to lead to sedition, insurrection, treason, all of these different potential charges that they were gonna levy against Donald Trump. Look at how quickly they pivoted. For months all summer long, we heard that January 6th was the new event that was going to for once and for all grab Donald Trump and he wasn’t gonna be able to continue his political career. He was gonna walk out in handcuffs. But look at what happened.
Almost with nary a comment out there, they pivoted from January 6th to the FBI raid over confidential documents with very little bridge between the two. To me, this is evidence that Merrick Garland is letting everyone know out there, “We don’t have him on January 6th. There’s nothing that we can get him on January 6th. We don’t have him.” This is now the litany. The Mueller report, impeachment 1, impeachment 2, all of the Russia collusion, everything that has been alleged by Donald Trump has now boiled down to this.
Think about it for a minute. Did he have documents that he wasn’t supposed to have that were directly connected to his presidency and may have been packed up there and ended up in his office in Mar-a-Lago as opposed to with the National Archives? Let’s think about this for a moment. If these documents are so incredibly dangerous, why does the National Archives need them? Would you think…? I don’t hear anybody asking this question.
But do you think to yourself, you know the safest place for documents to be in America? It’s in the National Archives. Have you ever been to the National Archives? I have. History nerd. I went and looked up records of some of my ancestors what fought on both the North and the South during the civil war. You can go in, you can request documents. They’ll bring ’em out to you.
I was a history major at George Washington University. I’ve been to the archives a few times. It’s not the place where you would want super-secretive documents to be stored. And I don’t hear anybody asking the question, if these documents are so incredibly top secret and classified, why do we want the random National Archives to have them? We’re not talking about these documents being seized and being brought under lock and key inside of the CIA or the FBI or someplace like that.
No, no, no. We’re talking about the historical record being kept so that these classified documents can be in possession of the National Archives. But they’re not able to be reviewed for years by the general public. Yet they’re so important that the classics status makes them top secret and everybody’s in danger. No. This is crazy. I can understand… Look at some of the documents that now they’re talking about.
Trump might have kept a personal letter that Barack Obama wrote to him that he found in the Resolute desk when he showed up in the White House on the first day. I can see how that could happen. Trump reportedly left a letter for Joe Biden as well, which is a historical trend. Typically, one president writes a personal note to the president that will follow him and leads that note inside of the Resolute desk. I actually think it’s a remarkably incredible, historic, and transcendent history that we have that we’ve created that sort of routine, that legacy.
But it’s not surprising to me that Trump would want to keep that letter to him from Barack Obama. And it’s not surprising to me that Trump might want to keep letters from Kim Jong-un that were written to him from when he was president as well. And, remember, this has been going on for generations. It wasn’t until the late 1970s that there were even any rules surrounding presidential records. Prior to that it was very commonplace for presidents to keep all their papers so they could write books, so they could tell the historical story of their time in office.
Think about how trumped up this entire story is. The National Archives is arguing that they should be able to have possession of documents from Donald Trump’s presidency instead of Donald Trump. That seems like a very minor conflict. And, frankly, for most of you out there listening, I bet a lot of you say, “Why wouldn’t Trump have the right to keep letters that were written to him?” And why would the National Archives even have the right to have access to those in the first place?
Let me just take a moment. Think about the Mueller report. The allegations against Donald Trump, even though we now know that they were not true, that Russia colluded and caused the outcome of our election to be different, that’s a significant allegation. It’s an allegation that a sitting president is working in conjunction with a foreign government to overturn what otherwise would have been the will of the people to subvert that will and end up president of the United States.
Now, it was a lie. It was all made up. There was no basis to it. But it was a significant allegation. If I told you right now that China had been working in cahoots with Joe Biden to put him into presidential office and subvert the entire will of the American electorate, that would be a significant claim deserving certainly of massive investigation. Now, impeachment 1 over the Russia collusion and Ukraine and all that was a joke, right? Impeachment 2 over January 6th also a joke.
But those were more significant acts. People went into the Capitol because they were unhappy with the outcome of the 2020 election and Trump allegedly encouraged them to go there. Okay. It’s not true, but it’s a significant accusation. The accusation that Trump had an inappropriate phone call with the Ukrainian prime minister and that he was asking him to do diligent research on his top political opponent Joe Biden, all right, it’s not true, it’s illegitimate, but it’s at least something.
Think about what we’re talking about here. Whether the National Archives has a letter or Donald Trump has a letter was used to justify a federal raid on a former president’s home. This is not a significant dispute. Maybe for historians. You might be sitting around if you’re a historian in years to come and want to see that letter. You might want to see what Kim Jong-un wrote to Donald Trump 200 years from now when you’re writing a book or a hundred years from now.
But this idea that the National Archives and where letters that were personally written to Donald Trump should be is somehow so worthy all of a federal investigation that we gotta storm the gates of Mar-a-Lago with 20 plus FBI agents and that the former president is being investigated by the current president for the first time in the history of our Republican? This is impeachable. This is crime worthy. But it ain’t Donald Trump who is impeachable or worthy of being charged with a crime. It’s Merrick Garland. And I’m making the case against him.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: You just heard me laying out what’s actually at stake in this dispute between the Department of Justice and Donald Trump. It’s documents that were, at minimum, we know, specifically referenced in this New York Times article, presuming that it’s coming directly from the Department of Justice, Kim Jong-un letters, Barack Obama’s letter to the president. There may be other documents that he took with him that the National Archives wants to put as part of their presidential records acts there.
But how in the world…? You just heard that dispute. We know that Russia collusion was a hoax. We know that impeachment 1 and impeachment 2, that they failed over and over again to get Donald Trump. The January 6th hearings have landed flat. But all of those were more significant disputes.
That’s his only job. He has made the most significant overreach and the most indefensible decision in our lives, something that no attorney general has ever done before, he signed off on a warrant to raid the top political adversary of his boss, Joe Biden. And he did that to a former president who likely will be the nominee running for president again. And in so doing he has set in place a precedent that does not end here. It is now potentially going to be followed by attorney generals in the years ahead. And for that reason, Merrick Garland cannot remain in office. He should be removed — at minimum, he should resign — and there should be a full investigation into how he came to make the decision to allow these warrants to take place.
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