Shifting Narrative: Trump’s Power Move Has FBI/DOJ on Defense

BUCK: Clay, it didn’t take very long. We were talking about this as soon as it happened. On Tuesday when the raid occurs and everyone’s… That night, I’m on Jesse’s show on Fox; you’re on Sean’s show on Fox. We’re talking about this, and there was a moment of true —

CLAY: I think it’s Monday night, right?

BUCK: I’m sorry Monday night. Thank you. Yeah. There’s a moment of true, just outrage. I mean, honest-to-God, what are these lunatics doing? This is a former president. And they were telling us on the other side, the way that they were playing it was, “Oh, but we need to wait for the facts to come in,” and now more facts have come in. And what we see is, they’re telling us Trump is overplaying his hand.

Trump is the one who is controlling the narrative. He’s “pouncing.” That’s their favorite word. And the FBI didn’t do anything wrong. And people are saying mean things about the FBI. And I think this is very directly tied to the fact that, with more information here, this does seem to be a fishing expedition, a massive overreach, and a blunder.

CLAY: Yeah. I think that’s true, and you can’t blame someone — and we kind of hinted at this yesterday. Trump is, for all of the criticisms that people out there levy against him, innately aware of advantage and leverage. And you would expect that he would be good at that because that’s basically how you have success in business. When you have leverage on your side, you exploit it. And here was a clear, what it seems to me, misplay by the Department of Justice, the FBI, and Merrick Garland.

And this is what we were talking about yesterday, Buck, that I find so significant. In June — June, just a couple months ago — the FBI and some of the archives people, they came to Mar-a-Lago while Trump was there, showed them the documents. According to the Wall Street Journal this morning, he said, “Hey, let me know if I can help you at all,” and after that visit, they called back — or emailed back, I think it was — and said, “Hey, could you better restrict access to those documents.”

A day later, the Trump people put a more significant padlock on the door where many of these documents were being stored. There was zero contact from that point all the way until August when this raid happened. These details matter and I think they matter significantly, Buck. Because Trump had been complying, friendly, with the investigation into what these documents might be and where they might belong and all of those attributes. And then out of nowhere suddenly we get a morning raid that lasts for nine-some-odd hours at his Mar-a-Lago residence while he’s not there.

And this story breaks… This is what I was hitting as we finished yesterday’s show. This story broke not on the New York Times, not on the Washington Post, not on MSNBC, not on CNN, not on friendly Democrat media where almost all negative Trump stories break. Trump broke it himself. Trump posted on TRUTH Social and said, “Oh, my goodness.

“Look at what they are doing. They’re raiding me,” and Trump didn’t even break it early in the raid. He basically broke that news when they finished their raid, Buck. So I think, the more and more I look at this, the more I think this was just a colossal miscalculation by the Department of Justice, by the FBI in not realizing how insanely, absurdly ridiculous this was gonna look for them.

BUCK: So I come from within the federal bureaucracy at the CIA, right? Clay? And one discussion that we would always have is, is this incompetence or malevolence? Whenever the federal bureaucracy is involved, you wonder, is this just we’re so dumb that we messed this up this badly or did someone make a decision somewhere to abuse their power or to engage in a politicized targeting? Here is, for example, just on how the narrative has shifted… You’ll notice, Christopher Wray of the FBI, the FBI director, is saying, you know, it’s terrible and deplorable, the threats people are making against FBI agents.

Okay. Obviously threats against FBI in general are stupid and illegal and people shouldn’t do that. But how about also speaking out about how the FBI isn’t the praetorian guard? How about, “We’re not actually doing the things that people very understandably think are being done right now?” He could take a moment here and say, “Guys, I promise you when the facts come out, everything we have done is by the book, everything we have done…” But he thinks he maybe recognizes at some level people don’t really-believe him. So that’s one. Certainly, a lot of people listening to this right now — and I would put myself in that category too — do not believe him.

CLAY: I’m in that category as well.

BUCK: Yeah. But at least he could try. But notice they’re also now acting like, “Oh, well, you know, Trump is making a big deal out of nothing.” Here is Heilemann over at MSNBC.

HEILEMANN: The DOJ did not make this public. They did not publicize this — this search of Mar-a-Lago. Donald Trump did. And it seems to me for the reasons that Joyce is kind of implying that that’s what this is all about. Trump took this public because he thought it was in his interest to not just explore these conspiracy theories, but then to put pressure on the DOJ. What would they say? There’s nothing they could say that wouldn’t — that Donald Trump and the right wouldn’t — make part of their narrative. They’d be attacked for breaking with policy, they’d be attacked for dirtying up Donald Trump, no matter what the words that came out of their mouth are.

BUCK: So the problem is that Trump said that they raided my home for nine hours now? You want to talk about gaslighting, this is like slapping somebody in the face saying, “Hold on! Hold on! I have a good reason. I have a good reason.” You wait ’til it fades a little bit, and then they say, “Okay, man, why do you slap me in the face?” It’s, “Well, we both know you deserved it.” That’s why you didn’t say anything when it happened.

CLAY: Well, so, this is interesting to me because what basically that MSNBC guest is saying is, Trump shouldn’t have drawn attention to the most unprecedented action ever undertaken in our democracy, right?

BUCK: Yes! (laughing) Yes. Crazy.

CLAY: That’s what he’s saying. And so, I wonder, though, Buck — and this is what I was saying about the fact that Trump publicized it. I don’t remember a lot of stories about the agents visiting in June, right, when they were at Mar-a-Lago according to reports. We’ll talk some with Miranda Devine about this. And I wonder whether they thought, clearly inaccurately, that Trump wouldn’t go public with this. I wonder on some level whether that was part of their calculus, and they didn’t realize how bad they were going to look when this happened.

And again, I just come back to Alan Dershowitz on Tuesday. We played the audio from him on Fox News. I did he did a good job right immediately analyzing the legalities of it. He said, “They’ve been dealing with subpoenas this whole time and responding to subpoenas.” That is, “Hey, could you please send us this document, this box, or allow us to come and look at the things that you have.” Why would they suddenly advance from subpoenas and/or collegial, it appears, emails and phone calls and visits to a 20-plus-person raid at the FBI? And, Buck, that, to me, we need to see the warrant, right? I mean, they should let us know what they were actually searching for.

BUCK: So, you and I talked to Andy McCarthy about this I spoke to also a friend of mine who was a prosecutor for the last 15 years earlier, we were texting about this yesterday. The warrant thing gets tricky because there’s the part of the warrant that they do have to show and then there’s the parts of the warrant that they would is only show have an indictment actually comes down, right? So when people say “show the warrant,” it’s gonna be a partial. Even whatever they show will be partial. They will not show everything for an ongoing criminal investigation. So part of that is gonna be held away.

CLAY: This comes back, Buck, to the question we had in our initial conversation. I still circle back to that. I don’t think there’s any doubt that the DOJ and the FBI have bungled this. The question I have is: What did they think that they were going to find that necessitated an acceleration to this level, right? And we kind of surmised. We mentioned Kim Jong-un letters. I just find it hard to believe that there is something that Trump took out of the White House that is so important that a warrant and a early morning raid had to happen.

BUCK: Let’s be clear. And others have been pointing this out and I think some of them are listening to our show yesterday, which is great. Trump did not hand select 15 boxes of documents that are being taken from… Trump has no idea what is actually in most of those boxes. He’s the president or was the president of the United States. He’s a former president now. So this notion that it is comparable to what Hillary Clinton did?

Hillary Clinton was reading top secret emails on her home computer, on an unclassified server, and forwarding them to people. Donald Trump has, in a locked room, documents that his staff has gone through and decided are to be a part of probably a future presidential library or whatever. He has absolutely no idea — and to your point about mens rea, he obviously has no criminal culpability in this. So when people are talking about the, “Oh, it’s classified,” this isn’t Trump stuffing classified documents in his socks, folks. That is a total bogus claim.

CLAY: Which happened, basically.

BUCK: Sandy Burglar or Sandy Berger. That’s what happened. By the way, he got a fine and community service, just for everybody who’s like, “Well, they went after Sandy Berger.” They didn’t send 30 FBI agents to his home.

CLAY: Mens rea, I think that’s important for people out there to be thinking about. If there were some sort of criminal charge that were going to be brought, virtually every criminal charge requires the worst thing, actus rea and mens rea: An act that is criminal in nature and then an intent to do that act that is criminal in nature. I don’t think there’s any way, Buck, that there was an intent here on behalf of Trump, based on every detail that we have out here, that would in any way rise to the level of being criminal in nature.