“Bullcrap!” C&B Take on the Ridiculous Trump Tax Charges

CLAY: The Democratic Party, Buck Sexton, has been expecting that they were going to have their own fireworks surrounding Donald Trump for over four years now. They talked about Stormy Daniels and the federal election violations based on payments to her and how Donald Trump was done, and he was gonna get impeached.

They talked about Impeachment Part 1 with Ukraine and Impeachment Part 2 with the insurrection. And all the time out there we had Russia collusion. And now we have, this has been the one that they have been teasing forever, Buck. You know, you’ve been talking about this.

They’ve been talking about it for years. “Donald Trump’s gonna go to prison. The Trump Organization is so corrupt!” Another swing and a miss, Buck, and I’ll dive into the legality behind it — why I think it’s total crap — but this is just another failure.

BUCK: So, I have a slightly different view of it, and it it goes back to what I’ve said before, Clay: The process is the punishment. So here’s what I would agree with you on 100%. They overpromise on this stuff all the time. Right? Donald Trump was gonna get frog-marched in handcuffs out of the Oval Office because of Russia collusion. There were people who —

CLAY: — believed that was true.

BUCK: — are on major news networks; they believed that was true, that there were gonna be major prosecutions of top Trump officials either while he was in office or, remember, there was the whole thing after the Trump Tower meeting. It was, oh, Donald Trump Jr. or Jared, they may be going to prison.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: Now I can tell you, neither Don Jr. nor Jared were worried they were going to prison over that; I can tell you that. But is this the storyline they tell ’em. So you’re correct in that they vastly overpromise and underdeliver. And they do that to keep the left-wing base, one, clicking and watching, and, two, happy. They kind of feed them this insanity.

But I get angry about this because the process is the punishment. Just like with Russia collusion, just like with this. Right? You and I see this, and I know you’re gonna break down the charges and we should get to that, so everyone understands exactly how… I mean, I called it Mickey Mouse yesterday, right? JV, however we want to describe it. This is —

CLAY: It’s embarrassing.

BUCK: This is traffic ticket kind of stuff they’re going after these guys. In the grand scheme of things. We’ll tell you the numbers and everything else. But think of all the time spent on lawyers. Think of all the time spent by people involved in the investigation, sitting down. Look at what they did with the Mueller probe.

It was process crimes that were always being charged with one exception, really, which was Paul Manafort and I guess his partner, which was tax stuff they got. Nothing to do with Russia collusion. This is the game they play. They punish you with the process, they send a message to everybody else as a result of it, and they’re just gonna keep doing it.

CLAY: It’s such a sham. And this is one that I think the Supreme Court got wrong years and years ago. And it actually dealt with Bill Clinton. Do you remember when the argument was civil lawsuits, all the Paula Jones mess? I do think that was correct, that it was going to turn into such an unbelievable political parade, and you’ve seen it happen since then, right?

Doesn’t matter who the president is, there are legal entanglements basically that surround the president throughout. This, to me, investigation of the Trump Organization… Let’s talk big picture here. Three years. Three years to look over all of this data, Buck, and look at every single line of a tax return, every single aspect of the organization and the business.

If any prosecutor in America investigates for three years any decent-size business in America, I legitimately believe that they can find something that they decide is inappropriate from their perspective associated with a tax return. And I believe that could be with the most scrupulous, honest, most least aggressive lawyers and accountants you could imagine trying to do everything right. You spend three years looking at any company’s books, and you can find some way, somehow, to argue that those books are not appropriate.

BUCK: Listeners to this show will recall Rush Limbaugh saying back in 2009, I believe, that he had been audited. His tax returns were audited 12 years in a row.

CLAY: Yes. (chuckles)

BUCK: It’s one of the reasons why the New York state tax authorities were openly harassing him, and he moved to Florida and he then — I believe was acting Governor Paterson at the time, or the new Governor Paterson at the time — said if they knew that they could get Rush to leave New York state and move to Florida with tax harassment, they would have done it 10 years earlier.

CLAY: Right.

BUCK: I mean, they weren’t even hiding from it. This is active political harassment against the Trumps. They were politically harassing Rush himself — God rest him — when he was, you know, the thing that was scaring them the most on air. So this is where we are now. They keep doing this.

CLAY: Let me tell you this, Buck. It’s funny you mention that. When I sold Outkick to Fox and then when I took this job, my accountants and my lawyers both said, “Your risk of audit just went from relatively low to insane, because there are lots of people who now that you are accepting into this realm — you’re associated with Fox and Fox News. You are associated now with Rush Limbaugh.”

They said, “You are going to get scrutinized with a fine-tooth comb in a way that when you were just doing sports and when you were just running a normal, you know, sports-related business and there wasn’t a connection to Fox and you weren’t stepping in for Rush, you weren’t gonna get harassed on that same level.” This is what my lawyers and my accountants said to me.

So I think it’s flagrantly unfair. But this is the conversation we have because of political prosecutions like this. You, me, anybody who’s out there willing to step up and toe the line sometimes and say things that are unpopular, we’re targets in a way that the average person is not. I didn’t even know the Rush story from 2009, but they specifically said, “This is what’s gonna happen to you every year.”

BUCK: Yes, and they didn’t even… What was so amazing about that was that Democrats in the state of New York government, including the governor himself, were like, “Oh, great. We harassed Rush with audits year after year.”

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: “We got what we wanted.”

CLAY: Which is terrifying, right?

BUCK: This is what I mean. We have to understand, the left of today — and by the left, I mean the Democrat Party and everything around it and the apparatus of it — they don’t care. They don’t have shame about these things. This is power dynamics playing out. When they can wield power against us, when they can go after a Trump, a Rush — talking to you, Clay, here about what your — by the way —

CLAY: Small potatoes compared those guys. But this is a legitimate conversation that I had with my lawyers and accountants about the decisions that I made in my career.

BUCK: Every right-wing person I know in public life has this concern. So think about it. Going back to how, you’re right, “swing and a miss on what they promise.” But we’re sitting here having a conversation about how the Justice Department, Russia collusion, and so many other things. I mean, I went through the other day Chris Christie, Governor Bob McDonnell, Scott Walker, Rick Perry. These are all people who are prominent, national level Republicans —

CLAY: Targets.

BUCK: — who have been targets of bogus criminal investigations, sometimes stretching out for years. So even when they can’t prove it because it wasn’t real, the process is the punishment ,and it makes people like you and me think about this. By the way — and I’m sure a lot of our friends listening right now feel the same way about this.

Guys, how many of you would be sweating if the IRS knew that you were a Trump supporter, knew you were a Clay and Buck listener — and you knew that they knew it — and they were gonna go through the last five years or seven years of all your business or all your personal tax returns? I can’t think of a person who wouldn’t be deeply anxious. I mean, I would be!

CLAY: This is why the Supreme Court decision, by the way — we talked about the 6-3 decision out of Arizona. But California tried to get the ability to see who was donating to conservative causes. Right?

BUCK: Yeah.

CLAY: And the ability to donate money out there at times without having the government able to scrutinize every single dollar you spend. Buck, look at the front cover. Like, I know you make fun of me about my obsession with actual print-copy newspapers.

BUCK: I’m just jealous that you can actually maneuver the pages.

CLAY: Yeah, I know how to turn the pages. That’s how old school I am. Front page of the New York Times — and when we come back out of this next break, we will actually dive into the charges, and we will explain to you why they are complete and total crap. But I just… Talk about a propaganda network? Front page New York Times:

“Trump’s Business Charged in Audacious Tax Scheme.” They have Weisselberg in handcuffs, the perp walk as the picture at the top, and then two different additional headlines: “Prosecutors Describe 15 Years of Hiding Executives’ Luxury Perks and Bonuses,” and then the news analysis — this is all on the front page — “Striking at the Heart of Ex-President’s Image.” It’s all — I gotta careful what word I use here — BS.

BUCK: I think we say “bull crap.”

CLAY: Bull crap.

BUCK: There we go.

CLAY: We need a word that personifies what this is that is not an explicative-laden attack. We don’t want the FCC after us.

BUCK: It is gosh-darn bull crap, Clay. I’m with you on that one.