Trump Tax Case: Big Dud That Sends Deadly Serious Message

CLAY: There are a couple of legal issues right off the top, Buck, that are getting a lot of attention. We may be able to update you after years — this is literally years — of discussion surrounding the Trump Organization’s tax returns. There may be officially a release of the charges that are going to be brought. Very often, Buck Sexton, these tax return charges and what not have leaked — no surprise — through the media.

And at least the early reports are that there are not going to be very significant charges. This, to me, has a feeling, Buck, a bit like the Mueller report where everybody got all riled up, “We’re gonna prove Russia collusion! Donald Trump’s presidency is in danger,” and then suddenly, the Mueller report landed with a big thud, found no collusion.

And I feel like in the grand scheme of things, this is not gonna be a very significant story when all is said and done. Are you also reading the same media stories as me and feeling like this is gonna be a Mueller report-like reveal where a lot of people who expected massive story, massive punishment, are gonna be disappointed?

BUCK: I think this is meant to send a message, actually. And while you’re absolutely correct in that the Mueller report — the witch hunt that was the Mueller report — didn’t get the goods because there was no “there” there. It was obvious for a long time. As the president then Donald Trump said to me himself in the Oval Office, “Russia collusion doesn’t even make sense. It’s not even a good idea.”

It’s a crazy theory that this is something that the then-candidate Trump would have done, and that his campaign would have engaged in. It’s never made sense. But the other part of this, Clay — and this is why I find this so troubling. You’re right. This is not… They’re reporting on this as though — and people in the media are gonna bend over backwards talking about, “Oh, well, how did we get Al Capone? We got him on tax evasion, right?”

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: This is idiots. Legal analysts, by the way, the people that go on CNN and MSNBC to talk about this stuff, I don’t care what their degrees are, where they’ve worked, they’re effectively reading from a DNC-provided script. They don’t add any insight, they just say stupid things, but that’s what that audience wants to hear.

Here’s the problem, though. There is not gonna be some big moment, I think, where the country says, “Oh, my gosh. Tax evasion!” By the way, we don’t even know what the specific charged tax issue is, but that’s broadly speaking it’s some kind of a tax crime. They’re not gonna find something really serious here, Clay. But the message is kind of the same, isn’t it?

“We can get you no matter what, no matter who you are, no matter how long it takes. We’ll go through your taxes. We will go after you on the most petty and vague grounds possible, if you come after the establishment, the left, the power apparatus in this country; we’ll make an example of people around you and of your organization and you yourself, if we can. That’s the message.

CLAY: So far, almost all of the charges that have been brought have been relatively insignificant. And we’re talking about, Buck, a three-year investigation plus that has been going on into these tax returns. And if the charges are as they have been reported to be, basically extra compensation that potential could have been in the method of an apartment that wasn’t correctly attributed for tax returns? This is nothing.

Right? And I don’t want to overanalyze based on all of the reports that have come out so far. Maybe there will be something associated here. But yesterday on the show I made the analogy that if you give a prosecutor three years to investigate anyone… I mean this legitimately. Any single person that is out there listening to us right now, if you gave prosecutors three years to pore over your tax returns over everything that you have done?

I believe that they could find something to charge you with. That’s because, for anybody who’s ever worked in the tax universe, the tax code is more art than science. What I mean by that is, if you had 10 accountants, and you gave all 10 of those accounts your tax return, and you run multiple businesses, complicated interplays of assets and advantages and, like, you would have 10 different numbers of dollars that you owe.

I see this now, and my tax returns are a scintilla as complicated as Donald Trump’s. When you’re an employee, a lot of people out there, you can go, you know, push a button and it’s easy to figure out exactly what you are doing. When you own multiple businesses and when you have different stakes in multiple businesses, you get these reports, you hand it over to your accountant, and then your accountant just comes back and tells you what you owe.

And I can talk about this having seen it over the last decade moving from a guy who’s making $40,000 a year as an employee to somebody that has got substantial assets and also business returns that are now wrapping into my tax return. It’s all art. This is not a science. And so anybody could be found to have done something inappropriate.

BUCK: The former secretary of defense under two administrations, Don Rumsfeld, passed away yesterday. And there’s a whole lot we could talk about there with his legacy. And look. The guy was a patriot. He served his country. I know people have different views Iraq war and other things, Afghanistan, the War on Terror. And maybe we can get into some of that later.

But I bring it up, Clay, because he famously used to send — he was very open about this — a letter to the IRS with his tax return saying, “I’ve done the best I can, guys, but you’re asking me to attest to is all of this accurate and correct, you know, to the best of my knowledge.

“It is, but is that good enough? I don’t even really know.” So to the point you’re making here about how they can get you on this if they want to, of course. Look at the pattern. You have the IRS weaponized. I know this isn’t specifically the IRS. It’s the district attorney. It’s this long-standing investigation. But it’s tax code stuff.

CLAY: That’s right.

BUCK: You have the IRS weaponized in an election year. Lois Lerner. You guys all remember this? In an election year in 2011-2012 came out and said, “Yeah, it turned out we were doing, you know, extra audits and doing all kinds of stuff to people who had ‘Tea Party’ or ‘patriot’ or anything like that in the name of their 501(c)(3) organization.”

And was there any real consequence for that? No. Did that affect the 2012 election? I think it’s easy to make a case that when you’re suppressing grassroots groups like the Tea Party and doing so using the apparatus of the state, it has a major chilling effect and one you can never really fully account for after the fact. But there was no consequence. And, Clay, this is what we keep seeing.

Yeah, they don’t get the goods, whether it’s Russia collusion or now this with Trump. I mean, this is gonna end up… Donald Trump’s not going to prison over this, right? That’s not happening. The process is the punishment. And it sends a message to everybody else, “You know, you’re not Donald Trump. You don’t have serious resources to try to fight against the government coming after you.

“Do you really want to stand with Trump if he runs again?” Think about what they did to lawyers in the White House and the Trump administration. People didn’t want to work and provide counsel to the Trump White House, to the president of the United States because of the professional consequences they’d face. Imagine now the IRS consequences.

CLAY: Well, we just saw the professional consequences for Rudy Giuliani, by the way, who made the exact same arguments as Maya Wiley — who, by the way, two different New York City mayoral… A little update there. Two different New York City mayoral candidates, Eric Adams, Kathryn Garcia, have filed suits already in New York court over the Democratic primary.

But to me, Buck, the story here is tied together with the Donald Trump and also the Bill Cosby fallout that we talked about yesterday as Bill Cosby was released from prison over a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision. What both of these tie into is the amount of prosecutorial discretion that is given to these district attorneys to decide whether or not to bring charges.

You can’t investigate the president of the United States like has happened in New York City for three years and come out and say, “Hey, after three years and untold tens of millions of dollars in expenses, we’ve decided nothing at all is improper.” They can’t do that from a political perspective.

And similarly with this Bill Cosby story, what you are seeing is, in response to #MeToo, the decision was made that there had to be a charge against Bill Cosby even though a prior prosecutor before #MeToo had said the evidence isn’t supported here. Both of these are about raw power and the amount of power we’re giving prosecutors entirely based on a politically expedient process.

BUCK: Isn’t it amazing, too, that we hear so much about how law enforcement officers and all the cops and people who carry a badge and a gun out there listening to this, the left wants to get rid of their qualified immunity? You know who else has, actually, even greater levels of immunity? Prosecutors.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: Prosecutors. People that can ruin your life from, you know, the comfort of a desk chair somewhere and do engage in very politicized decision-making, they actually have a greater level of immunity than even law enforcement does. So I just think that’s another component of this.