CLAY: I’m here with you making the case that what Donald Trump did — despite the front page of the New York Times and what you’re gonna see if you put on MSNBC and put on CNN — is actually not unprecedented at all. For hundreds of years, presidents have taken the papers that they were involved in as president and they’ve taken it back to their houses and back to their homes, and they used those papers to write books about their presidency.
And it wasn’t even until the late 1970s, in response to Richard Nixon, that this presidential papers dispute ever became an issue at all. And it hasn’t ever been applied as it is being applied certainly by Attorney General Merrick Garland. And there’s actually a fantastic Wall Street Journal editorial this morning by David Rivkin and Lee Casey. These are two guys who served in the Justice Department and the White House counsel’s office in the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations.
The headline is: “The Trump Warrant Had No Legal Basis.” These are astute, learned scholars who have worked in the White House counsel saying there’s no basis at all for the Trump warrant to have been issued, and this is Merrick Garland’s Waterloo. I really cannot impress upon you enough that the radical, unprecedented, indefensible act here was not being committed by Donald Trump at all.
It was the attorney general of the United States signing this warrant and allowing his agents to storm the gates of Mar-a-Lago that has upset the entire precedent of American judicial life. We use the phrase “unprecedented” quite a lot. Generally, it’s not true because for most situations there is a precedent. This is truly unprecedented. What Merrick Garland did, has never been done before in the history of the United States. No time ever, dating all the way back to George W., to George Washington, also including George W. Bush.
All the way up to now has a former president been raided by the Department of Justice at his private residence. This has never occurred. And it’s not just even a former president. It’s the former president who’s going to be running against the current president, potentially. Merrick Garland failed in his judgment to such an extent — I told you that there’s no way he should be able to oversee this investigation because he’s investigating…
You may have heard a great interview that we did with Alan Dershowitz last week where Alan Dershowitz said look, there’s no way that any attorney general could do this because the attorney general has essentially two jobs. He’s serving the president in such a manner that hopes to continue that president’s tenure so that he’s gonna be reelected so that the attorney general can continue to serve and simultaneously supposed to be the unbiased enforcer of American law.
But I just want you to think for a moment about what Merrick Garland did. And one way to easily think about this is, what would media reaction have been in 2016 if, when Donald Trump was president, he’d sent 20 FBI agents into Hillary Clinton’s home and they had raided and seized documents inside of her home? The mainstream media, if that had happened, would have said that Donald Trump was a dictator, that he was an authoritarian, that he was helming a banana republic, and that the United States had become a Third World country.
Joe Biden does it to Donald Trump, and almost everyone in that mainstream media has been carrying the water of the Department of Justice saying this was justified. I just want you to put the shoe on the other foot as a good attorney would ask you to do and as Merrick Garland failed to do. Because his job is to ensure that justice is filled but also not to set precedents that allow this country to fall further behind political impulses of justice. Instead, he did the exact opposite.
And for that reason, if Joe Biden had a scintilla of intelligence, if Joe Biden had a scintilla of cognition, if he knew about this raid at all beforehand, he is culpable for it. But if we take him at his word and he did not know, then the moment that Joe Biden found out what Merrick Garland did, he should have demanded his resignation. That’s what Joe Biden would have done if he had any character or decorum at all because the precedent that has been set here is going to unleash whirlwinds and we’re going to turn more and more into these countries that we had hoped that we were better than when it came to our democracies.
Every Republican should be demanding his resignation. And one of the first things that should happen when Republicans take back control of the House is Merrick Garland should be hauled in front of the House Judiciary Committee at minimum and forced to answer all of these questions. And this affidavit in its entirety — I’m not even willing — when I read all the details in this New York Times story I’m not even willing to give the government any basis for redactions at all because they’re leaking this information to the New York Times. It’s all out there publicly anyway, the entire affidavit, the entire thing, every word should be made public, and it should happen this week.
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