BUCK: Clay, I would just say couple things. One, to me, the idea that they could even consider bringing a criminal charge against President Trump right now is crazy. The problem, though, is that I think some of these people are crazy.

CLAY: (laughing)

BUCK: I think they actually have Trump Derangement Syndrome. So that’s why, I don’t underestimate their willingness to, especially what we’ve seen with the Russia collusion mess and the two impeachments over what, right? Remember they impeached Donald Trump twice. For what again? Does anyone remember? The second time it was because he asked a question about Zelensky — before the whole Russia invasion, of course — about Hunter Biden.

Who is corrupt and who they were covering up the corruption for and how they have done everything they can, including Facebook suppressing the story about Hunter Biden. So we sit here and say, where does this really go next? Do you think there’s a possibility that they just used this as almost like an early October Surprise where they’re gonna say, “Trump is so corrupt,” and they keep talking about it and leave it at that? Because it energized the base so much for Trump.

CLAY: Yeah, it’s such a good question ’cause you have to try to put yourself in Merrick Garland’s head. And to me the Bush administration takeaway is, there’s nothing to January 6th. And let me explain what I mean by that. Maybe they’re going on a fishing expedition hoping, using the National Archives dispute as a pretext to be able to go into Mar-a-Lago and look for documents that don’t actually deal with a dispute with the National Archives and they’re hoping there’s some smoking gun in there related to January 6th.

Doesn’t seem like it to me. It seems like Merrick Garland is getting all this pressure, and the way that he alleviates the pressure is by having a raid on Donald Trump, which is unprecedented, over these documents, which is ultimately not that significant, and that this is his release valve. I’m just trying to think through it. Let me also point this out, Buck, ’cause I’m glad you mentioned the impeachment. The allegations that came from Russia collusion, impeachment 1, and impeachment 2 — let’s just focus on those three — are actually really significant.

And not that they were substantiated, but the significance of them. Russia collusion. Trump was working with Russia, and that changed the outcome of the 2016 election. That’s a big allegation. And if it were true, it would be a big crime. Impeachment 1: Trump tried to get the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of his chief political rival improperly. Again, if it were true, it’s a big deal. Impeachment 2:

Trump tried to lead an insurrection to overthrow the United States government and a duly elected president who would replace him. This was a default coup. Those are three really big stories. They’re not true, but they’re really big criminal allegations. What we’re talking about right now, Buck, is Trump kept documents from when he was president instead of giving them to the National Archives. The first three here are monster potential stories. The fourth is, like, he kept a library book too long.

BUCK: Right. What is more likely, that there is an effort by the apparatus, the Democrat Party, the federal deep state bureaucrats, to just do everything they can over and over again to defeat Donald Trump, or destroy Donald Trump, or that after three huge swing-and-a-miss situations —

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: — they finally now just happened to stumble upon the one thing that Trump has gone too far, the walls are closing in? We heard that for years.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: These people are out of their minds. And now on this issue, I mean, I’m looking at them; it’s so crazy that I can’t dismiss possibility. You know what I mean? And I know that’s a cognitive dissonance there, right? But it’s such… It would be so insane to bring a federal criminal charge against President Trump over this, for all the reasons you’ve laid out, that he could have declassified these, that they didn’t actually fall into anyone’s hands, that he didn’t actually personally compile these boxes they can’t be there was a legal process. You go through this whole thing.

CLAY: Yes.

BUCK: You say, they’re really even considering it? But I want to remind everybody of something. They used national security bureaucracy and the little mechanisms therein as weapons in politics all the time. Remember there a special counsel — no one even thinks about this one in your name — looking into the leak of a CIA officer’s identity? They knew very early on it was a mistake. It was Richard Armitage who didn’t mean to, but he did it. But they kept going. Why did they use the investigation? They thought they could get either Karl Rove or maybe Dick Cheney. They got Scooter Libby — not on actually outing anybody — on, they said, lying about a conversation he had two years previously. Clay, this is what libs do because they’re crazy.

CLAY: And if they are truly crazy, and if we’re in Merrick Garland’s head, they likely, Buck, have convinced themselves that Donald Trump is Al Capone. And they may be trying to do, in their mind, the equivalent of getting Al Capone for tax evasion is, “Oh, Trump’s done so many awful things, but we’ve got him on document storage issues. We’ll throw the full weight of the federal government behind him on this because we believe he’s so corrupt and venal in other respects.”