The Trump-Hating, Epstein-Defending Judge Who Approved the Warrant

BUCK: We’ve been talking a lot about the judge, for example, who signed off on the Trump warrant.

CLAY: Yeah.

BUCK: And so much of the legal process is concerned with the appearance of impropriety. All recusals are really about, “I’m using my judgement as a judge to say I shouldn’t weigh in on this because I can’t be impartial.” The judge who signed off on the warrant to go do the raid on Mar-a-Lago may have had… First of all, there’s the Epstein defense thing, but I know defense attorneys will say, you defend whoever. But, I mean, you don’t actually have to defend anybody. There’s public defenders.

CLAY: Correct. And the part that’s particularly noxious, I would say, about the Epstein connection is, he was affiliated with, in some way, the office that investigated Epstein in South Florida and led to that very light prosecution agreement.

BUCK: I would say this. There’s never been, Clay — to your point about the light prosecution, there’s really never been — an explanation for why. Andy McCarthy told me this years ago: There is no such thing in prosecutorial conduct as a promise to not prosecute as yet unnamed coconspirators, which is essentially —

CLAY: — get a full story, yeah.

BUCK: Which is what they gave Jeffrey Epstein as part of his federal plea agreement, we’re gonna make this go away and also anyone else who gets dragged into this in the future cannot be the subject of federal charges. I asked Andy. I’d never seen that before; he’d never seen that before.

CLAY: Which is why there’s some discussion that Epstein may have been an agent, right, that he may have been in some way cooperating with someone in the United States government in order to get that kind of lenient treatment.

BUCK: He was running a massive surveillance and blackmail operation based on the infrastructure of the properties that he had. He had the wealthiest and most influential people in the world visiting him. And if you want to see something really crazy for the FBI’s integrity and believability, go look at how they showed up at his New York residence that was gifted to him by Les Wexner, which is worth about $80,000 million, I’m sure that, you know, people can feel very generous.

I’ve never had of anyone feeling so generous to a friend they gave him an $80 million mansion, you know, just ’cause. Sounds like maybe there was something else going on there. But the FBI showed up at the home of Epstein at one point and they were gonna get all these tapes, surveillance tapes. You know what happened? The lawyers for Epstein were like, “No, no, no. Hold on. We’ll separate it for you.” The FBI left the premises and came back, and the tapes were lost. This is all matter of court record. Sorry. Little woopsy there. Couldn’t find what was on those tapes.

CLAY: Again, the whole Epstein story doesn’t add up, and so he was on one side of the Epstein story in South Florida, then he leaves, goes into private practice and represents tons of Epstein associates. And when we come back, we’ll tell you about some of his Facebook posts that were very anti-Donald Trump and why I think it could be a legal issue going forward if we have an actual independent judiciary.