Joe Asks Former CIA Officer Mike Baker About the FBI Trump Raid

What do you think of this, the raid? Was that justified? Well, I'll caveat this by saying it's speculation because I haven't seen the affidavit. No, not many people have. But then I'll start by saying it's yet another self-inflicted wound by Trump. Didn't need to end up like that. The departure from the White House was fairly chaotic, as you can imagine. That's just the nature of what they were doing. There wasn't the level of organization. It wasn't a very buttoned up administration. It was in part because they had a lot of churn in personnel and all this. You can argue that every administration has some back and forth with the National Archives over what is and isn't presidential record, what they can keep as their own personal material and what has to be held by the government. Why would they keep it? What would be a reason? Well, I mean, if they consider it personal correspondence or they consider it information that is not classified and is just material that one day can end up in a presidential library or they can use to write a book when they finish up and they want to make a few hundred million dollars on a book, then fine. But there's always typically some back and forth that goes on about, okay, what is and what isn't and what can't be kept. But that requires a process. There's protocols involved for saying what you can take with you. If they had done that, if they'd done the right thing, they wouldn't have ended up in this situation. What they did was once again, Trump is able to suck all the oxygen out of the room. It's one of those things that I think was just unnecessary. Was the raid justified? I don't know what the specific documents were that they really had a Jones about. They were negotiating this for some time. They'd been talking to them and going back and forth and they discussed what they had and how is it stored and all the rest of it. They'd gotten 15 or so boxes earlier. Why they didn't just do that all in one effort and say, okay, we have more documents. Maybe it was taking the archives a while to understand what was and wasn't in the materials that were returned. I don't know. Do you have suspicions that it was a political maneuver? The design was to cast more bad light on Trump and eliminate him from the 2024 elections or try to figure out a way to diminish his appeal? I think there were politics in the sense that a lot of folks up on Capitol Hill took the light in it and found it to be a really good piece of entertainment. If you say politics from the FBI's perspective, from the Department of Justice's perspective, I know a number of guys that work for the Bureau and I know them to be really solid people. They're just their street guys, their investigators. They do their job. They're very, very good. I don't know anybody senior in the DOJ or at the Bureau. I don't know how politicized they are and whether that played into it or not. People that are actually engaged in the search, that show up at Mar-a-Lago, they're doing their job and they've been told this is what we have to do. I think that it was such an extraordinary step and so unprecedented that maybe I'll be proven wrong once they release the affidavit and we all find out what was sitting there. I can't help but think that they had a reason why they said, no, we can't just keep dragging along here because we're not getting the responses we need. We do need to go in. We need to knock on the door, say, look, we've got to ... Now, I do suspect that they could have approached it differently and not had the presence they had and everything, but who knows? Again, this is the problem we live in in this world today. There's immediately after that took place, there were people on the left and people on the right who were absolutely sure they had exactly the information to make a decision about what this meant and why it was done or why it shouldn't have been done. That's part of our problem. The unsatisfying answer is you got to wait and find out what exactly occurred to see whether it was justified or not, but nobody wants to hear that. It's like after a terrorism incident, everybody wants an answer immediately. It's an investigation and things take time. All I can say is the folks I know at the Bureau are really quality people, but do people at the top of an organization, are they more politicized? Well, sure, there's a tendency for that to happen because they've been around a long time there at that position because they worked closely with politicos or whatever, but it doesn't really answer your question. I've just spent a lot of time talking in circles. It's so confusing for someone like me that's going, well, what's going on here? Is there more than meets the eye or is this clearly an example of him doing something that is 100% forbidden but he feels like he can do it because he's Donald Trump and he feels like the rules don't apply to him? Because what the fear is, right? Yeah. Well, I think he's certainly always pushed the envelope. Nobody can really argue the fact that he's used his own playbook all along. You can't just say, and then people, he's saying things like, well, I declassified the documents. They're all declassified. Well, you can't just click your heels and say these documents are declassified. There's a process that takes place, otherwise it's a complete fucking goat rope. Nobody knows what's classified, what's not. You can't just in your presidential head say, okay, I'm declassifying everything related to whatever this was. Does a president have the ability to declassify things? Sure. Unilaterally. Yeah, unilaterally. He could declassify documents and then conceivably store these documents. Yeah, but there's a process for that. Did he not go through the process? Based on what has been reported so far, but again, without the affidavit, without the specific details, who knows? If there's documentation that's not cataloged and marked as declassified, again, it has to show that. If you've got a document that's top secret, code word, and you look at it and it's marked top secret, code word, then you have to assume it's still classified. There's a mere fact of him saying, oh no, last year I declassified that. That doesn't hold water. He has to follow protocol and that's where I think he slips up is he doesn't necessarily believe that applies to him or he's just not the nature of- He's not compliant. Yeah. Isn't he suing now to get documents back? Yeah, he is and also to have information not released. I think part of this problem, again, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about before with the transparency of the US government. When they talked about this in this little conference room in DOJ, wherever they talked about it, and they said, we're thinking about conducting a raid and the bureau doesn't like the use of the word raid or DOJ doesn't like to use the word raid, but when they said, we're talking about doing a raid on the home of the former president, they probably should, once again, from a messaging perspective, step back and thought to themselves, okay, what does that mean? How are we going to justify this? Not that they have to, but they should have known what a firestorm it was going to create. They should have had that completely buttoned up and ready to go the moment they were going to do it and be as transparent within the limitations of what they can do, of what they were doing and why they were doing it. Because if they don't, they create all that open space, right? That's where everyone jumps in and starts declaring what exactly happened without knowing what the fuck happened. And then you get all this misinformation and disinformation and it's another fucking goat rope. So it's a process that I think the attorney general probably should have handled better because he had to authorize it. They also had to go in. If the White House says they didn't know anything about it, that's where I'm going to call bullshit. At the White House saying we had no idea that the AG was authorized to search the former president's home, yeah, probably that's not the case. You have to assume they got to walk in, sit down and say, sir, we got a little something we got to talk to you about. Just to let you know this is coming down the pike. So how does that play out, you think? Is it nothing? Is it all much ado about nothing and will it not impact him or will it be a significant factor? Yeah, I think I'm going to lose that $1,000 to you because I think he's going to run again. I don't think it's going to stop him from running. I think they'll realize this. The hard left is saying, oh, he's got the world's most dangerous secrets held at Mar-a-Lago. The right is saying, he declassified it all, there's nothing there. The truth is, like it typically is, is somewhere probably in the middle. In the middle, they're probably going to realize they don't have anything to indict them on. It's going to be like all these other things that they were kind of going after. So I'll be cutting you a check if you take a check. I could Venmo you, PayPal. Yeah, we'll do that. Yeah, I do those things nowadays. For someone like me who's on the outside just trying to pay attention to as little as I can and still talk about it, it's very confusing. Yeah, it is. It's odd. It's not. If you think about it, I mean, we could end up with Biden and Trump running again in 2024. I don't think Biden's going to run. I don't think it's possible. I think he's so deteriorated. I think he's gotten to this point where we're only two years in and he's already completely fallen apart where he can't form sentences anymore. I can't imagine they're going to look at him as a viable candidate in 2024. I mean, a large percentage of the Democrats don't want him to run. Yeah, that seems to be the case for sure. No one's excited about Kamala Harris. They got that lady tucked away somewhere. Oh, God. I don't know what she's doing. I really don't want to job us anymore, but you're right. The problem is he's going to have to make that call. He's got to make that decision to say, I'm not running in 2024, therefore he clears the decks and then you get this mad scramble of a couple dozen people chasing in because I think you're right. In previous times, they would have deferred to the VP. I don't think they're going to do that yet. No. They're not going to do that. This free for all, where you get people like Gavin Newsom, Pete Buttigieg, probably Bernie Sanders again. Really? Yeah. He's even older than Biden. I know, but he's entertaining. You're just going to get a host of characters coming in because I don't think they're going to say, fine, we'll clear the decks for Harris. I agree with you 100% on that one. It doesn't look good. There's no real exciting options. 330 plus million people. I forget what the population of the US is nowadays, but 330 plus million people. These are the options we get. Nobody wants to do that job. It's a terrible job. Plus, you also get the primaries and they vote for the hard edge. You get that person who says, I'm all for clean energy. Climate change is the number one problem. Vote for me. Then you get the people on the far right that say, I'm all about banning abortion and contraception and porn. The hard right, maybe the conservatives on the hard right vote for them. That's what happens in the primaries. Yeah, unfortunately, because you get the registered people that are voting. You get that self selection that just fucks us over.