Live from Music Row Thursday morning on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m. – host Leahy welcomed all-star panelist Clint Brewer in-studio to examine the process in which the Department of Justice and FBI instituted the raid on former President Donald Trump’s home Monday.
Leahy: In studio, the great Clint Brewer, recovering journalist, and all-star panelist.
Brewer: (Laughs) I’m no longer “the man about town.” I’m now “the great.” Can I put that on my business card?
Leahy: “Man about town.” It has a certain …
Brewer: Connotation.
Leahy: You’re a family man. You’re not a man about town.
Brewer: I’m not a man about town.
Leahy: Okay, so let’s go into some of the process details here of what should have happened, what didn’t happen, and why this is such a debacle, politically, for the Department of Justice, and for the FBI, and for the Biden administration. This raid.
Brewer: Yes. Some of the natural inclinations of the people who actually do work at the Department of Justice and the FBI are kind of running against them in the court of public opinion. Which is to say nothing, right?
You could call them and ask the FBI, are you investigating Michael Patrick Leahy? Are you investigating Clint Brewer? And they would say, we don’t comment on ongoing investigations.
Leahy: That’s so standard.
Brewer: So standard. A lot of agencies do that at their level. And so their culture is working against them in sort of the messaging war that’s going on about this right now.
I would posit to them that, hey, fellas, I know your normal response is this, but you probably should have had a plan.
Leahy: And you should have thought – I think this is an indication of the arrogance and the abusive nature of their ideas about the power they have. Think about this.
Let’s just say you were the attorney general and I was the director of the FBI and there was a Republican president of the United States, and we were presented with our agents saying we want to conduct a raid on the former Democrat president’s house. I would say, are you crazy? That’s what I would say.
Brewer: I would say, look … the bar for that, let’s talk about it this way. Let’s talk about it in the context of, if they did everything right. Let’s assume they did and talk about what that looks like.
If they did everything right within the FBI and within the Department of Justice, this should have been the single-most scrutinized search warrant possibly in the history of the republic.
Leahy: I agree with that.
Brewer: If they did everything right. You have to understand, the workaday lawyers in the Department of Justice, not the political appointees that come and go with each administration, but the people who are career folks, particularly the attorneys in the Department of Justice, their bar is very high for this kind of stuff.
For anything involving any public official, I don’t care if it’s the mayor of a small town, or a gubernatorial appointee in any state, their bar internally is very high when it comes to anything involving a public official, which typically revolves around public corruption.
And so if they did everything right, it should have been unimaginably intense scrutiny before that was taken to the district court.
Leahy: Actually, it was taken to the U.S. magistrate in the Florida district.
Brewer: And again, that is, I understand your complaints, noted, and germane, about the person who signed, the magistrate. But again, that’s just a form issue. They didn’t go venue shopping. Because if the district judge didn’t want them to do it, the magistrate wouldn’t do it. So, it’s not like …
Leahy: I don’t know if that’s true.
Brewer: I do. The magistrate doesn’t have all-encompassing power. It’s not like they snuck around the district judge and had a magistrate sign it. It wouldn’t work that way.
Leahy: I’m not sure of that. If you’re the attorney general, and, back to the scrutiny of the search warrant, you don’t present it to the U.S. magistrate judge. The two pieces of information you already know about this guy, number one …
Brewer: Magistrates typically sign these things. That’s what I’m trying to say.
Leahy: Well, I don’t think so. Not in the case of this instance, where there are two known facts about this guy. A never-Trumper …
Brewer: I agree with you. I agree. But I’m trying to say to you, don’t presume conspiracy when it’s probably just a bad decision. I think it’s tone deaf. It’s clearly tone deaf, but I wouldn’t assign any meaning to it. Here’s the bottom line.
You, me, the guy on the street, most reporters covering this, have no idea of what’s actually going on. And I will say that for the sort of institutional – sanctity is not the right word, but in the interest of protecting the institutions of the Bureau and the Department of Justice – to your points, there needs to be something said pretty soon. Something.
Leahy: They don’t intend to say anything. They haven’t said anything since Monday morning.
Brewer: Maybe behind the scenes, there’s a path.
Leahy: What’s happening behind the scenes, though, Clint, they are leaking information from, “senior Department of Justice officials” are leaking information to liberal news outlets. One leak is saying, well, we had an informant on the ground. Did you see that?
Brewer: The first thing I read about that was in Axios, and it said that people inside of Trump world were concerned that somebody had been, ‘flipped’.
Leahy: Actually, Newsweek made that claim from a source in the Department of Justice who said, we had an informant inside.
Brewer: What do you make of them taking this particular congressman’s cellphone in Pennsylvania?
Leahy: Yes. Why would you do that?
Brewer: It’s very difficult to tell. Two things have been mentioned here. One, the records that may or may not have been at Mar-a-Lago, the presidential records, the potential classified nature of those records, which, again, we don’t know – it’s just been speculated upon – and then some connection to the search warrant to the January 6 debate. And those go in two different directions.
Leahy: Totally different directions.
Brewer: They appear to go in two different direction. But maybe not. Maybe they’re all about the same thing.
Leahy: On Tuesday, they seized the phone of this Republican Congressman, Perry. And I think that was related to something about J6. Who knows, right?
Brewer: We just don’t know.
Leahy: We don’t know. We don’t know anything about this. And again, it just is a brazen abuse of power. That’s what this looks like. There was a report from the president’s son, he was interviewed by the Daily Mail.
Basically, he said that the FBI agents kicked Donald Trump’s lawyer, Christina Bob off the property, and made her wait at the end of the driveway during the raid.
They also refused to hand over a copy of the search warrant during the operation. Now, who does that to anyone? Who does that? I mean, you’re supposed to be able to see a search warrant, right?
Listen to the interview:
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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 a.m. to The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.
