Name: Joe Asks Former CIA Officer Mike Baker About the FBI Trump Raid
Uploaded: 2022-08-24T17:58:28.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Asks Former CIA Officer Mike Baker About the FBI Trump Raid' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-24. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Asks Former CIA Officer Mike Baker About the FBI Trump Raid' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-08-24. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan experience.
What do you think about the raid?
Was that justified?
Well, I'll caveat this by saying it's speculation because I haven't seen the
affidavit.
Not many people have.
But then I'll start by saying it's yet another self-inflicted wound by Trump,
right?
He didn't need to end up like that.
The departure from the White House was fairly chaotic, as you can imagine,
right?
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, right?
And it was in part because they had a lot of churn in personnel and all this.
So, you know, 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,
you know, information that,
that, you know, is not classified and is just material that, you know, one day
can end up in a presidential library
library or they can use to write a book when they finish up and they want to,
you know, 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, what, what isn't and what can we get.
But, you know, that requires a process, right?
And that requires, you know, there's, there's protocols involved for saying
what you can, what you can take with you.
Right. And you, but you can, and so if they had done that, if they'd done the
right thing, they wouldn't have ended up in this situation.
And what they did was they, once again, you know, Trump is able to like suck
all the oxygen out of the room.
Right. And, and it's just, it's one of those things that I think was just
unnecessary.
Was it, was it, was the raid justified?
But I don't know, cause I don't know what, what the specific documents were
that they really had a Jones about.
They were been negotiating this for some time, right?
They'd been talking to them and going back and forth and they discussed what,
you know, what they had and how is it stored and all the rest of it.
And they'd gotten 15 or so boxes earlier, why they didn't just do that all in
one, you know, effort and say, okay, we need, 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 or was, so I, I don't know.
Do you have suspicions that it was a political maneuver that 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?
Yeah.
I mean, I think there were, there were politics in the sense that, you know, a
lot of, you know, folks up on Capitol Hill or took delight in it, right?
And, and found it to be, you know, a really good piece of entertainment, but if
you say politics from the, the FBI's perspective, from the department of
justice's perspective.
I mean, I, I mean, I know a number of, of guys that work for the Bureau and I
know them to be really solid people.
They're just, they're street guys, they're investigators, they do their job,
they're very, very good.
I don't know anybody senior in the DOJ or at the Bureau.
So I don't know how politicized they are and whether that played into it or not,
but I, you know, people that are actually engaged in the, in the search, you
know, that show up at Mar-a-Lago, they're, they're doing their job, right?
And they've been told this is what we have to do, you know, I think that it was
such an extraordinary step and so unprecedented that, you know, maybe I'll be
proven wrong once they release the affidavit and we all find out what was, what
was sitting there.
But I can't hope but think that they, they had a reason why they said, no, we
can't, we can't just keep dragging along here because we're not getting the
responses we need.
So we do need to go in.
We need to knock on the door, say, look, we've got to, you know.
Now, I do suspect that they could have approached it differently, you know, and
not had the presence they had and everything, but who knows.
Again, it's, 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, you know,
why it shouldn't have been done.
And that's part of our problem.
You know, 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, right?
It's like after a terrorism incident.
Everybody wants an answer immediately.
Well, it's an investigation and those things take time.
You know, 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, right?
Because that's, you know, they've been around a long time.
They're at that position because, you know, they work closely with, you know,
politicos or whatever.
But I don't know.
It doesn't really answer your question.
I've just spent a lot of time talking in circles.
Well, it's so confusing for someone like me that's like going, well, what's
going on here?
Is there more than meets the eye?
Or is this like 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?
I mean, that's what the fear is, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think he's certainly always pushed the envelope.
I don't think it's any – nobody can really argue the fact that he's kind of
used his own playbook, you know, all along.
And, you know, you can't just say – and then people – he's saying things
like, well, I declassified the documents.
You know, they're all declassified.
Well, you can't just click your heels and say these documents are declassified,
right?
There's a process that takes place.
Otherwise, it's a complete fucking goat rope, right?
Nobody knows what's classified, what's not.
You know, you can't just in your presidential head say, okay, I'm declassifying
everything related to, you know, whatever this was.
Does a president have the ability to declassify things?
Sure, unilaterally.
Yeah, unilaterally.
So he could declassify documents and then conceivably store these documents?
Yeah, but there's a process for that, right?
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?
But if there's documentation that's not cataloged and marked as declassified,
right, again, you know, it has to show that.
If you've got a document that's, you know, top secret, you know, code word, and
you look at it and it's marked top secret, you know, code word, then, you know,
you have to assume it's still classified, right?
And there's a mere fact of him saying, oh, no, you know, last year I declassified
that.
It's, that doesn't hold water.
You can't, you know, 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, you know, it's just not the nature of it.
He's not compliant.
Yeah.
So, and then he's, isn't he suing now to get documents back?
Yeah, he is.
And also to have information not, not released.
I think part of this problem, again, it kind of goes back to what we're talking
about before with the transparency of the U.S. government.
When they talked about this in this little conference room in DOJ, wherever
they talked about it, and they said, ah, you know, we're thinking about
conducting a raid.
And the Bureau doesn't like to use 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 have, once again, from a messaging perspective,
stepped 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 how, what a firestorm it was
going to create.
And so 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?
And that's where everyone jumps in and starts declaring what exactly happened
without knowing what the fuck happened.
Right.
And then you get all this misinformation and disinformation and it's another
fucking, you know, goat rope.
So it's, you know, it's a process that I think, you know, 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.
The White House saying we had no idea that the AG was authorized to search the
president's, former president's home.
Yeah, probably that's not the case.
They're going to have, 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.
And just let you know this is coming down the pike.
So how does that play out, you think?
Do you think that, 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.
You know, the hard left is saying, oh, he's got, you know, the world's most
dangerous secrets held at Mar-a-Lago, right?
And the right is saying, eh, you know, he declassified it all.
There's nothing there.
And the truth is, like it typically is, is somewhere probably in the middle.
And in the middle, they're probably going to realize they don't have anything
to indict him on.
They're not going to do it.
It's going to be like all these other things that they were kind of going after.
And, you know, so I'll be cutting you a check if you take a check.
I can Venmo you or PayPal.
Yeah, we'll do that.
Yeah, I do those things nowadays.
So 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 fucking odd 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, you know, 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.
And no one's excited about Kamala Harris.
They got that lady tucked away somewhere.
God, I don't know what she's doing.
I really don't know what a job is anymore, but you're right.
The problem is he's going to have to make that call, right?
So 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 him because
I think you're right.
In previous times, they would have deferred to the VP, right?
I don't think they're going to do that.
No.
They're not going to do that.
So you're going to have this free-for-all where you get people like Gavin Newsom,
Pete Buttigieg, probably Bernie Sanders again.
He's even older than Biden.
He's entertaining.
And 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.
So I agree with you 100% on that one.
It doesn't look good.
Yeah.
There's no real exciting options.
330-plus million people.
I forget what the population of the U.S. is nowadays, but 330-plus million
people.
And these are the options we get.
Nobody wants to do that job.
It's a terrible job.
Well, plus you also get the primaries.
And they vote for the hard edge.
So you get that person who says, I'm all for clean energy.
Climate change is the number one problem.
Vote for me.
And then you get the people on the far right that say, I'm all about banning
abortion and contraception and porn.
And so the hard right, you know, maybe the conservatives on the hard right vote
for them.
And 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.

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

The Joe Rogan experience.
What do you think about the raid?
Was that justified?
Well, I'll caveat this by saying it's speculation because I haven't seen the
affidavit.
Not many people have.
But then I'll start by saying it's yet another self-inflicted wound by Trump,
right?
He didn't need to end up like that.
The departure from the White House was fairly chaotic, as you can imagine,
right?
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, right?
And it was in part because they had a lot of churn in personnel and all this.
So, you know, 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,
you know, information that,
that, you know, is not classified and is just material that, you know, one day
can end up in a presidential library
library or they can use to write a book when they finish up and they want to,
you know, 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, what, what isn't and what can we get.
But, you know, that requires a process, right?
And that requires, you know, there's, there's protocols involved for saying
what you can, what you can take with you.
Right. And you, but you can, and so if they had done that, if they'd done the
right thing, they wouldn't have ended up in this situation.
And what they did was they, once again, you know, Trump is able to like suck
all the oxygen out of the room.
Right. And, and it's just, it's one of those things that I think was just
unnecessary.
Was it, was it, was the raid justified?
But I don't know, cause I don't know what, what the specific documents were
that they really had a Jones about.
They were been negotiating this for some time, right?
They'd been talking to them and going back and forth and they discussed what,
you know, what they had and how is it stored and all the rest of it.
And they'd gotten 15 or so boxes earlier, why they didn't just do that all in
one, you know, effort and say, okay, we need, 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 or was, so I, I don't know.
Do you have suspicions that it was a political maneuver that 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?
Yeah.
I mean, I think there were, there were politics in the sense that, you know, a
lot of, you know, folks up on Capitol Hill or took delight in it, right?
And, and found it to be, you know, a really good piece of entertainment, but if
you say politics from the, the FBI's perspective, from the department of
justice's perspective.
I mean, I, I mean, I know a number of, of guys that work for the Bureau and I
know them to be really solid people.
They're just, they're street guys, they're investigators, they do their job,
they're very, very good.
I don't know anybody senior in the DOJ or at the Bureau.
So I don't know how politicized they are and whether that played into it or not,
but I, you know, people that are actually engaged in the, in the search, you
know, that show up at Mar-a-Lago, they're, they're doing their job, right?
And they've been told this is what we have to do, you know, I think that it was
such an extraordinary step and so unprecedented that, you know, maybe I'll be
proven wrong once they release the affidavit and we all find out what was, what
was sitting there.
But I can't hope but think that they, they had a reason why they said, no, we
can't, we can't just keep dragging along here because we're not getting the
responses we need.
So we do need to go in.
We need to knock on the door, say, look, we've got to, you know.
Now, I do suspect that they could have approached it differently, you know, and
not had the presence they had and everything, but who knows.
Again, it's, 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, you know,
why it shouldn't have been done.
And that's part of our problem.
You know, 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, right?
It's like after a terrorism incident.
Everybody wants an answer immediately.
Well, it's an investigation and those things take time.
You know, 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, right?
Because that's, you know, they've been around a long time.
They're at that position because, you know, they work closely with, you know,
politicos or whatever.
But I don't know.
It doesn't really answer your question.
I've just spent a lot of time talking in circles.
Well, it's so confusing for someone like me that's like going, well, what's
going on here?
Is there more than meets the eye?
Or is this like 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?
I mean, that's what the fear is, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I think he's certainly always pushed the envelope.
I don't think it's any – nobody can really argue the fact that he's kind of
used his own playbook, you know, all along.
And, you know, you can't just say – and then people – he's saying things
like, well, I declassified the documents.
You know, they're all declassified.
Well, you can't just click your heels and say these documents are declassified,
right?
There's a process that takes place.
Otherwise, it's a complete fucking goat rope, right?
Nobody knows what's classified, what's not.
You know, you can't just in your presidential head say, okay, I'm declassifying
everything related to, you know, whatever this was.
Does a president have the ability to declassify things?
Sure, unilaterally.
Yeah, unilaterally.
So he could declassify documents and then conceivably store these documents?
Yeah, but there's a process for that, right?
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?
But if there's documentation that's not cataloged and marked as declassified,
right, again, you know, it has to show that.
If you've got a document that's, you know, top secret, you know, code word, and
you look at it and it's marked top secret, you know, code word, then, you know,
you have to assume it's still classified, right?
And there's a mere fact of him saying, oh, no, you know, last year I declassified
that.
It's, that doesn't hold water.
You can't, you know, 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, you know, it's just not the nature of it.
He's not compliant.
Yeah.
So, and then he's, isn't he suing now to get documents back?
Yeah, he is.
And also to have information not, not released.
I think part of this problem, again, it kind of goes back to what we're talking
about before with the transparency of the U.S. government.
When they talked about this in this little conference room in DOJ, wherever
they talked about it, and they said, ah, you know, we're thinking about
conducting a raid.
And the Bureau doesn't like to use 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 have, once again, from a messaging perspective,
stepped 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 how, what a firestorm it was
going to create.
And so 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?
And that's where everyone jumps in and starts declaring what exactly happened
without knowing what the fuck happened.
Right.
And then you get all this misinformation and disinformation and it's another
fucking, you know, goat rope.
So it's, you know, it's a process that I think, you know, 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.
The White House saying we had no idea that the AG was authorized to search the
president's, former president's home.
Yeah, probably that's not the case.
They're going to have, 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.
And just let you know this is coming down the pike.
So how does that play out, you think?
Do you think that, 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.
You know, the hard left is saying, oh, he's got, you know, the world's most
dangerous secrets held at Mar-a-Lago, right?
And the right is saying, eh, you know, he declassified it all.
There's nothing there.
And the truth is, like it typically is, is somewhere probably in the middle.
And in the middle, they're probably going to realize they don't have anything
to indict him on.
They're not going to do it.
It's going to be like all these other things that they were kind of going after.
And, you know, so I'll be cutting you a check if you take a check.
I can Venmo you or PayPal.
Yeah, we'll do that.
Yeah, I do those things nowadays.
So 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 fucking odd 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, you know, 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.
And no one's excited about Kamala Harris.
They got that lady tucked away somewhere.
God, I don't know what she's doing.
I really don't know what a job is anymore, but you're right.
The problem is he's going to have to make that call, right?
So 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 him because
I think you're right.
In previous times, they would have deferred to the VP, right?
I don't think they're going to do that.
No.
They're not going to do that.
So you're going to have this free-for-all where you get people like Gavin Newsom,
Pete Buttigieg, probably Bernie Sanders again.
He's even older than Biden.
He's entertaining.
And you're just going to get a host of characters coming in because I d