Barry Diller, a billionaire twice over who chairs the media conglomerate IAC, is a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter. | Getty The Playbook Interview: Barry Diller The IAC chairman says the idea that 'The Apprentice' can’t release its footage of Donald Trump is ‘total bullshit’.

Menlo Park, Calif. — The argument that "The Apprentice" can't release recordings of Donald Trump is "total bullshit," according to media mogul Barry Diller, who sounded off on politics and the future of media in a Playbook Interview on Tuesday.

"I think it’s total bullshit," Diller said when asked about whether he buys the claim by MGM, which owns the rights to the hit reality show, that “various contractual and legal requirements” restrict its ability to release footage of Trump that some have said would show the New York mogul making disparaging remarks about women and minorities.


"There are no legal obligations,” Diller told Playbook. “To who? For what? I mean, the legal obligations are they own the copyright. They can do whatever they want with it."

Diller, a billionaire twice over who chairs the media conglomerate IAC, is a prominent Hillary Clinton supporter and has personally maxed out to her campaign. His comments directly contradict a statement put out Monday by MGM and Mark Burnett, which said “The Apprentice” founder did not have “the ability or the right to release footage or other material” from the show.

Diller described himself as “kind of unshockable.” But he said that the now-infamous leaked video clip of Trump bragging about groping women was “so astounding it’s almost beyond belief.”

Playbook spoke with Diller at the Internet Association's Virtuous Circles conference at the Rosewood Sand Hill hotel, where he called for new laws to shorten the campaign season and urged Clinton to overhaul the tax code as president. Excerpts:

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The media isn’t responsible for Trump becoming the GOP nominee: “People who say it’s the media’s fault, it’s not the media’s fault. That’s craziness. And it’s not fault to say that what are people in the media interested in, they are interested in people being interested in what they are talking, writing or doing. That’s of course what anybody is interested in who is a disseminator of information… so you have a character that is compelling and he’s compelling for all those reasons and it’s never been any different from going back to Father Coughlin or other people who were so outrageous they were compelling.”

The U.S. needs shorter election cycles and campaign finance reform: “We have to change the cycle … They are exhausting and we should change them as we’re the only country that has this kind of an extended period. [The U.S. should] enact as Britain laws that organize it. We should do that. It’s crazy for us not to.

The financial system supporting elections is beyond – it’s almost beyond repair … If we’re not wise enough to fix the cycle, if we’re not wise enough to stop this money-grubbing [and] all of its consequences, horrible consequences, then we deserve what we get. I know the thing that I’m going to try and spend time on.”

Clinton should throw out the tax code and “start over”: “I want the administration to do something the previous administrations haven’t done for a very long time, if ever, which is fix the tax code, which is reprehensible. You think again that people now knowing you can get a deduction from kind of intangible losses that would preclude you from paying taxes is just one tiny, tiny little slice of the inequities that are in the voluminous tax code, which should be thrown out and we should start over. That’s idealistic, but I would really think that we have to.”

The future of media is direct to consumers: “What I do think is once the chains have been broken the control of media by the few, which the internet has done, there is only forward and those broken chains and the fragmentation that has come [from that] and will continue to come is going to create enormous challenges to incumbents, offer non-incumbents entry, very low-cost entry, and over time I think is the descending value of large media enterprises.

“It’s the reason we [IAC] exist. Because we have essentially been direct to the consumer. Once I left big-ticket entertainment business — Fox 20 years ago — I have not had to go through distributors, essentially, other than Google as an aggregator. But I have been in pursuit – I got it very early that what this allowed you to do is go direct and not have to go through anybody, so that ability is what drives everything.”