Big revelations from Tulsi Gabbard, DNI, about the Obama administration manipulating intelligence surrounding Russiagate. Also, the latest on the Epstein files, a tape of Jeffrey Epstein talking about Donald Trump, and Columbia University's full-scale surrender to the Trump administration.
00:01:26.000So yesterday on Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has been somewhat on the out with the Trump administration, at least a little bit, ever since the hubbub over whether to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities or not.
00:01:38.000Well, now she is back and better than ever because she has now made the claim that Barack Obama committed an act of treason back in 2017, 2016, 2017, the tail end of his presidency, the very beginning of the Trump presidency.
00:01:52.000So she has now declassified documents that she claims prove intelligence officials in the Obama administration lied about Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 election.
00:02:01.000Specifically, she is claiming that this intelligence community assessment that was eventually released at the beginning of 2017, just before Donald Trump took office, was doctored in order to reach the conclusion, among other conclusions, that not only did the Russians interfere in the election, but that the Russians did so in order to get Donald Trump elected.
00:02:23.000She said, Obama's IC, the intelligence community, created an intelligence assessment that they knew was false.
00:02:30.000There is irrefutable evidence that detail how President Obama and his national security team directed the creation of an intelligence community assessment that they knew was false.
00:02:42.000They knew it would promote this contrived narrative that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help President Trump win, selling it to the American people as though it were true.
00:03:06.000Do you believe that any of this new information implicates former President Obama in criminal behavior?
00:03:12.000We have referred and will continue to refer all of these documents to the Department of Justice and the FBI to investigate the criminal implications of this.
00:03:24.000And then she added that Barack Obama might be guilty of treason, which is a specific statutory charge.
00:03:31.000Do you believe President Obama is guilty of treason?
00:03:34.000I'm leaving the criminal charges to the Department of Justice.
00:03:38.000I'm not an attorney, but as I've said previously, when you look at the intent behind creating a fake manufactured intelligence document that directly contradicts multiple assessments that were created by the intelligence community, the expressed intent and what followed afterward can only be described as a years-long coup and a treasonous conspiracy against the American people, our republic, and an attempt to undermine President Trump's administration.
00:04:09.000Okay, so today we're going to go through what exactly the accusations are.
00:04:12.000What is the document that she released and to support the idea of criminal charges?
00:04:16.000Because many things, as always, can be true at once.
00:04:18.000One, the Obama administration clearly meant to undermine the incoming Trump administration through rumor, innuendo, and nonsense compiled into an intelligence community assessment about Russia and Trump laying the predicate for four long years of Mueller investigation trash.
00:04:35.000Also, it can also be true that Telsey Gabbard isn't really releasing anything new right here.
00:04:39.000And the administration lately has formed a pattern of, shall we say, overselling what they are doing and thus justifying people on the right and the left saying, well, then where's the goods?
00:04:50.000Meaning, if you're going to accuse Barack Obama of treason, and if you believe that's well-based, and then there is no actual prosecution that takes place, a lot of people are going to be a little bit perturbed.
00:05:01.000They're going to say, okay, well, thanks for the information.
00:05:05.000But if there's no follow-up, if nothing actually comes of this, then where precisely is the there?
00:05:12.000And this is a problem that we've had with regards to the Epstein files, obviously, because Pam Bondi, among others in the administration, radically oversold what the administration had and what they were going to do.
00:05:22.000And then people were very disappointed and upset.
00:05:24.000And again, I don't blame people for being disappointed and upset when Pam Bondi oversold a thing and now has created this ruckus around President Trump.
00:05:32.000Well, Tulsi Gabbard going after Barack Obama here, again, on a moral level, justified, on a legal level, it does create the necessity to actually do something that I don't think is going to be actually fulfilled.
00:05:44.000And it puts more pressure on the AG, on the Attorney General, to do a thing that the Attorney General almost certainly is not capable of doing legally.
00:05:50.000So we're going to get into all of the accusations because, again, all of these things can be true at once.
00:05:54.000The most shocking part of what Gabbard released yesterday, it's a House Intelligence Committee report.
00:06:00.000And the most shocking part of it that she discusses is that the Russians clearly had negative information on Hillary Clinton they did not drop during the 2016 election cycle, which undermines the claim, pretty obviously, that they wanted Trump to win.
00:06:12.000If they wanted Trump to win, then in the last days of the election, when Trump was narrowing the gap, they really should have dropped all of the dirt they supposedly had.
00:06:20.000The report goes into great detail about the information that Russia and Putin had on Hillary Clinton, which included possible criminal acts like secret Meetings with multiple named U.S. religious organizations in which State Department officials offered, in exchange for supporting Secretary Clinton's campaign for the presidency, significant increases in financing from the State Department.
00:06:45.000They also had documents that showed the patronage of the State Department to State Department employees who would go and support Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign.
00:06:56.000There were high-level DNC emails that detailed evidence of Hillary's, quote, psycho-emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness, and that then Secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers.
00:07:13.000Okay, so she's putting all of that out there.
00:07:15.000Democrats, of course, are very annoyed with all of this because they say, okay, well, that's Russian information supposedly about what Hillary Clinton's health condition was, but we don't have that confirmed.
00:07:24.000And so now you're doing rumor and innuendo by putting out a bunch of stuff that wasn't actually confirmed by the intelligence community and all of the rest.
00:07:32.000So let's go through what's actually here, what the timeline was, because you can see, again, it is absolutely true that the Obama administration from the middle of the summer and on in 2016 tried to create a massive narrative surrounding President Trump and then after he won his incoming administration suggesting that they were tools of the Russians.
00:07:51.000Kimberly Strassel over at the Wall Street Journal lays out the actual timeline here, which is pretty telling.
00:07:59.000She says, according to a new report released by the DNI, career security analysts in a September 2016 intelligence community assessment did not believe Russia had the capabilities to successfully execute widespread attacks on election infrastructure and judged it more interested in making the U.S. electoral process appear illegitimate, which is pretty much what it did.
00:08:15.000By December 8th, 2016, the Intel community had compiled a seven-page president's daily brief draft on what cyber activities it had found during the election.
00:08:24.000That presidential daily brief cited the intelligence community's low-to-moderate confidence assessment that Russia was involved in the compromise of an inadequately protected Illinois voter registration database.
00:08:34.000It also cited high-profile Russian cyber-enabled data leaks during the election that probably were intended to cause psychological effects like undermining the credibility of the election process and candidates.
00:08:43.000That draft was supposed to be published the very next day.
00:08:46.000Hours after that presidential daily brief was circulated, the FBI, led by James Comey, sent Kurt word it would be drafting a dissent and asking it be removed from the list of authors.
00:08:56.000A DHS official asked exactly what was going on.
00:09:00.000Later, the DNI killed the publication of the PBD based on some new guidance.
00:09:05.000We now know from former special counsel John Durham that this time period coincided with Comey seizing on the infamous Steele dossier.
00:09:12.000The next day, December 9th, and this is the key date, the Obama White House gathered together its national security principals to talk about a sensitive topic, including former DNI James Clapper, former CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and others.
00:09:26.000After the meeting, Clapper's assistant sent out an email titled, POTUS Tasking on Russian Election Meddling, asking DNI officials to create an assessment per the president's request.
00:09:37.000Usually the way you do intelligence assessments, as Strassel points out, is you look at the available intelligence and then the intelligence community filters it, double checks it, and then they create an assessment.
00:09:46.000You don't have the president saying, I want you to reassess the information that you've already put into this intelligence assessment.
00:09:54.000From there, says Strassel, it was a straight shot to the new and inflammatory January 6th intelligence community assessment.
00:09:59.000The new ICA baldly blared, quote, we assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election.
00:10:07.000Russia's goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency.
00:10:14.000We further assess Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.
00:10:19.000We have high confidence in these judgments.
00:10:21.000And it's that contention specifically that the House intelligence report that Gabbard released goes after.
00:10:27.000So again, when I say there's an oversell happening, the oversell is that there is no Russian election meddling.
00:10:31.000There clearly was Russian interference in the election.
00:10:35.000So the ICA, that assessment from January 6th suggested that they did it to help Trump and to hurt Clinton.
00:10:42.000And that, of course, was the line retailed for the next several years and even up till today by Democrats and their friends.
00:10:48.000That probably is not true, according to this House intelligence report.
00:10:51.000In fact, there is good information that not only is it not true, that essentially the Obama administration went back and doctored the intelligence in order to achieve that effect.
00:11:00.000All right, well, the Obama administration certainly inserted itself in discussions about Russia and RussiaGate to corrupt effect.
00:11:07.000And this is just another reason why giving the government more power, kind of a problem.
00:11:10.000Are you aware of House Bill Section 702?
00:11:13.000It extends the rights of government agencies to legally monitor American citizens without requiring a warrant.
00:11:18.000Congress just renewed it for another two years.
00:11:20.000While we should demand better privacy protections from our government, it's also important to take steps to protect yourself in the meantime.
00:11:25.000One significant way your privacy is compromised is through your browsing history.
00:11:28.000Your internet service provider tracks every website you visit, and if you live in America, they can legally share your data with other companies and government agencies.
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00:13:50.000Okay, so now we get into the House intelligence report.
00:13:54.000And again, we've laid out the timeline.
00:13:56.000The timeline was that essentially there was not intel strong enough to really suggest that the Russians preferred Trump to Clinton, and that's why they were doing what they were doing, as opposed to just screwing around with our elections, which is something they've been doing for literally longer than I have been alive.
00:14:11.000It's something that the Russian government has been doing since the days of the Soviet Union.
00:14:16.000So those House oversight files were released yesterday.
00:14:19.000And here is what the House oversight files say.
00:14:22.000Quote, most ICA judgments on Russia activities in the U.S. election employed proper and analytic tradecraft and were consistent with observed Russian behavior.
00:14:30.000Okay, so right off the bat, that House intelligence report that was released, again, by Tulsi Gabbard yesterday says that the vast majority of what was in that ICA was not in fact false, was not in fact doctrined.
00:14:43.000There were certain specific sections that were seriously problematic, and those are the things that we're going to get into.
00:14:47.000The key judgments found to be credible include President Putin ordered conventional and cyber influence operations, notably by leaking politically sensitive emails obtained from computer intrusions too.
00:14:57.000Putin's principal motivations in these operations were to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process and to weaken what the Russians considered to be an inevitable Clinton presidency.
00:15:05.000Okay, so this is different from the Senate intelligence reports.
00:15:07.000There was a Senate intelligence report that came out about the same time as this House report.
00:15:12.000The Senate report was not, so we knew about it at the time.
00:15:15.000That Senate report suggested that Putin interfered in order to help Hillary Clinton.
00:15:19.000The House report says actually the information suggests that Obama and team doctored that up and gussied it up in order to come to the conclusion that Putin was trying to help Trump, as opposed to screwing around with our election process to undermine faith in American elections.
00:15:34.000That House report says Putin held back leaking some compromising material for post-election use against the expected Clinton administration.
00:15:41.000And again, this is what the House intelligence report focuses specifically on.
00:15:44.000So can the charge that the Obama team basically exaggerated and doctored the claim that Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win, can that sustain the burden of, say, a treason charge?
00:15:58.000Now, again, we'll get to the legal specifics in a bit.
00:16:00.000Treason is an actual criminal statutory charge.
00:16:03.000Very difficult to make the claim that Barack Obama in dealing with the intelligence community is not protected by executive immunity.
00:16:09.000That case, Trump versus the United States, likely puts Obama's actions in the category of at least presumptive immunity and maybe total immunity because the executive has tremendous power over the sorts of people who he runs.
00:16:24.000But according to this report, in contrast to the rest of the ICA, the judgment that Putin developed a clear preference for candidate Trump and aspired to help his chances of victory did not adhere to the tenets of analytic standards.
00:16:35.000The director of CIA ordered the post-election publication of 15 reports containing previously collected but unpublished intelligence, three of which were substandard containing information that was unclear, of uncertain origin, potentially biased, or implausible.
00:16:46.000And those became foundational sources for the ICA judgments that Putin preferred Trump over Clinton.
00:16:52.000The ICA then misrepresented these reports as reliable without mentioning their significant underlying flaws.
00:16:58.000One scant, unclear, and unverifiable fragment of a sentence from one of the substandard reports constitutes the only classified information cited to suggest that Putin, quote, aspired to help Trump win.
00:17:08.000And, says the House committee, the ICA ignored or selectively quoted reliable intelligence reports that challenged and in some cases undermined judgments that Putin sought to elect Trump.
00:17:20.000They said, quote, we further assessed Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for Trump.
00:17:24.000We have high confidence in these judgments.
00:17:27.000It also said, CIA and FBI assessed with high confidence Putin and the Russian government aspired to help Trump's chances of victories when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.
00:17:36.000Now, again, that is the controversial part of the ICA that Gabbert is citing right here.
00:17:41.000And as the House report says, unlike routine IC analysis, the ICA was a high-profile product ordered by the president, directed by senior agency heads, and created by just five CIA analysts using one principal drafter.
00:17:53.000Production of that ICA was subject to unusual directives from the president and senior political appointees, in particular, DCIA.
00:18:01.000The draft was not properly coordinated within the CIA or the IC.
00:18:05.000The ICA did not cite any report where Putin directly indicated helping Trump win was the objective.
00:18:10.000That judgment rested on a questionable interpretation of this one unclear fragment of a sentence.
00:18:14.000The unclear fragment is part of a sentence that reads, quote, Putin had made this decision to leak DNC emails after he had come to believe the Democratic nominee had better odds of winning the U.S. presidential election and that candidate Trump, whose victory Putin was counting on, most likely would not be able to pull off a convincing victory.
00:18:31.000So a senior CIA operations official said, we don't know exactly what is meant by that.
00:18:35.000Five different people read it five different ways.
00:18:38.000Now, again, that is literally the only material that was used by the ICA to determine that Putin wanted Trump to win.
00:18:44.000But when it says whose victory Putin was counting on, was counting on could mean expected, desired, hoping for.
00:18:55.000CIA officers in the component running Russia operations described, according to the report, how two versions of the report, one without the fragment and one with, were published as the ICA was being written.
00:19:06.000The ICA bullet text is alarming, implying the existence of a Russian plan for engagement with the Trump campaign that most readers would see as strong evidence of Putin showing a clear preference for candidate Trump.
00:19:15.000But the ICA omits critical report context, which, had it been made available to the reader, would show the report to be implausible, if not ridiculous.
00:19:24.000And again, some of those big indicators that this was not true is that Putin made no positive mention of Trump.
00:19:33.000He actually was skeptical of both Trump and Clinton, that they could improve strained relationships.
00:19:38.000The ICA judged that Putin wanted to help Trump's chances of victory when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton.
00:19:44.000But when the race evolved to the point that it became possible for Putin to help Trump win, the polls narrowed dramatically as Election Day approached.
00:19:50.000The ICA did not address why Putin didn't drop all that information that we quoted Gabbard before saying all about Hillary Clinton's health and all of the rest.
00:20:00.000Now, this is the part that, of course, is getting all the headlines, is the fact that there was a bunch of material in the FBI's possession that showed that the Russians had what they thought was information about Secretary Clinton's health and all of the rest, suggesting that she had, quote, intensified psycho-emotional problems, including uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness, that she was placed on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers.
00:20:24.000And while afraid of losing, she remained, quote, obsessed with a thirst for power.
00:20:28.000Or that the SVR, that it's Russian intelligence, had information that Clinton suffered from type 2 diabetes, ischemic heart disease, deep vein thrombosis, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
00:20:38.000So why didn't they release that is sort of the question.
00:20:41.000Why didn't they release all of that in order to hurt Clinton if they wanted to hurt her in the last days of the election?
00:20:46.000That is the case that is being made by Gabbard and also by this House Intel report.
00:20:52.000By devoting nearly two pages of ICA text, says the report, to summarizing the Steele dossier in a high-profile assessment intended for the president and president-elect, the ICA misrepresented both the significance and credibility of the dossier reports.
00:21:03.000The ICA referred to the dossier as Russian plans and intentions, falsely implying to high-level U.S. policymakers the dossier had intelligence value for understanding Moscow's influence operations.
00:21:12.000So again, this is to support the idea that the ICA was designed in order to put a bunch of bad stuff about Trump out there into the public view.
00:21:22.000The ICA used the steel dossier is what the House committee concluded.
00:21:26.000The ICA lent an inaccurate sense of credibility to the dossier by describing it using intelligence terminology, but without addressing all of the serious intelligence tradecraft red flags that characterized the dossier.
00:21:36.000So, concluded the House, quote, President Putin's priorities were not focused on election operations designed to help candidate Trump win.
00:21:44.000Rather, his priorities appeared focused on post-election operations to undermine the credibility of the expected and possibly preferred Clinton administration and on calling into question the fairness and effectiveness of the American democratic process.
00:21:57.000According to the report, by finishing the ICA before the new president was inaugurated, the outgoing, that'd be John Brennan, retained total control over who could see the raw intelligence cited, who was allowed to review the draft, and what comments would be accepted or rejected.
00:22:10.000Senior experienced CIA officers who objected that the intelligence did not support the key judgments that Putin, quote, aspired to help Trump win were silenced by Brennan in December 2016.
00:22:20.000Those officers might have had their voices heard if the ICA's publication delayed until after the inauguration to allow the incoming CIA director to manage the process.
00:22:27.000Okay, so again, many things could be true.
00:22:29.000Those are the key findings of that House report that was released by Tulsi Gabbard.
00:22:33.000Essentially, that there's very little question, according to that report, that the ICA, that was done at the behest of Barack Obama directly based on that December 9th meeting, that it was biased in favor of the proposition that Donald Trump had been boosted on purpose by Vladimir Putin, which ended up being sort of the key load-bearing foundation of the Mueller investigation.
00:22:58.000There's nothing super duper new about all of that.
00:23:00.000This is the point that's being made by the editorial board at National Review.
00:23:05.000Quote, following Trump's stunning victory, Obama directed his intelligence officials to hurriedly compose and publish an intelligence community assessment to highlight Russian interference in the election.
00:23:13.000Obama and V.P. Biden met with top national security officials on January 5th, 2017, the day before they briefed the incoming Trump.
00:23:20.000That meeting covered Russian interference in the election, contacts between Trump transition official Michael Flynn and Russia's ambassador to the U.S., and the Obama administration's withholding from the Trump transition team of intelligence about Russia.
00:23:31.000In the last minutes of the Obama administration, then-National Security Advisor Susan Rice wrote a memo to File discussing that January 5th White House meeting led by Obama.
00:23:39.000The memo minimized Obama's role and shifted primary responsibility for the probe to FBI Director James Comey.
00:23:45.000But here's the point National Review is making.
00:23:47.000All of the above has been well known for eight years.
00:23:49.000Even though Gabbert presents it as a shocking revelation, there's nothing new about Obama's connection to the Trump-Russia collusion farce.
00:23:55.000Alrighty, coming up, we'll get into all the latest Epstein developments and we're joined by journalist Michael Tracy, who actually looks at all the details on the Epstein stuff.
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00:26:27.000Well, again, the answer here is not particularly a lot.
00:26:31.000Special Counsel John Durham, who is tapped by the Trump first DOJ, that's the first administration, to investigate the origins of the Trump-Russia collusion narrative, spent four exhaustive years on the probe.
00:26:41.000As his 306-page report concludes, the Clinton campaign was principally responsible for fabricating the story.
00:26:46.000The FBI was recklessly irresponsible in opening a full investigation using the dossier in court without rudimentary verification steps.
00:26:55.000Okay, so the question is whether there is anything that's sort of new here.
00:26:59.000And Eli Lake, who of course was very early on RussiaGate, like from the very beginning, covering this and now writes for the free press, he said, one area where Gabbert does bring new information to light is the revelation of a whistleblower inside the intelligence community who did not believe the intelligence supported the conclusion in that ICA that the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump.
00:27:20.000But that is not even the first time that issue has been raised, according to Lake.
00:27:23.000The 2018 report from Republicans on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence also found the intelligence did not support that assertion.
00:27:30.000All these are important points for the historical record.
00:27:32.000They hardly amount to the treasonous conspiracy Gabbert is accusing Trump's political opposition of fomenting.
00:27:38.000Okay, so again, two separate questions.
00:28:14.000RussiaGate is one of the worst scandals in American history.
00:28:17.000It really is, because having an administration and a deep state dedicated to undermining the presidents of the United States for four years is insane.
00:28:24.000And of course, we've seen many of these sorts of scandals, unfortunately, over the course of the last 10 years.
00:28:29.000It's why institutional trust does not exist anymore between RussiaGate, between BLM Summer, when we were led to believe that there was a vast attack on black Americans of all stripes by law enforcement, culminating in a massive Ferguson effect where law enforcement just stopped doing its job,
00:28:46.000from COVID, which was in fact a cover-up by the WHO, the origins of COVID, a cover-up involving Anthony Fauci, the actual treatment of COVID, a cover-up involving everybody from Pfizer to the national government, to, of course, the cover-up of Joe Biden's health.
00:29:05.000I mean, the number of massive, serious cover-ups and manipulations taken by people at the top levels of American government are insane.
00:29:12.000So, of course, it is fully justified and not only justified, necessary for people like Gabbard to expose all of this.
00:29:18.000The problem comes when you oversell, because once you oversell, you end up putting your own administration in a bad position because people want actual prosecutions.
00:29:26.000People want an outcome from all of this.
00:29:29.000None of this, by the way, undermines what Gabbard is saying here.
00:29:33.000So Gabbard was questioned about Senate Intelligence Committee findings.
00:29:37.000So again, there was a Senate Intelligence Committee.
00:29:38.000On that committee sat Secretary of State, Marco Rubio.
00:29:41.000And here she was basically saying that that Senate Intelligence Committee, she's not responsible for it, and kind of dodging the question a little bit.
00:29:49.000The Senate Intelligence Committee spent several years looking into this and unanimously agreed in a bipartisan fashion.
00:29:55.000Secretary of State Rubio was a member of that committee that there was no political interference.
00:30:00.000There was a years-long Justice Department investigation into this as well that also concluded no political interference.
00:30:06.000So help us, from a 50,000-foot level, explain, what do you now have that refutes those two surfaces?
00:30:14.000I'm not asking you to take my word for it.
00:30:16.000I'm asking you and the media to conduct honest journalism and the American people to see for yourself in the documents that we've released now close to 200 pages that point in multiple references, multiple examples, to include comments that have been made by senior intelligence professionals who are some still working within these agencies today that confirm the conclusions that we have drawn,
00:30:42.000that President Obama directed an intelligence community assessment to be created to further this contrived false narrative that ultimately led to a years-long coup to try to undermine President Trump's presidency.
00:30:56.000Did you believe that those two previous investigations missed that or covered it up?
00:31:01.000I'm telling you to look at the evidence.
00:31:04.000Look at the evidence and you will know the truth.
00:31:08.000Okay, so she is essentially saying that the House report is better than the Senate report, which is totally fine.
00:31:12.000The House report may in fact be better than the Senate report.
00:31:14.000Caroline Levitt, the White House press secretary, she says that Barack Obama knew that the Russian collusion stuff was a hoax, and she is right about this.
00:31:24.000The truth is that President Trump never had anything to do with Russia.
00:31:29.000And the Russia collusion hoax was a massive fraud perpetuated on the American people from the very beginning.
00:31:36.000And the worst part of this is Obama knew that truth.
00:31:42.000Okay, so again, she is right about all of this.
00:31:51.000Because the problem is, when you oversell, you end up underdelivering.
00:31:54.000And when you underdeliver, then people get very, very angry at you.
00:31:57.000So are you setting up the administration for a win?
00:31:59.000Are you setting up the administration for a loss here?
00:32:01.000Because when you say that you're referring, for example, to the DOJ for possible prosecution, Pam Bondi now has a check on her desk that she has to cash.
00:32:11.000We've already seen a situation in the Epstein files where Pam Bondi went way out over her skis, claiming that she had the Epstein files on her desk, that she was looking at all of this, that there were tens of thousands of hours of tapes, there were a thousand victims and all of the rest.
00:32:23.000And then when the DOJ and FBI looked at the evidence and came up with their actual final assessment, people were justifiably pissed because they said, Okay, you promised us X and you're not delivering X, so what the hell?
00:32:34.000This is the problem here: playing a short-term game where you oversell in order to earn points with the public or with the media or inside the administration, that is not the right move.
00:32:46.000Again, what she's doing here is great.
00:32:47.000I'm glad that she's revealing all of this information, and much of it we already knew.
00:32:52.000And I think it's totally worthwhile for us to discuss all of this.
00:32:55.000Listen, I wrote an entire book called The People versus Barack Obama about all the different ways in which the Obama administration violated the law during President Obama's presidency.
00:33:46.000Grand jury testimony is generally sealed for a reason.
00:33:49.000The answer being that a lot of that testimony is non-credible or unverifiable and may mention people who are innocent.
00:33:54.000And so judges very often will keep that grand jury testimony under wraps unless there is some sort of compelling national interest in revealing that grand jury testimony.
00:34:03.000U.S. District Court Judge Robin Rosenberg said she was legally barred from releasing the records from Florida grand juries that investigated Epstein in 2005 and 2007 under guidelines governing the secrecy of those proceedings.
00:34:15.000She concluded in her 12-page opinion that court rules allow disclosure of such material only in limited circumstances, according to the Washington Post, and the government's rationale for unsealing those transcripts, the strong public interest in the Epstein case, was not one of them.
00:34:27.000The court's hands are tied, the judge wrote.
00:34:29.000Rosenberg acknowledged the government had made requests for similar material that remained pending before two federal judges in New York, where federal grand jury secrecy rules are less rigid, but not without significant restrictions.
00:34:40.000So it's possible you could still see these released by a federal judge in New York.
00:34:45.000Meanwhile, Representative James Comer of Kentucky is arranging for Ghelene Maxwell, who is Epstein's paramour, girlfriend, and procurer, allegedly, to be deposed next month under congressional subpoena from the federal prison in Florida, where she is currently serving a 20-year sentence.
00:35:00.000Now, as we talked about yesterday, she has every interest at this point in trying to barter for her release by saying that she's going to talk about all the stuff that happened that she apparently has supposedly never talked about, even though she has openly said in a variety of settings that she doesn't really have all that much information.
00:35:16.000Now, listen, we should get to the bottom of all of this.
00:35:18.000Everyone of Goodheart should be interested in finding out who raped whom, who was sex trafficked to whom, what does Ghelaine Maxwell know?
00:35:26.000What happened and when, and how did Jeffrey Epstein get all of his money, and all the rest of this sort of stuff.
00:35:31.000None of those questions undermine the fact that the evidence that DOJ and the FBI are looking at forced them to come to a conclusion they clearly did not want to come to on Jeffrey Epstein.
00:35:41.000Now, the case that is being made by the left and some members of Horseshoe Pseudomaga is that the reason that the Justice Department is not releasing a bunch of files is because President Trump is in them.
00:35:52.000Now, I would be shocked if President Trump is not in the Epstein files, by which I mean many, many famous people are mentioned by Jeffrey Epstein over the course of the last 25 years in documents and other materials that were gathered for his prosecution on both the state and the federal level.
00:36:08.000I would be shocked if President Trump, who was not, who was a close friend with Jeffrey Epstein throughout the 90s and early 2000s, was not in the files, wouldn't you?
00:36:16.000I mean, that'd be kind of surprising because publicly he was associating with him.
00:36:19.000We have tapes of Trump with Epstein at parties.
00:36:22.000So it'd be kind of shocking if he wasn't in the files.
00:36:24.000But the media, again, treating everything as a revelation, even though it is not a revelation.
00:36:28.000According to the Wall Street Journal, when Justice Department officials reviewed what AG Pam Bondi called a truckload of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein earlier this year, they discovered that Donald Trump's name appeared multiple times, according to senior administration officials.
00:36:41.000In May, Bondi and her deputy informed the president at a meeting in the White House that his name was in the Epstein files, the officials said.
00:36:46.000Many other high-profile figures were also named.
00:36:49.000Trump was told being mentioned in the records isn't a sign of wrongdoing.
00:36:52.000The officials said it was a routine briefing that covered a number of topics and that Trump's appearance in the documents was not the focus.
00:36:58.000They told the president at the meeting the files contained what officials felt was unverified hearsay about many people, including Trump, who had socialized with Epstein in the past.
00:37:05.000One of the officials familiar with the documents said they contained hundreds of other names.
00:37:09.000They also told Trump senior DOJ officials didn't plan to release any more documents related to the investigation of the convicted sex offender because the material contained child porn and victims' personal information.
00:37:19.000Trump said at the meeting he would defer to the DOJ's decision to not release any further files.
00:37:25.000Much of the hubbup today surrounding this story from the Wall Street Journal is paying attention to one half of the story and ignoring the other half of the story.
00:37:32.000So they are saying that because Trump was informed that his name was in the Epstein files, therefore he covered it up, they're ignoring that the same sources who said that Trump was informed that his name was in the Epstein files, those same exact sources say the DOJ had already determined not to release those files and Trump said, fine.
00:37:48.000So far from Trump being the initiator of any sort of cover-up, the idea here is they came to him, they said, Mr. President, there's a bunch of crap in these files.
00:37:56.000A huge percentage of it is unusable, unreleasable.
00:38:00.000Your name is in there and we're not releasing any of it.
00:38:08.000Because otherwise you have to make the allegation.
00:38:10.000If you want to make the allegation, go for it.
00:38:11.000But you have to make the allegation that there was something so deep and dark and terrible in the Epstein files about Trump personally, that he is now personally engaged in a cover-up on behalf of a sex pest criminal rapist of children.
00:38:25.000If you're going to make an outsized allegation like that, you should have some outsized evidence, not just information that Trump was quote unquote in the Epstein files, which, of course, we already knew.
00:38:34.000Now, there is a tape that has been released by the left-wingers over at Midas Touch.
00:38:39.000It is a tape from 2010 of Jeffrey Epstein being asked about Trump and underage girls.
00:38:44.000And this is being turned into a hubbub.
00:39:05.000Have you ever socialized with Donald Trump in the presence of females under the age of 18?
00:39:18.000Though I'd like to answer that question at least today, I'm going to have to assert my fifth, sixth, and 14th Amendment right, sir.
00:39:27.000Okay, so you can see in the tape that he actually shakes his head while he is saying this, and then he says he's going to assert his fifth, sixth, 14th Amendment right.
00:39:34.000And this has turned into, again, a spotlighted area in the Epstein case because he doesn't give an answer.
00:39:40.000Okay, well, I mean, he is going to not incriminate himself.
00:39:43.000That's why he's citing the fifth, sixth, and 14th Amendments, the rights against self-incrimination, because he's saying, if I say yes, then that includes me in involvement with underage girls.
00:39:54.000And he was, again, under criminal investigation at the time.
00:39:58.000So does that mean something for Trump?
00:40:00.000So people are playing this as though it means something for Trump again.
00:40:03.000They keep basically implying that Trump is involved in a full-scale cover-up of pedophilia and a pedophilia ring based on what?
00:40:13.000The fact that he associated with Jeffrey Epstein back in the 90s and 2000s, like virtually every other famous major person in politics and the media.
00:40:22.000That's just the reality, which of course is why, for example, the House is now seeking to subpoena Bill and Hillary Clinton over possible links to Ghelain Maxwell.
00:40:47.000The big beautiful bill also cut taxes on tips and overtime, secures the border, finishes the wall, and protects Medicaid for Americans, not illegal immigrants.
00:40:54.000Leader Thune and Senate Republicans got President Trump's conservative agenda done, providing real relief for every hardworking American that's up early and home late.
00:41:01.000We're bringing manufacturing jobs back home.
00:41:11.000According to the New York Post, they're not just, by the way, going to subpoena Glenn Maxwell.
00:41:15.000They're now going after Bill and Hillary.
00:41:17.000Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania introduced the motion for subpoenas during a federal law enforcement subcommittee hearing.
00:41:23.000It was approved by the Republican-led panel via voice vote with no roll call taken.
00:41:27.000The Clintons and several former top DOJ officials, ex-FBI Director James Comey, one-time special counsel Robert Mueller, former attorney generals Loretta Lyncheric Holder, Merrick Garland, Bill Barr Jeff Sessions, and Alberto Gonzalez were included in the list of subpoenas sought by Perry in order to expand the full committee's investigation into Miss Maxwell.
00:41:43.000So the House Oversight Committee is going to issue a bunch of subpoenas.
00:41:47.000The former president, who has not been accused of any wrongdoing in the Epstein case, claims he had no idea Epstein and Maxwell were sex-trafficking minors.
00:41:54.000Apparently, Epstein visited the White House at least 17 times, beginning shortly after Clinton was sworn into office in 1993.
00:42:02.000So you could just as easily make the case that the Biden administration was covering up everything related to Epstein in order to protect Bill Clinton and Democrats as you can that Trump was covering up something to protect himself.
00:42:14.000And the answer to all of this, of course, is that if there was something in the Epstein files that was so deep and dark and terrible about Donald Trump, and the Biden administration had control of that, and the Biden administration leaked like a sieve against Donald Trump, you don't think that any of that would have been released?
00:42:28.000Democrats, of course, are trying to play this up to the hilt.
00:42:31.000Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, he says that the Republican Party and Donald Trump are now protecting pedophiles.
00:42:38.000What billionaires, what well-connected donors, what elite people are they trying to protect?
00:42:48.000Why haven't Republicans released the Epstein files to the American people?
00:42:54.000It's reasonable to conclude that Republicans are continuing to protect the lifestyles of the rich and shameless, even if that includes pedophiles.
00:43:09.000Again, it's unbelievable to me that Democrats are playing this cynical a game, except that this is what they do for a living.
00:43:14.000Tulsi Gabbard, DNI, for her part, she says she's seen no evidence that Epstein was connected to intelligence.
00:43:20.000So none of the original findings that were released a couple of weeks ago that led to this large-scale political conflagration, none of those findings have actually been challenged from anybody who's seen the total evidence at this point.
00:43:32.000On Jeffrey Epstein, can you rule out that he was connected in some way to any kind of intelligence, either foreign or domestic?
00:43:40.000I haven't seen any evidence or information that reflects that.
00:43:44.000If anything comes before me that changes that in any way, support the president's statement loud and clear, that if any credible evidence comes forward, he wants the American people to see it.
00:43:57.000Okay, so we'll have to see what comes out from all of this.
00:44:01.000Suffice it to say that once again, virtually all of this is a result.
00:44:05.000And this is why I think that everybody should be careful of what DNI Gabbard is calling for in terms of prosecution of Obama.
00:44:15.000None of this would have happened if members of the Trump administration had not oversold what they thought was there and then basically pants themselves, because it turns out that they said there was no they're there.
00:44:25.000If they just said, listen, we're looking into all the files, it appears at this point there is not available evidence for prosecutable offenses.
00:44:32.000And we still have open questions about Jeffrey Epstein, but I just want to warn you now that that's what's coming down the pike.
00:44:37.000That certainly would have been a better way of approaching this.
00:44:40.000Being clear and transparent with the American people also means being clear and transparent when you're giving something they don't want.
00:44:45.000And that includes saying things to your supporters that they don't exactly want.
00:44:50.000Don't chum the waters and then be completely unable to catch any fish with the net.
00:44:55.000That, I suppose, would be one of the big conclusions from all of this on behalf of people in the Trump administration.
00:45:01.000Joining me online to discuss everything Epstein-related is Michael Tracy, independent journalist and political commentator.
00:45:06.000He's been known for his skepticism toward the legacy media.
00:45:09.000Of course, his work appears everywhere from the nation to the American conservative.
00:45:12.000Michael, thanks so much for joining the show.
00:45:16.000You know, I think it's fair to say we've probably found ourselves in disagreement quite often over the years, but it's always so lovely to find these points of convergence.
00:45:45.000You see something suspicious like Jeffrey Epstein being worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
00:45:49.000Nobody knows where his money came from or how he got it.
00:45:51.000And there are all sorts of rumors that have been going on for 20 years now about what was going on on Epstein Island, all the people who were going there, who they were, and all the rest.
00:45:59.000And then it seems that members of the Trump administration, particularly Pam Bondi, oversold this and suggested they had tremendous evidence and then came out with a conclusion that basically there was no evidence that one, he was a member of an intelligence organization, two, that he was trafficking to third parties in prosecutable fashion.
00:46:16.000They didn't have evidence to support that.
00:46:17.000Or three, that he was blackmailing anyone, any third party on the basis of such information.
00:46:27.000Where do these rumors come from in the first place?
00:46:29.000Aside from the fact that, again, salacious rumors just spread very easily on the internet.
00:46:35.000You know, it's a confluence of hysteria that I think informed this frenzied speculation.
00:46:42.000Number one, you did have people like Cash Patel who were not particularly scrupulous in their discussion of this matter while they were private citizens.
00:46:52.000There's now a notorious clip of Cash Patel in late 2023 on Benny Johnson's show saying, commanding the FBI director at the time, Chris Wray, to put on his big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are.
00:47:11.000And even in 2023, when Cash Patel made that statement, it was not particularly well-founded of a supposition to think that Chris Wray was actively concealing this explosive list of pedophiles that he just had sitting around or hidden in a vault somewhere and could unveil, much to the amazement of the American populace.
00:47:33.000You know, one misconception that I think people are not really adequately familiar with is that even if you go back to the initial prosecution of Epstein in Florida in 2007, 2008, that led to the now infamous non-prosecution agreement that was overseen by Alex Acosta,
00:47:51.000who later became Trump's first labor secretary, there were serious evidentiary problems that the prosecutors involved with that investigation perceived as to their likelihood to obtain a conviction should Epstein take the case to trial, which he and his very high-powered legal team, Alan Dershowitz, Ken Starr, et cetera, he obviously had the means to get the best representation possible.
00:48:18.000They were signaling their willingness to potentially take this case to trial.
00:48:23.000And some of those prosecutors were wary of their probability of success at trial, which is why they were more inclined to potentially get a plea.
00:48:34.000So there were victims, as they put it, who in some instances exonerated Epstein or did not want Epstein to be prosecuted.
00:48:46.000You can go look at the 2020 Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility report that goes over this in great detail.
00:48:55.000And even the most hard-charging prosecutor, so there was some dissension within the federal prosecutor's office in South Florida about the best manner in which to approach the Epstein prosecution.
00:49:07.000But even the one who was most aggressive in wanting to go after Epstein acknowledged that none of the victims that she surveyed ever claimed that they had been trafficked to any other third-party individual.
00:49:22.000It was all in relation to Epstein to the extent that there were allegations.
00:49:28.000People just don't care to particularly look at the incredibly copious factual record around the story, nor, and this is incredibly galling to me, and I'm interested in your views on this, nor has it really penetrated the popular consciousness here that there's a demonstrable track record of serial fabulism when it comes to some of the core Epstein accusers,
00:49:51.000namely the accuser from whom this whole allegation of a sprawling child sex trafficking conspiracy springs, Virginia Guffray.
00:50:01.000I know you know, Ben, she admitted that she falsely accused, she fabricated depraved claims against Alan Dershowitz for nearly a decade.
00:50:11.000And Alan Dershowitz is an unusual figure in many respects, but he also had the means and the motivation to litigate what he always maintained were defamatory claims against him to its culmination.
00:50:23.000And his claims were vindicated on that score because even Goufre, represented by Davin Boyes, who was a longtime legal antagonist of Dershowitz, even he had to humiliate himself essentially by acceding to an acknowledgement from Goufrey that she had falsely accused Dershowitz of these crimes, that she had been cheating.
00:50:48.000How they worded the settlement was that she may have misidentified Dershowitz.
00:50:53.000You may have misidentified someone you claimed to have been sex trafficked to on six or seven occasions.
00:50:59.000So that's fatal, one would think, to the credibility of Gouffray and their other confabulations of hers over the years, which explains why when Ghillaine Maxwell was prosecuted in 2021 and went to trial, the prosecutors, led by Maureen Comey, who's now been fired, did not call Virginia Gouffray to testify.
00:51:25.000They called four witnesses, four reported victims, none of whom ever claimed that they had been trafficked to a third-party prominent individual.
00:51:37.000And I think you'll agree, Ben, that to the extent people are inflamed by this story or that perceive that there's a cover-up, what they think is being covered up is that there's a child sex trafficking ring that implicates all these prominent individuals, whether it's Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates, whomever.
00:51:58.000But I guess what I would say is that, Yes, there was fevered speculation that was sort of ginned up by people in the Trump administration and people in the right-wing media ecosystem, some on the left as well.
00:52:08.000But on top of that, the factual basis for a lot of what people so confidently claim they believe to be true has always been faulty if you do the slightest dispassionate empirical evaluation of the story.
00:52:26.000So Michael, you know, the big question I think that people have, and I think the reason that they are so incensed about this entire case is because very often people don't look at these cases at a granular level.
00:52:35.000They don't read even, as you say, the court records.
00:52:38.000They don't actually check the evidence.
00:52:39.000They instead get a sort of gestalt of the case.
00:52:40.000And that gestalt is sort of like an ex-post version of the case, like 140 characters, this case in 140 characters.
00:52:47.000And one of the elements that people remain very skeptical of and have open questions about, I think justifiably, is where the hell Jeffrey Epstein got his money.
00:52:54.000So there are a lot of questions about Les Wexner and Leon Black, people signing hundreds of millions of dollars over to Jeffrey Epstein for money management.
00:53:02.000And then it appears that Jeffrey Epstein, at least according to Leon Black, took some of that money.
00:53:07.000Why was he getting those amounts of money?
00:53:09.000This leads people to believe that the only reason you would do that is because you're being blackmailed.
00:53:13.000And so if he was blackmailing them, maybe he was blackmailing others.
00:53:17.000That sort of use, that situation with Wexner and Black particularly is used as sort of the gateway into the rest of the theory about Epstein.
00:53:25.000What do you make of Black, Wexner, where Epstein got his cash?
00:53:30.000Well, first, just in terms of how people absorb information about this story, you're right.
00:53:36.000They're absorbing the most kind of tantalizing snippets that they consume on social media or in popular media.
00:53:42.000Or, for example, on Netflix, there's a hugely popular Netflix documentary on this that came out in 2020.
00:53:49.000I think one of the problems, and I'll address the issue of Epstein's wealth in a moment, but one of the problems with this, with the public perception is that it really isn't formed by a lot of popular media that was overly credulous toward the purported victims,
00:54:07.000that did not identify that there was an obvious financial incentive for the purported victims, who I'm not disclaiming have any claim to have been harmed whatsoever in every respect, but still there's a very clear incentive for these people to have dramatized their claims or made the most maximalist versions of their claims, because you know why?
00:54:29.000Especially upon Epstein's death, by way of his estate and then by way of settlements with JP Morgan and Deutsch Bank, an enormous amount of money became available for self-identified victims to petition for.
00:54:45.000And under the terms of these settlements, quite unusual and quite remarkable, the victims were permitted to file claims for remuneration up to $5 million with the Epstein estate in a format that was non-adversarial and confidential.
00:55:02.000So they were not going to be cross-examined and they were not going to be publicly disclosed.
00:55:08.000So there was no downside reputational risk if they, let's say, inflated some of their claims in order to maximize their prospects of obtaining the largest possible financial settlement.
00:55:18.000And when people watch Netflix, there's Netflix documentaries, none of this context is given, nor are the demonstrable confabulations of some of the victims that they feature noted, because, you know, a lot of the renewed interest around the story did flow from Me Too.
00:55:34.000You know, Julie Kay Brown, the author of that Miami Herald series that really reinvigorated the Epscene story, actually, she claims, inspired prosecutors to go after him again after the non-prosecution agreement in the 2000s.
00:55:49.000Me Too has a large cultural role here.
00:55:52.000And of course, what's like a central tenet of Me Too?
00:55:57.000You know, I thought people on the right were supposed to be skeptical of those mantras, but oddly on this subject, they seem to have bought into the Me Too mentality in certain respects.
00:56:06.000And so, but I'm willing to acknowledge or concede anything that is demonstrably within the factual record.
00:56:13.000I want to be as evidence-based as possible.
00:56:15.000And so it's easy to see why people are so intrigued and titulated by the story, why there's been such a sustained fascination with it.
00:56:23.000And one of the components is Epstein's wealth.
00:56:27.000Would I love for there to be a full forensic audit of every aspect of Epstein's wealth, like where he stored it, were there overseas accounts?
00:56:38.000I mean, this guy was an international jet setter who did consort with an astonishing array of prominent individuals, whether it was former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak or the British royal family.
00:57:18.000That's probably how Epstein ended up covorting with Donald Trump because they both shared, let's say, an interest in attractive young models.
00:57:27.000Trump was a beauty pageant proprietor, so it's not that unfathomable that he would have crossed paths with Epstein in this regard.
00:57:35.000So in terms of the wealth, I mean, look, if I say anything that can be construed as positive about Epstein, it's not because I'm trying to defend the morality of the man or make an ethical argument in favor of him in any real respect.
00:57:48.000But I think there is some evidence that he had some skill and intelligence in terms of financial management.
00:57:54.000I mean, he was recruited into Bear Stearns, having been a math teacher with no college degree, because I think he demonstrated some acuity in complex financial maneuvers that were in high demand on Wall Street at the time.
00:58:12.000Perhaps not, but it was certainly one of them.
00:58:15.000You know, he made partner or he had a senior level, a relatively high-level position in Bear Stern in his early to mid-20s.
00:58:22.000And then he went out on his own and kind of marketed himself as somebody who had this exclusive clientele of extremely high worth Individuals, perhaps like people with a billion dollars or more in 1980s dollars.
00:58:49.000I just object to the logical leap that people are so excited to take without ample factual basis and suggest that we know where it's somehow just proven that the sources of those wealth can be tied to some international blackmail or intelligence operation.
00:59:07.000You know, I mentioned that OPR report or the DOJ report.
00:59:11.000So in 2020, after the public outrage or the public, the renewed public interest in this story, the DOJ did a very comprehensive report about that NPA, a non-prosecution agreement in 2007, 2008.
00:59:25.000They interviewed anybody that they could find who had a DOJ association.
00:59:29.000And there's an incredible footnote in that report that you never hear mentioned or rarely hear mentioned, because what people who believe the most maximalist version of the story want to believe is that there was an Israeli intelligence component or CIA or whatever nefarious purposes.
00:59:46.000And I don't necessarily deny that it's totally implausible.
00:59:52.000I don't believe rather that it's totally implausible that Epstein could have interfaced with Israeli intelligence, people with some connection to Israeli intelligence over the years because he had this known association with Ahud Barak.
01:00:03.000He was a former prime minister at that point, but when he was prime minister, he would have overseen the Mossad and so forth.
01:00:08.000So, I mean, look, let's just stick to what's plainly known in the public record and draw inferences from there.
01:00:14.000However, Alex Acosta is quoted widely with people, among people who have this more conspiracist maximalist view as having made this infamous statement that was reported in the Daily Beast in 2019 that Epstein, quote, belonged to intelligence.
01:00:31.000And that's why Epstein was given this quote-unquote sweetheart deal in the mid to 2000s.
01:00:39.000Now, interestingly, in terms of the sweetheart deal, again, misconceptions around that as well, because one of the reasons why the feds interceded is because there was consternation about how the local authorities in South Florida were handling the case.
01:00:53.000And there was a concern that if the Palm Beach District Attorney was allowed to handle the case entirely on its own accord, Epstein would not face any incarceration at all, or he wouldn't have to register as a sex offender.
01:01:06.000So the feds, Akasik says that his role, as he saw it, was to provide a federal backstop.
01:01:11.000So there would be an obligation imposed on Epstein to have to, for example, submit to some degree of incarceration, however lax people might have thought it was.
01:01:20.000And Epstein did have to register as a sex offender, although, yes, he did use his wealth to kind of gain that system in the aftermath and get more lenient treatment than others on the sex offender registry would have.
01:01:34.000And so, but in that OPR report, Acosta is asked directly, did you have knowledge that Epstein had any association with intelligence at the time that this plea agreement was being negotiated?
01:01:45.000And Acosta, under oath, under penalty of perjury, says the answer is no.
01:01:51.000And I mean, all these podcasts that are proliferating that talk about this issue, do you ever hear that quoted?
01:01:56.000Like, okay, if you want to use the hearsay.
01:01:58.000No, in fact, when I mention that to other podcasters on this particular topic, they will then say, well, he was put under DOJ to make that statement.
01:02:05.000So it's kind of an incredible ouroboros of misinformation on this particular topic, ignoring the actual evidence on the record in favor of things that are not in evidence in order to substantiate the theory.
01:02:17.000And I think that this is where things blow up for the Trump administration on this particular issue, because the people who are put in place to investigate this are, as you mentioned, people who are very open to the idea that there was this giant conspiracy, to say the least.
01:02:30.000You mentioned Cash Patel, the head of the FBI, Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, Pam Bondi, the attorney general.
01:02:36.000These are the people who, if there were a conspiracy, would be the most likely people on planet Earth to uncover it, expose it, and then talk about it openly, obviously.
01:02:44.000And instead, they come to a conclusion.
01:02:59.000And that can only be because they're in on it right now.
01:03:02.000And then you see, obviously, cynical people on the left jumping on President Trump saying that it's a cover-up.
01:03:07.000That's really why this is happening is because Trump's name is in the files.
01:03:10.000First of all, it'd be shocking if Trump's names were not in the files, considering he was friends with Jeffrey Epstein for solidly 15 years.
01:03:16.000And Bill Clinton's name's in the files.
01:03:18.000As you mentioned, a lot of prominent people are in the files.
01:03:20.000The search for a sort of further answer, I get why people are curious and upset because they were oversold the story, but you've been the most detailed expositor of what's actually in the evidence.
01:03:32.000And the desire by people to assume facts not in evidence or that the absence of evidence is evidence of a conspiracy is it puts us in the realm of the unfalsifiable, which is the case I've been making all along.
01:03:42.000And if you're going to accuse people of being complicit in a child rape and sex trafficking cover-up, you better have more than just I'm speculating about a series of facts that I don't have in evidence and I'm ignoring the evidence that's currently on the table.
01:03:57.000Yeah, you know, one area where you and I would traditionally disagree in general is probably on Israel or U.S. foreign policy, where I've been much more critical of U.S. foreign policy in relation to Israel than you.
01:04:09.000But now I'm experiencing this bizarre phenomenon where people who ordinarily would think that they would agree with me on Israel now assume that I'm like secretly covering for Israel or that I've been compromised by Israel.
01:04:23.000And that's why I have the views that I do around the Epstein thing, because of course Israel's sway within the American political system can be explained by sexual blackmail networks, as though like that's the most coherent explanation for the role that Israel plays in U.S. politics.
01:04:43.000And so like, yeah, you could never win.
01:04:47.000I think unfalsifiability is best reserved for the realm of religious dogma, in my estimation.
01:04:56.000So like, you know, people have unfalsifiable beliefs when it comes to certain doctrinal Tenets of the religious system that they adhere to.
01:05:03.000And they will openly acknowledge that, like, no, there is no possible evidence that could disprove my belief that, say, I don't know, Christ was resurrected or Muhammad ascended to heaven on a winged horse or whatever.
01:05:15.000And okay, I mean, we can get into a philosophical debate about that.
01:05:19.000But in terms of like current affairs and in terms of matters that could actively defame people and have in relation to this story, I think there should be a little bit more circumspection exercise rather than these wild, grandiose claims.
01:05:39.000I mean, so they, to the extent that they're implicated in something, I would argue that they're implicated in these like lazy habits of mind and kind of pandering to an audience.
01:05:51.000And, you know, Cash Patel perhaps should apologize if he wrongly impugned like Chris Wray, for instance, who's who he personally accused of concealing the quote-unquote Epstein list or a list of pedophiles.
01:06:05.000And now Cash Patel's in that same exact same position.
01:06:08.000And by his own logic, I guess he would also be indicted by what he was accusing Chris Ray of.
01:06:13.000So just as a matter of like public decency and honor, I mean, I think you should give some accounting of that.
01:06:18.000But the thing is, people don't want him to account for that.
01:06:20.000They want him to account for the conspiracy that he is assumed to now be party to.
01:06:27.000And also, Trump is at fault here as well, as I think you would probably acknowledge.
01:06:32.000I mean, there's just no plausible deniability that he had a lengthy relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
01:06:39.000There's been photos and videos making this known for years.
01:06:44.000Obviously, to the extent that there's an Epstein file, and we also have like semantic confusion what that would even consist of.
01:06:50.000I mean, there was this anticipation engendered that the Epstein file would be like a consolidated Excel spreadsheet listing all the people to whom Epstein trafficked minors or something.
01:07:02.000But no, what would be an Epstein file?
01:07:03.000It would be like FBI 302s, meaning memorializations of interviews that have been conducted over the many investigations that have been done on this subject or documentary evidence that's under seal, etc.
01:07:14.000Another irony here is that to the extent that there's a lot of material still that's not been disclosed to the public, particularly in the civil litigation context, a lot of that's remained concealed out of deference to the purported victims, meaning that they have outsized privacy rights and therefore they're entitled to have materials concealed seemingly in perpetuity.
01:07:37.000I mean, I agree with Dershowitz in that we should call for maximum disclosure, even if it would be seen as averse to the interests of those victims, because, you know, sunlight is the best disinfectant.
01:07:48.000But for Trump to have launched this weird crusade, like disavowing his own supporters and calling it a hoax.
01:07:55.000And who even knows what precisely he means by hoax?
01:07:58.000Is he saying the files are a hoax or the whole Epstein story is a hoax?
01:08:01.000Like he's not often that precise with his language.
01:08:05.000Maybe if he were a lawyer, maybe he would be a bit more legalistic.
01:08:08.000But, you know, he's a reality TV show host and entertainer.
01:08:11.000And so he just kind of talks and sort of maybe sometimes ambiguous generalities.
01:08:17.000But yeah, I mean, if I were advising Trump, which I'm not, but if I were advising him, I would say just be open about it.
01:08:24.000Like, yeah, you attended social functions with Jeoprey Epstein.
01:08:28.000Perhaps you did send him a birthday letter.
01:08:30.000I mean, they want to just deny, deny, deny that.
01:08:32.000I find it implausible that the Wall Street Journal would have fabricated something.
01:08:36.000But I think, you know, to do this routine where it appears as though you have something to hide just gives fuel, dowses this whole thing with additional fuel to the fire.
01:08:49.000To be fair to President Trump, I will say that when he was asked about the Epstein files in 2024, he said there was a bunch of crap in there also.
01:08:54.000He said, I want to do full disclosure, but he did actually say there's a bunch of stuff in there that is not incredible and all the rest.
01:09:00.000And you can understand his frustration because from his perspective, he's had a very successful month.
01:09:09.000He's pushed forward with apparently there's an impending peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
01:09:13.000There's a bunch of stuff actually happening in the world.
01:09:15.000He got a settlement from Columbia University and everybody on his side, on the internet at least, is talking about the Epstein files.
01:09:20.000And he's like, guys, you know, like, this is all old.
01:09:23.000Why are you bothering me about all of this?
01:09:26.000And Michael, I think this is where we can sign off on this.
01:09:29.000What this says about sort of the American body politic right now is that there is a very large scale incentive structure that has been constructed, particularly online, to suggest that there is an elite cadre of people who run your life.
01:09:42.000And those elite cadre of people who run your life are probably in league with Satan.
01:09:46.000And so any conspiracy theory that sort of ties into that is going to become incredibly popular online.
01:09:52.000And this is not to say that there aren't conspiracies, because clearly there are conspiracies.
01:09:56.000Clearly, there are people who get together and there's evidence of those conspiracies where they get together and they do things, right?
01:10:01.000This is a point that Karl Popper has made.
01:10:03.000To pretend there are no conspiracies is silly, but usually we can tell there's a conspiracy by the people who get together and actually do the thing.
01:10:10.000So for example, you can say that Anthony Fauci and company were trying to silence particular people when it came to their take on the COVID lab league theory, right?
01:10:31.000So it is not to deny that conspiracies exist that we're talking about this, but it is to say that if you're going to allege a conspiracy, especially one of this magnitude, that should require some evidence as opposed to just speculation.
01:10:43.000And there is something dangerously awry when people are so enthusiastic for the narrative that they are perfectly willing to simply ignore any and all evidence that is put in front of them and assume that absence of evidence, again, is evidence of the conspiracy itself.
01:10:59.000And as you may recall, Ben, I was a very early skeptical chronicler of what came to be known as Russagate or Russian interference in the 2016 election.
01:11:08.000I gained a lot of followers and supporters on the right, even though I had been seen as having been on the left because I viewed this as a essentially unfounded conspiracy theory to undermine Trump that had been generated by elements of the national security apparatus, CIA, FBI, NSA to basically criminalize differences in foreign policy views.
01:11:35.000And so there was a time when, you know, people on the right, and even in the Trump administration, tended to really like me.
01:11:42.000And, you know, but dynamics, political dynamics can be fickle over the years.
01:11:46.000And now people think that I'm more hostile to Trump.
01:11:48.000You know, it doesn't particularly matter.
01:12:04.000But there were times when during the Bush administration, George W. Bush, shocking numbers of Democrats believed in some variation of like a 9-11 truth theory, meaning that Bush was involved or complicit, not just negligent, but complicit in the perpetration of the 9-11 attacks, Trump Russia or a Russia gate.
01:12:22.000You had supermajorities of Democrats believing not just that there was quote unquote Russian interference in the election, meaning that somebody with some connection to some potential Russian state actor bought some social media bots and put out stupid stuff on Twitter, but that Putin tampered with the actual voting systems and illicitly stalled Trump into office to subvert the American electoral system.
01:12:49.000And one thing I remember hearing from like embittered Democrats or people on the liberal left when I was critical of the Russiagate narrative was them saying to me, where there's smoke, there's fire.
01:12:59.000So you can always build up, you can always like postulate the existence of some smoke.
01:13:04.000You can also always like, you can always like throw spaghetti at the wall and come up with all these disparate data points that you say must add up to something, even if you don't have a coherent theory for what they really add up to or like how one X leads to Y. I mean, some of these people really should probably go and take a rudimentary philosophy, like 101 class or something.
01:13:27.000He gifted us that concept of unfalsifiability that actually is a helpful sort of heuristic for evaluating news events.
01:13:35.000And then on Epstein, there's another component here because like the online right in particular really does have a certain need to be perpetually speculating that there is not just elites who are oppressing us, but that there's an illicit child sex trafficking ring.
01:13:57.000And like society is fundamentally ordered by or governed by the assumed existence of satanic child sex trafficking rings.
01:14:07.000Epstein has a much more tangible factual predicate than QAnon, but like there were similar elements with QAnon in terms of what was fundamentally understood by people who believed in that to be the ultimate explanation, which is that there was, you know, the Democrats were doing pedophilia, essentially.
01:14:23.000And so, yes, I do think, you know, I'm probably more sympathetic to you with some critiques that could be made about the control that elites exert over society.
01:14:37.000However, I think that the obsession with the critique by virtue of child sex trafficking accusations or everything is pedophilia.
01:14:48.000Everybody who we disagree with politically must be a sexual predator.
01:14:52.000I think that often tends to be a serious non-sequitur and ironically enough kind of discredits a sound or more rational critique that could be made of how elites conduct themselves or maybe, you know, divert resources or mismanage things or have look, elites are real.
01:15:42.000Okay, meanwhile, President Trump must be extremely annoyed by all of this, truly annoyed, because the victories keep coming for him on a wide variety of scores.
01:15:50.000According to the New York Post, the Trump administration has now won unprecedented concessions from Columbia University in a sweeping settlement with the Ivy League University paying more than $220 million and pledging to reverse racially discriminatory practices and resolve civil rights violations against Jewish students, according to the New York Post.
01:16:06.000Now, there's a bunch of other stuff here.
01:16:08.000The monetary payment is not the biggest deal because Columbia, of course, has tons of money.
01:16:12.000The real issue here is what Columbia does going forward.
01:16:15.000Well, apparently, Colombia now has to agree to submit to independent monitoring to ensure it's complying with merit-based hiring and admissions requirements, which is excellent.
01:16:46.000Columbia will fork over about $20 million to Jewish employees who are discriminated against.
01:16:51.000Also, they're sharing relevant data on foreign applicants with the U.S. government, meaning that if they have brought in students on student visas who have, say, terror support in their resume, they will now hand that over to the U.S. government, which is good.
01:17:04.000They're going to implement a ban on masked protests, which of course is excellent as well, because masking at protests is a great way for students to avoid culpability for violating the law.
01:17:13.000They're going to maintain a trained security force, and they're going to cooperate with the NYPD as opposed to limiting the ability of local law enforcement to actually enforce the law.
01:17:21.000Disciplinary matters have been moved to the purview of the Office of the Provost from the Faculty Senate, which of course is also a good thing.
01:17:27.000It means direct responsibility for oversight of discipline, moving from the faculty senate, which is a left-leaning body, over to an actual office inside the Columbia employees.
01:17:40.000All of this is good and a big win for the Trump administration.
01:17:44.000So what that means is that the $400 million in research grant money and $1.2 billion in frozen federal funding yanked from them will be returned.
01:17:52.000Now, again, Harvard could do the same thing.
01:17:55.000This is how the Trump administration is getting things done.
01:17:58.000For all those people who are suggesting that the Trump administration Is just randomly willy-nilly pulling money out of research at gigantic institutions like Columbia or Harvard.
01:18:06.000They are using that as a lever to get these universities to abide by the law.
01:18:10.000And now Columbia, presumably going forward, will abide by the law.
01:18:13.000They, by the way, have already said that there are some 80 students who participated in rioting, trespass, violation of property, and all the riots and all the rest, who are going to be suspended anywhere from one to three years, which effectively means you need to transfer over.
01:18:24.000We don't want you at Columbia anymore.
01:18:26.000And if those rules hold, then this sort of despicable behavior on campus will not be a thing going forward at Columbia.
01:18:37.000Meanwhile, President Trump continues to achieve wins on the economy.
01:18:42.000Now, one of the amazing things about President Trump's tariff regime, a regime that, by the way, I think is not particularly good for the American economy.
01:18:50.000I think that many of those tariffs are wrongheaded.
01:18:53.000With all of that said, it is worth noting that the Trump administration's approach to tariffs has been so baked into the cake that when the tariffs are still high, but lower than what people thought they were going to be, the markets react positively.
01:19:07.000As the New York Times, Anna Swanson points out, six months ago, few people would have anticipated the United States would place a 15% tariff on exports from Japan, one of America's closest and most long-standing allies.
01:19:17.000President Trump had campaigned on the idea of a 10% universal baseline tariff plus a higher levy on China.
01:19:23.000On Tuesday, when Trump announced a trade deal that included a 15% tariff on Japanese products, there was a palpable sense of relief.
01:19:29.000The reaction is a testament to just how quickly and completely Trump has transformed the world's expectations regarding tariffs.
01:19:35.000In a few short months, the president has normalized tariffs at rates that would have been shocking just months ago by threatening even higher levies and holding out the prospect of devastating trade wars.
01:19:43.000He has somehow made sharply higher tariffs, which are now at rates not seen in a century, feel like a relief.
01:19:50.000I mean, and that's right, because the economy is looking at this.
01:19:52.000They're thinking, okay, Trump is taking an off-ramp.
01:19:54.000Hell, at least we're not getting 40, 50% tariffs now.
01:19:57.000So I think that this means that this is now good economic policy.
01:19:59.000I don't think that these tariffs at 15%, 10%, 20%, that that really is going to accomplish the goal of reshoring large-scale manufacturing in the United States.
01:20:09.000I don't think that's likely to happen.
01:20:10.000I think that it's likely to raise prices on American consumers because eventually it will be passed down to the American consumer.
01:20:17.000I would prefer that the Trump administration were pursuing a fulsome free trade policy with pretty much everybody except for China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, and countries of similar ilk.
01:20:28.000With that said, is that a hell of a lot better than people thought it was going to be?
01:20:38.000President Trump is heterodox, but he is responsive.
01:20:41.000He has ideas that are different from the conventional norm, in some cases for the good, in some cases for the bad, but he shifts and moves with reality on the ground.
01:20:50.000And I think the markets know that, which is why they remain relatively sanguine, why the stock market is at all-time highs, despite all of this kind of tomfoolery that President Trump has been engaging in, economically speaking.
01:21:01.000The EU, for its role, is now trying to negotiate an all-in trade agreement with the Trump administration, in which it would accept 15% tariffs on most exports to the United States.
01:21:12.000Again, the EU basically wants like a two-page agreement.
01:21:15.000The way to negotiate with President Trump is not to negotiate every single detail of a trade agreement.
01:21:21.000The goal here is to get something on paper that President Trump can feel good about for these other countries and then get to the end of this process before President Trump kicks in 30, 40, 50% tariffs.
01:21:32.000And that is likely to be the outcome of all of this.
01:21:34.000At the very least, for those who said that Trump could not actually cut a tariff deal with Japan or with the EU.
01:21:40.000Again, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson has been doing an excellent job on this front.
01:21:44.000Democrats, meanwhile, simply cannot get off the schneide.
01:21:48.000They're having a very, very tough time.
01:21:50.000They sense that there may be some blood in the water with President Trump because his approval rating seems to be down a little bit.
01:21:54.000But the truth is that they don't have a clue as to where to move at this point.
01:21:58.000Senator Alyssa Slodkin of Michigan, she is admitting that the Democrats are actually kind of split on Trump 2.0.
01:22:05.000When I sit in rooms with elected Democrats, I really don't think the debate anymore is like progressive versus moderate.
01:22:15.000The debate that I see in the divide is between, you know, people who answer the question like, you know, Donald Trump presidency, take two.
01:22:24.000Is it an existential threat to democracy?
01:22:27.000Or is it, like Trump won, bad, but survivable if we just wait it out?
01:22:32.000And we are divided and it mixes up who's progressive, who's moderate.
01:22:52.000So again, there is a camp inside the Democrats who are like, well, it's not that bad.
01:22:57.000That's actually not even the full part of it.
01:22:59.000There are a lot of Democrats who actually kind of like many of the things that President Trump is doing.
01:23:03.000And one of the things they like is that he's not a crazy leftist, as many in the Democratic Party are.
01:23:08.000There was an event yesterday at which a bunch of progressive Democrats went out there and were praising DEI.
01:23:13.000Here, for example, was Maya Wiley, failed mayoral candidate in New York City, claiming that DEI is what makes us America.
01:23:21.000This is a country that is for all of us, that has values that we all share, no matter our background, our zip code, our bank account, or our country of origin, or our first language.
01:23:38.000That this is a country that has been built on the ideal, that an America that embraces all of us, embraces our diversity, says every last one of us deserves a fair chance and an equal opportunity, that that is what makes us strong.
01:24:12.000Trump and Republicans are trying to force their vision of an emboldened white supremacy as they work to undo centuries of progress that generations of organizers, activists, and lawmakers have fought to achieve.
01:24:50.000It is essential to ensuring our children, all our children, are afforded a better future than their ancestors were forced to endure.
01:25:01.000So until the Democrats dissociate from this kind of radicalism, this insane notion that anytime there is a group inequality in outcome that must be a result of inequity, they're going to lose and lose and lose and lose.
01:25:14.000And again, this is why President Trump is so frustrated right now.
01:25:17.000He probably had, aside from the Epstein stuff, the most successful month of his presidency, and everybody is all up on him about stuff that frankly is outside of his control.