Epstein fallout poses a loyalty test for Trump or MAGA? In the days since the Trump administration released a memo about Epstein directly at odds with conspiracy theories pushed by the president and some of his most ardent supporters, a growing number of conspiracy theories have begun to surface.
00:08:58.940They made this really, really big story.
00:09:01.040And it may be a big story, but they're not finding the evidence that they thought they were going to have.
00:09:06.900That's exactly—yeah, that's what I think is the possibility.
00:09:09.700Now, there's also a possibility that it's a problem.
00:09:12.060And, you know, the problem is we're not in a position to actually assess that evidence.
00:09:15.580And for me, the scandal is actually not Epstein specifically, although the idea of letting child sex traffickers get away with it is abhorrent to me.
00:09:22.660I'm a father, and so that makes me want to puke.
00:09:25.400It's something that I think Americans on the left and the right are going to get on.
00:09:28.460I think the folks that are in the left-wing media that are taking this up are seeing an opportunity to drive a wedge between folks, so that's awful.
00:09:34.180But, listen, for me, this is the same sort of unforced error that the Biden administration withdrawal from Afghanistan was.
00:09:45.020They got either bad information or it was being—you know, some subterfuge was happening.
00:09:49.560We're talking about a group of people from the FBI that are in mid-level management that are giving the worst advice possible and want to see Kash Patel and Dan Bongino fail.
00:09:59.980That's what a quote-unquote deep state does.
00:10:01.580That's what an administrative state will do.
00:10:04.080Everything we hear about is that Dan Bongino is miserable there because these people keep telling him that if he doesn't do everything that they want and sign off on all the programs and stay in the office late hours, that New York is going to explode or California is going to have a bioattack or some other crazy thing.
00:10:18.620So he's the man standing there in the gap.
00:10:20.660In reality, at some point, he'll realize that they're just hammering him with the same stuff they do to agents at Quantico.
00:10:26.800It's this tactic of just getting cortisol overload and stressing you out to the point where you make bad decisions.
00:10:32.060But it doesn't take away from the fact that there was a right decision, which was either coming out in full transparency.
00:10:37.760They could have just not talked about it for a while and said, we're still working on it.
00:10:40.500We haven't heard anything about the J6 pipe bomber.
00:10:42.180We haven't heard anything about the cocaine case, the Dobbs leaker, all the other things they said we were going to get transparency on haven't materialized either.
00:10:47.980So they didn't have to drop it this way.
00:11:02.440And again, these guys who were not in the government at the time said it.
00:11:05.460What you also will, for evidence, those two ladies on the DOJ side have been hyping this up.
00:11:10.460What you've actually seen is an undersell from Cash Patel and Dan Bongino over the last, let's say, three months.
00:11:15.740They've gone out on Fox, looked like they were sitting on kind of like thumbtacks, like really uncomfortably trying to kind of let this thing out slowly saying, hey, listen, by the way, like he didn't kill himself.
00:11:25.100And everyone went like, wait, wait, what?
00:11:28.200It may be 100% accurate, but then you've got this other undermining thing where the video came out the other day and it was edited in Adobe Premiere and it was spliced together for multiple takes.
00:11:37.720And, you know, there's a possibility of a timeline sync and some things like that.
00:11:40.960And you go like, this is not how you look, transparent and genuine and honest.
00:11:45.800It's not the way that you do a rollout where you go out and you show all your cards, which is what needed to happen for people to feel like if you're going to change it 100%, if you're going to do a 360 from what you said last year,
00:11:56.060you have to actually say I was wrong and I'm totally comfortable with knowing that I did it wrong.
00:12:03.140Like I said, when I was in the Bureau and I did that, it was a really relieving moment because nobody wants to go after somebody who's innocent.
00:12:08.620Nobody wants to go out and make a claim and then have to, you know, retract it.
00:12:12.460But it's better to retract it than to lie about it and try to cover it up.
00:12:15.660And I think they tried to get away with the best of both worlds, which was that maybe if we say it quietly, nobody will hear us.
00:12:39.580No, this is like the worst possible outcome.
00:12:42.080Mike Howell, who's over at the Oversight Project, they're a spinoff from Heritage Foundation.
00:12:46.400He said if you were going to teach a class on the worst possible way to do a government rollout of information, this would be one of the top lessons on not how to do it.
00:12:56.220You did it with nobody signing it, so nobody put their name to it.
00:12:59.500So you've got no sort of credibility behind the original memo.
00:13:11.640Axios is a mouthpiece for a couple things.
00:13:14.000One, people on the political left and sort of the murky, swampy administrative state, but it's also a mouthpiece for the intelligence community, which means they are favorable to doing a leak, and they will take that access, and they're happy to be the exclusive provider of this.
00:13:27.720And something that people are not going to know because if you don't – well, they weren't part of this conversation.
00:13:32.760But I had a private conversation with Kash Patel before he was sworn in.
00:13:35.380And one of his big concerns was media leaks, which is something that plagued Ray's administration, was an issue for the last DOJ and the last FBI, mostly because they were doing things that were nefarious and unseemly.
00:13:48.180And a longtime retired FBI agent and a whistleblower attorney brought the following information to Kash's awareness, which I guess he wasn't aware of.
00:14:11.060McCabe did as well when he was in the interim role.
00:14:13.680And, of course, Chris Ray did as well.
00:14:15.220So they could go out, and you can share and turn the narrative.
00:14:18.220Not only do you choose the information you're going to share and when you're going to share it and how you're going to share it, but you also choose the outlet that you're going to go to.
00:14:25.160And if you go to a Newsweek, it's going to hit differently than if you go to a Fox News or if you go to an independent media source.
00:14:31.900And if you go to Axios, it has a certain hit.
00:14:34.140And so he got – I think they made a strategic move.
00:14:37.000I just think it was the worst possible one.
00:14:38.960So whoever is advising them – and that fits with my theory that the folks that are inside the bureau that want to see bad outcomes, they're cheering right now.
00:14:46.260Because you're never going to hear the advisors who briefed Kash or Dan.
00:14:49.160You're never going to hear those people's names.
00:14:51.060They're not going to be someone that you're aware of.
00:14:52.540But maybe I might hear about them from people inside the bureau that reach out and say, hey, by the way, this is the person that was the last one to touch this.
00:14:58.920But other than that, it's not going to be transparent.
00:15:02.100The people who are going to be left with egg on their face, the two guys that are at the top of the agency, and used to be only one person would get it.
00:15:09.280Like most people don't know who Paula Bate was, and they don't know who David Bowditch was, the previous deputy directors.
00:15:13.920These are not people that are in their sphere because the deputy director is kind of a low-key role that runs the bureau, executes the policy,
00:15:21.520and the director is the one that's kind of the PR face.
00:15:26.140There was another story, and that's the Biden auto-pand pardons.
00:15:51.320So you're using an executive power that probably cannot be delegated, although I guess there's some question on whether or not you can delegate that under Article 2.
00:15:58.060Can you delegate it to a subordinate in the same way?
00:16:00.660You know, law enforcement authorities are delegated to the attorney general.
00:16:03.100The ability to either investigate and or prosecute are all delegated to the FBI and so on and so forth.
00:16:07.960So the way that it would play out is an FBI director would decide, you know, it would obviously probably be the deputy and then somebody who's actually running, let's say, criminal investigation, counterterrorism investigations.
00:16:19.200They would decide we are going to do an investigation to fill in the blank person for the following allegations.
00:16:23.660They have to be, you know, for criminal aspects, it has to be an allegation that some federal crime took place and that this person is the alleged perpetrator of it.
00:16:39.700They have a thing called an assessment, which is another animal.
00:16:42.140But at the end of the day, allegation or information that a federal crime took place is good enough for you to open that investigation and sign off and you get the resource to go along with it.
00:16:51.600You can investigate anybody even if they've been pardoned.
00:16:54.460Then comes the questions whether or not you can indict them.
00:16:57.120That's going to be a question of political will more than anything else.
00:16:59.340You bring it over to DOJ and somebody, either a United States attorney or a subordinate there, what's called an assistant United States attorney, a line prosecutor, will accept it and say, yeah, I am willing to prosecute this case.
00:17:09.940They're going to have a whole bunch of different questions.
00:17:12.180There's a process of vetting out the person that is called the subject through what's called the SIM, the sensitive investigative matter.
00:17:17.900So they've got all these policies that will come into play.
00:17:19.840But at the end of the day, if they want to do it, yes, they could totally do that.
00:17:23.020Then they could bring that information in front of a grand jury and get the indictment.
00:17:26.580The grand jury is going to say, yes, we believe that there's probable cause to believe that this person committed this federal crime.
00:17:38.840And then comes the question on whether or not that indictment can stand and whether or not that prosecution can continue.
00:17:43.880And that would happen from the defense end.
00:17:45.700They would raise motions saying, hey, by the way, this person was already pardoned.
00:17:48.580And then you probably have not a question of whether or not the law was broken.
00:17:53.500You'd have a question of the procedures that would go, as far as I understand it, would go to the appeals courts.
00:17:58.000And they would actually question whether or not the law was followed.
00:18:00.780And that's where you start having these constitutional issues.
00:18:02.640Maybe even the Supreme Court probably would have to weigh in on, can you delegate the power of pardon to a subordinate?
00:18:09.720And if the president's not aware of it, and can you prove that he was aware of it or that he wasn't or that he was cognizant or not, that might come into play then.
00:18:17.520So they could march it forward and they could push that moment to a crisis where you would find out whether or not they could ever get away with this thing again.
00:18:25.360Find a really good example of someone who's absolutely committed a crime and then push forward against them, against an auto pen pardon, and really put it to the test.
00:18:34.840And then you're going to basically create precedent that's going to invalidate or substantiate the validity of that pardon.
00:18:45.440Stephen Miller seems aggressive on that kind of stuff.
00:18:47.420It seems like he would advise that that's the way to go get it done.
00:18:50.320And I think the MAGA base in general is going to want to see that because we can't have unnamed bureaucrats who no one's ever going to hold accountable and didn't get voted in.
00:19:00.340We can't have those people deciding whether or not American citizens or criminal actors are able to go free in this country.
00:19:27.780Again, and so then the question is because now you're coming into an area of executive privilege too.
00:19:32.580So you've got some other concerns in there.
00:19:34.040I could see why this would be dicey only because you can't pull certain records.
00:19:38.200The judiciary doesn't have the ability to order it.
00:19:39.940But we're now talking about a new administration that might want to undermine the previous administration and they theoretically could actually offer it out.
00:19:47.180In fact, it kind of goes along with what Biden was doing where they were going after Trump, right, and he was the former chief executive.
00:19:55.360I think at the end of the day, it starts getting kind of banana republically when you start having one executive supplant the other and then going after him.
00:20:02.400But they've already started down this path.
00:20:04.100I don't think we can avoid the fact that some wrongs were done.
00:20:14.940They all kind of realize that the guy that was occupying the White House for the last four years wasn't sentient.
00:20:20.240My buddy Steve friend calls him the human Roomba.
00:20:22.940And once you see him on stage towards the end of that four years where he's just kind of like doing 30-degree turns and looking for the dock station, it kind of lines up with what he looks like and how he operated.
00:20:32.920So was that guy really making any decisions at all?
00:21:03.280Can we not really just print things off and have a president actually sign them?
00:21:07.220Can we not do some version of a DocuSign?
00:21:09.020When you're in the law enforcement realm, where I was at the FBI, if you want to sign off on and certify a document, so you'd certify your time card, you'd certify statements you made, they're evidentiary, they are testimonial, and they hold the full weight of you actually doing it.
00:21:24.640What you would do is you would insert a card, which has your name, and it's called a cat card, I think, when you're in the DOD.
00:21:32.200We had a different name for it, but it's a very similar type of thing.
00:21:35.680You'd push it into a card reader that would authenticate that it was you, and then you would have like a code that you would authenticate who you were, and it would automatically sign things digitally.
00:21:44.720The same way that you've signed real estate documents and everybody else has signed contracts or you sign with advertisers.