The Megyn Kelly Show - February 27, 2026


Bill Clinton's TRUE Epstein Ties, and New Guthrie Case Videos Revealed, with Mike Benz, Fitz and O'Connell | Ep. 1262


Episode Stats

Length

2 hours and 24 minutes

Words per Minute

177.33745

Word Count

25,680

Sentence Count

1,782


Summary


Transcript

00:00:01.000 Olivia loves a challenge.
00:00:03.140 It's why she lifts heavy weights.
00:00:05.620 And likes complicated recipes.
00:00:08.800 But for booking her trip to Paris, Olivia chose the easy way with Expedia.
00:00:13.060 She bundled her flight with a hotel to save more.
00:00:15.660 Of course, she still climbed all 674 steps to the top of the Eiffel Tower.
00:00:21.160 You were made to take the easy route.
00:00:23.880 We were made to easily package your trip.
00:00:26.560 Expedia. Made to travel.
00:00:30.000 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
00:00:42.260 Hey, everyone. I'm Megyn Kelly.
00:00:44.020 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Friday.
00:00:46.160 We have new video in the case of Nancy Guthrie.
00:00:48.680 We will break down whether it is providing any promising leads in the investigation with Fitz and Maureen just a bit.
00:00:54.700 And a legend in the legal community, discovered to be carrying on a double life, convicted on the charges against—I'm sorry, but my legal world has been rocked by the conviction of this guy, Tom Goldstein.
00:01:07.900 He is truly one of the most respected lawyers in America, one of the elite members of the Supreme Court bar, which is not easy to get into, the founder of SCOTUS blog, where all lawyers go whenever there is a big Supreme Court case.
00:01:22.040 And he's been convicted.
00:01:24.620 This guy is almost certainly heading to prison for a long time.
00:01:28.640 He turned down a plea deal of five years because he was like, I'm not serving time.
00:01:33.180 He was leading a whole double life.
00:01:34.920 I mean, a total double life.
00:01:36.940 He was cheating on his wife.
00:01:38.500 He was using women off of some website for, like, sugar daddies.
00:01:42.180 He is, like, about 5'7", bald, as dweeby, legal-looking as you get, you know, just like your quintessential—like, what you picture when you picture, like, geeky Supreme Court lawyer.
00:01:54.840 So well-respected there.
00:01:56.460 Guarantee all the nine justices know him and have probably socialized with him.
00:02:00.620 And the whole while in the past seven, eight years, he's been flying all over the world.
00:02:07.080 He's been winning and losing fortunes at every turn.
00:02:10.820 He was convicted of lying about it all on his tax returns, understating his income on the winning years so he didn't have to pay taxes on it, not disclosing his debts when he applied for mortgages, which is a serious problem.
00:02:23.620 You're $15 million in debt and you want to get a $3 million loan for a home.
00:02:26.860 You better disclose that.
00:02:28.040 That's relevant.
00:02:28.720 It's crazy to me.
00:02:31.480 It's just crazy to me that this, like, this can happen, right?
00:02:36.660 It's like, who else out there is leading this, like, respectable life?
00:02:42.700 And then you find out it's all a facade.
00:02:46.860 It's a facade.
00:02:48.740 They're smart.
00:02:50.020 A lot of these guys, they're clever.
00:02:51.820 This guy has no adrenaline.
00:02:54.280 None.
00:02:54.740 There's no adrenaline flow in him.
00:02:56.480 He kind of talked about it at these high-stake poker games where he was winning $10 or $20 million.
00:03:01.620 And then the next day, he'd be in front of the Supreme Court arguing some massive case for, like, Google.
00:03:09.000 They're built differently.
00:03:10.300 Maybe they're sociopaths.
00:03:11.660 I don't know, but I'm very interested in this.
00:03:13.880 And it's not totally unrelated to the story we're going to kick off the show with, which is Epstein.
00:03:18.660 Not that Goldstein was linked to Epstein.
00:03:20.660 He wasn't.
00:03:21.520 But I'm just talking about, like, the facade that these prominent people put on.
00:03:27.320 And it can be women.
00:03:29.100 Ghislaine Maxwell is one who comes to mind, possibly Hillary Clinton, though she denies even knowing Epstein.
00:03:34.320 But Ghislaine Maxwell, certainly, and she was friends with Hillary.
00:03:37.840 Mostly men, though, out there making gazillions of dollars.
00:03:42.060 You know, the paragon of virtue, the principled person, the picture of responsibility.
00:03:48.120 And behind the scenes, you know, what's with the weird grape soda and pizza emails over and over between Epstein and his accountant?
00:03:58.440 And what's with President Bill Clinton as soon as he's out of office?
00:04:02.400 And we're not talking, like, you know, 20 years past.
00:04:05.680 And he was like, no one's paying attention to me anymore.
00:04:07.540 I'm going to go see this pervert, Jeffrey Epstein.
00:04:09.740 I mean, right after I showed you the picture yesterday of my friends with Bill Clinton in 1999.
00:04:18.100 By the way, that's literally the picture on the front of the New York Post's homepage right now.
00:04:25.080 And, like, it's Abby Rittman and Meg Florence.
00:04:28.440 They're together in 1999 in this restaurant right outside or right in D.C.
00:04:32.500 And they were, you know, 20 at the time.
00:04:34.760 Now they're closer to my age.
00:04:36.500 But look at him.
00:04:37.380 This dog is still president and he's staring down the blouse of my one friend and his hand is dangerously close to my friend's side boob.
00:04:44.780 OK, this is he's still in office.
00:04:46.500 His wife and daughter are across the restaurant.
00:04:49.780 And my friends gave me this photo like a while back.
00:04:52.320 They were like, look at this.
00:04:53.060 We had a good laugh over it.
00:04:54.160 I'm like, you know, I'm going to put that on the air.
00:04:55.720 And today seemed like a good day yesterday because the Clintons are testifying on Epstein.
00:04:59.960 But my point is, like, brazen, brazen, right?
00:05:02.920 Like hiding in plain sight.
00:05:05.260 So Bill Clinton goes from that right after Lewinsky to palling around with Jeffrey Epstein in 2000 through 2000, like four or five around there in that man's hot tub with all these women.
00:05:19.220 Um, it's incredible.
00:05:22.100 It's incredible what happens.
00:05:24.180 And I'm sure is still happening with people other than Epstein right now.
00:05:28.580 Uh, he's sitting right now in the same seat his wife was in yesterday up in Chappaqua, New York.
00:05:33.700 I've been up there.
00:05:34.800 They have this beautiful home.
00:05:36.660 It's like picturesque on this rolling hill type property.
00:05:40.100 Um, they're living large, the Clintons.
00:05:42.860 They've got lots of staff.
00:05:44.100 They've got their loser daughter out there, the ultimate Nepo baby, trying to pretend we care what she has to say about Maha.
00:05:50.980 We don't.
00:05:51.900 We don't care what you have to say about anything.
00:05:53.360 We feel about you the way the Today Show did.
00:05:55.440 They hated you even more than they hated me.
00:05:57.300 And one of us had talent.
00:05:58.940 It was just, you know, you know who the one was who didn't belong there because she had absolutely no journalism chops and got the job because her last name was Clinton.
00:06:07.280 So Bill Clinton is up there now under oath.
00:06:11.140 And unlike his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he had lots of connections to Jeffrey Epstein.
00:06:17.200 Lots.
00:06:18.660 Um, I mean, he was on the guy's plane dozens of times.
00:06:22.820 He had multiple social outings with the guy.
00:06:26.500 I mean, raise your hand if you've been in a hot tub with Jeffrey Epstein and some women.
00:06:30.480 Um, not an experience most of us have had.
00:06:33.060 Bill, though, we know from these files, had many interactions with him for years, for years he did with Jeffrey Epstein.
00:06:41.780 And so now he's on the hot seat.
00:06:44.140 And he's going to have to answer for all that today in front of the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating him.
00:06:50.860 Yesterday, it was Hillary, as I said, and she came out and said, no, I didn't know anything.
00:06:54.600 I swear I knew nothing.
00:06:56.160 Here she is to the press after the deposition and sought to.
00:06:59.100 Well, I have just finished, uh, testifying.
00:07:03.480 I answered every one of their questions as, uh, fully as I could, uh, based on what I knew.
00:07:12.240 And what I knew is what I said in my statement, uh, this morning.
00:07:17.200 I never met, uh, Jeffrey Epstein.
00:07:19.880 Never had any, uh, connection or communication with him.
00:07:24.740 I knew, uh, Ghislaine Maxwell, um, casually as an acquaintance.
00:07:30.360 But whatever they asked me, I did my very best to respond.
00:07:34.880 I don't know how many times I had to say I did not know Jeffrey Epstein.
00:07:39.220 I never went to his island.
00:07:42.060 I never went to his home.
00:07:43.640 I never went to his offices.
00:07:45.880 Uh, so it's on the record numerous times.
00:07:49.900 Ugh, I'm so contemptible about that woman.
00:07:53.020 And now Bill Clinton's in the hot seat and it's going to go differently for him today.
00:07:57.980 I mean, I believe her that she didn't know Jeffrey Epstein, but she knew Ghislaine.
00:08:01.780 That's what's interesting about her.
00:08:03.440 She knew her husband knew Epstein very well.
00:08:05.840 All the time she was married to him.
00:08:08.680 What did, has she asked any questions?
00:08:11.120 Uh, did she then?
00:08:12.520 Did she once Epstein pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution with a minor?
00:08:17.800 Which is not a thing.
00:08:18.820 Um, here's Bill Clinton, who just offered an opening statement before his testimony.
00:08:26.020 Would you listen to this?
00:08:27.920 As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse.
00:08:31.580 Okay.
00:08:33.380 Not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing,
00:08:37.960 I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals.
00:08:43.320 Sure, Jan.
00:08:45.880 The reason I'm here is that the girls and women whose lives Jeffrey Epstein destroyed deserve not only justice, but healing.
00:08:53.880 Okay.
00:08:55.260 You and your crazy ass wife used George Stephanopoulos and James Carville to create whole war rooms to destroy the young women who were accusing you.
00:09:06.140 Of far less than Jeffrey Epstein was ever accused of.
00:09:10.040 You destroyed them.
00:09:11.860 You organized massive PR campaigns to undermine their credibility.
00:09:16.460 Woman after woman after woman.
00:09:18.220 Who we now know were telling the truth.
00:09:20.760 And who I certainly believe were telling the truth about you.
00:09:24.780 Um, Kathleen Willey is one.
00:09:27.620 Juanita Broderick is another.
00:09:30.220 Um, Paula Jones is another.
00:09:33.320 Jennifer Flowers is another.
00:09:35.140 So just fucking spare me.
00:09:38.060 Spare me that you now really have a lot of concern about the women and girls allegedly called up in the Epstein web.
00:09:46.780 The reason I'm here is the girls and women whose lives Epstein destroyed deserve justice and healing.
00:09:52.140 Oh, my God.
00:09:53.180 You're such a fucking liar.
00:09:56.160 This guy just wrote in his stupid letter trying to get out of this deposition along with his wife,
00:10:02.820 co-signed literally by his wife.
00:10:05.180 There comes a time in every person's life where they have to decide if they're going to roll over for this fascistic government or whether they're prepared to fight.
00:10:13.020 That time for us is now.
00:10:14.960 Oh, they were ready.
00:10:16.460 They wanted to be martyred.
00:10:17.280 We are going to fight this administration.
00:10:19.100 We have no information on Epstein.
00:10:20.700 This is just a complete bully job.
00:10:23.300 And then they were told in no uncertain terms they were going to get the Steve Bannon treatment.
00:10:29.220 You don't show up to comply with a subpoena.
00:10:31.860 You go to prison.
00:10:32.940 And they folded like a cheap tent.
00:10:36.660 They collapsed like a deck of cards.
00:10:38.940 Like that.
00:10:40.340 Oh, maybe that time is not now.
00:10:42.280 It's like maybe somebody else is going to have to say this is the time.
00:10:46.540 Maybe we'll say this is the time, but like six or 12 months down the line.
00:10:49.780 Oh, wait, we have to give testimony before then.
00:10:51.580 So they did.
00:10:52.620 There's such a couple of posers.
00:10:54.580 Everything about them, everything is about their image.
00:10:57.280 If you read, you should Google that letter.
00:10:59.160 In fact, let's post that letter in our let's let's include a link to that in our MK American News Minute.
00:11:05.920 We send it out once we send you once a week.
00:11:08.380 We send you an email with all the news of the week.
00:11:12.880 You can sign up at Megan Kelly dot com.
00:11:14.700 And I'm going to include a link to their letter that they wrote.
00:11:18.000 It is the most absurd, self-aggrandizing thing you've ever read.
00:11:21.340 It waxes poetic about all the reasons that this is so unjust that they were calling them in there to testify.
00:11:27.380 And how terrible this government is and they will fight.
00:11:30.120 They will be the ones they they have the wherewithal.
00:11:32.360 They have the means.
00:11:33.880 They rolled over like rover just as soon as James Comer was like, well, I will send you to prison.
00:11:41.720 And I have a Department of Justice ready to pursue those charges.
00:11:45.400 I mean, immediately.
00:11:47.500 So that's how they got here under protest.
00:11:49.500 But now Bill Clinton says the reason I am here is that the girls and women whose lives Epstein destroyed deserve not only justice, but healing.
00:11:56.920 You didn't want to show up.
00:11:58.740 You said there comes a time in every man's life where he has to decide whether he's going to fight.
00:12:01.900 And that time is now.
00:12:03.500 You only went in once Comer threatened you with prison.
00:12:07.040 They started off lying.
00:12:09.560 It's like unbelievable.
00:12:11.020 Here's the third paragraph.
00:12:12.100 Though my brief acquaintance with Epstein ended years before his crimes came to light, and though I never witnessed during our limited interactions any indication of what was truly going on, I'm here to offer what little I know so that it might prevent anything like this from ever happening again.
00:12:27.180 You made Hillary come in.
00:12:29.080 She had nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein.
00:12:31.160 Nothing.
00:12:32.000 No matter how many photos you show me, I have two things that at the end of the day matter more than your interpretation of those 20-year-old photos.
00:12:38.860 I know what I saw and, more importantly, what I didn't see.
00:12:41.260 I know what I did, and more importantly, what I didn't do.
00:12:44.200 I saw nothing, and I did nothing wrong.
00:12:47.180 You'll often hear me say that I don't recall.
00:12:49.260 Oh, he's setting the table before he says anything.
00:12:51.500 That might be unsatisfying, but I'm not going to say something I'm not sure of.
00:12:55.560 That was all a long time ago.
00:12:57.460 It ends with, with that, Mr. Chairman, fire away.
00:12:59.960 This is a man who's already lied under oath.
00:13:02.300 Depends on what the definition of is, is.
00:13:05.140 And that's what he was impeached for, because he lied under oath.
00:13:08.420 Threatened with disbarment, because he's a lawyer.
00:13:11.260 And so that's what we're getting under oath today.
00:13:13.640 Not exactly a proven truth teller.
00:13:16.040 And already he sets the table with, you're going to hear me say I don't recall.
00:13:20.040 That's his favorite, among other dishonest people's favorite trick, for getting out of telling hard truths.
00:13:27.160 Yes, some honest people also don't recall.
00:13:29.140 But over and over and over, to the point where you need to set it up before you even begin testifying.
00:13:34.700 And this stinks to high heaven.
00:13:36.580 No one believes we're going to get the straight skinny from him at all.
00:13:39.560 But I'm glad they're putting him through the exercise.
00:13:41.320 Let's get him on the record.
00:13:42.600 Let's try.
00:13:43.760 Why should he be treated differently than Les Wexner, who stinks to high heaven, too?
00:13:48.620 So, it's gross.
00:13:50.600 These guys are disgusting.
00:13:52.640 Let me just go back to my friend's picture for a second.
00:13:55.220 There's no crime in what he's doing there.
00:13:57.620 But just think of what a disgusting pig.
00:13:59.260 Ladies, think if you saw your husband like this, sitting president of the United States, okay?
00:14:04.720 And you're in the restaurant with him.
00:14:06.280 Your child is in the restaurant with him.
00:14:07.840 Chelsea and Hillary were there, according to my friends.
00:14:10.780 My two friends were there with a table full of guys and some other friends.
00:14:14.340 And he came over to them.
00:14:16.380 He wanted his picture with them.
00:14:18.020 And think of this where your husband, after he'd been impeached, after the Monica Lewinsky story had broken,
00:14:23.160 after the story with the, you know, sexual acts with the cigar had broken,
00:14:26.640 you'd been nationally humiliated, yes, through Jennifer Flowers.
00:14:30.300 That came out when he was running.
00:14:31.700 And through Monica Lewinsky now, who's giving him blowjobs in the Oval Office.
00:14:36.640 And then you see your husband pose for a photo where he's literally trying to get a look at some strange, beautiful woman's tits.
00:14:44.520 While he's appearing to slide his hand toward the breasts of the other one.
00:14:48.500 These are young girls.
00:14:49.600 They're 20 at the time.
00:14:51.680 He's a disgusting pervert.
00:14:53.600 Truly, most of us, our husbands would never do this in a million years.
00:14:58.440 They wouldn't behave like this.
00:14:59.820 Never mind as sitting president.
00:15:01.840 Never mind in the wake of the Lewinsky and Flowers and other scandals.
00:15:05.580 All those names I ticked off that they created the war room for.
00:15:08.640 That happened all before this.
00:15:10.620 That's who's testifying today.
00:15:11.960 Worried about the young women and the girls.
00:15:13.920 That's what brought him here.
00:15:15.820 On the thing he totally objected to doing until he was threatened with jail.
00:15:20.740 Like, I can't.
00:15:21.780 I can't with these two.
00:15:23.420 There's a lot to go over on them, on Epstein in general, and where we think the disclosures thus far have led us.
00:15:29.520 And we didn't think there was a better person to talk to about that than Mike Benz, who's never been on the program, but who I've admired on his testimonials elsewhere.
00:15:36.380 He's a former State Department official and executive director of Foundation for Freedom Online.
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00:16:55.640 Mike, welcome to the show.
00:16:56.980 Your thoughts on all that.
00:16:59.460 Thanks, Megan.
00:17:00.100 Thanks for having me.
00:17:00.900 Well, it's really two peas in a pod, Clinton and Epstein.
00:17:05.860 When you just went through your description of Clinton with your friend and that restaurant
00:17:12.780 scene, you can certainly understand how Clinton and Epstein were like attracts like, I suppose.
00:17:23.040 But what comes to mind when I think about the Clinton-Epstein story is there's this quote
00:17:28.140 you may remember that Hillary Clinton came forward with in 2014.
00:17:32.920 She said,
00:17:33.280 We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt.
00:17:37.000 As I recall, we were something like $12 million in debt.
00:17:40.340 And that sticks out to me when I think about the Epstein-Clinton affair.
00:17:49.060 It's been reported by the New York Post that Jeffrey Epstein is on the White House visitors
00:17:55.020 logs in the 1990s at least 17 times.
00:17:58.340 We know that the Bill Clinton State Department rented out a five-story mansion to Jeffrey Epstein
00:18:06.000 directly after it seized it from the government of Iran.
00:18:09.900 And then we know that Jeffrey Epstein's lawyers testified in court that Epstein helped set up
00:18:17.980 the Clinton Foundation in the early 2000s.
00:18:21.900 2001, 2002 is when Epstein began flying Bill Clinton around on his Africa tour as they were setting up
00:18:29.280 the Clinton Foundation.
00:18:30.680 We know from the Epstein files that Epstein's, you know, one of the ways that he seems to capture people
00:18:36.860 and network is by getting politicians towards the end of their government service as they're transitioning
00:18:43.400 into the private sector, hooked up with lucrative private sector deals that leveraged their government
00:18:50.780 connections.
00:18:51.420 This was something that Epstein did with Ehud Barak, the prime minister of Israel, who was
00:18:57.520 then the defense minister when he was poached by Epstein, did this with Bill Burns, who was the deputy
00:19:03.600 secretary of state when he went on to the Carnegie Foundation before he became CIA director, did this
00:19:09.460 with Kathy Rumler, who was the White House counsel, who then went on to represent the Rothschild Bank
00:19:15.060 and then Goldman Sachs, and appeared to have done this in some respect with President Clinton.
00:19:21.780 It was, he's in and out of the White House 17 times.
00:19:25.020 He's directly leasing from the Clinton State Department and then is immediately, 2001 is when,
00:19:33.000 you know, basically the, Clinton's fresh out of office starts the Clinton Foundation is being
00:19:40.100 flown around by Epstein.
00:19:41.400 And I would not be surprised if Epstein's donor network were early contributors to the Clinton
00:19:46.800 Foundation.
00:19:47.300 I think this is one of the questions that, one of the lines of questioning that the world is
00:19:53.320 eagerly awaiting in terms of the depositions that just took place with respect to President
00:20:00.140 Clinton, the Clinton Foundation has been a font of corruption and to, to, to get the Epstein side
00:20:07.720 of that story would be fascinating.
00:20:10.640 Do we think we're going to?
00:20:12.760 I mean, what would be most helpful, the way you normally take a deposition, is you get
00:20:17.860 interrogatories and you get document requests on the party before you sit down with them and
00:20:21.280 then you pour over all that information, the written admissions and then the documents that
00:20:25.980 relate to any issue you want to ask him about so that you can shove the document in his face
00:20:30.380 and say, what is this?
00:20:31.300 What's this loan?
00:20:32.340 What's, what was this job that was provided?
00:20:35.340 I don't know if they have all of that with Bill and Hillary and thus the cross-examination,
00:20:41.540 which is what a deposition really is, may be less effective.
00:20:45.480 That's, that's very possible.
00:20:48.060 I would say that, you know, even, even if you had those, I do suspect, as you pointed
00:20:54.180 out, you know, this is a president who, you know, couldn't remember if he got a blowjob
00:20:59.160 five minutes ago from an intern while he was president of the United States.
00:21:02.760 This is someone who will haggle with you over what the definition of is is and who pre-set
00:21:08.720 up his testimony by reminding, reminding the room that his memory is not what it used to be.
00:21:16.080 I just can't recall.
00:21:17.580 So, you know, even if he's going for a well-meaning man with a, with a poor memory, he's, he's,
00:21:22.520 he's going for the Joe Biden defense that stopped him from getting criminally charged.
00:21:26.260 Right.
00:21:26.460 That's exactly right.
00:21:27.360 The Robert Herr, you know, well, these are crimes, but unfortunately, you know, he's a
00:21:31.960 senile old man and we don't think that a jury would convict.
00:21:35.500 So here's a get out of jail free card.
00:21:37.600 But the fact.
00:21:39.280 Meanwhile, he's not being looked at for criminal charges, but he's being looked at for information
00:21:43.400 to try to put together a more complete picture of Jeffrey Epstein and what we've known about
00:21:49.220 Jeffrey Epstein and, and didn't know.
00:21:51.180 And by the way, why nothing has been done about Jeffrey Epstein, including during Biden's
00:21:55.620 four years as president.
00:21:56.620 Well, what's frustrating to me is the, there's this whole, we have these justice department
00:22:02.120 files.
00:22:02.660 Uh, you know, we appear to have about half of the, of the total, uh, uh, you know, it's,
00:22:08.760 it's very voluminous, but there does appear to be huge portions missing.
00:22:12.840 For example, it's, it's been reported that apparently about three years worth between
00:22:19.500 1999 and 2001, the justice department files basically cut off.
00:22:25.180 Uh, this is a very strange gap.
00:22:27.740 It's the tail end of the Clinton presidency, and there are basically no Epstein files in
00:22:35.560 this DOJ drop from mid nine, 1999 to 2000.
00:22:42.180 Well, that's, this is a very difficult thing to explain.
00:22:45.180 Well, no one has really offered a good explanation of this.
00:22:49.480 There's a lot of very strange, I don't want to sidebar this with, you know, the, some of
00:22:56.480 the strange kind of nine 11 issues around Jeffrey Epstein, but it is, it is a very serious
00:23:02.660 missing chunk of the Epstein piece, especially given that Epstein was asked to be on the nine
00:23:08.720 11 shadow commission and, you know, was, uh, in some of these very strange networks around,
00:23:15.440 uh, both the, the military statecraft intelligence apparatus, uh, both pre and post nine 11.
00:23:25.500 And, but that those are critical missing years.
00:23:28.480 Those are also the years that Epstein himself foiled the CIA for any open and acknowledged
00:23:34.300 agency links between the CIA and himself.
00:23:37.560 That was in 1999 while Bill Clinton was president, uh, at that time in 1999 is when, uh, Jeffrey
00:23:44.820 Epstein resolved his dispute with the, uh, Bill Clinton state department over the five story
00:23:53.740 mansion that had been seized from the government of Iran.
00:23:56.780 This is American taxpayer property, and it was rented out solely and exclusively to Jeffrey
00:24:02.940 Epstein.
00:24:03.460 Epstein then violated the terms of the lease, not only by not paying it.
00:24:06.980 So the taxpayer was eating the bill, but sublet, subletting it out to the criminal defense lawyer
00:24:12.900 for the French connection and pizza connection, drug ring cases, which are both drug ring cases
00:24:18.640 and, uh, involving alleged CIA protection of drug rings in France and Italy.
00:24:26.000 Uh, wait, I'm lost, but let's just pause for a second.
00:24:30.540 Uh, quick question.
00:24:31.820 Is this, would, is this the mansion that Jeffrey would ultimately purchase?
00:24:34.840 That was the largest mansion in New York or is that a difference?
00:24:37.520 This was prior to that.
00:24:38.960 This was a, this was the.
00:24:40.380 Okay.
00:24:40.520 So you're saying when Bill Clinton was president, his state department seized this town home
00:24:44.440 from the Iranians and then he leased it or the state department, I guess, allowed Jeffrey
00:24:49.760 Epstein to lease it.
00:24:51.040 And it resulted in subsequent legal disputes with respect to Jeffrey Epstein's what non-payment
00:24:57.080 or who, what?
00:24:58.560 Yeah.
00:24:58.760 So, so Epstein stopped making payments.
00:25:01.720 I was $15,000 a month in the 1990s.
00:25:05.060 And this was, you know, this giant property overlooking Central Park, five stories, uh, Upper
00:25:13.960 East Side.
00:25:14.780 And then he violated the, the lease terms by subletting it out to this, uh, lawyer connected
00:25:21.480 to these very, uh, high profile cases involving, uh, some pretty seedy elements of the intelligence
00:25:33.420 overworld and, and criminal underworld, uh, what I'm getting at here is if, if this justice
00:25:40.500 department and our legislative oversight bodies want to show their seriousness in terms of
00:25:47.180 pursuing the Clinton leads here, uh, I I'm calling for full declassification of all state
00:25:54.560 department and CIA files, because all we have are a fraction of the justice department and
00:26:01.320 by extension FBI files.
00:26:03.600 But the fact is, is the state department would have had to have diligence Jeffrey Epstein in
00:26:08.720 the 1990s.
00:26:10.040 We know that Epstein himself appeared to think that he was CIA adjacent enough to FOIA the
00:26:16.440 CIA itself for any open and acknowledged agency links in 1999.
00:26:21.520 Why would he do that?
00:26:22.880 Well, it, Jeffrey Epstein's had at, by that point for 20 years, been doing kind of CIA adjacent
00:26:29.560 banking work, uh, or I mean, banking is putting it charitably, but Bear Stearns who, where he
00:26:37.240 started his career.
00:26:38.160 Wait, wait, we'll go back.
00:26:38.980 I do want to talk about the Bear Stearns thing, but just before you get to it, just like I'm
00:26:42.180 looking for just the broad answer on why he would FOIA the CIA about what context they
00:26:48.160 had with himself.
00:26:48.780 I mean, he, something he would presumably know, but I guess he's looking for what context that
00:26:54.420 or work they've done on him that he didn't know about.
00:26:56.920 Well, Epstein did it through the, uh, through a lawyer using the Privacy Act, which is a
00:27:01.320 way of basically pre-FOIAing what other people could see about you.
00:27:07.840 So the, so, so this is before he became a public figure.
00:27:11.280 He wasn't really publicly known until 2001, 2002.
00:27:16.060 That was when he first became, the public took an interest, who's flying President Clinton
00:27:21.180 around Africa.
00:27:22.140 That was really when his public star began to rise.
00:27:25.540 And before that, you know, he was seeing what the public would see about him if they
00:27:31.700 were to FOIA the CIA for any open, open links.
00:27:36.180 All right, let's go back.
00:27:37.480 Let's go back on the Bear Stearns thing.
00:27:38.920 Cause this is the, just getting ready for today and reading what you've said about that before
00:27:42.980 is the first I, I understood.
00:27:44.800 What the Bear Stearns, cause I've heard that thrown around the Bear Stearns connection that
00:27:50.980 Jeffrey Epstein started.
00:27:52.160 He had a stint there, um, this massive New York bank at the time.
00:27:56.800 And, uh, you, you posit that his stint there and the man he worked for and the work he did
00:28:02.540 was critical to everything that would happen in Jeffrey Epstein's life thereafter.
00:28:08.080 Most especially these nefarious ties with the guys, he was subletting the $15 million or
00:28:14.820 whatever townhouse from Iran to, and his Intel connections, you know, call him an asset,
00:28:21.560 call him whatever you want, but his connections, which were ubiquitous in Intel with some very
00:28:25.940 shady people and entities.
00:28:28.800 And you posit that it all started when he was a very young man hired to work at Bear Stearns.
00:28:34.920 So in 1975 and 1976, there were these, the CIA was brought to heel for the first time in its
00:28:42.860 history.
00:28:44.000 Uh, the, this gave rise to the Jimmy Carter years between 1976 and, you know, 1980, 19,
00:28:51.160 there were reforms put on the CIA that prevented it from doing its usual type of operations.
00:28:56.600 And so CIA exiles created this network, uh, basically in the middle East and in Africa
00:29:04.660 and Central Asia, that was called the Safari Club, which was set up to basically have an
00:29:09.460 offshore CIA that was unrestricted by the new handcuffs put on the CIA.
00:29:13.120 And through that, a, uh, a bank called BCCI was, it was, it had been created in 1972, but it
00:29:22.140 became operationalized in 1976 as a way of running money to the Mujahideen.
00:29:27.220 The Mujahideen would, was the, is kind of Islamo-fascist group that would become Al-Qaeda and
00:29:33.580 ISIS.
00:29:33.960 This, uh, this was when the CIA was funding Osama bin Laden, when he was a freedom fighter
00:29:40.780 against the Russians during the cold war.
00:29:42.980 And those, the Mujahideen were financed by drug money on the golden crescent that was,
00:29:50.380 that was laundered through the BCCI bank.
00:29:53.180 And the guns that were shipped to the Mujahideen, the money was laundered through the BCCI bank.
00:29:59.860 Bear Stearns was one of the top.
00:30:02.600 So just to, just to, just to recap, we're talking about the Mujahideen, the Osama bin Laden linked
00:30:08.740 group that we would wind up dealing with after 9-11. Um, but they were on the opposite side of
00:30:14.340 the Soviets in the eighties. And so were we. So we were, so we did have this weird post CIA group,
00:30:21.860 um, called the Safari Club that was using this BCCI bank to, to launder its money and send out
00:30:27.800 payments to bad guys who we thought could do some good for us, like against the Soviets.
00:30:32.220 And, um, well, we're going to get to the Epstein connection, but that you're just setting it up.
00:30:36.560 This is like former exiled CIA guys in the Safari Club using this BCCI bank to funnel money to groups
00:30:42.100 like the Mujahideen because they were anti-Soviet as were we. Keep going.
00:30:45.360 Exactly. And so you need a, uh, a broker to be able to clear and, and put together these,
00:30:53.220 these trades for the money laundering. The, the Safari Club was run by a guy. It gets its name
00:30:59.280 from the Mount Kenya Safari Club in Kenya, which is where they, they stationed this group that was
00:31:05.380 run by a guy named Adnan Khashoggi, who at the time was rumored to be the wealthiest guy in the
00:31:11.720 world. Time magazine floated that rumor itself. He was the world's most prolific arms dealer.
00:31:17.240 He was a Saudi based in Saudi Arabia, and he would come to be the CIA's key middleman during the Iran
00:31:25.740 Contra affair in the 19, uh, 1980s that consumed the Reagan administration. If you remember Epstein
00:31:32.960 under Bill Clinton was, was leased a building directly seized from Iran. Uh, Adnan Khashoggi was the
00:31:40.480 Saudi billionaire middleman between the U S and Israel during the covert operation, uh, to run guns
00:31:48.020 to the Iranians to fight off, uh, Saddam Hussein's Iraq and to run, uh, skim profits from that to run
00:31:56.340 guns to the Nicaraguan Contras against the Sandinesis. All right, but we're into two different
00:32:01.400 lanes here, Iran Contra. So how do they connect? They connect because Bear Stearns was moved about 13
00:32:09.780 billion dollars worth of transactions through, uh, for BCCI, uh, that was used to launder the cash
00:32:19.180 for this CIA work that was running the guns to the Mujahideen. And then later the entire Iran Iraq war.
00:32:29.820 And so you, you see all throughout the Epstein files that Epstein is involved with the U S military,
00:32:36.940 that he's involved on DARPA projects, that he's working with military contractors, that he's getting
00:32:42.100 intel about, uh, the impact of, uh, military activities on, uh, prospective deals, how he can
00:32:49.880 get potentially seize millions from the government of Libya after, uh, NATO involvement with this. And
00:32:55.460 what I'm trying to impress upon people is that there is a banking and military nexus that goes
00:33:03.900 back decades. And in Epstein's career, he had a 31 year continuous relationship with Bear Stearns,
00:33:10.800 even though he formally stopped being employed there in 1981, he claimed to have a 31 year
00:33:18.020 continuous relationship until the day that the bank collapsed. And would even the New York times even
00:33:24.320 reported that late in the 1980s, he was picking up the phone at home, answering it as Bear Stearns,
00:33:30.180 even though he was on his own. And I, and I, and I want to make something also clear that I don't
00:33:36.600 think has been widely reported in the Epstein files. There is an incredible document that appears to be
00:33:42.840 around 2018. It's a six page legal memo that, uh, it does not have the name of the author. I don't know
00:33:52.520 if it was justice department or FBI originated, but it's in the files and it gets, gives a list of all
00:33:57.800 of the counts, uh, that could be brought against Epstein prior to his indictment in 2019 after the
00:34:05.700 Miami Herald, uh, break. And it has a, it's, it's a very thorough document, basically a dossier on all
00:34:13.280 the, um, crimes and legal theories that could be pursued. And at the very end, there is a note on
00:34:19.800 background information and it states that Jeffrey Epstein used to be, used to do work for the U S
00:34:26.700 government. It's a, it's a direct quote from the, uh, from in this legal memo. And it's the first time
00:34:35.820 I've seen what purports to be a government document claiming that Jeffrey Epstein worked at some point
00:34:42.200 directly for the United States government. Now, what I'm, what I'm trying to say here is
00:34:49.740 BCCI, the bank that was used by the CIA to do all manner of money laundering covert ops activity.
00:35:00.460 This was something that was literally used to run illegal guns, illegal drugs. It was covered up by Bob
00:35:07.900 Mueller back when he was a young man and by Bill Barr who personally wrote the pardons for six of the
00:35:12.940 BCCI officials back when Bill Barr was the head of the justice department. The first time, uh, this
00:35:19.600 who, which involved, it was Doug lease, uh, who was Jeffrey Epstein was flying back and forth to meet
00:35:26.300 with in London who used the BCCI bank to run the guns. It was Adnan Khashoggi who was moving billions
00:35:32.040 of dollars through that, who would become a personal client of Jeffrey Epstein. It was Stanley Pottinger was
00:35:37.360 using it. He was living with Jeffrey Epstein in the early 1980s. Every one of the key clients and
00:35:44.220 figures for the first 15 years of Epstein's career was involved in the BCCI scandal while Bear Stearns,
00:35:52.460 Epstein's firm was serving as the prime broker for the BCCI banking affair. What I'm getting at is,
00:36:00.220 is you're, you're basically talking about a CIA banking class. Everything the CIA does has to be
00:36:06.760 laundered illegally effectively in order to conceal the, the source of the funds. You need this
00:36:15.400 banking infrastructure. Uh, this was all of these type of, you know, banking concealment arrangements
00:36:23.740 require bankers. And what you're seeing here is this kind of class of folks in that finance world.
00:36:30.560 And they appear to have get out of jail free cards for their other crimes because of the utility that
00:36:37.540 they play in keeping the lights on at Langley. And so I bring this up because I think it's difficult
00:36:45.060 to, to really penetrate the, the Clinton side of the 1990s. If you don't have, for example,
00:36:52.160 the state department vet of Jeffrey Epstein, what was, why did when they seized, and I brought up the
00:36:59.000 Iran Contra and this safari club thing, because it's a little strange that the state department
00:37:04.500 seized that five story mansion from the government of Iran, the very government that kicked off the
00:37:10.720 entire CIA geopolitical, uh, whirlwind in 1979, when the whole BCCI bank network was used,
00:37:22.140 specifically to respond to the Iranian revolution in 1979, and then begin running guns. What I'm
00:37:28.920 saying is, is was Epstein leased that property by the state department because he was fulfilling some
00:37:35.620 sort of intelligence function meeting with dignitaries, stakeholders, oligarchs, when they
00:37:41.820 came to New York city for the UN general assembly, was he, uh, working in some respect with intelligence
00:37:48.660 or state craft when, uh, and was given a five story residence that could serve as a kind of
00:37:55.620 diplomatic back channel. We know that he was on the white house visitors logs, at least 17 times in
00:38:02.340 that time period. You don't go to the white house 17 times, unless you're consulting with the white
00:38:07.020 house in some fashion was, but we don't have this side of the story. Not only is there a gap in the
00:38:13.960 files themselves during these critical years, but there has not been that this, the bill that was
00:38:19.680 passed by, by Congress only hit the DOJ originated side of this story. Nobody has coerced the state
00:38:29.940 department and CIA side of this, which the Democrats did by the way, to get JFK transparency in 1992.
00:38:37.280 They got, uh, they passed the JFK rec assassination records collection act, which forced the state
00:38:43.500 department CIA to, to begin, uh, reviewing and declassifying JFK assassination files. That's how
00:38:50.400 we learned about some of the most shocking documents that have ever been declassified in American history,
00:38:54.520 operation Northwoods and the like that only became public because of that. I, if, if, if the same
00:39:00.100 bill were to be put forward today, I don't think anyone would vote against it. This one passed 427 to
00:39:06.860 one and 99 to zero. Why, why would they have omitted state and CIA in the Epstein bill and focus just on
00:39:16.620 DOJ? I can see a reason for doing it separately because if you remember, there was this very strange
00:39:22.260 moment when the bill passed at, uh, and Mike Johnson came forward and did not appear particularly
00:39:28.920 enthusiastic about this new obligation to do this. And, and he said something, which I think surprised
00:39:35.540 He kept like stalling the resumption of Congress to, to try to like push it off so they wouldn't have to have
00:39:40.640 a vote on it. Eventually the pressure just got too great and they did vote on it and they, and they passed
00:39:45.700 it and Trump signed it. The thing that he had been saying he didn't want, he had a huge fight with, um, some of
00:39:51.300 his favorite Congresswomen over it. And ultimately he signed it trying to look like he wanted it.
00:39:56.700 Well, it was veto. Whether he in fact wanted it. It was veto. I mean, yeah, it's, it was veto.
00:40:01.320 It was 427 to one and 99 to zero. Nobody wanted to put their, you know, their name on the dotted line
00:40:07.800 of a, of a doc, you know, of a bill, a vote count that would live in eternity. And you look like you're
00:40:13.080 protecting Epstein by not, not doing this. So everyone was afraid to bring it. But once the bill was
00:40:17.880 brought, everyone was afraid of, of the base to be on the other side of it. Now, I think one of the
00:40:23.200 reasons that this was limited to the DOJ side is for, for one is it does, if you had, if you, perhaps
00:40:31.280 if you had lumped them together, it would have given a carte blanche to delay the, you know, the DOJ
00:40:38.580 side of it because the declassification side is sticky wicket, but the other is the national security
00:40:45.020 side of this. Mike Johnson made this statement, which a lot of people I think were shocked by at
00:40:50.540 the time. It didn't surprise me in the slightest because I've been, I've been almost campaigning
00:40:55.000 on these, this intelligence connection side of it. But if you remember, he said, we need to make
00:40:59.700 sure the documents are, have, are, are redacted, not just to protect minors and victims, but to
00:41:07.080 protect sensitive national security information. And everyone went, what, what is, what do you mean
00:41:13.300 to protect sensitive national security secrets? What, how, the only way that's possible is if
00:41:20.260 this is effectively classified, if, if Epstein was involved in classified networks or there's
00:41:27.540 classified material about him. And if that's the case, that means that Epstein appeared to have been
00:41:33.920 protected, but he's in, you know, the whole Alex Acosta, uh, yeah, I want to, I want to get there.
00:41:43.200 So, so in Vicki Ward's lengthy piece on Epstein back in 2003 for Vanity Fair, and she came on this
00:41:51.100 program over the summer and we talked all about this. It was a great exchange. She was very interesting.
00:41:55.620 And she wrote all about Jeffrey Epstein back then in 2003. She wrote the following, um,
00:42:03.900 because now she's looking at, uh, Alex Acosta, um, later on whether Alex Acosta could be Trump's
00:42:11.100 labor secretary, given the fact that he'd been the U S attorney who had given Epstein the sweetheart
00:42:15.800 deal in 2008. And it was like, how is Trump going to make this guy in 2016, his labor secretary? When by
00:42:22.760 this point, the guys pleaded guilty to a couple of, you know, in connection with Alex Acosta's plea deal,
00:42:28.440 bad counts, not as bad as they could have been, but not great. Um, and that it was already clear
00:42:34.680 that there was like a, a whiff of impropriety, at least around, around Epstein in 16 and that Acosta
00:42:40.760 had helped kind of whitewash the thing away from him. This is before the big piece by the Miami Herald
00:42:45.000 in 2018. And so Vicki writes the following, um, Acosta had been asked, is the Epstein case going to
00:42:51.640 cause a problem for your confirmation hearings. Acosta had explained breezily, apparently that
00:42:56.860 back in the day, he had had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He had cut the non-prosecution
00:43:02.460 deal with one of Epstein's attorneys because he had quote, been told to back off that Epstein was
00:43:09.340 above his pay grade quote. I was told Epstein quote, belonged to intelligence end quote, and to leave it
00:43:17.140 alone. Final end quote. He told his interviewers in the Trump transition who evidently thought that
00:43:23.020 was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. And then, uh, before he was eventually
00:43:30.300 forced to resign after the Miami Herald piece hit, and he was one of its stars and not in a good way,
00:43:37.000 um, before he eventually was forced to resign on July 12th, he held a press conference on July 10th,
00:43:42.580 2019. Okay. This is right after Julie K Brown in Miami Herald regarding outrage over his nomination.
00:43:48.320 And he changed his tune from Vicki Ward's reporting. And by the way, Vicki Ward stands by
00:43:53.860 every word she wrote that he, that Acosta was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it
00:43:59.040 alone. But here was Acosta on July 10th, 2019. Mr. Secretary, were you ever made aware at any point
00:44:06.420 your handling of this case? If Mr. Epstein was an intelligence asset of some sort? Um, so, so, so,
00:44:14.460 so there has, there has been reporting to that effect. And, and let me say, um, there's been reporting
00:44:20.100 to a lot of effects in, in, in this case, uh, not just now, but over the years. And, and again, I would,
00:44:27.740 you know, I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact. Um, this was a case that was brought by our
00:44:36.980 office. It was brought based on the facts. And, and I look at that reporting and others, I can't
00:44:43.060 address it directly because of our, uh, our, our guidelines. Um, but I can tell you that,
00:44:49.180 that a lot of reporting is just going down rabbit holes. Okay. And then the office of responsibility,
00:44:56.280 office of professional responsibility at the department of justice started investigating
00:45:00.100 what, what did happen with the Epstein thing? Like what, what happened there? And that,
00:45:05.480 and in November, 2020, they released a 350 page report and they claimed that they interviewed
00:45:12.540 Acosta. And in their interview, he was more direct and said that no, Jeffrey Epstein wasn't intel.
00:45:20.520 That's what they claimed at OPR. So this guy, so we have Vicki Ward saying he did say,
00:45:25.780 he was told to back off because he's intel. Then we have him there equivocating on camera,
00:45:31.380 sounding kind of mealy mouthed about it, but intimating. Don't believe that. I don't,
00:45:35.900 you know, he's suggesting clearly in that soundbite, he's not intel. Then you have the
00:45:39.420 department of justice interviewing him behind closed doors saying he said to us, no, Epstein wasn't intel.
00:45:45.560 And that's where it stands today. I don't believe a word out of Alexander Acosta's mouth at this
00:45:50.440 point, but I know you've taken a close look at all of this. What say you?
00:45:53.260 Well, I was calling for the, for the transcripts of the OPR, the justice department office of
00:45:58.860 professional responsibility, uh, transcripts to be released. And they actually have been in the
00:46:03.440 intervening time. And, uh, Acosta does appear to make a blanket denial under oath that he had
00:46:10.500 any knowledge that Epstein was quote, an intelligence asset. So that's, that's probably as far as the
00:46:18.540 thread could be pulled on that given the, given the limited line of questioning that was, that was
00:46:23.980 asked about it. Uh, but the, the fact is, is you don't need to, you know, there's a lot of ways to
00:46:30.160 interpret that, that question that allow you wiggle room. And I'm, I'm not comfortable with,
00:46:37.440 with, with the risk. I know that there's a, I think given now that Acosta has made the denial,
00:46:43.820 there's, uh, the, the question of forcing on a kind of under oath response, uh, is,
00:46:51.260 has now been probably gone as far as it could. But the fact is, uh, I'm, I'm not, there's lots of
00:47:00.120 ways that you can intimate that someone quote belongs to intelligence to a prosecutor, uh, without,
00:47:07.520 you know, showing someone the two, oh, you know, 201 human intelligence file or making it, uh, you
00:47:15.000 know, making it so explicit. One of the things that the JFK file. Well, Mike, I mean, you're right,
00:47:20.200 but there's also a way that somebody at CIA or a related organization could get to you and say,
00:47:25.540 you will answer that question the following way. And I don't really give a shit. What is true?
00:47:31.760 This is how you're answering it. It happens all the time. Well, this is something that's just so
00:47:36.480 important. I think for the American people to not just understand, but really begin to add to their
00:47:42.680 knowledge set of how our country works and the kind of reforms that are needed. There is a relationship
00:47:47.700 between the CIA and the justice department that I think most American people have no vision into
00:47:54.420 the, uh, the extent to which DOJ and CIA are, are interconnected. I mean, we'll just remind the
00:48:02.680 audience that Bill Barr himself, who was the attorney general, not just during the BCCI affair in the
00:48:08.660 1990s under George Bush, but also the, you know, attorney general in charge of the justice department when
00:48:14.820 Epstein died in prison. Uh, he started his career in the CIA for the first, I believe, seven years of
00:48:21.780 his career. He worked directly at CIA and then went to law school at night, uh, to only become a lawyer
00:48:28.160 while he was, uh, while he was working for the CIA during the day and his first, you know, jobs there
00:48:33.920 involved basically blocking any transparency into the very Iran Contra scandal that Jeffrey Epstein
00:48:40.300 himself was intimately involved with both through his client network, his banking network, and what
00:48:46.240 appears to have been his operational role. But then he's the one who would ultimately tell us that
00:48:51.760 Jeffrey Epstein killed himself and that there was no way anybody could have gotten to him.
00:48:57.220 This is very, like, I actually didn't understand that full history early on when I interviewed Bill
00:49:01.660 Barr and it was kind of a passing reference when his book came out. We kind of covered it and like,
00:49:05.200 okay, I believe him. It's, it's a lot more complex. Back then the Democrats were attacking
00:49:11.320 Bill Barr as the mop-up man for the CIA scandals in the 1980s and 1990s. They were, they were attacking
00:49:20.160 him in the press in the 1980s for blocking Democrat congressional investigations into the CIA, uh,
00:49:27.300 during the Iran Contra affair. And then they were attacking him as attorney general, uh, for basically
00:49:32.060 blocking, uh, you know, pardoning the BCCI officials and blocking lines of inquiry into the CIA. But
00:49:37.420 what's, what's important is that the last year, these files, the JFK files dropped showing that the CIA
00:49:44.820 was interfering extremely actively on, on criminal cases to get the justice department to back off
00:49:52.500 of people who had committed open and flagrant crimes to protect their operational network. There's this,
00:49:59.540 this case of the, and, uh, for example, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, but I only have a minute
00:50:03.880 left and I, and I, so I don't want to, can I just ask you, can you take that time? You have 90 seconds
00:50:08.240 left. Give us the bottom line on this. What, what have we just learned with you over the past hour for
00:50:12.840 let's, what's a takeaway for the viewers listening at home? The takeaway is we need the CIA and state
00:50:18.720 department side of this equation. We also need the missing years in the justice department side of this,
00:50:25.320 but these two things are connected. You heard Alan Dershowitz say on Piers Morgan the other day that
00:50:30.660 if, if Epstein was connected to the CIA or Mossad, he could have, he could have gotten him off and
00:50:35.800 everyone went, wow, that means it's a get out of jail free card. Well, Epstein, guess what? He did get
00:50:41.380 off basically in 2006 with the 2008 plea deal serving basically less than a year in prison, being able to
00:50:48.720 work from there and then house arrest, uh, while you had 50, some felony charges that were basically
00:50:54.740 swept up and then a blanket, uh, non, you know, non-prosecution for, for all co-conspirators known
00:51:03.120 and unknown. So as far as I'm concerned, that, that is what happened and we need that transparency now
00:51:10.120 as well as this, this is a moment of reform. The, the fact is the national security predicate
00:51:18.220 for blocking disclosures has allowed the deep state to get out of jail free in part because of
00:51:25.380 its work with the justice department. We, we need time and time again. That's a good point. I got to
00:51:30.620 leave it at that, but Mike fascinating. We'll have a longer talk later. I love it. Thanks for your deep
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00:54:24.860 Turning now to the latest in the Nancy Guthrie case, newly released video from a neighbor's
00:54:29.860 ring camera. This is a person about, I mean, not exactly a neighbor. They said about 2.5 miles away.
00:54:36.200 obtained by Fox News shows 12 cars passing through the area between midnight and 6 a.m. on the morning
00:54:45.160 of Nancy's suspected abduction. But one vehicle in particular is drawing attention. It's a car seen
00:54:51.040 driving by at 2.36 a.m. The home where the footage was captured is just about a seven-minute drive
00:54:59.340 from Nancy's house. And that timing would appear to align with when her pacemaker disconnected from her
00:55:05.920 phone at 2.28. TMZ reports, however, this morning that its sources within the FBI are calling the
00:55:13.400 video a, quote, dead end, saying, reports TMZ, that they looked at the video and the area where the cars
00:55:23.820 are driving, as well as the ingress and egress, has led the agency to the conclusion the cars have no
00:55:30.460 association with the kidnapping. Now, we're not sure that's true. And we're not sure that TMZ has that
00:55:38.340 right. We're going to discuss it in a second with our panel. Meanwhile, Savannah Guthrie is speaking
00:55:43.320 out again on Instagram just now, sharing a Today Show segment about the reward on her Instagram along
00:55:51.780 with the caption, please be the one that breaks her home. Tips can be anonymous. Reward can be paid in
00:55:58.720 cash as explained here. Watch. How does the FBI go about guaranteeing that people who do reach out
00:56:07.400 that they actually remain anonymous? Yeah. So, Craig, experts say that let's say you submit a tip. It
00:56:15.300 qualifies for the reward. You want to remain anonymous. You can then pick up that reward at a neutral
00:56:20.900 location that's decided, often a place like a post office. That reward will likely be given to you
00:56:26.460 in cash. And all you have to do is show that unique PIN number that's associated with your tip.
00:56:32.420 You do not need to show your ID. Experts say it is really not traceable and no questions asked.
00:56:39.280 Not traceable, no questions asked. So, Savannah's reposting that clip we just showed you on her
00:56:44.420 Instagram, emphasizing that the tips can be anonymous. She's obviously desperate for tips.
00:56:50.900 And she wants to reassure someone who might have one that they can give the tip anonymously without
00:57:00.700 it being traced back to them and get the reward, which is now up to a million dollars for either
00:57:05.820 the return of Nancy or information leading to the abductor. So, you know, you can get it just if you
00:57:12.120 know where Nancy is. And it's been made clear they mean dead or alive. Savannah then reposting a follow-up
00:57:19.820 shorter clip from her latest video announcing that reward of up to $1 million. Here to react is Maureen
00:57:27.820 O'Connell, former FBI special agent and co-host of Best Case, Worst Case podcast, and Jim Fitzgerald,
00:57:34.340 former FBI supervisory special agent and co-host of the Cold Red podcast. Maureen Fitz, welcome back.
00:57:41.320 Let's start with the latest breaking news just now. And that's the Savannah repost of that short clip
00:57:46.840 on the Today Show emphasizing you can stay anonymous and there's a way to retrieve the reward that would
00:57:55.220 keep you untraceable. Fitz, your thoughts on that? Sure. And this is a very smart move to make. And
00:58:01.460 we talked early on, Megan, what was it, three weeks ago now, put some level of humanity onto
00:58:09.080 Nancy Guthrie. Now the humanity part is being put on Savannah and her family. They want their
00:58:16.420 mother back. And they're basically saying in any condition here, here's the million dollars. I know,
00:58:22.160 yeah, by the way, no strings attached. You can get it without any, I'm not sure if you have to pay taxes
00:58:27.600 on it or not, if the government takes something out up front, but who cares about that? But it's
00:58:33.000 going to be a substantial amount, close to a million dollars, perhaps in cash. And that is
00:58:37.420 going to be a strong incentive. So where the early on stage was humanizing the mom, now it's humanizing
00:58:44.320 us. We realize things may have gone bad in so many words, they're intimating, but at least give us our
00:58:50.220 mom back and let the family have closure on this. There'd be nothing worse. Of course, I've interviewed
00:58:54.900 parents of little kids who have gone missing and have never returned. That's probably the worst.
00:59:00.280 But even having any loved one, such as a parent, that you can't somehow have closure, put them in
00:59:05.260 their resting spot and have the final rights, et cetera, that has to be tough too. So it's a million
00:59:10.860 dollars is probably easy for them to put up. And they mean it with all their heart. They really want
00:59:15.940 their mother back. And I'm hoping someone out there, one or two people involved in this can look at this
00:59:21.040 and have some element of their heart to say, you know what, we can do this in a tricky sort of way.
00:59:26.800 Let's just make this phone call, go pick this money up, and then go from there. I hope that person is
00:59:31.580 listening. And if there's any little bit of a heart that they have, they follow through.
00:59:36.360 Maureen, here's the clip that Savannah reposted just now. So what she thinks is the most salient
00:59:41.580 part of her nearly two-minute video she dropped the other day. But we need to know where she is.
00:59:50.280 We need her to come home. For that reason, we are offering a family reward of up to $1 million
01:00:00.560 for any information that leads us to her recovery. All of the information about this reward and the
01:00:12.340 details is in the caption below. You can call the 1-800-TIPLINE. You can be anonymous if you want.
01:00:20.600 Someone out there knows something that can bring her home. Somebody knows. We are begging you to
01:00:32.160 please come forward now. She captioned it, please bring her home. You can be anonymous. So if memory
01:00:39.560 serves, what was omitted there from the first video that this was clipped from are discussions of the
01:00:45.460 agony the family's been in, and references to their understanding that she may no longer be with
01:00:51.800 us. She may be with Savannah's dad, with Nancy's parents in heaven. So sort of all that humanizing
01:01:00.680 stuff about Nancy and about the family taken out and boiling it down to bring her home. You can be
01:01:07.380 anonymous. And here's a million dollars. It's haunting, really. And it worked on me. I can tell you
01:01:13.720 that. I mean, I just, I could feel her broken heart through that message. And to Fitz's point,
01:01:20.180 I think it's, I think it's the right thing to do right now. And if they can get them that money
01:01:25.380 anonymously, good for them. They're going to have to produce Nancy some way, somehow before that.
01:01:32.880 And, you know, my, my advice is take the money and run. If that's, if this is who you are and this is
01:01:38.040 what you did, get that money, take that money and just good luck to you.
01:01:43.800 Can I ask you this? Savannah, in all these videos, you've sort of seen her. We talked about the fact
01:01:48.780 that the one day she decided to put her makeup on, you know, like the first couple of videos,
01:01:53.100 she clearly didn't have any makeup on. Her eyes were so puffy from all the crying. This was right
01:01:57.200 after Nancy was taken. And that obviously was a choice. And then, and then I thought it was a good
01:02:01.920 sign. She did one with her makeup on, like she was kind of coming back to life, putting on her armor,
01:02:06.620 you know, which can be makeup can be for a woman, especially a woman who's on camera every day.
01:02:11.040 You're, that's how you're used to seeing yourself. And here too, she's got a little makeup on her eyes
01:02:16.160 are bloodshot. I mean, clearly this woman has been doing nonstop crying. And I wonder if that kind of
01:02:22.420 thing fits as coordinated with the FBI, like your look, you know, I, if Savannah wanted to go full glam
01:02:31.080 and put in the visine and get rid of the red and like, not be super up close to the camera. I mean,
01:02:37.660 she knows full well, but like the super up close shot is not the most flattering thing ever on any
01:02:42.240 of us. She's doing all this. I think for a reason she's, there's no way none of this is like, this
01:02:47.440 is just happenstance. I believe it's all calculated. And what do you think the discussion sounds like
01:02:52.160 behind the scenes on that? Yeah. I I've been in these multiple times in my profiling career,
01:02:57.540 advising people how to go before a camera or, or put out some kind of a message in some way.
01:03:02.580 I obviously didn't get into the makeup category with, if it's, if it's a woman doing that,
01:03:07.300 but certainly more importantly, the words to choose and the overall demeanor or persona you're going
01:03:12.440 to present on camera or in some kind of a public speaking situation where you're looking for someone
01:03:17.920 or someone to come back into the fold for whatever reason, or someone to give themselves up if
01:03:24.220 they've done a crime. So yeah, this is well-coordinated and there've been, I'm certainly
01:03:29.080 assuming there are profilers, behavioralists on the scene, certainly in touch with the family.
01:03:33.700 They're, they're talking to them. They're, they're, they're, they're helping them put the words
01:03:37.140 together. They don't want to offend the person. They don't want to challenge the person. There's no
01:03:41.740 name calling that, you know, you're a low life, you're this, none of that stuff. And I'm not saying
01:03:45.940 that either, but just appeal to their human, their basic human nature. And Maureen put it well,
01:03:53.300 it got to her, it got to me too. I mean, it doesn't get more sincere. Megan, you're on camera
01:03:59.160 all the time and I do my share and, and I always, you know, I'm always meaning what I say, but I've
01:04:04.760 never had to put something together like Savannah just did and so much from my heart and sort of
01:04:09.860 begging people to listen to what I'm saying. And that's a whole different part of your personality
01:04:13.980 and your brain and your, and your psychological makeup that has to come in front of a camera.
01:04:18.780 Have you been crying all the time? As she said, as you said, Megan, but the bottom line is this
01:04:23.200 was coordinated. They didn't give her the words to say, but I have no doubt that someone came in.
01:04:28.060 Hey, let's have your, you know, light looks a little bit, nothing heavy duty, but just enough
01:04:32.320 that you're appealing looking and you're talking. You're important. The people watching this,
01:04:36.380 you're important enough. They're important enough to you that you should, you know, look your best
01:04:41.260 whilst talking to them. And that's part of the reason why she may have glammed up using air quotes
01:04:46.600 here just a little bit for this, basically this plea to, uh, to whoever has her mother.
01:04:52.620 I, I mean, I do think I said this the other day, but I think it's somewhat of a sign of resilience
01:04:56.460 that she managed to get any makeup on at all and her jacket on, you know, and started to look
01:05:01.420 a little closer to the professional Savannah we've seen. I just think as a woman in the exact same
01:05:07.040 industry that she is who came up with Savannah, I mean, I literally came up in the business right next
01:05:12.840 to her. Um, we were at the Supreme court covering the high court together. She for NBC, me for Fox
01:05:18.580 news. When we were both like cub reporters, she went to NBC. I went to Fox. We covered a lot of
01:05:23.320 the same stories. I wound up at NBC for, you know, a short stint with her. I got to know her very well
01:05:29.780 during that 18 months that I was there, Savannah and her husband. I had known her for all those years
01:05:33.800 prior, but like we got to be personal friends. And then the relationship ended when I left NBC,
01:05:38.460 um, for all sorts of reasons. But, um, my point is simply, I know that she's going to feel more
01:05:44.720 together and defended with the makeup on. I just know it. That's just how it is in this industry.
01:05:50.100 So I think it's a good sign. I do think the puffy red eyes are an intentional choice because I'm sure
01:05:55.720 they were authentic and they could have been resolved had she really wanted to do that for a
01:05:59.700 camera, but she probably made the choice to show people the pain she's in because of the reasons
01:06:05.500 you're saying, you know, there's no downside. It's real. It's what's, it's what's real. And
01:06:11.300 there's no downside to telegraphing to the public and to the perpetrator. I'm deeply wounded and you
01:06:17.140 could, you could help me Maureen. You know, you could help me is what she's saying. She's also saying
01:06:21.620 you got me. You wanted to hurt me. You hurt me. You got everything you wanted. I am broken.
01:06:28.380 My family is broken. Can we end this now? I'm willing to pay you my hard earned money to end
01:06:36.840 this now. I surrender. Yes. You won. Yes. Oh, oh, it's stomach turning when you think about it like
01:06:48.460 that. That's not because the perpetrator will watch this. You know, you, you, you point that out all the
01:06:53.680 time fits, you know, that, that, that the guys out there watching all of this coverage and there's
01:06:58.020 no question he's watching Savannah's latest messaging. And so he's going to see it. Like
01:07:04.420 it's so creepy for her to know that whatever she chooses to put out there, he will be watching and
01:07:09.620 assessing and we'll have a new decision to make right now, this morning, as we speak, he has a
01:07:13.940 new decision to make fits. Yeah. And this all goes back to from again, day one. Uh, what is the
01:07:19.540 motivation behind this? If it's strictly money, this is strictly a transactional crime that was
01:07:26.420 committed on the part of this one, if not two or more people. I haven't logged in on that at this
01:07:31.960 point. Uh, all right. So now this is kind of a, you know, an offer you can't refuse. I mean,
01:07:38.620 you're probably, you got away. You, you pulled an abduction very successfully. And I've said this
01:07:43.000 before. You can, you can talk about the flowers of the camera and all that kind of stuff. Weird
01:07:47.360 holster. They got away with this thing. He slash, they got away with this thing. If there was ever
01:07:52.000 about money, which I'm not convinced that's the case, but if it ever, even if it wasn't about money,
01:07:56.540 you've got a golden opportunity here. And, and, and Savannah is doing her best. And, and she's,
01:08:01.800 she, she, her, her, her inner makeup and her outer makeup is so expressive of what she's saying
01:08:07.220 right now. She's not acting. And I don't know her at all, of course, but I can, I'd be very much
01:08:12.080 surprised if there was any acting in here at all. So this person now goes back to motivation. Why
01:08:18.660 was Mrs. Guthrie taken from her home at, you know, after 2 AM or, you know, around that time,
01:08:25.100 that Sunday morning that we don't know if, if it was about money, maybe this is a chance to
01:08:29.820 then, then capitalize on it. If it was for some other reason, deeply personal to one or more family
01:08:36.600 members, they said, nah, this isn't gone far enough. You've done this to me again, real or
01:08:41.680 perceived. You've done this to me in the past, you know, a week before or, or two decades before
01:08:46.980 you're going to keep paying. And, uh, if they don't react to this million dollar reward with almost
01:08:53.060 with virtually no strings attached, that would lean me towards the fact that this is a highly personal
01:08:59.620 crime done for highly personal reasons. And money was never a factor. Oh, or, or can it just be the
01:09:07.460 person scared? Like they're like, holy shit, the 400 cops. I don't believe it's not traceable. I'm
01:09:13.240 not, you know, I got away with it and I'm not going to jail now. So nice try, but I'm peacing out.
01:09:18.320 It was high risk to begin with this crime. They knew who this woman was and to whom she was related.
01:09:24.560 I don't think that would scare them off now. And if they think they could pull this,
01:09:27.820 they pulled it off perfectly so far, quite frankly, they've had other people try to come
01:09:31.860 in and take money from them. I'm binged multiple people, probably from overseas, wherever, uh,
01:09:37.100 with the whole Bitcoin thing, TMZ, all that. So it's like, all right, well, now this is my turn.
01:09:42.400 I made my cause. I made my, I sent my message. Um, maybe now I'll take the money. But again,
01:09:48.020 if the money isn't the issue here, then perhaps this is for a whole reason that's highly personal.
01:09:53.160 I use the word revenge early on to describe this side of the abduction as opposed to for profit on
01:09:59.580 the other side. And, and that is so deeply entrenched in this person. Look at the Brown
01:10:03.720 shooter. Went back 30 years to Portugal, uh, you know, and is angered with this, this then fellow
01:10:09.940 student. And he goes up to, you know, MIT, uh, uh, outside of Boston and kills him there after
01:10:15.400 shooting up the university itself. So these types of issues, you know, can go back that far,
01:10:20.460 it may be something more closely connected to more recent times, but, uh, this is really,
01:10:27.420 this is, this is the proverbial fork in the road for this person. And, um, you know,
01:10:32.340 And to me, to me, the Savannah messaging is like the, to steal a term, um, the closing argument.
01:10:38.620 Savannah also went to law school. Uh, I, she, she then went and did like shoe leather reporting
01:10:43.440 in small markets. I went and practiced law for 10 years, but, um, she, she is a lawyer. Uh,
01:10:49.120 at least she's been trained. And I think this is her closing argument because the reporters are gone.
01:10:55.920 That annoying, uh, Democrat Congresswoman, the local lawmaker got her way. The press is gone.
01:11:02.140 They left. The story has been drying up and that's when the influencers leave. And I think it's sad.
01:11:07.880 It's sad for Nancy that they're leaving. The law enforcement is leaving too. The FBI had a Tucson
01:11:14.460 field office, uh, that they were kind of a makeshift one. They're pulling up stops on that and going
01:11:19.040 back to Phoenix. Um, they're claiming that they're not going to reduce the man count, you know, man
01:11:24.140 and woman count on officers, but there's no way they're going to keep 400 officers on this case,
01:11:28.160 right? That's just, they're not, they, they are not, they have other cases to solve. They have
01:11:31.920 missing children. They have new crimes. They have murders. Like they've got to move on. Sadly,
01:11:35.760 because other crimes come and, and Savannah's leaving. There is a report today saying she's going
01:11:40.720 back to New York. It was just a matter of time. It's been a month. This Sunday is the first of
01:11:45.620 March. So we're at an actual month and, uh, she's got two young children who are in school. They're
01:11:51.360 being taken care of by a friend right now. I know the person and, um, you know, they need their mother
01:11:56.640 and she knows that. And I'm sure she needs normalcy too in her life and her routine. So even she's
01:12:02.260 leaving. And I think this is the closing argument, like reward, not traceable, anonymous, goodbye.
01:12:09.720 And, you know, we'll see whether it shakes anything loose. Maureen, I want to talk to
01:12:14.040 you about the video. It's very interesting to me that this gets dropped by Fox news last night,
01:12:20.140 which has been doing very good reporting on this Fox has, and they find it. I want to read you the,
01:12:24.940 the way they describe it. I know you're familiar, but the audience, um, it's a resident of the Catalina
01:12:29.900 foothills neighborhood. That's Nancy's, um, who has a street facing ring cam that caught 12 cars
01:12:36.540 passing by in the morning. Nancy disappeared. They took the recording goes from midnight to
01:12:41.180 6 AM on February 1st. That's the relevant timeframe. And the activity occurred near the
01:12:45.520 two 30 AM mark. That's the relevant time. Um, the homeowners, Elias and Danielle Stradigulius
01:12:52.320 told Fox digital that the police had not canvassed their neighborhood at all in all the time. Since
01:12:59.120 Nancy went missing, the FBI and the Pima County Sheriff's department have been alerted to the video
01:13:04.060 writes Fox digital, not immediately clear whether the video is of any use to the investigation.
01:13:08.500 This is last night. The Stradigulius house is on a back road. Fox writes North Camino real that leads
01:13:15.980 out of Guthrie's neighborhood, avoiding major intersections leads out of Guthrie's neighborhood,
01:13:22.780 avoiding major intersections. And they live about 2.5 miles away from the crime scene,
01:13:26.880 which is outside the two mile radius of neighbors who received a ring alert, asking for video,
01:13:33.700 taken from Jan one, Feb two. So the concentric circle drawn by law enforcement did not include
01:13:40.140 this house, but this couple nonetheless checked their ring camera and found something they think
01:13:44.520 may be of relevance. Their house writes Fox is roughly a seven minute drive from Guthrie's address.
01:13:49.620 As I mentioned in the intro, one of their videos was recorded around 2 36 AM, which is roughly eight
01:13:55.860 minutes after Guthrie's pacemaker last synced with her iPhone. So the timing would work.
01:13:59.840 Yes. Danielle said the number of cars passing that night was not unusual, but she and a friend
01:14:04.360 found it odd that no one from law enforcement had visited the neighborhood. The route itself had been
01:14:10.160 flagged to Fox news digital by another neighbor who said she also saw a suspicious man walking in the
01:14:17.160 area on Feb two, which would have been Monday around the corner from what appeared to be an abandoned
01:14:24.960 car. And then finally, uh, she says she described that man is five foot, nine inches tall, Hispanic with a
01:14:31.280 close trim beard and wearing a silver bracelet, smoking a cigarette. Uh, and then this is actually the final
01:14:36.840 point. Another unidentified man was spotted in mid January, according to a different neighbor who did not
01:14:43.240 have your typical walking gear on. He had his hat pulled really far down over his eyes. He was just walking in the
01:14:49.440 neighborhood near an intersection leading to Guthrie's home, leading to Guthrie's home and hadn't
01:14:55.400 encountered him before or after kind of younger, just didn't look like he was going out for a walk.
01:15:00.620 She thought he was suspicious. Now we get the TMZ report today saying our FBI source has looked at the
01:15:10.200 video and says it's a dead end. The area where the cars are driving, as well as the ingress and egress has led
01:15:17.200 the agency to the conclusion, the cars have no association with the kidnapping. And yet Fox had
01:15:24.760 reported that this house, the Stratagolius house is on a back road that leads out of Guthrie's
01:15:30.540 neighborhood, avoiding major intersections and talking about how this is her neighborhood. That's the
01:15:37.860 neighbors themselves say this is her neighborhood. And I feel like the neighbors of all people would know
01:15:45.440 very well if there was an ingress and egress out by their home from Nancy's neighborhood. I don't know.
01:15:55.060 This is, I'm not sure about TMZ. And I don't, you tell me whether we should be discounting the
01:16:02.540 Stratagolius' new lead so quickly.
01:16:07.440 Well, there's a lot there. But first of all, if in fact the FBI is discounting this vehicle or these
01:16:15.640 vehicles that drove down that Camino Real, then it's definitely for just a number of, a couple of
01:16:23.240 reasons. Number one, they threw up a geofence on that area for that night and all the cars there
01:16:29.460 were, um, were telegraphing different information via cell phone or their, um, uh, or just their
01:16:36.260 vehicle. And they, they were able to get with those people and, you know, find out where they
01:16:42.740 were coming from or going to. Wait, it can't be that because the Stratagolius' say no one came to
01:16:48.600 see them since Nancy disappeared. So the FBI certainly hadn't ruled them out. They hadn't seen
01:16:54.880 this and ruled it out prior to this because no one had come to see them. And also, um, there was a
01:17:01.620 report after this by Fox that the FBI was seen, um, going to visit the Stratagolius' after the Fox
01:17:11.760 News report. But I mean, I, so I guess overnight, you know, they may have ruled it out between like
01:17:17.980 the time the Fox News digital report hit yesterday evening and the time the TMZ report hit this morning,
01:17:22.240 but they, they definitely hadn't ruled this out prior to yesterday evening.
01:17:26.200 Right. Here's what I'm saying. Well, it, I think it came out yesterday mid afternoon,
01:17:30.180 if I'm not mistaken, the Fox, um, it came out on that and everybody, a lot of people were getting
01:17:36.640 alerted. What I'm saying is right then you've got the, um, uh, the, the cast team with the FBI and
01:17:42.980 they're already doing all kinds of work and they're up to their eyeballs in it. And now they're like,
01:17:47.520 okay, let's throw a geofence. You don't have to go there. You don't have to visit anyone.
01:17:51.660 I mean, initially, and you put a geofence up on that area at that timeframe to see who's going
01:17:58.280 past. Now, what, what we would expect if this, if these were the offenders is we would expect
01:18:04.280 no activity coming from the car, maybe a little from the telematics, but, but definitely not from
01:18:10.380 cell phone data because we've, we've already found out that there was no cell phone data pinging or
01:18:15.800 anything around that house. They probably used a little handheld radios or something. So they,
01:18:21.660 they looked at that. They found out who those people were. They could have dispatched agents
01:18:25.240 to those houses last night at midnight for all we know. And they could have followed their phones
01:18:30.060 wherever they went, uh, all the way to a, to a, um, a, a, an investigative end, so to speak.
01:18:36.900 So they, you know, they could have done a lot of work last night and, and, you know, wouldn't be the
01:18:41.080 first time a police officer or an FBI agent showed up at your door in the middle of the night
01:18:44.720 because they probably wanted to really hammer this down. We don't know that that happened.
01:18:48.940 We don't know that that would have, I don't, I, you know, all I can say is I would expect
01:18:55.360 one or two of those vehicles to have no telematics pinging or nothing from phones pinging. If these
01:19:03.340 were, if this was our, if it were our perp or our two, or maybe two, you know, two vehicles.
01:19:08.360 Yeah. The follow-up reporting fits from Fox was per Michael Ruiz, Pima County detectives arrived
01:19:15.380 at the home of the Stratagulius's yesterday on Camino real, um, where the new ring video was
01:19:23.220 taken. So it does appear that in response to the Fox news digital report, they went there and they
01:19:29.240 spoke with this couple. And then by this morning, not the Pima County sheriff's detectives, but the FBI,
01:19:35.100 which has been somehow Harvey's source in this whole thing is saying it's a dead end. He puts
01:19:43.100 it as a, yeah, quote, it is a dead end. The area where the cars are driving, as well as the ingress
01:19:48.120 has led the agency to the conclusion that the cars have no association with the kidnapping.
01:19:53.800 Well, Maureen did an eloquent job of explaining the, uh, you know, the, the cell tower markers and
01:19:59.180 what's coming out of the car and all those types of things. But I think all of us rely on what's worked
01:20:03.320 for us in the past and investigations and the technology, of course, maybe DNA if we're lucky
01:20:08.180 will ultimately perhaps help solve this case. But I also, uh, earlier cases, I worked my police
01:20:14.400 career, as well as even FBI in New York and later as a profiler reaching out to the public is always
01:20:19.740 an interesting way to sort of narrow the suspect pool. And it's certainly in a situation like this.
01:20:25.320 And I would like to see perhaps on the part of the sheriff's department, the, the, the FBI to put
01:20:30.800 something out there like, all right, everybody, we all know about this crime that occurred when it
01:20:35.060 occurred, where, uh, can we ask for anybody who's been, who was driving in that area? If you're in
01:20:41.000 the range of, of the internet, which of course everyone is, is what's going to be posted. And
01:20:45.680 you were out there driving, could you contact us and let us know? And just, maybe you saw something,
01:20:50.360 you're not a suspect. Maybe you saw something, a car went by, somebody pulled over doing something
01:20:54.640 strange. And, and then these videos that there may be more videos coming in. There may be some
01:20:59.660 we don't know about, uh, also, and do your best to slow everything down, blow them up. There's,
01:21:04.840 there's technology now they can make it probably read the tags. Um, and then if a person in one of
01:21:10.440 these cars is not, does not contact the FBI or the sheriff's department, it doesn't mean they're
01:21:15.820 guilty of anything, but that's something I think we'd want to talk to them. They can have an affair
01:21:19.360 and they shouldn't be out, you know, doing what they're doing at 3am, whatever. But, uh, let's,
01:21:23.940 let's try to get people to come forward and say, yeah, I was driving right in that neighborhood or,
01:21:27.920 you know, a mile away or two miles away. If you're on back on, you're in some of these back
01:21:31.440 roads that you've described, Megan, I don't know the area. Well, I'm looking at the map.
01:21:35.560 This is not a wrong turn. You'd make, you're there for a reason. You know, where you're going
01:21:39.320 most likely. And clearly the person who took Nancy knew where he was going.
01:21:44.100 Absolutely. I just put out there, Hey, I didn't want to do anyone who was driving, you know,
01:21:47.460 between 1am and three, they can make it anytime they want. Can you just contact us and let us know?
01:21:52.620 And if they do identify some cars, tags, ownership, et cetera, and that person didn't call,
01:22:00.540 not doesn't mean they're guilty, but at least move them up a few notches on the suspect list.
01:22:04.560 And let's do some more follow-up with them. That's how I would go about this. They may have
01:22:08.340 already, well, they haven't done the posting as far as I know. If you were driving around, let us know.
01:22:13.060 But, um, uh, but okay. Let's, let's keep going. Cause there, the only other like truly interesting
01:22:19.820 thing I've seen in the case over the past couple of days is the following headline from Brianna
01:22:23.960 Whitney, reporter for Arizona family. Um, and it is follows on Wednesday evening at 7 21 PM. She
01:22:30.420 posted multiple people have asked me what the status is on Annie Guthrie's car after it was
01:22:34.940 taken for processing in the case. And that was taken for processing the first week that Nancy was,
01:22:40.720 had disappeared. I asked Pima County Sheriff's department today and just received this response
01:22:45.820 quote, all we can say at this time, the vehicle is still part of the investigation.
01:22:52.660 WTF Maureen. I've been banging this drum since the beginning because we've taken cars into custody
01:23:00.940 and we process them. I've processed hundreds and hundreds of cars in my career. We only keep the
01:23:06.720 ones that are involved in some way, shape or form, or have some sort of evidentiary value. You're not,
01:23:12.380 you're not keeping a car from a member of the victim's family. I mean, first of all,
01:23:18.760 it's my understanding that may be the only car that Annie and Tommaso have.
01:23:24.600 Why are you keeping the car? And is it a common practice to keep the car? If there isn't evidentiary
01:23:30.700 value, the answer to that is an absolute no. Ask anybody call 25 PIOs from police departments,
01:23:37.480 municipal police departments all over the country. They're all going to say the exact same thing.
01:23:43.280 You don't keep a vehicle unless you have the authority to do so. And you only need it if
01:23:48.500 you're going to need it for trial. It's been three weeks. They've had that car in their possession,
01:23:54.220 Fitz. Yeah. And there are protocols within all these departments about how long you keep an
01:23:58.460 impounded vehicle because it's, you know, it just gets in the way of their everyday functions too.
01:24:03.200 But what I find even more interesting, Megan, is that the house was released after two days,
01:24:09.660 then it was unreleased. That's the actual crime scene. We know the crime occurred there at Nancy's
01:24:15.220 house. So it's, I think two days was held, then unheld, then pizza delivery people are coming up. I
01:24:20.300 think it, you know, locked down again. And now I believe it was officially released, but not the car
01:24:26.440 of, of, of Annie and Tommaso. That is odd. And I, I, I, it, it, it must have some evidentiary
01:24:34.160 value to someone for some reason that it hasn't been released, but, uh, it, it, it does raise some
01:24:41.240 interesting red flags yet. The same time, what was it a week, a week and a half ago, the family is
01:24:46.100 fully absolved. They weren't involved. They're not suspects, but we're keeping their car out of,
01:24:51.060 out of what habit. He came off of that the next day. They haven't been identified as suspects is
01:24:56.200 what he fell back on after everybody was like, what are you saying? How can you rule them out
01:24:59.920 when you don't know who did it? Yeah. It's so bad. And the, with the release, with regards to
01:25:05.400 releasing the, the house, um, back to the family. Now my hope was yesterday, Megan, when I heard that
01:25:12.040 they were kicking all the press off the street and everything, I was like, please, Lord, let FBI ERT
01:25:18.660 descend upon that location and do a thorough stem to stern, soup to nuts, DNA search of that
01:25:28.380 whole house to try to find DNA that will match the, the, the, um, co-mingled DNA that they have for
01:25:38.060 their touch DNA, but in a cleaner, um, in a cleaner way so that they could say, this is in fact who it
01:25:44.860 was, we can now move forward with forensic genetic genealogy to find out who this offender was.
01:25:52.240 Can I ask the following, is there any chance this sheriff who I know it's easy to villainize the
01:25:58.640 guy because he's all over the board on his messaging and we've come to not really trust him too much
01:26:03.140 is, you know, too, too smart by half. And that this guy maybe does know what he's doing.
01:26:10.960 And what if he has zeroed in on a family member? And from the get go, he was like, this is a
01:26:19.680 homicide, which is why he called in the homicide cops day one and called off the search and rescue
01:26:25.560 day two. And why ever after we haven't had the hand in hand grid search by either law enforcement
01:26:32.280 or volunteers. That's the thing that's been missing in this case from the beginning, the urgency when
01:26:36.780 there's a missing person, you not only see law enforcement doing what you just said, Maureen,
01:26:41.060 you see volunteers, you see the family members, you see everybody go out there arm in arm when
01:26:45.800 there's a missing person, a child, a college student, an elderly person, and they all hold
01:26:51.700 hands and they do the grid search together. And they make sure that every inch of their entire
01:26:56.320 community has been traversed by well-meaning civilians and law enforcement to try to find any sign of
01:27:02.340 them. And they find things. They often find bodies or they find, you know, the civilians,
01:27:07.160 we haven't seen one, not one of the Guthrie family. They're hauled up in their multimillion
01:27:12.040 dollar house coming out via video only. They never come out for a search. They haven't encouraged
01:27:17.300 civilians to help in a search. They haven't invited. In fact, I'm, I'm told they rejected the offer of,
01:27:22.900 I think it was Equifax, which EquiSearch, I mean, that always like offers to, yeah, that offers to go in
01:27:29.260 search whenever somebody's missing. They didn't want it. So like, is there any chance this sheriff
01:27:34.260 is like, this is a homicide. I've got my eyes on the prize. I am going to intentionally confuse people
01:27:41.420 on my messaging because I don't want any heat coming down on the people that I'm looking at.
01:27:46.360 I would like to keep them trusting me. And if I have to lie to the press and everybody else about where
01:27:51.200 my beliefs lie, fine by me, as long as I keep these people talking to me.
01:27:55.720 It's possible. But if, you know, you're, you're essentially calling him Columbo
01:27:59.420 on steroids. And if that's the case, he should get his own series because he's very believable.
01:28:06.440 He's good.
01:28:07.140 Yeah. So yeah, there's a chance. And, and if so, he's playing it, you know, perfectly and,
01:28:13.940 and whoever.
01:28:14.880 And very close to the vest.
01:28:15.980 Yes. But he's talking too much, but you know, I guess that could be part of his shtick.
01:28:20.500 Uh, and the bureau on the other hand is just being totally tight lipped. If I were the bureau,
01:28:25.280 I'd be trying to figure out who that, uh, TMZ, uh, leaker is because that's a bit of a nightmare
01:28:31.400 for the bureau. We don't, we don't.
01:28:33.300 I'll give you a hint. It's who it's, whoever you put on the case of looking into the ransom notes,
01:28:38.640 it's 100% that guy or girl, because that's the only person I guarantee you that Harvey Levin knows
01:28:44.240 at the FBI. And that person is continuing to leak to him. So yes, I agree with you. You might want
01:28:50.100 to shut that down since not sure TMZ is your most credible way of disputing leads or news items. I
01:28:58.260 mean, I think frankly, you'd be a lot better off going to Fox news, which does have credibility and
01:29:03.800 also FBI sources. But what do you like, what do you think about my theory fits? Because let's not
01:29:09.020 forget. The other thing is, um, he's, he shut off all the press conferences. He only gave,
01:29:14.520 he decided to seize the messaging and you shut down the press conferences. The FBI no longer gets
01:29:18.380 to answer questions, just me, the sheriff. And then this week sent out a note saying,
01:29:23.040 we're not going to be doing any more daily updates to the press. Like all the messaging is shutting
01:29:27.760 down, which I guess we shouldn't confuse with the conclusion that the investigation is going
01:29:33.260 nowhere. We actually don't know that. And that's by design. Uh, and, uh, yeah,
01:29:38.480 I guess our question would be to the sheriff or about the sheriff, what does he know? And
01:29:43.040 when did he know it to borrow that catchphrase? Uh, and I mean, if, if, you know, the cards being
01:29:50.220 kept, uh, of, of, you know, the sister and the brother-in-law, uh, of, of Savannah, I think last
01:29:56.920 I heard they were all living together in a gated community in a rented house or something, but yet
01:30:01.260 here's the million dollar reward being put out. Most, I know, uh, I heard Savannah was interesting.
01:30:07.000 She said up to a million dollars. Interesting. That was put in there. And also that it's a family
01:30:11.640 reward. Uh, but I, without knowing all the dynamics of the family, I have a feeling it's
01:30:17.460 her million dollars and that's fine. That's that, that part is their business. But what are the
01:30:22.580 dynamics? If, if, if the car is being kept, I mean, if I was completely innocent, I'd hire a lawyer
01:30:28.320 by now and say, I want my car back, especially if it's the only car that I have. And who knows?
01:30:33.360 Savannah has a rental car, brought another one in whatever for the time she's there.
01:30:37.060 But what are the dynamics going on in that household that we're still getting videos made
01:30:40.560 as, as you presented early on in our, in our, our hit here, uh, by Savannah. And, and we're
01:30:46.160 talking about male makeup, how she's saying, what she's saying, but boy, out of the corner
01:30:49.760 of her eye, does she have some suspicion, but she's still willing to put a million dollars
01:30:53.500 up. Maybe she doesn't want to believe some things. Is she, I'm not saying she's involved
01:30:57.540 at all, but it just gets so, it's so, so internecine involvement here within the family
01:31:03.920 that I, uh, and, and, and I don't want to give the sheriff, I don't want to take away
01:31:07.920 from him or give him more credit, uh, than, than maybe he deserves here. Uh, it'll all come
01:31:12.660 out to be a master, you know, Shakespearean, uh, play that's unfolded here. If all along
01:31:17.500 he knew what was going on and that comes out, well, we knew all along he was focused. We knew
01:31:22.640 the neighborhood wasn't, you know, the neighbor, the Tucson wasn't in danger of another abduction
01:31:26.380 and this is the whole thing and how it played out. Right. But it hasn't happened yet.
01:31:30.000 That's another piece. Yeah. Isolated incident. Right. Which is just like Idaho. How the hell
01:31:35.200 can you say that when you don't know who did it or why they did it? You know, they're, they're
01:31:39.560 act. And then we see the video of the masked man. It's like, oh, I don't, I'm not sure the
01:31:42.980 Tucson residents do feel so safe. That guy's not in custody and we don't know his motive in
01:31:47.320 taking Nancy. No, I wouldn't either. Especially if I were 84 years old and living alone.
01:31:51.100 Oh my God. I would buy an arsenal instantly. Well, it's tough for an 84 year old Maureen.
01:31:58.080 You know, you're way around a firearm. When Maureen hits 84, she'll be having an arsenal.
01:32:02.380 Oh yeah. I'll totally have an arsenal. Do not mess with Maureen's house. I already have an arsenal.
01:32:05.820 And I learned yesterday that your husband, it was 37 years on the force. So yeah, nobody should
01:32:10.660 break into Maureen's house. It's a bad idea. No, definitely not. Or give it a shot.
01:32:16.580 I hope the sheriff proves everybody wrong. I really do. I hope we see an arrest by the end
01:32:21.080 of the weekend and we're all like, you know what? He was very clever. He was Columbo.
01:32:25.100 Hope that's our update next time we all get together. Guys, thank you.
01:32:28.520 Thank you. Have a great weekend. We've got more news ahead.
01:32:32.080 You know Pure Talk's favorite holiday? It's President's Day. Because they believe wireless
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01:33:37.660 The Cuban government is talking with us. They're in a big deal of trouble, as you know. They have
01:33:46.880 no money. They have no anything right now. But they're talking with us. And maybe we'll have
01:33:53.400 a friendly takeover of Cuba. We could very well end up having a friendly takeover of Cuba.
01:34:01.060 You don't say. We could have a friendly takeover of Cuba. Okay. Okay. I guess they have to get
01:34:09.580 behind Canada and Venezuela. They could be like our 53rd state. Not sure what the president means
01:34:16.420 there. But, you know, Cuba was very dependent on Venezuela and very intermixed with Venezuela.
01:34:21.740 They said half the guards guarding Maduro were Cuban. So maybe that's what he means now that
01:34:28.280 we're kind of running Venezuela. I don't know. He didn't really expand on it. But his comments
01:34:33.740 about Cuba come as we are evacuating personnel or strongly encouraging personnel to leave our U.S.
01:34:40.640 embassy in Israel per Mike Huckabee right now. And we've got we talked about yesterday with Tucker,
01:34:46.280 all the aircraft carriers and other military assets that we've moved to the region. And we do appear
01:34:51.640 to get to be getting ready to bomb or start some sort of a war with Iran. So you can take that into
01:34:58.540 the weekend and sleep well at night. I'm sorry. Like, why again? Why to take out their nuclear
01:35:05.200 facilities? We did that in July. Okay. We just did that. I mean, six months ago. So I'm sorry,
01:35:12.920 but the administration needs to make a clear and cogent case for putting American lives at risk
01:35:19.520 with such an extraordinary mission if that's what we're about to do. Like, what are we doing?
01:35:25.260 He barely even mentioned it in the State of the Union. Are we invading Iran? Like, why?
01:35:31.440 Let's hear it. Let's like, let's let's at least do it. Can we at least have the respect of having it
01:35:35.080 laid out for us? Normally, you go to Congress before you start a war. But if we're going to do it by
01:35:39.400 commander in chief, you know, action, then shouldn't he at least make the case to the
01:35:44.240 American people? It was like, we're going to save the protesters. They're killing 10,000 tens of
01:35:47.620 thousands. The protests have died down. Okay. So it's not that's not the rationale regime change.
01:35:53.380 Well, how are we going to do that? Because it's not just the Ayatollah. All right. It's like the
01:35:57.360 entire regime is filled with Ayatollah loyalists. So how many people are we taking out and how it's not
01:36:02.420 as simple as getting Maduro. That's why reportedly Dan Raisin Kane, chairman of the Joint Chiefs,
01:36:07.220 is having some hesitation about a longer missions here or the mission at all suggesting we could
01:36:11.860 be this could turn into a quagmire, which President Trump denied for the record in a true social saying
01:36:16.600 that's not true. He'll do whatever he's commanded to do and he'll do it perfectly. And all he knows
01:36:20.520 how to do is win. But I don't know. I mean, like a lot of us have real concerns about what we're
01:36:24.000 about to do in Iran. I mean, it seems like we're getting closer and closer could also be a head fake
01:36:28.340 where the president is just making them think we're getting closer and closer. So they give us what we want
01:36:33.060 in these negotiations, which apparently aren't going that well. We're asking them for no
01:36:36.560 enrichment forever. I don't know about you. I don't like where it's going. And I at least want to hear
01:36:42.940 my president explain it to me in terms that I could get behind. That's I think that's the bare minimum
01:36:47.580 we are owed. OK, so that's international relations. Now on to the very exciting subject of Megan Rapinoe,
01:36:53.780 who, as you know, decided to pull the ladder up behind her after she made millions playing soccer
01:36:58.980 and now would love for your daughter and mine to have to play against biological boys
01:37:03.020 who could physically hurt them at any turn. She has absolutely no care about that.
01:37:08.100 She has a podcast with her wife or girlfriend, Sue Bird, and they ripped on the men's hockey team
01:37:15.660 for having the nerve to have Kash Patel on site and taking the president's phone call. Here's a taste
01:37:21.500 of that in top five. What I like to call a classic ripping defeat from the jaws of victory.
01:37:32.260 The United States men's hockey team in their utter moment of glory. Childhood dreams come true.
01:37:42.240 Once in a lifetime accomplishment.
01:37:49.000 Sensational.
01:37:52.160 Ruined it for themselves because they allowed themselves to be totally co-opted.
01:37:58.000 Co-opted, yep.
01:38:00.720 By a clown. And now you're a clown.
01:38:03.660 You look like a clown.
01:38:06.420 Kash Patel is in the locker room.
01:38:09.280 He's partying. He's chugging beers.
01:38:11.100 There's, I'm not like decorum over everything.
01:38:16.040 That's not what I need out of my FBI director.
01:38:20.160 Like, what are we doing?
01:38:22.800 The nerve of this extremely homely woman to call these guys clowns and say they look like clowns.
01:38:31.920 The nerve.
01:38:34.340 So what should they have done?
01:38:36.060 Should they have said, no, we don't.
01:38:38.860 We don't want to take a congratulatory call from the president.
01:38:41.640 We refuse.
01:38:43.060 We are hashtag resistance.
01:38:45.960 The absurdity of that.
01:38:48.080 And let me show you more of what she said and tell you how hypocritical it is.
01:38:52.840 Here's the next thought.
01:38:53.760 Number seven.
01:38:55.000 Watch.
01:38:55.240 They get on the phone with Trump.
01:38:58.780 I have questions whether it was even a secure line.
01:39:00.520 That's beside the point.
01:39:02.780 Who gives a shit?
01:39:03.840 They weren't talking about the nuclear codes.
01:39:05.780 About the women's team.
01:39:08.180 And then the men's hockey team erupts and giggles and har, har, har, har, har.
01:39:12.080 You just accomplished this amazing thing.
01:39:15.260 And then you just gave this whole moment over to this person who you know is just only going to use it for him.
01:39:22.860 Going to totally co-opt it.
01:39:24.800 Hey, first of all, the joke isn't even funny.
01:39:26.580 Like, from a technical joke standpoint, like, what, I don't understand the funny part of the joke.
01:39:31.940 If, I always say this, like, I can't believe how much, how people have such a, like, a lack of self-preservation.
01:39:37.760 But if you don't think you're in threat, then you're not going to preserve.
01:39:40.520 For me, the choice point is, like, I would have never, as a captain or a leader on my team, I think you can say the same.
01:39:50.480 I think that would have been clear to our staffs and to the larger organization and, like, support staff.
01:39:57.700 Those people would never be allowed in our locker room.
01:40:01.060 Never.
01:40:01.980 She wouldn't have taken the call and she wouldn't have allowed them in the locker room.
01:40:05.300 And yet, Clay Travis reporting that President Obama called the women's team after they won the World Cup in 2015.
01:40:13.480 And Vice President Joe Biden was on the field for the title game and joined the team in person for their title celebration that day.
01:40:22.880 So Megan Rapinoe is lying.
01:40:25.580 She was completely fine with a Democrat president calling in to congratulate the team with a Democrat VP celebrating on the field with them.
01:40:35.280 She did not find that in any way controversial.
01:40:38.180 It's only controversial when it's President Trump, you see, which transforms you into a clown from a national hero.
01:40:47.920 She's jealous.
01:40:50.320 She's full of hatred for anyone who's a white male.
01:40:54.780 She's like a rabid, angry lesbian.
01:40:57.600 And she is jealous that they are in the spotlight and she's not.
01:41:02.760 In fact, she's loathed by more than half the country, unlike these guys, who are beloved by everyone except a tiny segment of rabid partisans.
01:41:11.980 And she can't see straight.
01:41:14.320 She wants it taken away from them and she feels powerless to do it because she is.
01:41:21.140 Enjoy your bitter, bitter life.
01:41:24.680 We'll be right back.
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01:43:59.900 Hey everyone, it's me, Megyn Kelly.
01:44:01.980 I've got some exciting news.
01:44:04.200 I now have my very own channel on SiriusXM.
01:44:07.380 It's called the Megyn Kelly Channel, and it is where you will hear the truth, unfiltered, with no agenda, and no apologies.
01:44:13.500 Along with the Megyn Kelly Show, you're going to hear from people like Mark Halperin, Link Lauren, Maureen Callahan, Emily Drushinsky, Jesse Kelly, Real Clear Politics, and many more.
01:44:22.460 It's bold, no BS news, only on the Megyn Kelly Channel, SiriusXM 111, and on the SiriusXM app.
01:44:31.320 A couple more items for you before we go.
01:44:36.780 Mayor Mamdani continues to downplay what happened to the NYPD officers who were pelted by a mob with snow, ice, and rocks after this big snowstorm that we had on Sunday into Monday.
01:44:50.200 And his complicit DA, Alvin Bragg, who would love to throw 34 felony charges at Donald Trump for a bookkeeping error, does not really want to bring charges against these people at all, just like his mayor.
01:45:05.360 The mayor said it was a bunch of kids, and he really didn't want to see charges brought.
01:45:08.880 Well, the cops insisted on it, and they arrested, they're starting to arrest the perpetrators, including this one guy who we reported to you about yesterday,
01:45:17.860 Ghazmaine Kolubali, 27, one of the so-called kids, nothing of the kind.
01:45:23.260 By the way, the guy's had other legal troubles that he's already been dealing with.
01:45:26.960 And he was arrested two weeks ago for trying to rob a confused subway rider in what he claimed was a social media prank.
01:45:35.380 He also had another issue.
01:45:39.220 Gosh, I'm trying to remember what it was.
01:45:40.520 I can't find it in front of me.
01:45:41.380 But there was a separate issue as well involving this guy.
01:45:44.420 And now he's been charged.
01:45:47.280 But the DA already downgraded the charges.
01:45:50.900 He was initially arrested and charged with assault on a police officer, obstruction of governmental administration and disorderly conduct.
01:46:00.060 They've dropped the assault on a police officer charge.
01:46:03.700 They are only pursuing the obstruction of governmental administration and disorderly conduct, which are much lesser and non-serious crimes that they're going after this guy.
01:46:16.420 Now, you may just think, oh, what do you mean?
01:46:18.020 He just threw a snowball.
01:46:18.820 Why should it be assault on a police officer?
01:46:20.340 A, because it is.
01:46:21.900 It is.
01:46:22.860 B, because there are reports, as we mentioned to you the other day, that, well, the president of the police union said that the suspects knowingly packed the snow with ice and rocks before launching their so-called snowballs at cops.
01:46:38.780 And clearly one officer, he said, has an obvious injury below his eye.
01:46:44.520 His name is P.O. Johnson.
01:46:45.820 They said he suffered redness, tenderness, and pain to the left side of his face near his eye.
01:46:50.100 We were told earlier by the union that at least one, if not more, had to go to the hospital for treatment of the injuries, which will happen when you're hit in the face with ice or a rock or even a very hard-packed snowball if it hits you with enough force.
01:47:05.860 So the first one charged gets charged over the objections of the mayor.
01:47:10.920 And then as soon as he gets in the hands of Alvin Bragg, they dismiss the most serious charge.
01:47:16.160 And now it's just a disorderly conduct case, basically, which is a nothing.
01:47:18.920 That's a slap on the wrist.
01:47:20.840 It's not even a misdemeanor.
01:47:21.980 The other one is a misdemeanor.
01:47:23.160 But this is a nothing.
01:47:24.060 This will go away.
01:47:24.760 And this person will have no punishment because they don't believe in punishing crime in New York anymore now that the communist regime has taken over.
01:47:33.000 And Alvin Bragg, as you know, is a George Soros-funded prosecutor who doesn't believe in funding in pursuing crime at all unless your name is Donald Trump.
01:47:41.760 That's the state of the state in New York City.
01:47:44.160 These poor cops are on their own.
01:47:47.060 And these two, this pair, Momdani and Bragg, they're not going to be happy until every single New York City cop resigns.
01:47:53.940 You remember Momdani, all of his tweets?
01:47:56.060 I want to abolish the police.
01:47:58.020 And then when he got closer to the vote, he started to backtrack on that stuff.
01:48:01.940 He only did that to win.
01:48:03.700 That was obvious.
01:48:04.640 This guy hates the cops.
01:48:06.360 He hates cops.
01:48:07.920 He does want to abolish them.
01:48:09.100 Remember, already he's been saying he wants to send non-cops to domestic violence calls so a woman gets the shit kicked out of her by her husband.
01:48:18.660 And he wants to send some 70-year-old overweight female social worker with her little bifocal glasses to go intermediate the dispute.
01:48:28.200 Good luck with that.
01:48:29.760 What we would call that lady normally is his next victim.
01:48:33.620 You need a cop with a firearm going to intervene there.
01:48:36.960 It's just, it's absurd.
01:48:39.060 And each one of these, the Momdani calling this a snowball fight, oh, I'm not going to get involved in kids, as if those of us who wanted to see some justice here just saw little, like, toddlers throwing snowballs at one another and wanted somebody charged.
01:48:51.600 It's so absurd.
01:48:52.400 It's a lie.
01:48:53.800 He's not going to be happy until they all leave.
01:48:56.920 I mean, it was, the writing was on the wall.
01:48:58.280 He hates cops.
01:48:59.120 He never stopped hating cops.
01:49:00.440 He does want to defund the police.
01:49:01.920 And this is another way of doing it.
01:49:03.280 Don't defund, just don't defend.
01:49:05.300 Let them twist in the wind.
01:49:06.940 Hang them out to dry.
01:49:08.260 Let them get hurt.
01:49:09.320 Don't do anything about it.
01:49:10.400 Lie to the public's face about what actually happened.
01:49:12.800 And then, when the cops charge them anyway, because they do have some authority here, you bounce past it over to the DA, who's complicit, and says, nah, don't worry.
01:49:21.360 Don't worry.
01:49:22.460 I ultimately have the authority.
01:49:24.180 And he's right about that.
01:49:25.380 It is ultimately his call.
01:49:26.900 And I'll get rid of it.
01:49:28.540 And this will probably be pled out to a nothing burger, too.
01:49:32.400 So, query whether they'll even bother arresting another person.
01:49:36.300 Right?
01:49:36.860 Why spin your wheels?
01:49:38.520 Why waste your time?
01:49:40.180 So, it's working.
01:49:40.880 Their little plan is working just perfectly.
01:49:43.280 And Mayor Mamdani is a disgusting piece of you-know-what.
01:49:46.840 I have absolutely no use for this guy.
01:49:49.500 Cannot believe what he's doing right before our very eyes.
01:49:54.500 Okay, wait.
01:49:55.180 There was something else.
01:49:58.280 Yeah, no, it wasn't that.
01:49:59.820 But, in any event, I do want to get to this.
01:50:01.300 Okay.
01:50:01.660 The real reason I had to hold over is because I've got to tell you this story.
01:50:04.900 We touched on it in the AM update.
01:50:06.640 But it's an unbelievable story.
01:50:07.900 And you can talk about this over the dinner table or at your cocktail party over the weekend with your friends.
01:50:13.940 Because it's that good.
01:50:15.100 There's a guy named Tom Goldstein about whom you care nothing and you don't need to care anything.
01:50:21.720 But it's an interesting story for the reasons I stated at the top of the show.
01:50:25.660 This elite guy in the most elite circles you can run in.
01:50:29.000 I mean, Supreme Court bar hanging out with Supreme Court justices.
01:50:31.480 I mean, how many of us can say that every single Supreme Court justice knows our name if we're not on TV every day or, like, in the news, you know?
01:50:40.240 It's like, this guy wasn't.
01:50:41.340 He's a lawyer.
01:50:42.700 And he earned their respect.
01:50:44.600 Unlike virtually everybody who gets admitted into the Supreme Court bar, Tom Goldstein did not have some super elite education.
01:50:52.020 He went to, I think, American law school.
01:50:54.960 He went to University of North Carolina undergrad.
01:50:56.840 He did not clerk for a Supreme Court justice, which is sort of the path you go if you want to wind up being a star in the Supreme Court bar.
01:51:06.600 He was not Solicitor General of the United States.
01:51:09.240 That's another way you can do it.
01:51:10.200 Paul Clement, who was Solicitor General under Bush, is now, you know, killing it in private practice in front of the Supreme Court bar.
01:51:16.480 Everybody wants to hire him if they have a Supreme Court case.
01:51:19.140 Tom Goldstein, to his credit, did it with, you know, good old-fashioned hard work.
01:51:24.260 And he was a go-getter.
01:51:25.380 He actually worked at my old law firm for a stint, Jones Day, among other places.
01:51:30.380 And he, in his Supreme Court practice, did something most people weren't doing, which is he started calling people who had lost at the circuit courts of appeal and making a case that he would be clever about getting the Supreme Court to take the case, that he had a pretty good track record of getting cert granted, certiorari.
01:51:47.100 And that was looked down on when he first started doing it.
01:51:50.960 But he increased the firm's practice, like, threefold, the Supreme Court practice.
01:51:55.260 And then the cases at Jones Day reportedly kept getting taken away from him because he wasn't that experienced.
01:51:59.480 And eventually he left the firm and opened up his own shop with his wife, Amy Howe.
01:52:04.240 And they built an incredible Supreme Court practice.
01:52:07.800 He had, I think, 40.
01:52:09.400 He's had 40 arguments before SCOTUS.
01:52:12.000 And he, like, he became the go-to shop.
01:52:17.280 Like, I think only two others have more experience arguing in front of the Supreme Court than Tom Goldstein.
01:52:22.560 So, I mean, self-made, to his credit, great story, very well-respected.
01:52:26.920 And then in 2002, I think that was the year, he started SCOTUSblog, you know, SCOTUS is Supreme Court of the United States.
01:52:33.140 SCOTUSblog, which became a go-to destination for all of us who had a foothold in the law at all, whether you were on television or not, or just in the legal profession, that's where you go.
01:52:42.620 As soon as the Supreme Court issues an opinion, you go there.
01:52:46.160 And they did great write-ups in advance of the cases.
01:52:48.920 I used them heavily when I was a Supreme Court correspondent.
01:52:51.240 Very, very efficient write-ups of the cases before the cases would go up with links to the briefs if you wanted them.
01:52:58.580 And then immediately upon the decision coming down, they would be ready with a quick summary because they were steeped in knowledge about every case going up before the high court.
01:53:07.100 Great stuff.
01:53:07.960 Takes a lot of work and takes a good legal brain to process quickly.
01:53:11.820 I mentioned when we covered this story on AM Update, they got the Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare correct when everybody was getting it wrong.
01:53:21.840 It was all over the news.
01:53:23.180 It was like, remember when everybody got Bush v. Gore wrong?
01:53:25.440 They thought the high court had ruled in favor of Gore because they didn't read through the opinion because, in fact, they had ruled in favor of Bush.
01:53:31.580 The same thing happened on Obamacare when that went up.
01:53:34.920 And the whole question was whether Congress had the power under the Commerce Clause to pass this sweeping law that changed one-seventh of the U.S. economy.
01:53:42.540 And that was the big question.
01:53:45.040 Are they going to uphold Congress's power under the Commerce Clause or not?
01:53:48.000 And the top of the decision said, no, Congress does not have this power under the Commerce Clause.
01:53:53.440 And those of us who went to SCOTUSblog, including yours truly, did not get embarrassed because SCOTUSblog understood, as did yours truly because I'd been following the case closely,
01:54:02.900 that there was another argument on behalf of President Obama and those defending Obamacare saying it was like a catch-all.
01:54:09.540 It was like a throwaway. It was barely discussed, saying, we also have the power under the Tax Clause.
01:54:14.720 The individual mandate is a tax.
01:54:16.680 And sure enough, the Supreme Court, thanks to Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld that law under the Tax Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
01:54:23.240 And so Obamacare stood. That's the reason we still have it to this day.
01:54:28.020 And I went to SCOTUSblog. I was on the air live. Fox News was calling it wrong, too.
01:54:32.920 And I was on the air, and I said, hold on.
01:54:34.960 And the only reason Fox did not embarrass itself, like CNN and the others did, is because I knew about SCOTUSblog.
01:54:41.860 And we saved ourselves from a lot of embarrassment, thanks to Tom Goldstein and his quick reporting over there.
01:54:48.660 So I had nothing but respect for him. I had him on my show later that day.
01:54:52.880 He came on, I think it was that day or within a day or two.
01:54:55.660 We pulled a clip from, you know, what seems like 200 years ago, but here it is.
01:55:00.360 I owe you my thanks because I was on your blog this morning as this ruling came down and we were getting conflicting reports and you, as expected and as always, had it right.
01:55:11.900 The high court upheld the individual mandate, but not on the grounds most of us expected.
01:55:18.920 Not on the grounds that most of us expected, not on the principal argument based that the Obama administration had offered.
01:55:26.360 The Affordable Care Act was saved by the conservative chief justice, John Roberts, applying maybe not a conservative result, but a conservative judicial philosophy saying,
01:55:35.360 it's my job if I can find a way to uphold what the people across the street have decided to do as the elected representatives.
01:55:42.560 That's what I'm going to do.
01:55:43.360 There he is in front of the Supreme Court's facade, broadcasting live, save the day, universally well-respected, revered.
01:55:54.100 He's going to prison now.
01:55:57.120 It's unbelievable to me.
01:55:59.020 He was leading a whole double life, you guys, not just professionally, but personally too.
01:56:06.900 For the listening audience, like with respect, the guy's, you know, he's kind of dweeby.
01:56:10.320 He's a kind of like a dweeby Supreme Court lawyer.
01:56:12.240 He looks kind of short, very bald, nothing to, you know, not, not homely, but like nothing, you know, whatever, nothing to like write home about.
01:56:20.220 It's fine, like a pleasant man.
01:56:22.240 But I'm just saying he looks like your quintessential dweeby lawyer.
01:56:27.160 And that guy had a life of Bentleys, Ferraris, prostitutes.
01:56:37.920 I don't think they'd call themselves that, but if you sleep with a man for money, that's what you are.
01:56:43.880 Multiple women in one house, like he'd snap his fingers and they'd come and fall all over him and God knows what else they were doing to him.
01:56:50.680 All while married, stealing from his law firm to pay off debts, not declaring his actual income on his tax returns,
01:57:01.720 understating his income to the IRS and understating his debt to the mortgage application lenders, to the banks,
01:57:13.040 because he didn't want his wife to know reportedly that he had, like, given, you know, any given week or month,
01:57:20.080 some 12, 15 million dollars that he owed thanks to these high stake poker games.
01:57:25.160 I mean, it's unbelievable.
01:57:28.400 And then he would fly in, like, the next day and argue a Supreme Court case flawlessly.
01:57:38.300 I mean, frankly, it's all part of the same skill set, right?
01:57:41.360 Like, taking huge swings and if you nail the ball, great, it's a home run.
01:57:48.300 You can also foul out, you can strike out.
01:57:50.880 And the stakes, if you strike out in multi-million dollar poker, are very, very high.
01:57:58.000 So he was able, I guess, just thanks to his smarts and his familiarity with these cases, to do fine before the Supreme Court.
01:58:04.540 He was a gifted oral advocate and he would write the briefs.
01:58:07.340 Somebody else would do all the legwork because he was gallivanting the world.
01:58:11.200 It got to the point where he left his practice in 2023 because this was overwhelming him.
01:58:16.460 He was just all poker all the time.
01:58:18.140 But prior to that, he was still just doing the briefs, reportedly, and the oral arguments.
01:58:23.020 And he was crushing those.
01:58:24.080 So he's maintaining kind of like the alcoholic who's like a functional alcoholic.
01:58:29.360 And by the way, he denies being a gambling addict, though his close friends and clearly his soon-to-be ex-wife clearly think he is.
01:58:36.520 He says, I stopped and I'm actually fine stopping.
01:58:39.040 That doesn't sound like a gambling addict to me.
01:58:41.560 But the behavior certainly tracks.
01:58:44.920 So we went back.
01:58:46.760 So he's been convicted.
01:58:47.420 He just had a trial.
01:58:48.500 I don't know.
01:58:48.760 It's like it happened so fast.
01:58:50.380 He just had a trial.
01:58:51.980 And the jury found him guilty on 12 of 16 counts following a six-week trial in Maryland.
01:58:58.680 One count of tax evasion.
01:59:00.480 One count each of willful failure to timely pay taxes for four tax years.
01:59:04.620 Three counts of making a false statement on a loan application.
01:59:07.200 That's your mortgage.
01:59:07.940 Four out of eight counts found guilty on of aiding and assisting in preparation of a false tax return.
01:59:15.820 Seven men, five women heard 15 days of evidence over six weeks, including testimony from Goldstein in his own defense.
01:59:22.220 He made clear that he was going to, through his lawyer, say to the jury, like, this is either a very good man who made some mistakes or this is a very bad man who's nefarious.
01:59:45.280 And he was going to argue the former.
01:59:48.020 And the jury believed the latter entirely.
01:59:52.220 The jury does not believe Tom Goldstein is a good man.
01:59:54.640 And I have to be honest, neither do I.
01:59:56.500 It's like a lot of people have affairs on their marriage and they get divorced and they find love again in a second marriage or a third marriage or whatever it is.
02:00:03.860 That's really between the two spouses.
02:00:06.560 I don't know if that makes you a bad person.
02:00:07.900 You violate a vow in any way.
02:00:10.680 It's not great.
02:00:11.700 I'm not sure you're, like, universally a bad person because of it.
02:00:14.640 You know, it's not a good thing to do.
02:00:16.300 But you cheat on your wife repeatedly with multiple women.
02:00:19.520 Like, you register on some sugar daddy website touting the fact that what you'll bring to the table is dough.
02:00:27.000 And you know that these young women will sleep with you just because you're rich.
02:00:31.080 Like, who would want to get on top of a woman knowing that's the way you did it?
02:00:35.340 She's literally just there because she wants you to buy her something.
02:00:38.140 That's so disgusting.
02:00:39.440 How emasculating.
02:00:41.220 How gross.
02:00:43.040 Like, I can't even imagine a man could perform under those circumstances.
02:00:46.820 And with no care whatsoever about whether she's attracted to you or enjoying it.
02:00:50.640 None whatsoever.
02:00:51.960 There's something hedonistic and selfish and disgusting, not to mention what he's doing to his wife, about the whole thing.
02:01:00.680 And then on top of that, you're stealing from your law partners, who's also your wife.
02:01:04.780 So you're cheating on your wife in two different ways.
02:01:06.920 You're stealing from the government, which means you and me and all the taxpayers.
02:01:10.020 I pay my fucking taxes right on time.
02:01:13.120 I mean, it's like, this is ridiculous.
02:01:15.040 All of us would like to cheat on our taxes a little so we could elide some sort of massive tax.
02:01:19.120 But we don't.
02:01:20.500 It's not to say you never make a mistake here or there.
02:01:22.240 But, like, if you make it, you make it in good faith and then you rectify it.
02:01:25.260 But this guy, no, it was active fraud against the government, which means against us.
02:01:31.120 What?
02:01:31.520 I have to pay my taxes.
02:01:32.480 Why doesn't Tom Goldstein have to pay his taxes?
02:01:34.740 Because he won the winnings at a poker match?
02:01:37.480 F that.
02:01:38.540 Bullshit.
02:01:39.460 I won mine hard work every day in and out with the research working for you guys, same as you guys do.
02:01:44.380 You go to your job.
02:01:45.680 Sometimes you miss your lunch break.
02:01:46.980 Sometimes you miss your vacay.
02:01:48.420 Sometimes you stay late to the office till 11 or 12 at night.
02:01:50.640 Sometimes you work the weekend.
02:01:51.560 You work a vacation.
02:01:52.320 You work a holiday.
02:01:53.080 F this guy who thinks just because he won it at a poker table, he doesn't have to declare it.
02:01:57.880 And the rules are different for him.
02:02:00.300 It's crazy what he got away with.
02:02:02.380 So Jeffrey Toobin, yeah, that Jeffrey Toobin, who notwithstanding his issues when it comes to whipping out his dick, I'm sorry,
02:02:10.700 and jerking off in front of a whole Zoom full of colleagues.
02:02:17.100 What is our legal profession coming to?
02:02:20.840 Had been a very well-respected lawyer and legal reporter at CNN, and he sat down with Tom Goldstein shortly after these charges broke.
02:02:33.040 We did a long report about this when the charges broke because I'm just obsessed with this story.
02:02:36.880 And in December, late December, he sat down with Jeffrey Toobin, Tom Goldstein did, which was dumb, dumb.
02:02:43.680 And his admission that the reason he didn't declare how much debt he was in when he applied for the mortgage was because he didn't want his wife to know, because they were both co-applicants, came back to haunt him in the trial.
02:02:54.560 Of course it did.
02:02:55.540 It was an admission that he did it.
02:02:57.700 No one cares what your reason was.
02:02:59.520 The point is, you did it.
02:03:00.920 You lied.
02:03:01.220 Did you lie?
02:03:01.720 Do you think, you know, Bank of America would care if you were like, oh, I didn't state my debt because I just felt so shamed about having it?
02:03:09.180 They don't care.
02:03:09.900 You're going to jail.
02:03:11.420 You defrauded them.
02:03:12.280 They gave you a $3 million home loan for your beautiful estate in the Washington, D.C. area, and you were a very, very high risk, none of which was disclosed.
02:03:22.840 We're all going to get charged for that kind of behavior.
02:03:26.020 So this was a dumb thing to do, to sit with Jeffrey Toobin, but hey, what the hell?
02:03:29.860 It was his risk to take, and as we've seen with Tom Goldstein, he is not risk averse.
02:03:35.720 Okay, let's go through some of the highlights because you're not going to believe this.
02:03:39.560 Okay, Toobin writes, he'd been leading a secret life of ultra-high-stakes gambling and sugar-daddy relationships with multiple young women, a life so sheltered from those around him that no one knew the full extent of it, least of all his wife.
02:03:51.880 When it came to light, his life unraveled.
02:03:54.380 His friends have largely abandoned him.
02:03:56.060 His marriage of three decades is ending.
02:03:58.260 He is nearly bankrupt.
02:04:00.260 Most pressing of all, he's staring down a 22-count federal indictment on tax fraud charges in a trial scheduled to begin in January.
02:04:06.280 Yeah, which it did.
02:04:07.360 And now he's been found guilty.
02:04:09.560 Um, outside the front door of his home, his $3 million home, are two Bentleys, writes Toobin, among other family vehicles, or at least that's what was there.
02:04:20.360 Now, writes Toobin, they're gone, replaced by a Honda.
02:04:23.340 Oh, the shame.
02:04:24.800 Like the rest of us.
02:04:26.600 I used to drive a Honda.
02:04:27.720 No, a Toyota.
02:04:28.960 Uh, now I drive a Beamer.
02:04:31.120 Highly recommend.
02:04:32.200 But Goldstein is uncowed.
02:04:33.960 I have never, ever believed I did anything wrong, he told me.
02:04:38.120 And for defensive trial, he's planning the same kind of bold all-in strategy that he used at the Supreme Court, this time with his own freedom on the line.
02:04:45.980 His fall has been as precipitous as his rise was meteoric.
02:04:50.160 And he goes on to talk about some of that background, how he actually worked for David Boies and Lawrence Tribe, ugh, on Bush v. Gore.
02:04:59.180 And, uh, that he mastered Supreme Court practice, made a name for himself in the ways that I just described.
02:05:08.120 And then talks about how he started, he started gambling, um, because in the early 2000s, ESPN began broadcasting poker.
02:05:21.240 He had never played it, but he loved watching.
02:05:23.360 I think of it as a pretty intellectual thing, he says.
02:05:26.860 But he quickly graduated from games around the kitchen table with jars of quarters to tables of high rollers in D.C. and New York.
02:05:33.880 I would play in home games where you could win and lose $100,000.
02:05:38.340 This is not that unusual.
02:05:40.040 I have a friend whose doctor, whose brother is a doctor, like a well-respected doctor.
02:05:44.500 And he's amazing at poker.
02:05:46.180 And he finds these games where he will win or lose $100,000 or $200,000 in a night.
02:05:54.220 Now, he declares his winnings and losings, and therefore it's legal.
02:05:57.740 But imagine, like, making $100,000 in a night with hands of poker.
02:06:03.340 Tom Goldstein took that to the next level.
02:06:07.340 His style of play reflected his swaggering, risk-friendly approach to litigation.
02:06:11.440 Okay, let's see.
02:06:14.380 He says, I'm a big believer.
02:06:15.820 You have to figure out what your winning argument is.
02:06:17.960 It's a poker thing.
02:06:19.640 And that being willing, and that is being willing to say this is not working.
02:06:24.080 And if I just sit here and hedge my bets and argue both, I'm not going to accomplish anything.
02:06:28.260 So somebody who knew him said the following,
02:06:31.900 Tom is extremely wild and crazy, like a lunatic at the poker table.
02:06:35.360 He's fearless, an over-bluffing kind of player, what we call a chip bully.
02:06:39.640 He tried to run people over at the table.
02:06:41.800 You want controlled aggression.
02:06:43.180 And he had unbridled aggression.
02:06:45.660 For better or worse, in poker and elsewhere, Goldstein believed in going all in.
02:06:50.080 Listen to this.
02:06:51.480 The first major turning point, writes Toobin, in Goldstein's poker career came in 2008.
02:06:57.440 That was before that clip I just showed you of the two of us on the air in 2010 with Obamacare.
02:07:02.400 When he put up the $10,000 fee to enter the World Series of Poker, a multi-day extravaganza in Las Vegas.
02:07:11.620 On the first night after the tournament had ended for the day, Goldstein sat down at a table at the Bellagio.
02:07:16.720 I end up playing without looking at my cards, Goldstein said.
02:07:22.000 Imagine it.
02:07:23.840 That, to put it mildly, was an unconventional strategy.
02:07:26.900 He bet wildly and recklessly, but his opponents were flummoxed by his blind aggression.
02:07:34.440 Goldstein told me he ultimately played that way for 18 hours and won $400,000 at the Bellagio.
02:07:42.760 So you can see what's happening to this guy, right?
02:07:45.220 He's taken big risks in his career.
02:07:46.760 They've paid off.
02:07:47.460 He's come up with a Supreme Court strategy where, like, you, if your argument is failing, you abandon it and you go for another one and you kiss off the first argument, even if it was your primary in the breach, because that's what wins.
02:07:59.360 You get to the poker table and you intimidate the hell out of everybody, but not even looking at your cards.
02:08:05.280 And that's so wild and crazy and reckless.
02:08:07.620 It was working $400,000 in a night.
02:08:11.600 That's when he met somebody named Dan Bilzeriar, an heir to a family fortune who became famous for his extravagant and ridiculous lifestyle as a professional poker player in Vegas and later for being a social media influencer who often featured guns and women in bikinis.
02:08:35.540 Bilzerian recalled Goldstein's antics that night.
02:08:37.780 People were all watching the game and talking about what an effing maniac he was.
02:08:42.440 The two got super tight, and suddenly Goldstein started wearing chunky silver jewelry and, like Bilzerian, sporting a thick, full beard.
02:08:53.500 He wanted you to do all kinds of bets.
02:08:55.980 The TV show that Goldstein decided might be a great idea around poker and crazy things never came to fruition, but they did make one famous non-poker bet.
02:09:05.340 Goldstein bought a Ferrari worth about $300,000.
02:09:09.440 Bilzerian had a 1965 Shelby Cobra, and he bet Goldstein that his Cobra could beat the Ferrari in a race.
02:09:18.440 They agreed to a quarter-mile showdown at a drag racing track in Vegas.
02:09:21.360 The original wager was $100,000.
02:09:23.600 They upped it to $300,000.
02:09:26.000 The Ferrari went 121 miles an hour.
02:09:29.080 The Cobra went 133, and Bilzerian won the Ferrari from Goldstein.
02:09:35.340 This is like, I might go to a movie or dinner with friends on the weekend.
02:09:41.280 What is happening with this dweeby little man from SCOTUSblog?
02:09:47.140 Good gracious!
02:09:48.680 And then he just saunters into the Supreme Court and does arguments on behalf of blue-chip Fortune 100 companies.
02:09:54.640 Here's just a little color.
02:09:57.360 During a photo shoot for Hustler magazine, Bilzerian, his BFF, threw a naked porn actress named Janice Griffith off a roof in Los Angeles into a swimming pool.
02:10:06.180 She broke her foot.
02:10:07.240 She wound up suing.
02:10:08.160 Goldstein was the lawyer and wrote to the lawyer for the woman in defense of Bilzerian.
02:10:15.880 I, like, he wrote, like your client, the facts of this claim won't quite fly.
02:10:22.880 I mean, it's a clever turn of phrase.
02:10:25.040 You can see why he was in demand.
02:10:27.820 Goldstein had law clients in the poker world, and that helped him explain to his wife his increasingly long absences from Washington.
02:10:34.500 He had actively misled his wife and friends about how much he was gambling.
02:10:39.980 Once he started playing in public tournaments like the World Series of Poker, the size of the stakes unnerved those who cared about him, including Nina Totenberg of NPR.
02:10:47.960 She's, like, this very uptight Supreme Court reporter over at NPR.
02:10:52.440 She thinks she's the goddess of the Supreme Court.
02:10:54.380 She's quite insufferable.
02:10:55.400 She was so nasty when I was there.
02:10:56.940 I covered the high court for nearly three years.
02:10:59.020 She never warmed up.
02:11:00.100 She thought she was better than everybody.
02:11:01.540 Meanwhile, she never even fucking practiced law.
02:11:02.940 I had a decade of litigation under my belt, and she wanted to lecture me about the law.
02:11:07.720 I was like, you know what, madam?
02:11:08.680 Why don't you get back to me once you've passed three bars like I have?
02:11:11.300 Anyway, not a fan, but she and he appeared close, so much so that they named a kid after her, and I think she might have been a godmother or something like that.
02:11:21.860 Okay, so she saw that he was huge into gambling, but she says he lied to us about it.
02:11:27.600 In 2010, he promised Nina he wasn't going to gamble anymore, but he did.
02:11:32.940 And so, and how so?
02:11:37.520 He said, okay, he quickly realized that even with his successful law practice, he didn't have the cash to compete.
02:11:43.920 The idea was to be able to play very, very, very deep and not be out of money.
02:11:48.160 So he took out a $10 million line of credit from a guy named Stuart Resnick, a California billionaire.
02:11:53.520 He owned the parent company of Palm Juice, who was a former client of Tom's, and that guy started backing him.
02:12:00.540 In 2014, he met a Malaysian businessman who would bring his poker career to the next level.
02:12:05.200 That guy, Paul Fuwa, he's been called the world's biggest bookie.
02:12:09.660 He owned one of the leading sports betting sites in Asia, and he was also an inveterate gambler.
02:12:14.220 He traveled the world looking for high-stakes poker games.
02:12:17.260 The FBI raided Fuwa's villa at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas and so on and so forth, but he had his own trouble.
02:12:24.020 But these two became great friends, and Fuwa introduced Goldstein to the kind of poker that made his contests with Bilzerian look like penny ante by comparison.
02:12:32.660 With Fuwa, Goldstein no longer flew commercial.
02:12:35.720 They took Fuwa's jet to Hong Kong and Manila.
02:12:38.060 Goldstein increasingly operated in hushed private suites or homes.
02:12:42.820 Two types of poker predominated.
02:12:44.780 The ring games, six to ten players compete against each other, and the heads-up games, one-on-one with just a dealer.
02:12:52.300 Goldstein promptly lost nine million playing ring games and realized they were not for him.
02:12:57.460 They require patience, which he didn't have.
02:13:00.100 He liked the heads-up contests, one-on-one.
02:13:03.380 He got billionaire after billionaire to back him in these heads-up poker games, which he was doing well at, but he didn't always stick to.
02:13:15.560 And he says, in Manila, the two have been writing, Goldstein played poker with a gambler known as Tango and won $13.4 million.
02:13:23.300 He also won $9.96 million from a gambler known as Chairman, the Chairman.
02:13:27.980 From 2016 to 2018, Goldstein was out of the country for almost a full year.
02:13:32.060 He told his wife he was on business trips for FUA.
02:13:35.140 At the end of 2016, Goldstein played a California businessman named Alec Gores in Beverly Hills and won $26 million.
02:13:42.220 26, imagine this.
02:13:44.080 The biggest score of his life.
02:13:47.120 Earlier that year, he'd won $200,000 in a game that included the actor Kevin Hart.
02:13:51.320 During this run, he won a total of about $50 million, even though he had sold roughly 70% of his stakes to investors.
02:13:58.300 But he still personally cleared around $12 million.
02:14:01.220 So he's not personally, like, completely loaded.
02:14:04.180 $12 million is loaded, don't get me wrong, but he doesn't have hundreds of millions.
02:14:07.280 He's got about $12 million.
02:14:08.700 And the problem with $12 million is he promptly lost $14 million to a different billionaire named Bob Safari, a real estate magnate.
02:14:19.480 And he didn't have it.
02:14:21.040 He did not have it.
02:14:22.220 He owed it all out of pocket.
02:14:24.500 And this is why he had debts and he had to steal, according to the prosecutors from his law firm, to pay them.
02:14:32.240 And couldn't tell the mortgage company that he secretly owed millions of dollars to people like Safari or Safai, Bob Safai.
02:14:40.720 And his wife certainly didn't know any of that.
02:14:43.660 So, like, imagine the stress.
02:14:45.060 But he has no stressable emotions.
02:14:49.660 He has no adrenaline flow.
02:14:51.700 He has no conscience.
02:14:53.120 I mean, honestly, I think you could make a pretty strong case we're talking about a sociopath here.
02:14:57.460 Imagine going home to your wife after this.
02:14:59.100 Imagine standing up before the Supreme Court and making an argument about ethics.
02:15:02.020 By the way, all of these are massive violations of your ethical duties as a lawyer.
02:15:05.800 And 100% Tom Goldstein's going to be disbarred.
02:15:09.040 So he's gone from the vaunted top of the profession to going to be disbarred and a convicted felon going to prison.
02:15:15.160 Nice.
02:15:15.620 Well done.
02:15:16.060 That's some gamble.
02:15:18.820 I asked Goldstein, writes Toobin, how he could stand the stress.
02:15:23.340 He says, I have both the benefit and great disadvantage of not placing particular value on money.
02:15:29.020 I'll take too many risks with too much money.
02:15:32.200 It's a blessing and a curse.
02:15:33.500 It doesn't cause my heart rate to go up.
02:15:38.160 Like, there's something wrong with you.
02:15:40.280 Either you're the free solo guy or you're a sociopath.
02:15:43.660 Goldstein began to adopt the kind of decadent lifestyle he saw in the Jet Set poker world,
02:15:48.360 including contacting women on a website called Seeking Arrangement,
02:15:52.020 which existed to foster sugar dating to connect wealthy men to young women.
02:15:56.000 You're gross.
02:15:56.940 You're a John seeking a prostitute if you go there.
02:15:59.920 According to the indictment, between 16 and 22, he was involved in or pursued intimate personal relationships with at least a dozen women,
02:16:07.500 transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars to them from his financial accounts or joint bank accounts he set up with the women
02:16:13.200 and paying for travel and other expenses for them.
02:16:16.320 Goldstein's wife remained in the dark.
02:16:17.900 She had no idea about any of this.
02:16:20.940 Criminal investigators from the IRS came to see him in November of 2020.
02:16:25.320 They showed up unannounced in his office to serve grand jury subpoenas.
02:16:29.660 There was a report that somebody he beat or crossed in a poker game called the IRS with a tip.
02:16:36.760 But nothing came of it.
02:16:39.160 He was neither charged nor cleared, and life just kind of went on until last year when they did show up and charged him.
02:16:49.300 They say, in addition, he became more estranged from his life in Washington and pursued relationships with the women he met online.
02:16:55.620 At one point, he rented a house in California where three of the women lived together, and he carried on relationships with each of them.
02:17:01.060 So he sets up what, I mean, I would just call a whorehouse.
02:17:04.280 It's a brothel.
02:17:05.380 Sorry, ladies, but that's what you are.
02:17:07.680 If you're living there because you met him on, what's it called?
02:17:10.620 Success, wanted, whatever.
02:17:12.160 Hold on.
02:17:12.800 Going back.
02:17:13.860 Seeking arrangement.
02:17:15.360 Please.
02:17:17.220 He's got the three ladies hauled up there and, like, pops in like a pimp to have sex with them whenever he wants.
02:17:24.740 He was facing a big poker game at the Beverly Hills home of Alec Gores, which included, among others, Leonardo DiCaprio and a big gambler known as Big Al DeCarolis.
02:17:37.120 Al Pacino came to watch but did not play.
02:17:39.220 So he's going to listen to this little dweeb going to hang out with Leo and Pacino and Kevin Hart.
02:17:44.420 And this guy, DeCarolis, then invited Goldstein to a poker game in Costa Rica where some guy, this big mark, as Tom Goldstein saw him, called the Southerner, was going to be playing.
02:17:55.180 He wanted to play the Southerner who liked those heads-up games, too, one-on-one.
02:17:59.020 He had a reputation, the Southerner, as an inveterate womanizer.
02:18:03.840 So Goldstein thought he would impress him by showing that he was a kindred spirit, and he brought four of his girlfriends with him to Costa Rica.
02:18:11.040 He found this to be the most interesting thing in the world, Goldstein recalled.
02:18:16.220 That was on purpose.
02:18:18.400 They struck up a friendship as well as a poker rivalry, and Goldstein began flying to play against him, usually successfully, traveling back and forth so often that he rented an apartment in the city where the man lived, which is undisclosed to protect this guy's identity.
02:18:30.440 And so he's going to get those three gals out of the house, as well as a fourth who lives someplace else, to come around like a harem, hanging all over him, praising his every move, rubbing his bald head.
02:18:45.420 I'm editorializing, but you get the point.
02:18:47.540 And this guy was some sort of a mark and fell for a hook, line, and sinker.
02:18:51.920 I was beating him, Goldstein said, and that was just a way more interesting life than his Supreme Court practice.
02:18:59.620 He won roughly $50 million from the Southerner, netting $15 million for himself after paying out his investors.
02:19:08.140 And then, writes Steuben, he got the worst break of his life, the tax investigation, which had drifted inconclusively for years, but was taken over by an aggressive federal prosecutor named Stanley Okula.
02:19:19.400 And Bob is your uncle.
02:19:21.920 They hit him with 300-plus subpoenas, they interviewed dozens of people, and the formal charges came down January of 2025, four days before the end of the Biden administration.
02:19:32.120 So he can thank Joe Biden for that.
02:19:36.140 He used funds from his law firm to pay several million bucks in personal expenses, including poker debts, reducing his taxable income, errors by his office management, and so on and so forth.
02:19:45.320 I outlined for you what they accused him of.
02:19:47.340 They allege that he briefly hired four of the women that he met on his travels, but they did no work for his firm.
02:19:55.280 Thus, according to the government, the payments to them were personal expenditures, but he put them on the company payroll.
02:20:00.320 And they said, these are personal expenditures that you're trying to launder through your firm and make them tax-free.
02:20:06.840 That's illegal.
02:20:07.460 As the government brief put it, he met woman one, then a recent college graduate, on a dating website for individuals seeking to receive or provide financial support as part of an intimate personal relationship.
02:20:17.500 He paid her 500 bucks for their first meeting.
02:20:19.760 They began an intimate personal relationship.
02:20:21.840 And these four women are different from the three who shared the house in California, the ones who went on his company payroll, his law firm payroll.
02:20:28.040 Poor Amy, the wife.
02:20:29.560 He did establish that three of the four women did do some work for the firm.
02:20:35.360 The fourth immediately went on medical leave.
02:20:37.500 The payments were small, just a few thousand dollars, so the tax issues were almost trivial.
02:20:43.120 Now, they get close to trial.
02:20:45.020 They offer him a plea, nearly five years, though, in prison if he takes it.
02:20:49.100 He said, no.
02:20:50.520 He said, I am not taking a plea that involves jail time.
02:20:56.740 They say he's won upward of 88 million total in heads-up contests, vast majority of which went to his investors.
02:21:04.640 Most of his losses came in ring games, where there are multiple people, where he financed himself.
02:21:09.420 Bad move.
02:21:10.060 Should have been the opposite.
02:21:11.580 He told me, writes Toobin, that overall he was a net loser with a deficit of between 10 million and 15 million, but denies he's addicted to gambling.
02:21:19.140 As my brother Pete always says, you know who's calling the Gamblers Anonymous lines?
02:21:25.840 You know who calls themselves a gambling addict?
02:21:29.740 Losers.
02:21:31.720 Losers.
02:21:32.860 If you're up 15 million, you don't call Gamblers Anonymous, and you don't wind up getting indicted, usually.
02:21:40.720 Tom Goldstein, you are a loser.
02:21:43.280 I'm sorry to break it to you, but you're a loser in gambling and in life.
02:21:47.540 You did not have a net profit when all was said and done.
02:21:51.400 You defrauded the federal government.
02:21:52.800 You defrauded your friends who went into business with you, law partners.
02:21:56.460 The whole basis of a law partnership is trust.
02:21:58.420 You defrauded, worst of all, your wife and your family.
02:22:01.640 If you have a kid that you named after Nina, you defrauded your children.
02:22:05.960 You cheated them too.
02:22:07.040 Out of the example of an honorable father and the privilege of having a father to grow up with in one's home.
02:22:15.260 And let me tell you, as somebody who lost her dad at age 15 to a heart attack, it hurts when your dad's not there.
02:22:21.660 And teenagers and below need a father in the home.
02:22:28.380 Screw you for throwing that to the wind because you wanted to spend time with the Southerner.
02:22:34.080 Because you wanted to have a harem of women waiting for you at your little townhouse.
02:22:39.140 As you defrauded the government and all of us of our money.
02:22:43.180 This guy is disgusting.
02:22:45.100 So now he will go to jail.
02:22:48.620 And his strategy of, quote, my strategy is going to come down to am I a good guy or a bad guy, did not work.
02:22:58.420 The jury took one look at him, listened to him testify in the stand, and reached its own decision about the guy who bought the Bentleys and the Ferrari and the women and his silver jewelry.
02:23:13.140 And fooled us all for far too long.
02:23:15.880 I credit whoever called the IRS.
02:23:19.920 That person's a hero.
02:23:21.460 I credit the aggressive prosecutor at the DOJ under Joe Biden who said I'm going to do something about this, even though this guy is at the top of my profession and probably has connections to a Supreme Court that I don't.
02:23:34.800 Good for you for going.
02:23:36.480 I credit the jury for being able to see through this man's obvious gifted ability to deceive, whether at the poker table.
02:23:45.880 In front of the high court, in front of his wife, or elsewhere.
02:23:50.800 That's not easy.
02:23:51.560 But, you know, you get lay people, a jury of 12 sitting there, and more times than not, they will see through a liar no matter how skilled and experienced he is.
02:24:02.080 So good for them.
02:24:03.920 And Tom Goldstein, I wait now to see what your sentence is.
02:24:06.620 I only hope it's enough to actually send a message to you that you are a bad guy.
02:24:12.820 You did something deeply immoral and wrong at every level.
02:24:16.420 And I just think we are past the point as a civilian group where we are willing to put up with it.
02:24:24.800 You know, the Epstein files are part of it.
02:24:27.380 Like, we're just sick and tired of these so-called elites getting away with this shit.
02:24:31.320 And we all know we'd go to jail if we did it.
02:24:34.100 So, just desserts for him.
02:24:36.120 And I hope you guys enjoyed that story.
02:24:39.480 Have a wonderful weekend.
02:24:40.780 We'll talk to you on Monday.
02:24:43.760 Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
02:24:45.980 No BS, no agenda, and no fear.