Bill Kristol: It's the Crimes and the Cover-Up

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Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

It is Monday, July the 21st, and I'm here with Bill Crystal, as is our habit.

How are you doing, Bill?

I'm doing fine.

How are you?

I'm doing pretty good.

I binged the Epstein documentary over the weekend, so we'll get to that in a minute.

But that's where, that's where, that's where I am.

You thought you were obsessed with the Epstein case.

I was staying up after the husband and child were in bed, you know, binging the documentary.

I actually had a fairly Epstein-free 48 hours at a wedding, a family wedding, and then seeing kids and so forth.

But though I did take it 45 minutes off to do the podcast with Sarah yesterday where we obsessed about Epstein and lamented the fact that more people weren't obsessed about it, but we can we can discuss that.

We can.

That's good that you're in the obsessed camp, in the internal

subtle internal bulwark split.

It's you and me and Sarah, you know.

Yeah, on the and obsessed is maybe an understatement for me.

So we will discuss.

I want to do it, though, first

start with the news that came out late Friday, so after we did the podcast of this, what they were calling a prisoner swap, but it was really a hostage exchange between the United States and Venezuela.

The 250 Samad Venezuelans that we had kidnapped and disappeared to El Salvador got sent back to Venezuela, the country they had fled, in exchange for some Americans that were being held hostage in Venezuela.

The government was trying to claim that this was like just a prisoner deal between El Salvador and Venezuela, which doesn't even like pass the laugh test.

Obviously, the United States that had claimed that they had no ability to effectuate

return for any of these men obviously were the key factor in

this swap.

On the good news, and we did, if people want to see it on Friday night, kind of an emotional live stream with Andre Hernandez-Romero, the makeup artist we've been covering a lot, his lawyer, and she's a lawyer for seven or eight of the other folks that were detained, as well as some other immigration experts.

And Sam got on with me.

If you want to catch that live stream that we did on Friday night, you can get the audio on the Bulwark Takes feed.

If you haven't been checking that out, that's where we're kind of putting our rapid response video audio products.

So go check out Bullwar takes on your podcast player of choice.

You know, at the top level, it's kind of like I wrote in the newsletter about this this morning.

There's like a relief.

And thank God that he and these other men are alive.

At the same time, it's combined with just this feeling of rage that we're even in this situation.

But I'm wondering

what you think about the developments.

A couple of people at the wedding we were at Saturday had seen the live stream Friday night.

I think we'd probably been driving and very much liked it and thought you were properly emotional about what had happened and properly both joyful, but also angry that it had to happen and angry that it's not clear it's not still happening or won't happen again, right?

I think that's, you know, you make that point this morning in the newsletter, too.

Yeah, and I think that the good news here from a policy standpoint is that the El Salvador Saka policy seems to be a failure.

I mean, they might send more people there in the future, who knows, but they had a plan to send a lot of folks there.

They'd initially sent the three plane fulls.

They were going to send more.

And that plan totally unraveled because, in large part, because of their incompetence.

You know, they tried to, you know, they did so in spite of legal rulings against them.

And even Bukele, you know, reportedly, according to the New York Times, said that he was like, wait a minute, who are these people?

You told me you're sending me the worst people.

And I was like, I've seen some of these guys, and I don't think that's true.

Right.

So if even the fucking dictator of El Salvador is like,

you went a little overboard, I think it shows that that attempt was a failure.

So that's good.

And it's good these guys are free.

I should just say this morning, we'll continue to follow this.

They haven't actually been released.

They're still being processed in Venezuela, according to the lawyers we've spoken to.

Andre and some of the other detainees have talked to their families, had a chance to be on the phone with them and said that they're going to come home today or tomorrow, but they're still in this process.

So that part is good.

The thing is, though, is that like we're here now in a place where, okay, well, they just got 45 more billion from Congress to do a domestic fucking detention archipelago.

And

they still have the other policies of like the policy of being able to send migrants to a third country, not to their home country, is a policy that they're still enacting.

So

again, it's nice that the El Salvador policy was, I think, disrupted in large part by the legal and political reaction to it.

But they got a lot more to come.

Yeah, I feel like one could always generalize that statement.

There's been a pretty decent legal and political reaction against, I would say, Trump's super aggressive deportation policies, the detentions.

We haven't seen the effects of the tripling of the size of ICE and the tripling of the detention.

capability yet, but obviously that'll have real effect.

But also just the way ICE is behaving, the masks, the seizure of all these people who were doing nothing but trying to get a job or doing their jobs or selling you know things from street vendors in LA, the whole thing.

I mean, so I think on the one hand, the reaction's been probably will constrain them a little.

On the other hand, they seem determined to just plunge ahead.

I mean, I'm very struck by that.

I did a conversation with our friend Aaron Reichland-Melnick, I guess, last week.

And he's really also, I mean, we would have six months ago said maybe they would be more politically sensitive.

Trump would respond to the ag and hotel people calling him, and he did for like 24 hours, saying, oh, maybe we're going too far.

But that is not the order that Miller and Holman Holman received, apparently.

And it's certainly not the ones they're transmitting.

The degree to which, I mean, the fanaticism of this is really amazing.

And it seems to be getting carried out.

There's apparently reports of dissatisfaction with the NICE and grumbling and so forth.

But basically, they have tens of thousands of people.

And they've got other law enforcement people roped in.

And some of them are unhappy, the police forces, but they're kind of a lot of pressure to go along, a lot of financial incentives to go along, actually.

I was just going to say, now they've got this slush fund, they're going to be able to pay people to go along.

So it's been, that part is very, you know, I mean, it's great that these people are back and it's great that that particularly grotesque, you might say, you know, leading edge of the deportation agenda has been curbed for now, but it's bad and it's going to get worse.

I mean, I don't know what it's going to look like in six months, honestly, in terms of if they keep doing this.

Yeah, just to sit on that a second about the leading edge.

I mean, it was a category difference.

The immigration regime overall is horrible, but like what we did in El Salvador, where they kidnapped these people, disappeared them.

They're gone for 125 days in the hole.

The reports that we've heard from at least a couple of the folks have gotten out is that they were beaten.

One guy said we were beaten for breakfast, beaten for lunch, beaten for dinner.

And it's like they had no access to lawyer, no access to their family.

There was a story just that came out just before this deal that there was a couple dozen of them that weren't even confirmed to be there.

Like they literally disappeared them.

They were not on the list that the government had put out.

And it was only revealed via hacking.

So, I mean, like, this treatment is, you know, I hate to kind of do the superhero movie reductive good guy, bad guy thing, but it's like, it's the way that the villains in the world have treated people.

And it's, it's really more similar to how Putin dealt with people in the Britney Griner situation, for example.

It's like

we're going to hold somebody hostage that committed a minor violation of some crime and we're going to use it to get something out of the West, right?

Like, that's us that was doing that.

We're going to use these men as pawns to get something out of Venezuela.

Just on the Rubio geopolitical thing,

it's almost literary how much of a bad actor he is,

just on specifically the topic that had been animating to his political career, right?

I mean, it's like these men are fleeing a communist country in Latin America, like the Rubio family had.

They come to America, they are kidnapped without any due process.

They're treated as if they're in a communist regime

and jailed as political enemies, essentially, despite not having done any political activism against the United States.

And then they're traded back to the communist leader who Rubio is now handing a political win.

This is a huge political win for Maduro, where Maduro can now domestically say, oh, he was the white knight that saved these Venezuelans from the evil capitalist gringos and like, and be accurate in that assessment essentially you know imagine just how

evil you have to be to give a win to maduro

um and to make maduro seem like the good guy and to me it's just for rubio it's like that whole confluence of like his backstory and doing this to people fleeing communism and then giving a geopolitical win to maduro and it's just it's a total just utter failure on his part.

And I feel like that does get lost a little bit in all this.

I mean, those of us who knew him once upon a time said for a while, I think after he became Secretary of State, you know, well, he must really be dissatisfied with this or unhappy or, you know, doesn't really want to be doing this.

He has, he feels he has to suck up to Trump.

That's unfortunate.

That's foolish.

But I don't know.

Maybe he's just crossed some Rubicon in his own mind, honestly, and his own psyche.

And this is where he is.

And he's sort of put his past out of his mind.

And everything he said as a senator and as a candidate and as a human being, honestly, until 2015 or 16 has just been memory holder.

I don't know.

Let me ask you one question.

You would have a better feel for this than I.

I feel like there's a bit of a religious, but particularly Catholic backlash against this.

There have been the archbishop, various bishops who have sort of denounced this in California, but I think elsewhere as well.

I think 25 Knights of Columbus showed up at the Florida Detention Center to pray the Rosary for those who were incarcerated there.

I don't know.

Maybe, I don't know how much effect it has, but do you sense that a little bit?

I mean, I remember thinking about this.

I did Christmas Mass with my family at a church that has a lot of immigrants in Colorado because we were in the mountains over the holidays.

I kind of remember thinking that, like looking around the church and being like, God,

like bad stuff is coming for this community.

I don't exactly know who is documented and who is not in this church, but it's hard to imagine that in the Spanish-speaking Catholic church, a lot of working class folks, that there's nobody that has, you know, mixed immigration status or, or, you know, who is not here, who's not documented.

And that is like a built-in community, right?

Like, so there is, I think, both like kind of the backlash within the Hispanic community, folks that like that this is more draconian than they expected.

And there have been some examples of this at churches.

And then at the elite level, I mean, you know, the Catholic Church, like anything, is anymore split, like it's polarized, right?

There is a whatever Francis Leo wing and like a MAGA wing.

But

for the ones that are more in the Francis Leo mold, the immigration is kind of a safe place to advocate on politics, right?

Like it is a traditional, it's part of the traditional, you know, kind of Catholic social justice outreach and teaching.

And so, you know, I, you know, it's the kind of thing that you can talk about in the context of church.

You know, that's different from

Epstein or, you know what I mean?

Like if you're anti-Trump or whatever, like like it's not you're not gonna go up there and do a homily about whatever the latest random Trump scandals immigration stuff you can though and there's action you can do right like going down and providing service to migrants in these communities we saw that in the first Trump term so I think there's potentially something to that

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I told some of you who are there for the live stream when Andri and the other Venezuelans had been released that

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I just want to run through a couple other immigration things when when we get to Epicenter.

George Redis, I mentioned him on Friday, was a security guard in California.

He was arriving to work when federal agents surrounded his car, broke his window, pepper sprayed him, dragged him out.

He's a U.S.

citizen and a veteran.

He ended up being held in detention for three days and he was released.

But that's a U.S.

citizen that was just.

racially targeted and targeted because of where he worked.

There's a story from Human Rights Watch this morning.

Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates like dogs, according to a report published by the Human Rights Watch on the overcrowded South Florida facilities.

Then there's this strange story about Luis Leon.

So I want to just caveat this: that sometimes

it's so strange.

Maybe I guess there's at least a outside chance that this is a hoax, but 82-year-old man was granted political asylum in the U.S.

in 1987.

He lost his wallet containing his green card, went to get it replaced, and they arrested arrested him.

The family was later told he died in ICE custody.

Then they later found out he was in a hospital in Guatemala.

He was not Guatemalan.

He was, I think, Chilean.

Guatemala's Migration Institute says they have no records of him being in Guatemala.

So we still don't exactly know what's happening.

And that part of it, I mean, it's terrible to seize these people in the first place and the way it's being done.

It's awful.

But also.

Okay, they seize this U.S.

citizen and a veteran.

They presume we discovered he's a U.S.

citizen and a veteran in two hours, four hours?

I mean, what are we talking about here?

It's not hard these days, right?

They do have computers

at the Immigration Center.

There's a big backlog.

Yeah, good point.

And they want, but you want to get, well, it gets, I mean, apart from in addition to the obvious, the humiliation of the feeding of these other people in overcrowded facilities and stuff, they want to, I guess, humiliate people.

They want to send a message to other people.

Aaron really stressed this in our conversation.

The self-deportation agenda, they need that to get anywhere close to their goals.

And also, it's what they believe in.

They really do want all these people gone.

So, you know, they know they can't literally probably seize them all.

They need them to leave.

What causes them to leave?

Well, part of it is just how badly one is treated in these centers.

And there's apparently evidence from the past that if you're in one of these places, the place in the Everglades for X number of weeks or maybe a month or two or something, much more likely to say, you know what, this isn't worth it.

Maybe you have been in touch with a lawyer.

Maybe there's some appeal pending.

It's going to take another three months.

They can hold you.

This is not like being a U.S.

citizen where they release you after 470, where they could, but they don't release you after 48 hours and, you know, on your own recognizance or with some bail or something in someone's custody and someone's vouchers for you.

And you get to live as a free person while your appeal is pending.

No, you're in this horrible place.

And you say, you know what?

Okay, I'll go back.

I'll go back.

This is all part of the plan.

This is not like, oh, that's a weird kind of fluke that they detained the guy much longer than they needed to.

No, no, that's exactly right.

They don't,

they don't mind these stories, right?

Like, unless it rises to the level of Trump and Trump feels like he's embarrassed, right?

They don't like Stephen Miller and Christy Noam and Tom Homan.

Like, again, that's part of what their agenda is, is to, you know, treat the migrants like subhumans and be capricious and hope that some of them just check out.

I mean, they say it.

It's explicitly, it's not a secret.

Yeah.

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all right let's do epstein

As I said, I watched the documentary.

It's like a five-parter, so a lot of time.

When I'm doing my podcast research now, I'd listen to everything on 2x speed, and they haven't done that yet on Netflix documentaries.

I kind of wanted it to be on 2X speed so I could make it through as quickly as possible.

So does this date from before the Maxwell?

What period is this?

Yeah, so the original documentary was done in 2020, and it was focused on Epstein.

And then there was a supplemental on Maxwell in 2022.

So this was all during the Biden administration.

I hadn't watched it.

I'd read Julie Brown's archive on all this.

So it's like decently, so a lot of it was not unfamiliar to me, but some of it refreshed my memory.

One of the interesting things about it i guess i want to start here there are all these new little wrinkles like trump really just from a pr standpoint botched this so badly like by putting out this document and creating this feeding frenzy you know there's some new material that came up which we're going to get into related to trump but it also sort of unearths re gives people an excuse to bring back up stuff that that had been known but like not really discussed you know or not really you know given as much attention to anyway one of the things that really jumped out to me as something that's like creates a huge vulnerability for Trump now is one of the main characters in this documentary, Maria Farmer,

went to the FBI in 1996

and said that Epstein was abusing her and her sister.

And they didn't get into this in the documentary, but it's related to it in the New York Times story that was out over the weekend was apparently during that report, she named Trump also.

And Trump hadn't done anything to her, but she'd said that she was with Epstein and like Trump came by the office or something and and she's standing there and she thought he was kind of hovering over her and she said that epstein said to trump no she's not for you which kind of has some implications for what

what maybe maybe there are others that are for him i don't you know i don't know so she gives this forward to fbi 96.

it's relevant because epstein doesn't get arrested for a decade after that till 2006.

And during 2006, it was the local Florida, local Palm Beach cops that were after him.

And when they were trying to make it to take it to the FBI, they needed it to be, to go across jurisdictions, right?

And it was this woman's report from 96 that made it, that rose it to an FBI type case, right?

Because I think it had happened in New Mexico or Ohio.

I forget.

So anyway,

the fact that the Trump connection goes back to that, like the original FBI report on Epstein is obviously noteworthy and speaks to this now question of, okay, well, what, how much is he in the vials?

Seems like quite a bit.

I mean, yes.

I assume he's probably in quite a bit.

I mean, there's so much public information.

That's the thing, right?

Leaving aside that they had access to Epstein's own records.

Someone said Trump is, I'm a little fuzzy on the Black book.

Maybe you know more about this than I do.

And then some names are circled.

I think this is legitimate reporting, though.

I think it's Julie Brown actually either reported it or confirmed it.

35 names are circled.

They are the kind of, I don't know, special friends of Epstein or

It's not clear if they're all clients or, quote, clients, or friends.

And Trump is one of them.

So again, the closeness to Epstein, very clear.

Way back.

And of course, the video, that video of them yucking it up is early 90s, maybe.

And then the story about the two of them, 20 or something young women being invited to something at Mar-a-Lago.

Sort of like it's going to be a party.

Yeah, this was also another thing that came out this weekend as a Times story that there was a calendar girl party or something at Mar-a-Lago.

There's only Trump and Epstein, right?

It's not a party.

Trump only invited Epstein Epstein as among the men to be there.

And there's one, I guess, one of the hopes.

The sickness of it all.

You know, I do feel like I was trying to think of a way to summarize where we are.

I mean, I think one thing is, I'd say before all this came out, this was sort of

Access Hollywood level,

plus the MAGA interest in Epstein and later to QAnon and stuff, which made it slightly different.

But still,

it was sort of reports of things, or in the case of Access Hollywood, an actual tape of Trump.

There didn't prove that he did anything exactly.

It just proved him boasting to Billy Bush, I guess, right, you could say.

And that's pretty bad.

And it did do a lot.

People forget once, oh, well, that's only Access Hollywood.

It almost derailed his campaign in October of 2016.

That was not nothing, but whatever.

We're in a new era now.

And I'm sure that's not.

So I thought pre

the last two weeks, it was the Epstein issue was a kind of an excess Hollywood type thing.

Now we're way beyond that.

We've got, you know, we're now dealing with there, there was no crime in Access Hollywood and what the well may have been crimes that Trump did.

You talked about it.

What would have been a crime had he done?

What would have been a crime, but we don't have not the concrete.

I mean, would you read the indictment?

I mean, Epstein was, of course, convicted of crimes.

Maxwell was convicted of crimes.

And Trump's, you know, I'm going to say adjacent to that criminal enterprise, either almost certainly knowing about it, sort of, but maybe not really, or maybe knowing about it really, or maybe being, you know, tangentially connected, not tangentially, just connected to it.

So there's that.

And then the second thing that people haven't focused on enough, I don't want to jump ahead, but is he's the president of the United States and they're covering it up.

I mean, so you have both the crime and the cover-up.

I don't think people, you know, it's not like when Trump tried to cover up things as a private citizen, Stormy Daniels, $150,000, they got him on something in New York.

But again, that's different from using the government of the United States to cover up

files that exist about a crime, a criminal conspiracy, which the president of the United States, when he was a private citizen, was connected to or mentioned in, let's just say.

In this respect, people who keep saying, oh, none of this stuff ever gets to Trump.

We don't have a case.

I don't think I was trying to think, we don't really have a case study of this combination, the criminal conspiracy and the government cover-up under Trump, you know.

Right, because he was out of government, right?

Like when he was trying to get out of the other various criminal conspiracies, whether the classified documents case, you know, for example, or some of this, I mean, I guess, was there an attempt to cover up?

some of the Ukraine phone call stuff, I guess.

But that's not, again, that was like

not really a crime.

Yeah, and that was him pressuring a government to do something.

It wasn't exactly a criminal, it was sort of, but it wasn't exactly a criminal conspiracy.

No, no, no, you think about the first term in 2019, they arrested Epstein.

So in a way, they were being more aggressive than the Obama Justice Department, you could argue.

And then,

you know, he dies.

And so that became a conspiracy topic, but couldn't really prove Trump had anything to do with that.

So yeah, I do think

it's new.

People are being too blase, a lot of our friends and a lot of the journalists, I think.

And, oh, he always avoids these things.

And this is going to be just like the others.

Just one more thing on, like, kind of, again, not a new piece of information, but information that people were re-reminded of, you know, because of the nature of how the story goes.

The Stacey Williams, you know, who was not under age time.

I think she was in her early 20s.

So she's a young woman, but she is dating Epstein and Epstein brings her by Trump's office and Trump gropes her.

And she was one of the initial accusers.

When you go back to like that first, you know, in the 2016 campaign, like after

Access Hollywood, and there are all these different women that are making credible accusations of sexual harassment or assault against Trump.

Again, one of them was Epstein's quasi-girlfriend at the time that he brings by Trump Tower.

And so there are a couple of interviews about with her over the weekend.

And Epstein takes it for granted.

It doesn't look like Epstein's offended by this, right?

I believe if one brought one's girlfriend over and some of your friends started to grope her, that might be hard on the relationship, you know, but not in this case.

I got a buddy who just dropped one of a mutual friend over, not a grope, but over a consensual, consensual relationship with a girlfriend.

So, yeah, you could see them being upset.

So, they are,

their behavior is more that of co-conspirators

than buddies who like to have a good time.

Yes, good point.

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All right.

So on the cover-up, the Dick Durbin letter over the weekend.

He writes this.

According to information my office received, the FBI was pressured to put approximately approximately 1,000 personnel in its information management division on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records.

This effort, which reportedly took place from March 14th through the end of March, was haphazardly supplemented by hundreds of FBI New York Field Office personnel.

My office was told that these personnel were instructed to flag any records in which President Trump was mentioned.

So talking about the cover-up part of this, and again, like the decision to not release this now does not come after,

it would be bad, but it would be one thing if it was like, oh, the DOJ, they'd been lying this whole time about Epstein, and they didn't really even look at it that deeply.

And they're just like, sorry, guys.

Like, you know, it turns out we're not going to investigate this after all.

Again, that still would have been a huge controversy in MAGA world,

but okay.

But that is not what it seems like happened.

It seems like they spent huge amounts of government resources to go through everything.

And then, once they saw what was in there, decided not to release it possibly because of the extent of how many records that mentioned donald trump and which now we presume they have like a file catalog of the times trump was mentioned and if he was flagged right then at some level somebody was collecting all those flags you know that's really important such an important point i was thinking about it yesterday evening i assumed incorrectly i think that two three weeks ago when the whole thing you know when the memo came out from von di and patel that they hadn't done a real real search, that it was all kind of fake.

You know, they had done a fake review

and decided, hey, nothing there, which incidentally, if you were going to just determine to cover it up in the beginning, that's presumably what you would do.

I mean, why would you, you know, you want a thousand agents to have seen different things and have the possibility of having a chat with a Wall Street Journal reporter and so forth.

So

it seems like, I don't know if that was a Trump, if that was Bondi sort of acting maybe a little bit without talking to Trump because she really believed that they wanted to have an extra.

Or Patel.

Or Patel.

Corporate Bongino, right?

Again, it's important to remember that Patel and Bongino not only were active participants in the conspiracy and making claims, you know, that there was this big conspiracy that included a lot of deep state officials and a lot of Democrat, prominent Democrats.

So I don't think it's crazy to think they believe their own BS.

Right.

And then they got in there and they thought this was part of their remit, that they had promised their listeners on the podcast that they were going to nab the Epstein conspirators.

And so then they, you know, ordered a bunch of their underlings to do it.

I mean, I assume they'd have to talk to Bondi about that, but definitely Patel and Bongino, too, I would think.

I talked to a couple of legal types who've been at DOJ.

And FBI, who knows their experiences in the past and nothing to do with Epstein.

So who knows if their sense of how things work is how things now work.

Obviously, it's a very different world.

But now they think Bondi and DOJ would be central to it.

FBI is not really set up to do this kind of thing at the degree to which

they're doing it.

I mean,

some of the reporting suggests pretty intensive DOJ involvement.

So, you know, Bondi at least has to agree and then put some resources behind it and so forth.

They didn't check with Trump.

Maybe they did check, and Trump was just kind of, oh, yeah, go ahead.

But he assumed they would arrange it all so there was no problem.

Bondi knows a little bit about Epstein.

She was Florida Attorney General and totally failed to investigate anything from 2011, maybe to 18.

I can't remember, something like that.

Two terms, I think.

She's a bit of a villain, I think, in Julie Brown's account of the total failure to take any of the evidence seriously, any of the victims, many of whom were in Florida.

Obviously, a lot of this happened happened in Florida.

Some of it happened in Florida.

So, anyway, I'm a little bewildered, but they seem to have done a very extensive search.

And as you say,

I mean, they would have, when they do these searches, they would have had lists of everyone in a sense.

I mean, it's not like the FBI doesn't do, like we do, word searches and put them into a different document, you know.

So, but they would have had Trump, you know, 30-seven times, whatever.

But someone, it would be interesting to find out more about this, what moment it was in mid-late March when Bondi and/or Patel and or, you know, Bongino or some deputy to them discovered, oh my God, you know, we have to reverse course in effect on this.

It does feel like they wanted to put out something, which I guess, I guess, your point's right about that.

If you've been screaming and yelling about it for years, you think, okay, I'm going to put out something and also keep people happy in NAGA world and also get credit for investigating something that Obama and Biden didn't or something, right?

I mean, it's very hubristic.

And I guess you go in there,

and the fact that these people are such amateurs probably contributes to this, but you go in there and you're thinking, all right, we're going to tell people to flag the Trump stuff.

I'll just pocket veto that or whatever.

We'll put it over here in a secret file to be dealt with later.

And in the meantime, we'll go out and put out evidence against Bill Clinton and whoever else, Bill Gates or whoever, you know, Prince Andrew, whoever they think are the villains in the situation.

I guess.

And then they just sort of felt like, well, we're running everything.

We're in charge.

Like, we'll be able to do that.

I don't know, though.

That's so stupid in retrospect.

Like the risk, there's so many risk points of different people that could leak.

A conversation between hubris and being true believer, like not believing that, like, kind of believing the story that Trump had dumped him actually before the bad stuff happened.

And that was, for people in MAGA world who are, who are deep in the sauce on this, they already had had to come up with a rationale for why Trump was not a bad guy, even though, because they knew that he hung out with them, right?

And it was that, oh, in 2004, whatever it was, he banned him from Mar-a-Lago.

And so Trump is with the good guy here.

I guess maybe they've convinced themselves of that.

I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know.

Yeah, the hubristic side of it, or just the, or maybe that they're doing the search.

They're pretty confident.

It's all going great from their point.

Not great, but it's going fine.

They're going to have some report.

And then they discover something in mid-March.

And suddenly it's, oh, my God.

Or they talk to Trump.

I mean, this is also possible, right?

Hey, we're doing this good search of the Epstein documents, just like you wanted, Mr.

President.

He's like,

you know, I want to know what's in that before you guys do anything.

And suddenly it's like, oh, didn't the flagging Trump come a little late maybe?

I think in the search.

I think, as I recall from one of the TikToks,

that's not the first thing they say.

First, they say just do a search.

And they reverse that mid-March moment would be interesting.

I hope I trust reporters are looking at that in some depth.

What might have happened to cause this?

But then they also, you know, you said something like, well, didn't they realize this would go wrong?

But to be fair, there weren't many leaks that we know of at the time.

If they hadn't put out that statement two weeks ago, that was also unbelievably stupid.

I mean, that is to say, I think from their point of view, don't you just sit on it forever?

This search is very complicated.

We're very, very careful about not

being sure that when we and if we release something, that no one who's innocent or certainly none of the victims would have any personal identification, blah, blah, blah.

And so you just put it off, at least for a while.

Then you find sometimes it's released it where it's.

It's just a total rake step.

Yeah.

And it was a total cell phone.

They absolutely did not need to put out that statement.

Nobody would have been talking about it.

I mean, there'd be a handful of mega obsessives that would have been hassling them about it.

But yeah, you probably could have found some other chum.

Again, having now being a fake expert, having watched five hours of documentary on it late night over the weekend, I like, there certainly are other co-conspirators who have not been indicted, really Depstein, who are not Trump.

And so, you know, you could do that.

There are a million potential things that they could have done besides.

just put out a press release saying, oh, nothing to see here.

And you don't think, I don't recall at least

the MAGA world was intensifying intensifying pressure on Bondi and Patel.

Where's the report?

Maybe there was.

I wouldn't.

There was some chatter because she had given out those, and the original sin was she gave out those ridiculous binders and it made some of their own people look dumb, right?

So like there were some people that were mad at them in MAGA World.

And, you know, this kind of stuff where it comes by in my feed and, you know, it all sort of blurs together.

So I kind of don't really remember who was the point person on being mad, but I do remember seeing people that are like, you're making us look dumb, right?

Like Like you handed this out, like this is a serious thing.

We've got to go after these people.

Like we need a neck, whatever the next step is from the binders.

There was a little bit of that pressure, but like

nothing unmanageable.

Here's a question.

You and I have been in a different lives, slightly involved in trying to deal with the press when there are adverse news coming.

Is it conceivable they got a call from the journal two weeks ago?

I mean, I don't know.

We don't know what, I don't think, when the journal got the information it got.

And it's also the journal, I think, understandably has been slightly murky about, I mean, they clearly 100% believe in, and I assume therefore fully checked out the provenance and the authenticity of the information.

But it's unclear exactly what they got when they got it.

And we still haven't seen it.

Like, we like, you know, they haven't shown it.

Is it possible that it's two and a half weeks ago the journal begins to call us and says, hey, we need to talk to you about the Epstein files?

We have some information here.

Obviously, we're not going to report it until we blah, blah, blah, give you a chance to explain.

And they're like in total panic mode and decide to put out that statement as a kind of preemptive.

It has a vague feel to me of clever campaign people.

We're going to preempt the story that's coming, right?

I mean, we've tried to publish such things once or twice.

Not related to sex crimes with minors, though.

But, you know,

the concept of

but I mean, yeah, no, it wouldn't be, but we wouldn't do that, I don't believe.

But this is another reason why these cover-ups are hard.

The journal is a player in this.

We're going to learn more about what they have, what they got, when they got it, what the reaction of the administration was.

And so, Sarah and I discussed this some yesterday.

I mean, these scandals have a certain dynamic of their own once they get going often.

The one thing this one doesn't have, I've cautioned Sarah, who's very, you know, I mean, she was great and gung-ho and the media should investigate, which it should.

In past scandals, one reason they keep going is that there's a special counsel or sometimes the Department of Justice itself or sometimes a state.

House oversight.

Yeah, house oversight.

Someone is investigating.

So on the one hand, there's the stonewall side of things, which is always the White House and whatever whatever they control.

And on the other hand, there's the investigative side of things, and they, you know, they clash.

But there is someone, this case, they've got Justice, FBI, the Congress totally sewn up, so far as one can tell, at least the majority in the Congress, and therefore the official committee proceedings.

So it's really a little ⁇ I'm a little worried.

I mean, if you ask me why.

Can they suppress this?

My instinct is to say no.

It doesn't usually work.

The cover-up doesn't usually work.

But they have an awful lot of assets on the cover-up side, many more than Nixon had, many more than Reagan had in Duran-Contra, many more than Clinton had in 98, right?

I mean, they don't have the, especially they don't have a special counsel with the authority of the Justice Department to subpoena, indict, put people under oath.

So I guess maybe they'll certainly they'll move heaven and earth just to cover it up, to support the cover-up.

I agree with that, though.

And this gets us into the political with the Democrats.

Lauren Egan wrote a great newsletter last night, just kind of about how the Democrats are thinking about how this this could be useful and tie it into sort of a broader message about how Trump, you know, ran as a populist, you know, who cares about regular folks, but has his administration has been all about, you know, protecting, you know, elites and tax cuts for the rich and now protecting, you know, prominent child predators.

And I think there's something to that.

And I think that the Democrats then, you know, assuming they take back the House,

then do have an opportunity to call Jelaine Maxwell from prison if they choose, call whoever.

And I think that now this FBI, this is where the Durbin letter is, I think, so important.

Right.

Because that gives them a tangible thing, like the House Democrats, a tangible thing to investigate.

That's not like Donald Trump's behavior in the year 2003.

It's Cash Batel and Pam Bondi's behavior in the year 2025.

Did they receive incriminating evidence about Trump and stifle it?

And did they report that to Trump?

And did Trump order them to stifle it?

No, that's your classic, literally your classic kind of Watergate Iran-Contra question of what did the president know?

When did he know it?

And I very much agree.

They should focus a lot.

I mean, they should focus on the crimes as this kind of out of justice to the victims, for one thing.

And also because Trump, what the journal to get, the birthday card is pretty, in my view, reasonably incriminating.

But the cover-up is

the issue that you're right, that the Democrats can really focus.

That is the Trump administration, and who knew what when, who made the order in March to reverse course, and if there was one,

who looked at the files?

Can we have testimony?

It's not just from Bondi and Patel, but from some of the people who went through, you know, the deputies, the subordinates.

I mean, there's a ton they can do there.

They can do it if they take the house.

They can run on doing it to some degree.

We need an investigative body here.

This is not being investigated by special counsel.

It's not being investigated by justice.

It's not being investigated by the Republican Congress.

We need to bring to light this cover-up.

It's not a...

totally a nothing issue, I don't think, in an actual 26, you know, congressional campaign.

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i don't want to spend more than one minute on this, but it is just worth noting in the flailing Trump reaction to this.

His social media over the weekend was even more unhinged than usual.

He is, you know, he's posting about arresting Barack Hussein Obama over some fake scandal that's too arcane to even

justify explaining to the listeners.

But also, as part of that, he wants to investigate all the other Russia hoax people that accused him falsely of coordinating with Russia.

And he put out a list of nine or AI pictures of like nine Democrats in orange jumpsuits.

Deport Rosie O'Donnell has been on his list

recently.

He brought out this old saw.

He wants the Washington football team to change their name back to the Redskins.

I mean, this is the sign of somebody who's like desperate for at least the right-wing media to talk about anything other than other than Epstein.

Yeah, the football thing is kind of just classic, you know, distraction or desperation.

The initial thing I just thought quickly was I was getting a little tied up, but that's crazy, actually, because he's now legitimizing the notion that there's been massive cover-ups of ability.

I mean, if you took it all seriously, it's obviously nonsense, but there's been massive cover-ups of crimes throughout the federal government, and those should be investigated.

Okay, well, you know what?

Investigate if you want.

I mean, we can't stop Trump's Justice Department from looking at Obama and Clinton.

And for all we know, they are, incidentally, after they've talked about it at times, Bonte and Patel and Trump himself.

But if you're going to investigate them, investigate Epstein and Trump, right?

I mean, I think the right position to be in if you're going to be justifying a cover-up is, you know what, we have to govern this country.

We're very concerned about rising prices.

We're concerned about bringing peace to the Middle East, blah, blah, blah.

And we don't need to be distracted by all this past stuff.

Let bygones be bygones.

That would be a little crazy for them to be saying this at this point, given MAGA propaganda for the last few years, but it wouldn't be.

Some people might say, okay, fine, we need to move on.

They should be in the move-on camp, not in the let's investigate everything camp.

And so in that respect, they're opening a door for the Democrats, right?

Yeah.

And I think if you're an average MAGA person, right?

And there's some of these folks, whatever, you've been going along with these conspiracies for 10 years and you'll believe whatever Trump says and Mr.

Trump is the best and you're kind of in a cult and so you'll go along with it.

But and you're already seeing this, but people who are more in the Joe Rogan camp that are into conspiracies, quack conspiracies, they're not so much MAGA, right?

And so they got aligned with Trump as part of the kind of quack alignment that we had.

They're like, eventually people start to be like, wait a minute, you've been president now twice.

Like you're talking about how there's this huge criminal conspiracy against you, you know, dating back to the Obama administration and they tapped your wires and, you know, and James Clapper and Comey, and they're all involved.

It's like, you haven't indicted any of them.

Where's the evidence?

You are in charge now.

You have the DOJ.

When you're sitting in Mar-a-Lago, you know, Norma Desmond bleeding about how they should be arrested.

It's like, okay, well, that's silly and ridiculous, but like now you're in charge.

So do it.

Okay.

So show, put your money in your mouth.

Eventually people start to, and I think that there's an interplay between that and Epstein, which is like.

you've breached the trust with the conspiracists.

Like even conspiracy theorists want to believe that there's at least some level of like trust, you know, that they're not being made for fools.

Right now, it seems like they're being made for fools.

And I think some of them are going to figure it out.

No, I think that's that's a good point.

That's well said.

But I'd also say, which way does, I'm curious, which, what you think about which way does that cut?

Does that cut to them actually intensify actually going after a bunch of Democrats and sort of trying to find people to indict?

Because as a kind of to prove your point, right?

I mean, just and to get to the point.

The problem is you need to have grand juries.

From the start, dating back to January, what were our worries?

Like, I always was worried that like, you know, they're going to create major hassle for people.

Like, they're going to come after them.

And yeah, I don't, I don't want to even put anybody's name into the ether right now because I don't want to manifest that.

But like, right, that they're going to hassle people and create all this trouble.

You know, but even still, it's like, okay, like you need to have crimes, right?

Like you still have to go to a grand jury.

Donald Trump just can't, you know, call people up for military tribunals, at least at this point.

So maybe they do that.

Who is going to do it?

They've demonstrated a ton of competence across, well, obviously it was some misses within the immigration space that's spending OMB vote.

We haven't exactly seen it across these other areas.

And so I don't know.

I don't know.

I don't want to jinx it, but.

Don't jinx it.

No, no.

I mean, just one more point.

That's an interesting question.

Just like grand jury, D.C.

grand jury, but I guess they could be one down in Island, Canada's district in Florida, which basically, which is, I believe, is where they're suing the journal, interestingly.

That also is desperation.

I mean, that is to say, they could have taken the position on the birthday card that, look, we're not going to comment on it.

And God knows what cards were in that book.

And we don't know if V wrote it or, you know, he doesn't remember

writing it, but, you know, it was whatever, meaningless.

I mean, it would have been a little hard to say.

That's a little makes it, tries to make it access Hollywood-ish locker room talk.

They felt that was damaging enough, or, and, or, they felt that what was going still to come is going to be damaging enough that they had to take the position, it's a hoax, literally, that this, this thing was invented, that it's not done by Trump.

I just can't believe the journal does not have extremely good proof, I'm almost going to say, that this is a legitimate 2003 birthday card.

You know, the doodle is by Trump and presumably the doodle on a script that he had dictated or, you know, whatever, and been typed by someone at his direction.

And I then, one can then interpret the script as

the sort of ridiculous dialogue as much as one wants.

I interpret it pretty dark and sick, but they felt they couldn't sustain that.

I think that's interesting.

I mean, that is Trump's first instance has always been lots of people's nicks and first instance is denied.

It's not true.

It's not true.

You know, didn't Trump say that about Access Hollywood for like 12 hours?

Yeah, it doesn't sound like me.

Doesn't say that.

But then within like that became ridiculous, of course.

And then he just went to the kind of locker room talk.

They can't go to locker room talk on this one, I think, either because the card itself is so damning or because they know there's more stuff to come.

And so they have to make it all a giant, I guess, conspiracy to get him.

I mean,

what is their actual, they can say, okay, it's fake, I'm assuming the Wall Street Journal.

What's their actual account?

Someone made up this card?

I mean, some human in 2024 or 2025 knew about this book of Epstein and was able to slip this card into it.

I mean, if you think about it for a minute, it's a pretty far-fetched argument they're now making.

And I think it shows a kind of desperation, but it also shows, I think, knowledge maybe on Trump's part of

what is there.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Really quick on the Hill, one other thing.

Brendan Boyle, the Democratic ranking member on the budget committee, has an op-ed in the bulwark over the weekend about this upcoming government funding fight.

We're about two months out from it.

So there's a little bit of time.

That's an interesting take, again, about where the Democrats are now.

You know, we had this rescission bill where, you know, essentially there's this bipartisan budget that gets passed, which was an extension a lot of the Biden budget, really, a couple of months ago.

And the Republicans then last week take out $9 billion from it via party line vote 50-50, you know, including some really like insanely harsh removals of pretty modest like budget line items.

Boyle's point is, okay, well, so now here we are.

Like Democrats can't be expected to do any deals with the Republicans going forward.

Like they can't, you know, how can you do that if you're going to come to a bipartisan deal and then the Republicans are going to go the next week and be like, oh, we're just going to take out everything that's the Democrats' priorities.

To me, it just, signals a posture that has changed from what a lot of us were complaining about at the beginning of the year, which was, can we work with them in certain areas, look at good faith?

There was another example of this.

I think Mark Warner said at a town hall recently that he regretted voting for the Lake and Riley Act.

Now, in retrospect, it does seem like that there's been a change in posture from the Democrats.

Right.

I mean, remember, it takes

the rescission of legislation takes only 50 votes, 51 votes to sustain the president's attempted revoking of these funds.

Like reconciliation only takes 51 votes.

The budget takes 60 votes.

That's why the Democrats had the ability to stop it.

That's why Schumer's decision to go ahead and, in effect, okay the continuing resolution, I think it was, but that was a budget, in March, whatever, was controversial because they did need Democratic votes.

That's why the September issue becomes very interesting.

If it's not reconciliation, it's obviously not a rescission.

They'll need Democratic votes.

And the Democrats' attitude, there's a reason there's been no recision legislation since the late 90s.

The rescue was kind of complicated.

I don't even remember it exactly, but the legislative line on the beta was struck out, or this was kind of an alternative to it.

Anyway, there's a reason it hasn't been done for almost 30 years because you can't have a situation where

the Democrats go along with some bipartisan-ish compromise on spending for HHS or anything else, DOD or whatever.

And with 60 votes, that's...

you know, how they get some say in the situation.

And then the Republicans get to get 51 votes to rescind it, which is what just happened, right?

I mean, that's why the Democrats genuinely feel aggrieved.

It's not just they don't like the policies.

You know, this is like a double cross, in effect.

There's a reason this didn't happen under Bush, under Obama, under Biden, under Trump won even.

They just, it was so obviously a way to stack the deck.

And it'd be interesting.

So I agree.

That combined with the general exasperation, correct exasperation of the Democrats, or sense that they get no reward for being a little bit bipartisan or a little bit accommodating.

It will be interesting to see what happens to September.

All right.

Bill Crystal.

They're giving us plenty to talk about, I guess.

So we've got that going for us.

You can't complain about that.

Yeah.

Enjoyed the trip back to DC.

Everybody else, we got a good one coming tomorrow.

So we'll be back here.

Make sure to check us out and we'll be talking to you then.

Peace.

It's time to tear this place down.

I've got the last game on my mind.

Not see friends in Asia.

How about I be left behind?

It's time to figure out why.

I find myself in custody

with each and every question.

What's come so easily?

Flash, well, Salvador.

I don't know what, and I don't know what for.

I've seen the picture for myself.

Where did that label go?

I tried it out, but it didn't work.

So

I'll choose the picture for myself.

It's time to start all over.

Take only one thing spent away.

Head for the check-in lights and get up into the air.

It's time to take new measures.

Someone will put us up tonight.

Far from my place of of rest, I've almost got you inside.

Flight to El Salvador.

I don't know why and I don't know what for.

I've seen the picture for myself.

Where did that label go?

I tried it out, but it didn't work.

So

I'll choose the picture for myself.

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