Ep 261 | Epstein's Lawyer Makes SHOCKING CLAIM About Client List | Alan Dershowitz | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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Joining me this week is one of the most celebrated lawyers in the world.

He was the youngest full professor in Harvard Law School, Harvard Law School history, where he is now the professor of law emeritus.

He is also the author of numerous best-selling books, including Guilt by Accusation and The Case Against Impeaching Trump.

His latest book, The Preventative State, he says is the most important book he's ever written.

It takes a deep dive into the authoritarian tyranny that the left tries to enact on a daily basis.

He is also the man with the most knowledge on the topic of every person in America that every person in America is dying to learn about, and that is Jeffrey Epstein.

Joining me now, please welcome Alan Dershowitz.

Mama, Papa, my corporate a unrimo alarme, y la ropo que me compreha me que dora muy pe queña muy pronto, pero suvilletera no tin que su frí por la moda cons precios vacos de la vuenta classes de Amazon.

Amazon, dastamenos sonriemas.

Ellen, welcome to the program.

Thanks for having me.

I appreciate it.

Nice to see you.

Keep doing great things.

Thank you.

So,

you know, with the shooting that happened this week in New York,

I did a monologue right after the shooting where I said,

you know, basically quoting Adams: this system is wholly inadequate for an immoral and irreligious

people.

We just have to have more and more monitoring, more and more laws, and that is not consistent with our Constitution and our way of life.

I think, you know, there's so much mental illness.

I want to get into what, what do we do to prevent, you know, that, to stop that, but also the red flag laws and your book, The Preventative State.

Just the name of it scares the hell out of me, Alan.

Sure.

But it's intended to.

Yeah.

It's in, you know, I live just around the corner from where the shooting occurred.

We live on 54th Street.

This was on 52nd Street.

I walk by that building every day virtually.

So

what's failing us?

Well,

what's failing us is our inability to

anticipate, particularly what people who we don't understand will do to us.

We have no way of comprehending a young man like this and what's going through his

adult brain.

It's just very, very difficult.

And if we try to lock up everybody like that,

we'll have a million people or more in prison.

We used to have that when I started doing my research on this back in the 1960s.

There were more people in mental health detention than in prison.

So that's one of the things I talked about is, you know, the president just said we need to put more people in through

mental health centers.

And I remember what that was like in the 60s and 70s.

I remember when Ronald Reagan, you know, shut those down and a lot of people went out on the streets.

And

the state is not a good caretaker.

of people.

I don't want to get back into that business with the state because

that's a nightmare waiting to happen.

Or is it?

I agree.

You do agree.

We're a country of extremes.

We moved from one extreme to the other.

We moved from locking up many, many, too many people in mental hospitals, which became snake pits, to releasing suddenly onto the street without adequate concerns for how we might deal with them in a less compulsory manner.

But what happened?

I mean, you know, I remember when the streets, when Reagan first let people out, and

there were more, you know, mental, there was more mental illness on the streets.

But it wasn't like it is now.

I mean, you walk down the streets of any major city, and it is,

it's crazy central.

We're becoming, in many cities, Gotham.

Yeah, and people are frightened.

I lived on the New York subways growing up.

I went everywhere.

For a nickel, you could go to Coney Island.

You could go to the Metropolitan Opera.

The train, the subway was our life.

Today,

almost nobody I know takes the subway.

They're terrified that they're going to be locked in this tin container with crazy people who will do crazy things.

We saw what happened.

when this young Marine

risked his life to try to save people on the subway, and he was charged with homicide.

Fortunately, he was acquitted, but it took so much away from him to have to defend himself from that.

So you talk about red flag laws in the book.

Take us through that, because that's something that people, this guy was known to be mentally unwell.

So what's the problem with a red flag law?

Well, there's no problem if you use the red flag law against somebody like that to make sure he doesn't get the gun.

The problem is

if you prevent everybody who has his symptoms from getting a gun, you're going to interfere with the Second Amendment rights of ordinary people to have guns.

So we have to strike an appropriate balance.

And that's the difficult task that all governments have and that all governments fail.

In my book, The Preventive State, I go through every conceivable issue of when the state steps in to take preventive action, ranging from mandatory inoculations to dropping weapons on nuclear facilities to trying to prevent climate disasters.

And I would say the state never gets better than about a C minus in any of its activities.

And the goal of the preventive state is to move it up from a C minus to a B plus.

We're never going to get higher than that.

We're never going to get it perfect.

We're never going to be able to create a situation where we stop all the potential killers without also confining lots of people that would never, never kill.

We have to strike that balance.

Look, this begins in the Bible with Abraham arguing with God.

Can you imagine the scene?

Here's Abraham.

He meets his new God and he yells at him.

He says in the Hebrew,

it would be impure of you.

It would be wrong of you.

It would be unkosher of you.

to sweep away the innocent along with the guilty.

How dare you do that?

What if there are 50 innocent people and then Abraham argues with God and gets them down to 10?

But it's never perfect.

It doesn't get him down to zero.

God admits that you might have to confine 10 innocent people or even execute 10 innocent people to prevent the horrors of letting all those people go free, the people of Saddam.

Right, because we have always been a country that said, if you have to let, you know, 10 guilty people go for one innocent man.

we've always been, you can't do that to the innocent guy.

But

we've said it, but we haven't really meant it.

What we've done, you know, you tell a jury,

look, if the guy is guilty, but there's any doubt, you know, let him go free because it's better for 10 guilty to go free than one innocent to be wrongly confined.

Most jurors are going to say, look, we want to know whether this guy did it.

If he did it, we want to put him away.

If he's going to do it again, we want to put him away for an even longer period of time.

That's the way juries think.

Yeah, you know, abstract philosophers sitting in Harvard's ivory towers

couldn't write things like better 10 guilty go free than one innocent be wrongly confined.

But when you take 12 jurors off the street who have been on the subway or have been on the streets where crazy people are threatening them, they think a little differently than the abstract philosophers.

Look, it was Thomas Jefferson who said, put a problem to a plowman or a philosopher, and I'm more likely to go with the plowman, or Bill Buckley said he'd rather be ruled by the 100 first people in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty.

And having been on the Harvard faculty for 61 years now, I tend to agree with him.

Why?

Why is that?

What's the difference?

Because

pure intellect of the kind that universities try to pick often do not include the most basic core common sense.

The reason your show is so successful is you're a guy who exudes common sense.

You sit there and you talk and everybody who listens to you says, we don't know what kind of grades this guy got in high school or college, but we recognize a man of common sense when we see him.

And you exclude, exclude, exclude that.

You make it clear that you're a person who does things from a common sense point of view.

And in doing so, you speak for the average American.

It doesn't seem like we have any common sense left.

I mean, at least,

I don't, I don't know what it is.

Ellen,

I go all across the country and I meet people all across the country and people who disagree with me.

But when they're regular people,

they know this is right, this is wrong, this is right, this is wrong.

And we're pretty close lined up.

Even if they vote differently, we're pretty closely lined up on what's right and wrong.

I agree with you completely.

I grew up on the streets of Brooklyn.

All my friends were the sons and daughters of immigrants from Italy,

from Ireland, from Greece, from even Norway, from Poland, from Germany.

And

we had different religious perspectives, we had different political views, but we all shared a sense of we know what the heck's going on.

Don't try to fool us.

We can see through you.

And that's kind of, you know, Brooklyn sensitivities and sensibilities that I think is very much closer to what people who grew up on farms and in rural areas have than what fancy people who grew up in high, you know, very, very high buildings

without a close connection.

to the earth that they stand on.

Yeah.

I

read something written in 1946 by no, sorry, 1943 1943 by Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

And

he said that

I'm horribly paraphrasing, but basically stupidity is the problem.

It's the stupid of the world.

And he didn't mean not intellectual, not educated.

He meant the people who had just

assigned their critical thinking to someone else, to some ideology or

just stopped thinking.

And he said,

there's no way to argue with the stupid because they're no longer thinking or questioning.

It's so interesting.

I'll tell you a fascinating story about a man who you and I both admire.

His name was Antonin Scalia, great justice of the Supreme Court.

And he and I were sitting with a glass of wine at a at a bistro

not far from where, in jerusalem not far from where jesus had been crucified and we both had a glass of wine and we were good friends and i said to him nino you know you're the smartest guy i know in the world you're i just don't know anybody smarter than you here we are right near where you say jesus was crucified buried and then after three days arose i mean

How can that have happened physiologically?

And I said, do you actually believe it?

He says, I believe it with every fiber of my soul.

I said, Well, but you're so smart.

How can you do that?

He said, Alan, you don't understand.

When it comes to belief in Jesus, I am a fool for Christ.

That was his exact words.

I am a fool for Christ.

I suspend my rational mind when it comes to my religious beliefs.

He says, when it comes to everything else, it has to be completely rational, common sense.

I will never believe anything like that about anything other than my deep faith in the resurrection of Jesus.

And it was so different from the way I was brought up, but it was so enlightening.

And I really understood Justice Galia better, having had that wonderful conversation with him, than I had ever understood any religious differences that I might have with people before.

It was such a brilliant acknowledgement that there's one part of him that he won't subject to the kind of empirical,

scientific,

null hypothesis analysis.

More with Alan here in a second.

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Back to Derschwitz.

Let's go to your book and talk about, let's talk about crime and the things that a preventative state can do or might do that

might work out to not be in

humanity's best interest.

What are we looking at?

Let's just start with crime.

Well, we start with crime.

First of all, as Thomas Jefferson once said,

in order to define what a crime should be, you have to think of it as somebody running while reading a book, running while reading, and he has to be able to read the criminal statute and he has to be able to understand it so that he can act on it.

So the first thing we need is clarity, and we don't have it.

We have these big laws, these conspiracy laws, these RICO laws.

Take, for example, the crime that was charged against Donald Trump.

Failing to disclose hush payments and instead listing them as legal expenses.

You know, I've been teaching criminal law 61 years.

I don't understand the charge against them.

I simply don't understand it.

And the first thing you have to have for law to work is absolute clarity.

The law has to be written in simple terms.

You know, there's a story about an old emperor back in the day who was told he had to write the laws, but he wrote them in a hand so small and put them so high that nobody could read them.

And that's the way tyrannies work.

If you know what's illegal and what's illegal, if you know where the line is, at least you can do the Hamlet

soliloquy.

to be or not to be a criminal.

I'm now crossing the line to criminality, but too many people cross that line inadvertently and accidentally.

So the first thing we need is clear laws, and we need laws that are preventive in nature.

For example, let me give you,

why do we prohibit good drivers from driving 120 miles an hour?

They might not ever crash, but we want to prevent crashes.

And so we reduce the speed limit to 70 in an effort to prevent.

Now, the vast majority of people who go over 70 would never ever have an accident, but some will.

So we set a law we pick a number it's 70 and that's kind of a metaphor for how we have to decide what to prohibit and what not to prohibit um there are so many examples uh of of how we over

legislate um and also under legislate so you said give me some over and then give me some under

Okay, yeah, easy.

So

prohibition was over.

You know, between 19, what was it, 18 and 1932, we went into people's living rooms and bedrooms and told them they couldn't have a brandy after dinner,

even though the vast, vast, vast majority of people who would have a drink wouldn't do anything, wouldn't do anything wrong.

And we learned our lesson.

And after realizing that prohibition caused more crimes than it stopped,

we, for the only time in our history, eliminated a constitutional amendment by another constitutional amendment.

The area where we've under, for a while, used to under

criminalize

perhaps was the easy availability of guns.

We've now made it much harder, obviously.

And we've had to compromise the Second Amendment to do that, just the way we've had to compromise a little bit on the First Amendment.

When it comes to, you know, Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.

Well, maybe some laws, if you incite people to immediate violence, even though it's by your words, maybe you can be prosecuted.

So that is, but

that is not as far as where I think people think that line is.

You know, hey, you can't cry fire in a crowded movie house.

Well, actually, you can,

but if you cry fire, because I've done it on stage several times,

unless it immediately incites violence and death.

Well, that's a pretty narrow path.

It's not what everybody thinks it is.

It's still very narrow.

I think that's right.

And I make a prediction here.

I think in the next half a century, we're going to see a little bit of a cutting back on that theory.

I don't think people are going to be allowed to engage in free speech that endangers human life under the standard of incitement to immediate violence.

That test may not have worked.

And it's the virtue of the Supreme Court and its vice at the same time that it can

do things

and correct its mistakes.

So wait, so where do you think it should be?

Well, I think it should be incitement, but not to immediate.

It should be incitement.

If you Boy, Alan,

that scares the hell out of me because I have been blamed for the shooting on Gabby Giffords.

I have been.

But

you haven't incited it.

No, but it depends on who's defining it.

Depends on

the power shift.

You know what I mean?

What court it's in, et cetera, et cetera.

Look, there are risks on both sides.

Or to move it to the international, look, we made a terrible mistake in 1935 by not attacking Hitler when he was still vulnerable while he was violating the Versailles Treaty.

We were afraid that if France and England attacked Hitler, it would cause 10,000 deaths.

And it probably would have caused 10,000 deaths, but it would have saved 50 million, 50 million lives.

So we made a terrible mistake there.

We probably made a mistake before 9-11 in not

doing

more to try to predict that kind of use of airplanes against us.

And then we made the opposite mistake afterward.

We

went into Iraq when we should have gone into Iran.

After the Second World War began, we put 110,000 innocent Japanese Americans in detention centers.

That was an overreaction.

to the mistake we made in not being able to

predict and anticipate Pearl Harbor.

So, you know, we pay a heavy price.

In the book, The Preventive State, I argue that when we fail to stop and we fail to prevent a mass casualty attack, often we will overreact.

You can, people believe that Israel is doing that now.

I don't happen to share that.

People believe that because Israel messed up and didn't prevent October 7th, where you know 200 innocent people were killed and 2,000 and 250 of them were taken captive, that now they're overreacting in Gaza.

Well, you can agree or disagree with that, but it is clear that there is a relationship between the failure to prevent and taking extraordinary actions after the fact.

So from every point of view, it's better to prevent if you can do it.

Grandma was right when she said a stitch in time saves nine.

I don't even know what that phrase means anymore.

So maybe you can explain it.

I know my grandmother used to say it, but I don't remember what it even means.

But, you know,

we're looking at a place, and

I am not a conspiracy theorist.

I actually have railed against conspiracy theories, unless it's likely that there is a conspiracy going on,

which it sometimes is.

Sometimes it is.

And

it's hard not to see

the movement of the uber uber left.

I'm not talking about your regular Democrat.

I'm talking about the Uber left.

In a way that it looks like

the more chaos we can have on the streets, the better, because then the regular people will rise up and cry out for more restrictions and you get a totalitarian state.

I mean, it's what happened, I think, was it Hungary?

Yeah.

The Bolsheviks came up with that a hundred years ago.

Exactly right.

The theory of the hard left from the beginning uh create this

you think the hard left really cared about civil rights in the south or gay rights now they don't care about any of those issues they only care about getting people riled up in order to go against the government and that's what we're seeing now and that's why I left the Democratic Party.

I cannot be in a party that features AOC and that features so many of these other radical left-wing extremists that want to essentially overthrow the United States government and substitute what they call democratic socialism, but ultimately is Bolshevism.

There's never been a successful democratic country.

Ask the people from Venezuela that are pouring into our shores now, want to come to America, hate Venezuela.

Ask all the people from Cuba about the success of Mom Dani's approach to socialism that he wants to bring to New York.

And that's what we have to prevent now.

But it seems as though,

for instance, let's just go again to violence on the streets.

And everything is so extreme

that it is,

there is this pull towards a preventative state.

There's a pull towards, you know what, shut it down.

And that is, that's, that, I'm afraid, in some cases, could be on the horizon to where

I wrote the book now.

i've been working on this issue for since i started teaching um more than 60 years ago trying to figure out what the right formula is and ultimately at age i'm now going to be 87

in a short period of time i decided i had to finally write this book and put it out as my magnum opus because we're living in such a terrible dangerous time uh where the risks and the choices are between anarchy and authoritarianism and i don't like either of those i don't either alternatives nobody i don't think the average american does but they're they're not being presented with any information that says there's any other option and i don't know what the other option is other than self-control and self-regulation

you know i think politically the other option is to move toward the middle and we had great people like Joe Lieberman who are doing that who tragically died too young, but we don't have Joe Liebermans

and people like that

and

Pat Moynihans and people who are prepared to cross party lines in order to bring us to the middle.

The vast majority of Americans are common sense centerists, but the political system, particularly the primary system, where few people vote and you can get AOCs elected and other

radicals elected the primary system exaggerates, I think, the extremism of our country.

And if you get a candidate, like, you know, you could love him or hate him, but both Bill Clinton and

George W.

Bush represented the center of both parties.

And that's why they did so well.

We thought Barack Obama, many people thought he represented the Senate.

I was fooled into thinking that, and I rejected him after his first term.

But it's very hard to get people to vote in the center.

People, you know, like it's kind of exciting to vote for extremists on both sides.

And that's what we saw happen in Europe in the 1920s and 30s.

So help me out because I've been called an extremist forever.

And I don't think I am.

I am.

You're not.

I am extreme for the Constitution.

I'm extreme for

civil rights.

But you have people who are constitutional.

When Mike Lee is known in the state of Utah as an extremist, something is wrong.

So I know Mike Lee before he was born.

Mike Lee's father was my co-clerk on the United States Supreme Court in

1962.

His name was Rex Lee.

He was one of the greatest lawyers of our day.

He died too young.

And he

was a Mormon.

And I was an Orthodox Jew.

So we both had restrictions on what we can eat and drink.

And so we always had lunch together.

He wouldn't have

my bacon.

And we were really good friends.

And then when Mike Lee became a senator, I thought he was great.

I mean, because he put the Constitution before everything.

And, you know, when you put the Constitution first, it sometimes leads you to extreme views like you need to have incitement to direct violence before you can prohibit speech, or perhaps Perhaps you can't require people to inoculate themselves when the risks of

side effects are too high.

There are all kinds of conclusions that the Constitution mandates that we might think.

Or, oh, you have to let a murderer go free, a murderer go free if the search wasn't properly done.

That's an extremist view, but it's in the Constitution.

And without that,

if we're not basing our views on that, then what are we basing it on?

Well, you know, for people, you can base it on the Bible.

For constitutionalists, you can base it on the Constitution.

The Bible was the, I mean, you know this, Alan, the Bible was the most quoted

book out of everything they read.

It was like 28 or 32% of everything that came out of the Constitution came from the founders and their understanding of the Bible.

I mean, it's rich with Bible.

Oh, there's no question about that.

You just look at when I was bar misfit at age 13,

you are b'misfed on a certain week, and the week that I was b'misfed on had the portion of the Bible which dealt with justice and

structs the judges two things: justice, justice must you pursue, and do not recognize spaces, which means no affirmative action, no DEI,

no basing decisions based on your race or who you are or how rich you are or anything like that.

That's in the Bible.

It goes back

so many, so many years and it's been tested and proved to be correct.

And why do we say justice, justice, Shall Upra said?

Why not justice once?

Because

procedural justice is as important as substantive justice.

Not only do you have to do it

to do be just, but you have to do it justly.

And I think if we were to go back to the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament, and read it more thoroughly and apply it,

we would be in a lot better shape than the anarchy and

kind of woke

approach that we have today in so many areas.

I know that Arkansas and Texas, and I think Kentucky is about to come on

to put the Ten Commandments, if people present them in a certain way and

they have to go into the school classrooms.

And

everybody's having a hard time with that.

And I'm like, you know, you could look at those as biblical, you look at those as messages from God, or you can look at them as the basis of all civilization.

That is the basis of civilization.

If you want to say no God before me, well, maybe that's your car.

Maybe that's your job.

It doesn't have to be the God of the Old Testament, but it is the, that's the entire basis of who we are as a Western civilization.

But the problem is, even the Ten Commandments is controversial.

Five of them probably aren't.

The last five, thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not, you know, but the first five are a little, you know, controversial.

Do not take the name of the Lord in vain.

God damn it.

I don't like that one.

But, you know, if that's the way you read it.

If that's the way you read it.

I mean, I read it.

I can read that in a way that says, you know, the Lord speaks with power.

He creates, he speaks.

So don't speak.

I mean, the Lord's name,

you know, the way I view it is I am.

Don't say things, follow I am with something that is negative because your words will create whatever it is.

So don't take his name in vain means, you know, to me,

don't speak things into existence that are negative, are bad, that are not good.

Personal ideology, but I wouldn't make it the law.

I wouldn't allow the state to enforce that.

That's why I'm not in favor of the Ten Commandments being mandated for schools.

I am in favor of parents teaching their children the Ten Commandments and churches emphasizing that.

and private institutions emphasizing that.

But I do believe in the separation of church and state.

I think that's good for the church and it's good for the state.

How would you answer Thomas Jefferson allowing the Senate in his day to be church on Sunday?

Isn't that well?

There's no question that we never separated church and state completely.

Indeed, the very concept that Jefferson said is not in the Constitution.

It was a letter to the Baptist Convention.

But Jefferson himself, as you know, was a deist, and he rewrote the New Testament to eliminate the miracle.

The Jefferson Bible, which today is used as the official Bible of the Unitarian Church,

is something

that

has endured.

So, you know, the founders were interesting people.

George Washington drove his wife to church every Sunday, but mostly sat outside and read while his wife went to church because he felt that the church was a little too restrictive.

On the other hand, others, and John Adams said,

every American will ultimately be buried as a Unitarian.

And as Unitarians believe in at most one God.

So, you know, we have to have religious freedom.

We have to have our own ability from the time we're sentient human beings to think through these issues.

Jefferson's letter to his nephew, Peter Carr, is one of the great documents.

The best.

Changed my life reading that.

I have to tell you, that should be taught in every school.

Yes.

Talk a thing that should be taught in every school, especially his letter.

Especially when it comes to religion, horribly paraphrasing, if there is a God, question with boldness even the very existence of God, for if there is a God, he must surely rather honest questioning over blindfolded fear.

That one line just changes everything.

You are a scholar, and

I used to teach a course at Harvard Law School just on the letters of Thomas Jefferson.

You know, Thomas Jefferson never really wrote any books.

He wrote a book on Virginia, but it's mostly farming and stuff like that.

But his letters, his collected letters, are amongst the most brilliant pieces of American literature, constitutional history.

They're better than the Federalist Papers, and I didn't think anything could be better than the Federalist Papers.

But I used to assign my students at Harvard Law School to read his letters.

His last letter, the one just before he died on the same day that John Adams died, when he was asked to speak at the commemoration, the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

His letter, declining his ability to speak because he didn't have the physical energy to do it, but his letter was so brilliant.

And it talked about how the Declaration was intended not only for America, but to free the world of what he called monkish ignorance, just

accepting things because people said they would accept them.

So we agree.

I mean, Thomas Jefferson.

And yet, look at Thomas Jefferson.

He was a sinner.

He did terrible things in his own personal life.

So did Martin Luther King.

That doesn't make him bad.

It makes him wrong in certain areas, but we're all on the road somewhere or another to right.

Okay, well, here, let me make a point that you might disagree with.

I wrote a book called The Genesis of Justice about the Bible.

And I say the difference between the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament, and the Christian Bible is that the Jewish Bible is filled with flawed characters.

Practically everybody in it is screwed up in some way.

Always.

You know, there's no perfect people.

Then you get to the New Testament, and there's Jesus.

Who could be a more perfect person than Jesus?

He does everything

right.

And so you have these two testaments.

really having a very different view of the perfectibility of man.

No, but you you know what?

I would disagree.

There's only one character like that.

The rest of them are, I mean, look at Saul/slash Paul.

He's so deep.

He was killing the people that he suddenly said, I'm going to protect.

I mean, deeply flawed.

And I think that's

the

beauty of it is

none of these people.

That's why I think it's so important for Jews to read the New Testament and for Christians to study the old

because we each can learn from each other's point of view.

And both Bibles, by the way, engage in prevention.

The Old Testament obviously talks in extreme terms about what you deal with, how you deal with a recalcitrant child,

stone him to death because he's going to grow up to be a criminal.

That's

in the ultimate.

And Jesus saying to the people, he who is without sin cast the first stone.

There are so many great lessons to be learned for each religion from the other's religion.

And so

I think Christians really miss the book.

Daniel Lapin is a friend of mine, and he's always said to me, everybody needs a rabbi.

And I think that's true.

You read the Old Testament with a rabbi or somebody who actually knows it in Hebrew, and it's completely different.

The depth of it is just never ending.

No, I agree with you.

And I used to teach courses, non-credit courses at Harvard on the Bible, both the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the Quran.

The course was called The Scriptural Sources of Justice.

And a lot of what's in my book, The Prevana State, remember, I was a yeshiva boy.

I grew up for 12 years studying Bible, Talmud,

never eating an Abisco cookie because it didn't have the magic U that certified that it was kosher.

I was, you know, a very law-abiding, strictly Orthodox Jew.

So I know I'm not a rabbi, but almost all my uncles are.

And so, you know, I studied this stuff very carefully.

And I don't think I ever taught a class in law at Harvard where I didn't make a reference to the Bible, to rabbinical teaching, to St.

Augustine, to

some religious source, because for of the

you know 5,000 years of human sensibility, what at least half of that the most of the intellectual material came from the church or from the synagogue or from the mosque so to ignore all that in the name of separation of church and state is ridiculous so in the preventive state i borrow a lot in fact the last chapter is explicitly about uh the religious view of prevention so if people are interested

go go there go there

one commercial from my book so this is the best book i've ever written.

I've written 58 books, most important book I've ever written.

The New York Times reviewed every one of my books until I defended Donald Trump on the floor of the Senate.

Then it cut me off completely.

The New York Times will not review this book, has not reviewed any of my books since I defended Donald Trump.

I have been banned from speaking at 92nd Street Y, at various other places.

And if you want to get even with these censorial people, go on Amazon and buy my book.

I think that's the best way.

We don't care what you review.

We care what's on the Glen Beck show.

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I will tell you that you'll have a very hard time getting on the Times list, too.

I mean,

I was,

I think, 4,000 books more than what they put at the number one on one of my books, and

I made it to number 14.

I just made the list.

The New York Times list seven times times before I defended Trump.

My book, Chutzpah, was number one in the whole nation, and my book Case for Israel was on the list for quite some time.

But since I defended Trump, I could sell a million copies.

They won't put me on the list.

They'll figure out some way of making sure that it's not sufficiently broad or something like that.

So we have to fight back against that kind of censorship.

Can we go to something that I think is pretty controversial?

And that is, you in

your book,

you talk about,

you know, there might be a case to have people,

you know, be forced to take an injection if there is

if there's a, you know, pandemic.

I think we've seen this, and

it was horrible.

It worked out to be horrible.

No, look, I agree.

It's a tough problem.

George Washington wrote to his troops in the middle of the Revolutionary War saying, we're not going to lose this war to Britain, but we may lose it to smallpox.

And so every single soldier has to be inoculated.

And in those days, by the way, the inoculation was very dangerous.

All it was is some smallpox from some people, some pus, and put it in a needle and inject it into you and it hoped that you would get only a small case of smallpox, not a big case, but every soldier had to do it.

Of course, that's not a

paradigm for citizens.

Remember, the president is not the commander-in-chief of the people.

He's only the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.

And so I would not be in favor of compelled mandatory inoculation, except if we had a situation where the risks of spread of the disease were so great that that really endangered the future of the country.

But the standard would have to be much higher than it was, for example, during the COVID.

What is the standard?

What is the standard then?

I mean, because it, I mean, we were told that millions were going to die.

Yeah, it has to be very high.

And

then the question is, who decides?

Is it a legislative?

Is it an executive decision?

Does the Supreme Court get to play a role in it?

You know, who decides is the hardest question in democracies.

It's a question I pose throughout my book, The Preventive State.

You know, when you have this balance of avoiding too many false negatives and avoiding too many false positives, avoiding too many people who are improperly imprisoned and too few.

You got to make a decision, but who's going to make the decision?

Is it something that the legislature makes and does it make it in broad terms?

Is it something the executive authorities make?

These are very, very hard decisions.

You don't really present the answers in your book.

You present

The purpose of the book is to open a dialogue.

Nobody has ever written a systematic book about the preventive state before.

And so I raise all the questions, all the hard questions, and I provide some tentative answers, but they're only tentative because you have to make the decision as to where the ultimate decision gets made.

I think ultimately it has to be made by the legislative branch, but the legislative branch of our government has not proved its ability to make these hard decisions.

So

many of the decision-making authorities have been taken over by the executive.

Look at President Trump's first half year in office.

He has taken more power than any president since only two before him really have taken more power.

Jefferson early on when he bought Louisiana and did all those things, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Lincoln, but that was wartime.

Wilson.

But Trump,

Clinton didn't do that.

No, Wilson.

Wilson.

Wilson.

Yeah, no, Wilson did.

But of course, that too was wartime,

World War.

But for a peacetime president, more or less peacetime, President Trump has taken more power than any

other president

in history.

And so far, he's done

a pretty good job on most of these issues.

I have some quarrels with some of his priorities on immigration and some of the priorities on health care.

But certainly in terms of energy, no president has been more energetic in his first six months since, certainly since Roosevelt, than President Trump, for better or worse.

But is it lasting?

I mean, one of the things conservatives say is until it is codified, until Congress acts, and then he signs it in a bill, everything can be reversed.

Of course, and it would be.

And look what happened with

Biden and Obama and the treaty.

Iran, and as soon as Trump came into office, he abrogated it.

And the same thing would happen if a Democrat were elected three and a half years from now.

We would see a lot of Trump's executive orders, particularly relating to immigration, rescinded.

So legislation is much better, but legislation is hard.

Even when you have both houses controlled by the Republicans and a Republican president, which makes the veto unnecessary mostly,

it's still hard to get legislation passed.

So let me change the subject on

this

Epstein thing, just will not go away.

Will not go away.

And,

you know, I was told by Cash Patel, I've seen the book.

I know the book.

I've seen the names.

I've seen it.

They're hiding it.

That was before he was in office.

Then when he gets in office,

I mean,

I was his lawyer, and I went to his academic seminars.

So, of course, when Ghelaine Maxwell said, Alan, it's his 50th birthday, write something funny.

I wrote something funny.

I took the cover of Vanity Unfair and I called it Vanity Unfair.

I don't know whether I did that or not.

I don't remember.

My wife says I would say something like that.

I asked the Wall Street Journal to send me a copy of my letter with my signature to authenticate it, and they refused to.

That raised a level of suspicion with me that they refused to send the letter.

So, but

I now am to the place to where even if it existed,

This thing has gone through so many hands, both Republicans and the Democrats.

And, you know, the one thing I'm certain of, if there was horrible things about any Republican, the last administration would have used it if it looked like Donald Trump was winning.

Of course.

Oh, of course.

Yeah.

So, but now we're, now we're talking about Maxwell possibly testifying.

And I mean, how do you possibly believe anything she's going to say when

she is facing

another 10 years in prison and would, I mean, likely do whatever she has to do to get out of prison?

And on top of that, she's now petitioning the Supreme Court because she says she, you know, she was caught up in, you know,

in the release

for Jeffrey Epstein, that she wouldn't be held accountable for anything.

And I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's accurate in more than one state.

I mean, how do you read this?

Well, it's very hard.

First of all, you always need to corroborate anything that anybody who's in prison ever says.

That's the basic rule.

And I think the Justice Department lives by that rule.

So what they're looking for is self-proving evidence.

They're not looking for name and name.

They're looking for us, give a document that proves that this person was on the island or something like that.

So they're self-proving evidence.

And I think Lane Maxwell can give them that.

I was part of the legal team that got the original deal for Jeffrey Epstein, and it did include a statement that said the United States government will not prosecute any of Epstein's co-conspirators.

Now, Elaine Maxwell was certainly a co-conspirator, that's why she's in jail.

And so, the Supreme Court, if it grants review, probably won't because generally doesn't, but if it were to grant review, it would have to deal with that issue.

It's a very tough issue.

Look, let me make two points that will be very controversial, and you may disagree with them completely.

Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile.

That term has a specific meaning.

It means people who are sexually attracted to pre-pubescent girls or boys.

That is 11, 12 years old.

That's the definition of all psychiatrists and of the law.

Epstein was interested in 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds, 18-year-olds.

He was a bad person, did terrible, terrible things.

The word pedophile is not a correct description of what he was.

Number two, he was not a trafficker.

Traffickers make money by selling and enslaving girls.

What he did is he was a selfish guy who was having sex with all these sexual contact, at least, with all these 16, 17-year-olds, and maybe, maybe lending them to people like Prince Andrew.

We don't know for sure.

But he was not a trafficker in the true sense of the word.

That's why there's no client list.

There were no clients.

And the other

money being made.

That's what I mean.

Yeah.

And the other, he didn't work for the Mossad.

I know that because I debriefed him when I was trying to make a deal for him back in 2007.

And he would have told me if he had a deal, if he was working for the government, because it would have helped him get a clear,

better deal.

I will tell you that Business Insider reported this week that four people

have gone through every bit of it, and they have come out and said he was clearly not intelligence.

The idea that he was in intelligence

was not said by the prosecutor in Florida, although it's attributed to him.

It wasn't said by him.

He said, I never said it.

And it looks as though

a newspaper took a quote from one anonymous sort that said, he's absolutely Intel.

He's deep with Intel.

And that's where that came from.

So.

No, I think it came from something else too.

Ghelain Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell, probably was a source for Intel.

Yes.

But I don't think that Jeffrey Epstein had any contact with Robert Maxwell.

The chronology doesn't work.

Maxwell died or was killed.

Remember, he was on his boat and he was found in the Mediterranean.

And he may have been an intelligence resource.

We don't know.

But that's what led people to say, oh, if Maxwell...

then maybe through Ghelane, he must have been too.

If he had been in intelligence and worked for the government, the first thing he would have done is told his lawyers so that his lawyers could have used it to get an even better deal.

He was furious at the deal, the sweetheart deal.

He had to serve 18 months and get registered as a sex offender.

When I helped him get that deal, he fired me, refused to pay my legal fees, and said I was the worst lawyer he ever had because he didn't think that was a particularly good deal.

He wanted a better deal.

He didn't want to have to register as a sex offender and he didn't want to have to go to jail, but he did.

As they are saying, you know, release all the records, which I am for, release everything, open it all up.

But

I'm also torn, and it kind of goes to the theme of your book.

We are such an irresponsible people that have just checked out.

We don't ask critical questions, no critical thinking.

If we see a headline that says,

so-and-so,

on the island, they could be there as a priest, you know, you know, performing an exorcism on a tree or whatever, had nothing to do with anything.

We would all say that priest is guilty because we would not look into it.

We're too irresponsible, aren't we?

Yeah, let me give you two examples.

There's a woman whose name is Sarah Ransom, and she wrote 20 or 30 or 50 emails to the New York Post, a reporter named Maureen Callahan, saying she had videotapes, literally videotapes, of Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, Richard Branson all having sex with teenagers.

So if you release that, that sounds terrible.

But she then admitted she made up the whole story, that it was no truth to it whatsoever.

Or another woman named Maria Farmer, who has blamed everybody.

And it now turns out she's not only a complete liar, but she's a virulent anti-Semite and Holocaust denier.

Her most recent tweet says the Jews weren't killed.

They killed all the Germans.

And this is somebody who CNN puts on.

CNN has put her on three or four times without revealing what a liar she is and what an anti-Semite she is.

So the people believe her accusations.

And that's the problem.

Unless you also reveal the credibility issues of the accusers, it would be unfair just to list the people who are accused without knowing that the accusers are people with long histories of lying.

So that's why I'm in favor of everything being released.

From day one, I wanted everything released.

I've waived all my privacy rights, my legal lawyer client rights.

I want everything out there.

So the public, even though I agree with you, the public will rush to conclusions, but at least everything will be out there.

Right now, we have selective releases, which are unfair to everybody.

Ellen, always good to talk to you.

Thank you so much for everything you've done for the country over the years and for freedom and the Constitution.

Appreciate it.

God bless.

Thank you so much for having me.

You bet.

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