After Party with Emily Jashinsky - FBI Finally Investigating Brennan and Comey, with Matt Taibbi, and Why Biden's Doc is Just the Start

Episode Date: July 10, 2025

Emily Jashinsky is joined by Matt Taibbi of Racket News to talk about the breaking news on the FBI finally investigating John Brennan and James Comey, the terrible media coverage about it, X CEO Linda Yaccarino leaving and what that means about Elon Musk, and more. Then Christopher Bedford of BlazeMedia joins to discuss why Biden's "Doctor Kevin" is just the start of the investigation into Biden's cognitive decline, the real state of a MAGA civil war, and more. And Emily closes out the party with some final thoughts on why the Jeffrey Epstein story matters.Tax Network USA: Call 1-800-958-1000 or visit https://TNUSA.com to speak with a strategist for FREE todayDelta Rescue: Visit https://DeltaRescue.org to learn more Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

All right. Hi, everyone. Welcome to 10 p.m. Actually, welcome to After Party at 10 p.m. Of course, we are here Mondays and Wednesdays live 10 p.m. I'm getting into kind of a rhythm. We're several weeks into this now. But more importantly, I hope you're getting into a rhythm too. We have a great show tonight. One of my very favorites, Matt Taiibi is here. And if you've been going, if you're like an OG listener to some of the work that I've done, you will recognize the next name. That would be the one and only Christopher Bedford. Back by popular demand, really, in my podcasting portfolio, people just can't get enough of me roasting Chris Bedford from the Blaze. That's a tradition that goes back about half a decade now. So Chris Bedford from the Blaze is going to be here. Matt is going to talk about major updates. Major updates in the case of John Brennan, major updates in the case of James Comey. So Matt's going to break that down for us. Talk a little bit about Elon News.

Linda Yacarino is out as the CEO of X as of today. So we have all kinds of stuff to get into with him, and Bedford's going to break down some new updates in the Biden health case. Biden's doctor, you will probably be surprised to know. He's not super interested in talking more about what he knows. So we have all kinds of good stuff. Before we begin, though, I have to tell a little bit of a story here. My wonderful boyfriend knocked at my door about an hour ago with a mason jar full of a suspicious-looking liquid.

And it turns out the suspicious-looking liquid is actually delicious. It is a Doug Brunt margarita recipe that my boyfriend dropped off for me because Megan kindly saw my cocktail poverty the other night. And I was drinking a medallo. Love a meddalo, but I'm not good at mixing cocktails. So the recipe was passed along. The worst characteristic that I probably have, period, is that I have a strange tequila allergy. I've always taken pride in not having any allergies, no offense, people of allergies, not being one of the peanut kids as a millennial.

There were certain tables you couldn't eat your peanut butter and jelly sandwich with, sandwich at at lunch, you know, circa like 1998, so I took pride in that, but somewhere around the age of 26, just even a little bit of tequila. Doesn't go well. So this is with rum. And it's incredible. So it's like new hack unlocked. Thank you to Megan. Thank you to Doug. And of course, thank you to my wonderful boyfriend who got on his vintage motorcycle. He has a new Honda Trail 90. Zipped over and made sure that I had this in time for the show. Now, before we bring Matt in, I actually want to raise my glass of margarum margarita to our uno, margarita. We thought it. might happen, but the light behind us did actually just fall over, perfect timing. But here is, I'm going to show this on my own because I want to even zoom in. Our unofficial mascot of the show is Hakeem Jeffreys, House Minority Leader. Let me just zoom in here. It has been discovered that this man

is photoshopping hilarious pictures of himself and has been for a long time. Look at this. I mean, if you're listening, I can't, I can't do it justice. I can't possibly do it justice, but you can see the background of his pictures are bent. It's like amazing. Like anything that is solid and straight in the background of his pictures are completely bent. This is the House Minority Leader. This is the man who is supposed to have the torch pass to a new generation of Democratic leadership. Look at this.

People are analyzing the Photoshop's. He's always trying to pose like he's an absolute, like he's a, like he's a, coolest guy. He's very relatable. And the reality is that he's actually like photoshopping these pictures to make himself look amazing. And he pulled it off, right? Like this feels to me like a man that I can trust. What's the Wendy Williams quote? He is the moment. He is, I don't remember. I'll have to, I'll look it up. And we'll come back to it. We'll circle back to it at the end. But this is a true scandal that has been unfolding quietly. We didn't notice. until recently after he posted that incredible picture of himself with the baseball mat.

He became the unofficial, baseball bat, became the unofficial mascot of the show. And we couldn't be prouder to have him on board as the unofficial mascot of After Party. But on that note, enough about Hakeem Jeffries, we have Matt Taibi, editor-in-chief of Rackett, one of I think the indispensable sources in all of journalism. He's joining us now. Matt, thanks for being here. Thanks, Emily. I appreciate it.

I'm glad to be on. Yeah, it is great to have you. And on an important day, because as you reported, pretty big news on one of your signature beats, and that's FBI director Cash Patel has opened criminal investigations into John Brennan and James Comey for, as you write, quote, offenses related to the Trump-Russia scandal, colloquially known as Russiagate, the opening of criminal probes into the two of the most powerful enforcement chiefs of the Trump era marks the first steps towards consequences for the elaborate and historically unprecedented intelligence fraud that for years consumed American politics. And this follows the ICA scandal of the week before.

We're going to get into all of this because, Matt, you make it very intelligible to people who don't follow it as closely as you do. But let's just start with these investigations against Brennan and Comey. Seems like a pretty significant escalation. Tell us what's going on. So I was able to confirm. this morning that they've opened up criminal investigations at the FBI pertaining to Brennan and Comey and that those were as a result of a criminal referral from the CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who as you know last week also released an eight-page report on irregularities

with the process of creating the intelligence community assessment of 2007. But it's a significant step forward for anybody who's followed this incredibly annoying story for the last nine years because, you know, this is now the boomerang coming all the way back. You know, once upon a time everybody was waiting for indictments against Donald Trump or people in the Trump family. And now it looks like there's a realistic chance that there may be cases that end up in court against figures like James Comey and. and John Brennan, and that's good news. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the question now is actually what some of these, what some of the investigations could turn up.

And I think we have this video of, because you sent out a separate note today to racket subscribers. People should subscribe to racket, racket. That was a clip of Cash Patel on Joe Rogan. The FBI is like transferring buildings at the moment, and it's all like very bizarre. But this is Cash Patel, maybe previewing something when he was talking to Joe Rogan recently,

and we could go ahead and roll this clip and get your reaction map. We, just think about this, me as the director of the FBI, the former Russia Gate guy, when I first got to the bureau, found a room that Comey and others hid from the world in the Hoover building full of documents and computer hard drives that no one had ever seen or heard of. Lock the key and hid.

and hit access and just said, no one's ever going to find this place. What? Yeah. So my guys are going through that right now. What's in there? A lot of stuff. Matt,

this is amazing clip for a rogue. It's just in the background. I'm like, what? No, he's like Brad Pitt in true romance in that scene. It's great. I love that you had that right at the top of your mind. You're like, oh, yeah, it's Brad Pitt.

No, no, but that was an interesting thing and everybody is sort of passing that around the internet. But then as I was calling around this morning, somebody close to the one of the investigations told me like, yeah, he was actually, that was actually a slip or he did actually refer to this investigation when he was talking to Joe. So that is a true thing. It's not something that people are just saying on the internet. And it's also interesting because it brings in, there are really two parallel tracks to this investigation. I think that's one of the things that's confusing people. There was a huge investigation that was run out of the House Intelligence Committee for years. It began with, oddly enough, Cash Patel working for Devon's.

But all that stuff was housed over at Langley for years. It's been locked up there since 2018. and people haven't been able to get at it. Trump tried to declassify it. So that pile is now meeting this other new pile that the Justice Department just found, they say, in the old Hoover building by chance just because they happen to be moving out of the Hoover building.

It's so random. It's like the perfect ending to this idiotic story. I mean, it really is the only way that you ever end up getting certain classified information is that they just accidentally leave it in a room when they're moving the Uber building from the Hoover Building, because it's the greatest combination of incompetence and secrecy, and that's really the story of the FBI. Oh, totally. Yeah. No, it couldn't, there couldn't be a better resolution to this whole thing.

If there's actually damning evidence on any of those documents or hard drives that, that Cash is referring to, I mean, that that would be hilariously funny and kind of the perfect resolution to this whole thing, but we don't really know what's on there. We do have a pretty decent idea of what's on the other stuff, and that's probably going to be the predicate for, you know, these perjury slash conspiracy investigations that they're pursuing. Yeah, that's one of the things I thought you did a really good job of running down, and that's one of the questions I have for you right now is what, it's hard for me to believe that they open these investigations. Cash Patel opens these investigations, and they don't end up

charges against Brennan and Comey, particularly for perjury over whether or not the steel dossier was involved in this ICA that became big news last week because the CIA under director John Ratcliffe, who is very well regarded in the MAGO world and is close to Donald Trump, frankly, released a, Matt, what was the document formally? It was like a memo. Yeah, it was called, it had some bizarre name like tradecraft shortcomings of something something something it was a very forgettable title but you know it got kind of lukewarm reviews among hardcore russia gate followers and even among people who had conducted the original House Intelligence Committee investigation. You saw Rick Crawford from the Intel Committee talking about how the CIA was attempting

to whitewash everything that happened. He sent a letter, angry letter to Trump about that. But I think that was actually just the misunderstanding. It appears, from what I hear today, it appears that Ratcliffe, wrote that very short eight-page thing in a way that was specifically crafted to give, in a narrow way to give cash a way to open up some perjury investigations, and then everything else can come in afterwards. But that document is not the be-all, end-all of everything that they found. It's just, it's designed for utilitarian purpose.

So that's a really important point, because the big picture, zooming out of all of this, is whether or not they said the steel dossier was sort of immaterial to opening up the Trump-Russia investigation when they did, and they were passing along what's called an ICA internally. And so there's a big fight over basically whether or not they used this opposition research to target a political opponent. And then the sitting president of the United States, that's one of the most undemocratic schemes that we've seen happening. And the Peter Strzuck text message about an insurance policy basically,

tells you all you need to know about their mentality here, but I want to put two headlines up on the screen. This is F2. This is the Politico headline about the Ratcliffe memo, which said, CIA review of 2016 Russian election probe finds no major flaws, which Matt, you wrote about also, apparently I hadn't seen this, but Kendallanian, also known informally as Fusion Ken,

because of his obvious connections to Fusion GPS, which was peddling all this opposition research. He went on MSNBC and said the Ratcliffe report didn't show any, so Brennan had done any wrongdoing, let alone a crime. And you kind of fisked this. Let's put the racket headline. This is F3 up on the screen. But at the same time, there's something interesting about Politico reporting

that essentially this was a letdown, that there wasn't much in it, that it almost like didn't accuse anybody of wrongdoing, because that's kind of what the people you were talking about said. Your reporting suggests that actually it was maybe the first step into investigating perjury regarded to the Steele dossier. Is that correct? Yeah, I think that's right. But by itself, the Ratcliffe report is still pretty bad,

and it also moves the ball forward significantly. There were some things. I mean, I spent a month on this question last year in February, working with Michael Schellenberger on the question of what was in that House Intelligence Committee report and it was very similar to the WMD story essentially Brennan, Comey and the NSA when they were putting together the intelligence community assessment that came out in the first week of 2017 you have to remember that Russiagate at that point had stalled out all the various investigations had finished. There had been a story in Mother Jones.

It was David Corrin. By David Corrin suggesting the Russians had blackmail material on Donald Trump, and that didn't go anywhere. So there was nothing left. The Russia Gate was about to be kind of a non-story. And then they dropped, you know, Barack Obama commissioned this report. And the only way that they could say in the report that Russia specifically interfered to help Donald Trump was if they brought in material from the steel dossier because they didn't have a source on this. So that's how this whole thing was put together.

That's what's in the Ratcliffe report is essentially like a documentary confirmation that John Brennan overrode his internal controls. They told him that they shouldn't use this stuff, that it didn't meet even minimal standards of anything and you know he said no and there's a written thing by him saying no i think it warrants you know in consideration and that's the reason that's relevant is because he's on the record saying otherwise in testimony so there's your case right there if you want to make a perjury case yeah there's such a circling back to that video of cash pettel and rogan you also made a good point about this. And I'm curious to hear more of what you think because you know the internal machinations

of the media really well and how government tries to spin reporters and the position that it puts reporters in when they're giving newsworthy information, even if it's also clearly trying to get ahead of something or to disrupt a bad news cycle. And so the obvious connection that a lot of people have made is this is happening amidst the fallout over Jeffrey Epstein basically, the DOJ basically like closing the case on the Jeffrey Epstein investigation saying there's no more is coming from us, nothing to see here, no incriminating client list, no credible evidence of a blackmail operation. It's all very ridiculous. But then we hear that from the FBI, they're opening this long-awaited investigation into two of the major villains of the Trump era,

John Brennan and James Comey. So your point, and flesh this out for us a little bit, is that clearly this was already percolating according to your sources when Cash Patel went on Joe Rogan's So maybe is it possible that the story that I think was originally given to Fox News, the exclusive on this, was Epstein related, but the actual investigations themselves maybe weren't? Yeah. What I was told is that the investigation has been going on for months. I don't know the actual what the deal is with how the Fox story came out, but I do know that there were rumors flying all over the conservative media world this weekend that something about Russiagate much bigger than. the Ratcliffe report was about to come out. So, yeah, it's possible that's politically related, that maybe the timing on the, you know, the announcement of an investigation.

That could be related to the Epstein fallout. But there's no question that we're working on this and that they have been working on this. I mean, this is the reason that Cash Patel was named FBI director. I mean, this is the case that put him in that office. and it would be an enormous shock if they weren't working on this from day one, frankly, of his tenure there. But we know that they've been working on it for at least two months, from what I understand. The other thing I wanted to ask you is you put it well in your racket piece was just sort of about the motivations going into this.

Obviously there's anti-Trump, but like seeing the force for the trees, you write, had Russia Gate not taken place, the expansion of the drone program in the Middle East during Obama's first term likely would have been at the forefront of John Brennan's legacy. Now his role as a Trump antagonist fighting from within government and without will define how he's remembered. I think he's still frequently on MSNBC. He might even have a NBC contributor. I would have to check. Which one is it? I'm pretty sure he's like a paid contributor. He's not he's not like a full-time anything, but you know, he's got a contributor deal. That's insane. I mean, it's completely insane. And so tell us a little bit more about James Comey and John Brennan coming off of, you know,

Comey's been around for a long time. Brennan's been around for a long time. But coming off of the end of the Obama administration, as all of this stuff starts building up, what's going through their minds as best as you can tell now that we have almost 10 years in the rearview mirror? Well, it's funny because the one of the most interesting new deal, details in the Ratcliffe memo is that the FBI wouldn't sign off on the intelligence community assessment, according to Ratcliffe, unless the steel dossier was included in the final product. And that's something that none of us had ever heard before, but it makes

a lot of sense because the steel material really came through the FBI. The FBI used it in their FISA application. They were politically committed to it. And by the fall of 2016, they also already knew they had serious problems with that document, maybe even some legal exposure. So the idea that maybe Comey says to Brennan, well, if you include this thing and throw the weight of the CIA behind it, I'll sign off on your conclusion, your unsupported conclusion that Russia interfered to help Trump, because they hadn't done that previously. This is something that people forget.

The FBI had refused to say that through December 2016. So, yeah, that makes sense. And we also have to remember that there were kind of two different tracks of Russiagate beginning in 2016. There was the FBI's investigation. But also the CIA was also working on different aspects of it. And I think the ICA is where they come together and become a single kind of unified investigation. It was weirdly so, I don't even know what the best word for it is, incoherent because throughout the early days of the Trump administration, he turned out quietly to be kind of hawkish on Ukraine. And it just, I know they created that impeachment scandal over the Zelensky phone call.

it all, looking back 10 years later, as Trump is utterly frustrated with Vladimir Putin and Matt, like you know, I was going to say the Soviet Union, but you know Russian politics. You lived there. It's just crazy to me how much of this came from these old Cold War, maybe grudges, reflexes, and looking back, it's utterly bizarre what it did to our politics. I mean, the whole thing is so crazy and comic that, you know, if a screenwriter came up with it, you would throw it away. It would be a bad script. It would be unbelievable. Even some of the details, you know, Donna Brazil tweeting out, you know, we can't be having the communists dictate the terms of the debate, you know, with the big hammer and sickle and everything. the degree to which people were blending the Russia and the Soviet Union remember the cover story in New York Magazine Prump Tutin, this idea that

Trump had been recruited by the KGB back before disco or whatever it was and nobody cared that those were two different countries that the Soviet Union and Russia were not contiguous government continuous governments. It was all just based on this kind of muscle memory thing that Russia's vaguely an enemy and that they have tremendous intelligence powers. Whereas, you know, at the time,

you could say that they were good in the intelligence game, but there's no way that we can attribute turning an election to Vladimir Putin's Russia at that time anyway. I think that was absurd. But everybody bought it. So, you know, kudos to them. Those Facebook memes were just incredibly powerful. We are so weak as Americans that you can meme anything and we'll believe it. I wanted to get your take on the Linda Yaccarino news. This is F4. So she actually resigned as the CEO of X today after two years and said,

when Elon and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime. I'm immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility, protecting free speech, turning the company around, transforming X into the everything app, And it goes on to say, I'll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world. Yucarino came in and was expected, and I think was clearly at least better on the question of content moderation than what had been seen previously. It actually was an Elon ally, obviously.

And correct me if I'm wrong, Matt, but two years ago is about when Twitter file stuff started happening? Is that timeline correct? So she came in right as the Twitter files were ending. Okay. Did you have any interaction with her? Did you have an impression of her at all? I didn't. So I was being shown the door right around the time.

Linda came in and, you know, there was some criticism within the, you know, the social media world landscape, but she had been brought in to help bring ads back to the platform. by basically reinforcing some of the standards that the previous regime had done, which includes suppressing certain kinds of content that people don't want to see next to ads. So she was thought of as kind of an industry villain coming on the way in. But from what I understand, she ended up in a lot of inter-Nissign arguments with Elon, which probably isn't a surprise to anybody. And that announcement that you just read from, to me, that's just one big few, you know, like, I'm out of here.

So it's interesting. You know, this arc that Elon's on, he's become this incredibly fascinating character in American history. And he just, it's not clear whether he's fully in control of anything right now. or whether this is strategic, who knows. You never know with him. He's genuinely hard to read. Well, actually, that's kind of interesting because, again, like you were sort of, you had some contact with him throughout your reporting on the Twitter files and found him,

I think maybe the best word is to be sort of capricious. Is that right? Yeah, he was just, I mean, you always want to try to size up people who are giving you information, and try to understand what their motives are, what they want, out of the relationship, you know, whether they're doing it for altruistic reasons or whether out of self-interest or whatever. But with Elon, it was impossible to tell what he really wanted out of the Twitter files. He did say that he wanted to bring back some credibility to the platform by being open about, you know, the old practices that had gone on there.

But he would change his mind, you know, at the drop of a hat. You would be having a cheerful conversation with him in one minute and then it would turn dark in the next. And, you know, I'm someone that I pride myself in being able to try to read people. And I had no idea what was going on with him. So I'm probably not alone in that department. So as other people have said the same thing. But, you know, he is incredibly energetic.

There's no question about that. And he manages to do quite an awful lot every day. So that's fascinating. Well, yeah, it's worth mentioning as well that this happened on the heels of the absolute GROC meltdown. That, you know, as recklessly, I think, as the term anti-Semitism gets thrown around, what GROC has been doing in the last 24 to 48 hours, just like abject, anti-Semitism. I haven't even heard that.

Wild. Oh, really? So wild. Like, it's just responding to, like, people with Jewish names and saying every damn time. It's just like, oh, my gosh. Dark, dark stuff. So I wonder if your point about Yakorino being someone from the industry who wanted to bring ads back to the platform, then she's like, this is, I'll never be able to go anywhere else after Groch doing it.

after what's happening with Musk. And on that note, Matt, we have a question, our team sent along a question from Ronald Jacobs in the YouTube chat who says, Matt, what is the current state of social media censorship? Do you see a future where Google or Facebook roll back their content moderation? We've seen a bit of that. Do you think that's the sort of permanent trajectory, or is that going to flip again? I think that's what the companies would prefer to do. And, you know, We saw all the platform heads at Donald Trump's inauguration, and a lot of people were wondering, well, what's going on with that?

Why are they suddenly making this political display? And to me, the answer is pretty simple that they, we've seen with Trump's executive orders and with J.D. Vance's speeches, that the United States is putting an enormous premium on trying to throw off sort of the shackles of European sort of content standards that are imposed by laws like the Digital Services Act or the Online Safety Act in England, the Online Harm's Act. And what Mark Zuckerberg said is that we can't do anything about that stuff without the help and the backing of the United States government.

And I think they would prefer not to have to, you know, abide by all of these, foreign speech codes and even our own informal ones. But they need the United States, the backing of our government in order to stand up to those countries. So yeah, I think there is a future where that could happen. The problem is that, you know, the Trump administration hasn't been great on this issue, frankly, right? Like they're not organizing a centralized digital censorship operation the way, you know, as was being planned previously. but they haven't been great either. So, you know, we'll see.

I still have hope for it. It's a strange dichotomy of, like, Secretary Rubio, on the one hand, getting rid of the GAC, the Global Engagement Center. And then on the other, you know, the administration is pulling Ramesa Ozturk off the street for an op-ed. It's a really bizarre juxtaposition. Yeah, and using AI to scan social media postings

to make determinations about whether or not a person is, you know, they're worthy of being led into the country. It's kind of exactly the same thing we didn't want to see from, you know, old Twitter. It's algorithmic analyses and, you know, for use and shadow landing, right? So, yeah, it's weird, but it is what it is. Before I let you go, Matt, this actually reminds me. I wanted to ask you about this great piece that you wrote, I want to say it was back in May,

you wrote a piece called Ode to Scum. And I know you've gotten a lot of questions. I'm sure you've gotten a lot of text messages and DMs about this piece. But I thought it was, I mean, I remember reading it at the time and just like cheering along with it as someone on the right. I was like cheering along with it. And you said, I'm often asked, what happened to you, man?

And I laugh it off. But now I'd officially be lying if I didn't admit to maybe being affected by over-exposure to a certain kind of person. There's some dubious human categories that haven't spent time around, child traffickers, makers of computer viruses, torturers, necrophiles, uh, zuno necrophiles. What the fuck is that? It's a zumo necrophiles.

Sleep with dead animals. Okay. You know. It's a joke. You learn something new every day. Really, you do. I'm sure there are others. For my money, though, there's no more shocking and shamelessly repulsive animal than the righteous progressive particularly ones in media. And this actually goes right back to the censorship question.

It's like there's been so much talk about a vibe shift. Matt, I was just at the Aspen Ideas Festival for like a week. I'm telling you, the millennials, people my age, there were a lot of pronouns. There were a lot of, there was a lot of sort of therapeutic talk and rhetoric. A lot of the stuff that we saw in 2020 that we found objectionable, it seems like to me it's still happening. And you probably get the brunt of that.

I don't know, tell us more. Yeah, I mean, I worry about that because you see all of these poll results talking about people under a certain age category. There's a sizable percentage of Americans who believes there should be laws against hate speech, which, you know, has traditionally never been against the law in the United States. There are people who misunderstand what the First Amendment allows, what it doesn't allow. And I think, you know, people, young people in America are moving more in the direction of a kind of a European understanding of speech where there's a harm standard that outweighs the individual freedom standard. To me, that's troubling because that's what's always distinguished the American system from everybody else's, is that ours is based, you know, on this idea of inviolable, inherent human rights. But young people now, I mean, maybe it's not young people, but maybe it's just people

of a certain political bent. They don't have a whole lot of patience for a certain kind of speech and they, and I think they're trying to achieve, for instance, on the issue of Israel, I think they think, hey, if censorship gets it done, we're for it. And you know, that's very troubling. It's like this short-term thinking. And it's what we saw in 2020 after the George Floyd riots when everybody was just in a mania to stamp out speech they didn't like and, and, you know, fire people for harm or, you know,

for, remember how people lost their jobs just for co-signing the Harper's letter with J.K. Rowling, right? That kind of thing is kind of coming, sort of coming back into Vogue. And I thought it was dead. And, you know, it's like Friday the 13th, I guess he's coming back out of COVID. Camp Crystal Lake again. So, yeah, it's back. And it's too bad. But, you know, we'll have to see how far it goes.

But my worry, though, is that the numbers, the demographics are so overwhelming with people under a certain age group on this issue that people like you and me, I think our views are going to be considered anachronistic fairly soon. Well, that sucks. Right? Isn't it? Yeah. I hope not, but maybe.

Well, no, it's a good point because there's no real baseline for Gen Z of the prior ethos, right? Of the anti-defamation league, like literally defending Nazis, which I heard the executive of the ADL talking about at Aspen very proudly that they do that. But does it seem like that's what Chase Strangio wants to do? No, yeah. I think the old Ira Glasser model has been switched out for the Chase Strangio model. And look, they would say it's just a different way of trying to get at the same end, but I think it's short-sighted and they'll find that out. And one of the things I warned about when I testified in Congress about this issue

was that, hey, if you're okay with these tools, you have to be willing to let some other political entity used them. And, you know, now we see all these people complaining about First Amendment violations by the Trump administration. I feel like saying to them, yeah, that's why you got to stand up for this stuff all the time, right? But, you know, it is what it is. So we'll see. Matt Taibi, thanks for staying up late, hanging out with us, and thanks for everything you're doing at Rackett. No, likewise. Thank you, Emily, and good luck with the show. Thanks. Appreciate it. We'll stand by everyone. We have Christopher Bedford.

waiting. I've kept him waiting and I have zero shame about keeping him waiting. So I just want to say, if you are stressed about back taxes, speaking of waiting, maybe you missed the April deadline or your books are a mess. Do not wait. The IRS is cracking down. Penalties add up fast, 5% a month, up to 25% just for not filing. But there's help. Tax Network USA can take the burden and off your shoulders and stop the spiral before it gets worse. They have helped thousands of Americans, whether you're an employee, a small business owner, or haven't filed in years. Messy books, no problem.

They've seen it all and know exactly how to clean it up. I bet Chris Bifford is the type of guy with messy books. We'll ask him when he comes in. With direct access to powerful IRS programs and expert negotiators on your side, Tax Network USA knows how to win. You'll get a free consultation. And if you qualify, they may even be able to reduce or eliminate what you owe. more importantly, they'll help protect you from wage garnishments or bank levies.

So don't wait for the next IRS letter. Call 800958-8-1,000, or visit tnusa.com to talk to a real expert at Tax Network USA. Take the pressure off, let Tax Network USA handle your tax issues. We are joined now. I see him waiting with his head in his hands. He's so sleepy by Chris Bedford, Senior Politics Editor for Blaze News, and author of the Beltway Brief on Theblaze.com. Chris, how bad are your books?

You have messy books, back taxes? No, I don't have, well, I filed for an extension. I actually had my stuff together. Everything was together, and then my accountant got sick. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then your dog ate your tax filing. Well, by the time my accountant logged back on, I was like, oh, we got, anyways, I had some technical questions.

I thought were easy. They were not easy. So everything is filed. Every document's been gathered. But I have to go through my year of credit card statements to find out what was a business expense and what wasn't. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Every year, you know, you just pour yourself a whiskey and you just go through that paper. So I actually want to ask you about this because Megan and her wonderful husband, Doug, had like a cocktail recipe passed on to me today.

and you know about my late in life tequila allergy. It's very sad. This is a margarita where the tequila was substituted for rum, and it's incredible. Chris was a longtime bartender. He makes the best drinks of anybody that I know, and that's St. Alexin from Wisconsin. And this is really good, Chris.

Like the margarine with rum in it is fantastic. You know, a margarita with rum in it, you basically add a little bit of orgia in a bitters, and you've got yourself a mitre. I mean, you got the orange liqueur, you've got the lime for that, that citrus. The margarita's got a little bit of sugar in there as well.

You got rum. You add some bitters? I mean, my Thai recipe is one part rum, half part orgiat, which is like an almond syrup, half part orange liqueur, squeeze of lime, dash of bitters, one part rum, one part rum. A lot of rum. Yeah, I mean, rum is great. Cheers. There's nothing around with that.

Oh, you have the teaky mug. I have the Steve Bannon teaky mug. That's the Steve Bannon teaky mug. Like shrunken head. Can you just tell us the story of why you have a Steve Bannon Tiki mug? Because I think it goes back to Tucker. Is it a Tucker thing? No, it goes way back to this Capitol Hill bar. They used to throw Tiki parties once a year around the elections. And they would release commemorative mugs. But the time I got there trying to find some Tiki glasses, I think probably for one of our bartending videos back in the day,

they were sold out of everyone except for the Steve Bannon one and the Obama one, which I didn't understand at the time because Obama had left office, but he was still popular. I have since realized why. It's this cool-looking, teaky, like, totem pole thing. And I told somebody once, hey, this is an Obama mug. And she thought I was making, like, a crude, racist joke. You wouldn't, no, you wouldn't do that. Yeah, I know. My mind is so pure, like, fresh-fallen. I didn't even know why she would think that. But because of that, they carved this dancing guy in the back with a VP hat, which would be Joe Biden, just to show that it was, It was in fact Obama. And I insisted.

And she's like, it was basically like somebody insisting that their racist joke was not racist to her. And it kept on getting worse. Yeah, you didn't win that conversation. There was no one. She had made a judgment call. She had moved on. Yeah. She probably wasn't wrong in the big picture.

Chris, actually, yeah, people can go back and watch our cocktail videos. They're all on like the federalist YouTube. But yeah, you would mix cocktails. There's a good Christmas one, actually. Maybe we should re-up that come Christmas time. And a great margarita one. That really offended a lot of people. No surprise there.

So I think you're offended by this. I think a lot of people are offended by this. Let's bring in this is F8. This is Joe Biden's former doctor, refusing to answer questions. Dr. Kevin. Maybe I should just have you explain this story. But yeah, he's pleading the fifth. Dr. Kevin O'Connor will respectfully decline

to answer any questions that might be posed to him by this congressional committee. This news broke today, Chris, and our friend Rachel Beauvard posted on X, his classic Bovard, hold him in contempt and then straight to jail, the Navarro Bannon standard. That's the standard. The Liz Cheney Democrat set,

and no one is above the law. Was that shrill enough? Was that enough righteous indignation? That's classic, Rachel. She's got high speed and then super high speed. We love her. Fantastic. I call her all the time when I need to sound smart about something.

But I actually wouldn't hold Dr. Kev in contempt so quickly. I mean, I would keep that card ready to go. But, I mean, what are we trying to do here? We're trying to prove that soupy-brained president was, in fact, soupy-brained at the time. Dr. Kevin, he's like the mob doctor. You don't, who cares? You don't need to arrest the mob doctor. He's like, you took care of.

What I want to know is, which gunshot wounds are you taken care of? Which bosses were you covering up for? Who was, who was criminally misusing the president? So, like, I would actually make them all kind of sweet promises. Like, hey, listen, we promised you complete immunity. We promised you that we're going to have immunity. from ethics boards. We're going to try to figure out how to do that. I've never done that before. You've never behaved ethically is what you mean. Oh, I'm always ethical. It's not always moral.

Ethics is my favorite class. The only class I probably liked in college, it gets dark real fast. Anyways, I would make him all kinds of promises. Like, listen, you're safe, Doc. You're safe with me. I'm not after you, but I am after people who you worked for. I mean, was he calling the shots? Absolutely not. He was, he's pleading the fifth because of self-incrimination. That's not a really good look for a doctor in general. But he's not the one I'd be after. I'd be going after people who are higher up in the administration who signed off.

And that's how you do it. You can't just put, you could put the mob enforcers and the mob doctors in prison all day long, but you really want to go for the kingpins. Hmm. But ultimately, you wouldn't be opposed to the Bovard standard here, which is saying, hold them in contempt, and then straight to jail because that's what Liz Cheney and the Democrats did. They did.

And in order to sort of get out of this doom spiral. And this is a controversial argument, by the way, even on the right. But in order to escape the doom spiral, yeah, okay. In order to escape the doom spiral, you have to fight fire with fire. That's the only way. That's literally the only way. It's peace through strength. And I'm so happy that this administration, the Republican mindset has shifted so dramatically

because there are a lot of different Republican presidents in the past who would have come in and said, we're going to take the higher road. We're going to be holier than now. You take the high road. I'll take the high road. You burn my village down. And this administration doesn't act like that. That's not what they're about.

They're going to go in there. And we've had a rough week for administration watchers in some ways. But there's also, this is a serious administration, much more serious than the first one. All the people are in place. mostly the right people on board, the efficiency, the willingness to move together as a team. I mean, look at that strike on Iran. You know for a fact that there are people, high-ranking people in that cabinet who didn't agree with that strike. There was no leaks to the New York Times. There was no leaks to Washington Post. There's no anonymous letter written.

There's been all kinds of leaks about Bridge Colby in the last couple of days in Ukraine. Yeah, well, he's in trouble inside the Pentagon. But I mean, in the White House itself, the Pentagon's got more leaks in the Iraqi Navy, and they don't like Elvers Colby. But within the White House itself, it was a unified team moving in one direction. And that is an important thing to have on foreign policies. It's an important thing to have in domestic policy. Once you leave those discussions at Camp David, you move together as one team. So, I mean, I would threaten them. Absolutely. That's the only way that, hey, I'll cut you a break. But would you do it? Threatening is one thing. Would you do it and put him in jail? If he refused to cooperate.

right if he's a dead end witness but the whole point of this is to flip him to make him scared to make him say i could lose my license to make him say i could lose my freedom and then say actually don't worry have i got a deal for you doc have i got a deal for you let's sit down let's talk about this let's talk about the people who made you die because i know you didn't want to do this i know you're a good guy somebody made you do this and i want to get that guy you know he's a bad guy Or woman. Probably a woman. Yeah. Well, wait a second. He's a Democrat for talking about, Emily.

Yeah. Are you saying that this doctor may have perhaps been beholden to a higher doctor? Someone who could have been our surgeon general, Dr. Gil Biden. Yeah, thank you for using her proper address as well. It's sexist not to, frankly. Well, guilty, I guess. So this is, to just put a point on this, one of the things O'Connor says he doesn't want to do is reveal confidential patient information. The committee doesn't necessarily, for what it's worth, need to get him to reveal or to like break doctor patient confidentiality.

There are all kinds of questions that are on the periphery of the actual doctor-patient relationship that could be useful. to get Dr. Kevin on the record about from the House Oversight Committee. On that note, Chris, though, you were just going in this direction of something you'd written about recently, and you read a great newsletter. It's called The Beltway Brief. You can get to that on blaze.com. Slash Bedford. Slash Bedford. Right there.

What a ridiculous URL. But you can get it there. And Chris is F9. You wrote a piece that was headlined. Rumors of a Maga Civil War are just with. full thinking. And for the sake of having a little bit of fun here, I wanted to raise you, raise you, I see your headline, and I raise you one, Nick Fuentes talking to Alex Jones. This is S5. Well, the reason I think it's over, and I'm just done with him, is because he's really

betrayed us on a lot of the key issues already. I mean, this is the first six months of the second term. And the big question, which was hanging over people like you and me, and by that, I mean, people that are paying attention, we knew the problem from the first term is that he had bad personnel. And that's a fair problem to have. He's an outsider. He's inexperienced. He relied on Ryan's prebis and Paul Ryan and these other people to basically run his first term. And it was a disaster. So Fuentes, who of course openly refers to himself as a racist at this point. That's not the... I think that's been his deal for a while.

He told Candace Owens recently that he used to refer to himself as a racialist, but now he just calls himself a racist. Those are the creepy ones. Yeah. I mean, I grew up in Boston. Like, I don't really... I'm used to people just having dislike for, like, other types of white people. Like, it's pretty standard.

But the racialist means you're... Yeah, no, I've experienced that. And that's weird. You're like, your last name is Jashinsky? Where would you say that comes from? Let me measure the circumference of... your skull. Yeah.

Like, that's what racialists do. They're creepy. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Grandpa's racist, you know. So I'm saying, all that is to say, Fentes is a representative of the MAGA base, of course, all of that is worth saying. But give us your argument amidst the serious fractures over the one big beautiful bill that

was ultimately passed and everybody is like eagerly touting it and has been over the course of the last week, big signing ceremony and, you know, as much, as many like bitter pills as people were forced to swallow in like house freedom caucus and also lisa markowski it's a strange coalition now there's furor and uproar over the geoffrey epstein stuff there's anger over the ukraine stuff that we just mentioned bridge colby wanted to focus more on china um and people are inside the administration leaking to nbc and all of those different places about uh how terrible bridge is because he has a smart strategy and all of that so chris it it's seems like there is a mega civil war, but you say there's not. So make the case.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of excitement, too. And first of all, I'm not angry at you for platforming 20, but I am angry at you because now I know what he sounds like. And it sounds exactly like what I thought. I mean, there's not a lot of-breathing dude from, yeah. There's not a lot of alpha energy there. There's something that's kind of creepy, like makes you move down away from the bar, even if he's just sitting there talking about puppies and flower petals. It's like, yeah, this guy's weird. I would say especially if he's a bar talking about puppies and flower petals, man. Yeah, I guess that's probably not what the kids talk about these days.

A lot of your client tell. Talk about that. Talking about skull sizes. Yeah. But so this is a blip, I think. The Epstein thing is something that is an obsessive matter for a lot of folks. At the end of the day, you kind of have to step back and look at this and say, well, what were we hoping for, what we're expecting?

I know what some people were hoping for, which was the untangling of a great web of extremely powerful people. So the question is, I don't know if the DOJ was incredibly stupid and incompetent on this matter and talked a big game that they were unable to live or if they got in over their skis and above their pay grade. And it matters that they're actually not really allowed to expose and it's not worth it to put Bill Clinton in prison at this age or a disgrace British royal in prison at this age. It's not worth unraveling operations run by different people who may or may not be from. and allies or even internal. But my point with this piece is that the big, beautiful bill is one of the more consequential pieces of Republican legislation in my lifetime.

This is the delivery of the ability to deliver President Trump's promises. We're just over 10 years from when he promised to build that big, beautiful wall. And while Mexico hasn't quite paid for it, they have, it's going to be finished by the end of his term because of the money that was the money. delivered here. Forty-six or 47 billion dollars for internal immigration deportations and policing. That's massive. That's not just money for the border, which is secure right now with the help of the military and the Customs and Border Patrol in local police. But this is empowering local police agencies, state police agencies, and federal police agencies to actually go after illegal immigration

within the homeland and go at people who are honestly have taken over different neighborhoods. There are dangerous neighborhoods that are no longer recognizable by some of the residents who may be legal immigrants from that same country, but the kind of people that the United States let in legally because they don't have MS-13 tattooed or symbols for it on their body. They trump tax cuts. I actually think your tattoos would be flagged if you were coming. If you were like coming from Ireland, someone would be like, no. No, we're not letting that guy.

Absolutely not. Is that a gang tattoo? Straight to Sikot. Straight to Buckele. My tattoos didn't go over well in Central America either because having a tattoo in some of these more rural communities basically means you're in a gang. Like you don't just get one because you're 18 or 19. It's stupid.

You have them because you're dangerous as well. So people thought I was like, I also walked a dog on a leash when I was down there. So people thought like this guy's an eccentric, violent gang member who was seven inches taller than all of us. The tax cuts are going to be crucial. The jumpstart to the economy, the actual administration that is now really hell-bent on protecting American industries, renegotiating trade deals, and reshoring the American economy. That tax write off, I think I was with you when we found out about it for building industrial infrastructure inside of this country. You can write off 100% of that on your taxes.

That's incredible. So these things that seem like a huge massive explosion are not actually. actually, and even the Ukraine thing. I think that's really fundamentally misunderstood by a lot of folks. Now, I don't think that we're going to get peace in Ukraine any day now. I think that Vladimir Putin knows that the American administration lasts somewhere between four to eight to maybe 12 years before there's a change in policy, and he's outlasted numerous presidents in his time. He's also not going to just walk away from territory that it looks like they're getting in, aren't really in a big risk of losing. However, the mistake that Elbridge made and the mistake that Hegeseth made,

aside from not simply checking with the White House, was they assumed, I think correctly, that President Trump's against the Ukraine war, he wants peace, but they forgot that his overriding and overwhelming aspect of his philosophy and his personality is sealing a deal. And when Putin is embarrassing him and making him look like a jerk and refusing to negotiate, there's no way in hell he's reducing leverage on the guy. He's not going to walk away from that. This is not the way he operates. It's not the way he deals.

So maybe this is more personal. I don't think it's a massive break with actually the kind of foreign policy that he has conducted or that he has advertised over the years as Donald Trump. A lot of people like to paint things onto him. They like to, and this is what makes a powerful leader, a powerful leader. They paint their own ideas, philosophies, and dreams onto strong men or powerful. whether it's Barack Obama or whether it's Donald Trump. And they feel like when their personal desires have been betrayed, that he has betrayed them.

But there's no shift in the loyalty on Capitol Hill. In fact, I would say that Capitol Hill loves war. So this is actually a good thing for them. There's no, I don't think there's any discern. There's some bewilderment. But there's not a massive shift amongst the American base, the Trump voting base, over this sort of thing. It's not like there's really an actual 80% of this country that's in the middle that's maybe was true at some point in fantasy land history, but it's certainly not true right now.

There's no, so these things that, they're palace drama, but they're also a symptom of our success as an American people, which is that the Trump administration is their enemies in the deep state, in the intelligence apparatus, in the media, and their actual political enemies across the aisle from them, the Democrats, are completely on the back foot. There's not a siege mentality right now, either inside the administration or outside like there was in the first administration. So when you've got that sort of success and when you've got these things, you're going to have more party swabbles. You're going to have more fights over, well, how true is this to what we're here to do? How true is that? So there's no risk of a breakup.

There's no risk of people actually, I think the Iran war actually caused more trouble than this for the administration. And it's all completely overblown. And I think it'll be greatly overshadowed by the successes of this administration with the money they now have and the powers that they now have. So when voters get there in November and when voters get there two years from November to the booth, these issues are not going to be something that's a threat to the coalition. That's wishful thinking by its enemies. Yeah, and there's a distinction between the MAGA coalition in D.C. and the MAGA coalition among the electorate. So I think that's a-

Yeah, we don't have four-wheelers here. Actually, we do, but not the MAGA coalition. I was going to say. So let me- There's only one boat in D.C. That's a MAGA boat, and I love it. Yes. Yes.

It's a hell of a boat. Maybe we'll have Corian soon, actually, talk about his MAGABO. That's you go go follow Corey and Gannamort on Instagram to see his various exploits with riding around the Potomac River through some of the most high traffic areas full of D.C. locals. He has a flag up right now that has Tom Homan's face on it and says Ice Ice Baby. And it just is. I don't even know where he gets this merchandise, but it's amazing. Probably makes it. But anyway, Chris, before you run, as you sip out of your abandoned mug, what do you drink in a night, by the way?

I'm drinking my tie. Oh, okay. I'm in a Paradise Island mood, Jashinsky. I don't watch that Bravo. That's right. Yeah, he watches the battler, not Bravo. But let me get your, you're a gentleman, and probably had something to do with the Daily Caller having for a long time. It's men's fashion correspondent be Roger Stone.

Take a look at here at House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who I think maybe is the, he is the, he is the. the iconic American right now. He is the man onto which we are all projecting our hopes and dreams. He appears to have been caught in a very minor photoshopping scandal that people shouldn't be paying much attention to this. They should be paying more attention to the outfits. He's putting together and the just air of relatability and casualness that he projects when he poses on train tracks. So, Chris, let me get... I don't think that's the Kim Jeffers. What do you think it is? Who is that?

That's pretty sure it's a game driveries. Really? Raid his outfit. That's what I was going to ask you. Obviously, you're from Boston, so you're not going to like the Yankees drip, but how becoming is it of a house minority leader to be straight reping the Yankees on a train track and sweats, I guess? I don't know.

I guess you kind of have to. I guess that's cool. I mean, if you want to be the house minority leader who takes pictures like you'd put them on a CD, you tried to sell me for $5. dollars outside a convenience store. It's a very not cool look. I think I accidentally took better band photos in college spring break. That is what it looks like.

You're right. It's like when we all had flip phones. It's giving battle of the bands. And the sleeves are too long and baggy. And did he Photoshop that one too? Yeah, you can see. Actually, here, I mean, I'm all about this. I'll go ahead and pull it back up again.

You can see in the background here, and I'm just going to go full screen for the heck of it on this one. you can see how the rails are bent. Yeah. Yeah. And he did that also with the park bench to make it look like his hips weren't quite as wide as they were. Which, you know, the most embarrassing aspect of this is a dude photoshopping his hips. It's like more embarrassing than just rock it in your mom bod.

You've not done that? It's totally, no, I don't know how to. And I don't know if you follow this, but I'm a fitness influencer now. don't need to do that anymore. I heard that from Laura Ingram. She's on my fitness journey with me. Did she refer to you as a linebacker? Yeah. Like on national television? It was one of the, it was one of the nicest things that anyone has ever said to me, especially you. But the next thing you've said to me is reminding me. Yeah, no, you're right. Oh, an influencer. What can I say? Grading on a curve. Yeah, follow Chris for more fitness tips.

Yeah, he'll have all of them. They won't stop coming. Bedford, this has been wonderful. We haven't had a chance to do one of these podcasts in like a year. So it was a great opportunity to chat. Appreciate it. I hope to come back in time for Festivus. Yes. Of course.

The airing of grievances. Yeah. Whatever it takes to do a Festivus episode, we'll make it happen. We'll make it happen. Well, thanks for having me, Dysinski. And congratulations on your success with this awesome new show. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

Now go to bed. Good night. All right. tonight, man. Let me tell you a story about a guy named Leo Grillo. While on a road trip, Leo came across a Doberman and this dog was severely underweight and clearly in trouble. Leo rescued that Doberman and named him Delta. So cute. Sadly, Delta was just one of many animals that needed help, which inspired Leo to start Delta rescue. The largest no-kill care for life to animal sanctuary in the world, they've rescued thousands of dogs, cats, and horses from the

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So please visit deltarescue.org today to learn more. That is deltarescue.org. Now, before we wrap up, I wanted to go back for a moment to the Epstein story because both Ben Shapiro and the president himself have had thoughts that I think are worth, just since we covered this with Megan the other night, going into, given that this is very important. and the question of how it matters compared to other stories is still relevant, right? You know, a story can be important and can be not the most important thing in the world to everybody

at any given time. People still have kitchen table concerns, obviously, and still have concerns about the cost of living and all of that. And we're going to get into it for a moment. So let's first take a look here at Donald Trump in a cabinet. meeting, which they now routinely bring reporters into and take questions in front of the whole cabinet. So Trump is actually flanked here by, I think Marco Rubio and Pam Bondi is sitting very close as well and answered some questions about this as well. So let's go ahead and listen here to Donald Trump. Your memo and release yesterday in Jeffrey Epstein, it left some lingering

mysteries. One of the biggest ones is whether he ever worked for a American performance. foreign intelligence agency, the former labor secretary who was Miami U.S. Attorney, Alex Costa, he allegedly said that he did work for intelligence agency. So could you resolve whether or not he did? And also, could you say why there was a minute this thing from the jailhouse tape on the end of Yeah, sure. If I have, did I just interrupt a little second? Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years. You're asking, we have Texas, we have this, we have All of the things. And are people still talking about this guy, this creep?

That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time? And do you feel like answering? I don't mind answering. I mean, I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this where we're having some of the greatest success. So I'm actually going to stop it there because the news from the FBI, as much as, you know, the cliche saying that,

you don't hate the media enough is often true. In this case, the FBI put out its own statement, its own memo. It was leaked actually to the quote-unquote mainstream media, but to the corporate press, to Axios in the Sunday night news dump, in which they basically said, we were closing the Epstein case, don't think any further disclosures would be warranted, and frankly, didn't find any incriminating evidence of a blackmail scheme, and didn't find any incriminating client list.

It was credible evidence of a blackmail scheme. They said they didn't find an incriminating client list. So there's a very legitimate reason to be asking that question to the president of the United States. And particularly to his attorney general, who was the person who made the decision to obviously close the case. I think her name was literally on the memo. So on that note, got to just had to stop. Here's the rest of Trump's comments. And also tragedy with what happened in Texas.

It just seems like a desecration, but you go ahead. So Ben Shapiro, who should be noted, is allergic to conspiracy theories. He is a, I think he has a helpful skepticism about a lot of different things. And I'm working out to pull this clip up, as you can see. He says basically that most Americans, don't care. Here it is. I'll just, I'll let Ben say this so that I don't end up paraphrasing him. And he says, guys, don't we have better things to do?

You can understand his irritation. The man is trying to negotiate an end to a war in the Gaza Strip. He's trying to negotiate an end to a war in Ukraine. He's attempting to revivify the American economy. He's attempting to crack down on any legal immigration. On a list of American priorities by the polls, the Epstein-Maxwell case comes in pretty close to zero, just on a list of priorities. However, when President Trump speaks for the American people more generally, and he says,

guys, don't we have better things to do? You can understand his irritation. The man is trying to negotiate an end to a war in the Gaza Strip. He's trying to negotiate an end to a war in Ukraine. He's attempting to revivify the American economy. He's attempting to crack down on illegal immigration. So I just want to say, I just completely disagree with Ben on the point that you can understand the president's frustration because this was the concept of like restoring transparency,

especially as it relates to places like the CIA and the FBI was an important element of Trumpism. And I think that on the other hand, Ben is absolutely correct. This is not a kitchen table issue for most voters. It is not urgent enough that it is, and this isn't everybody, for most people, whether you think it's right or wrong, it is not what drives them to the polls, and it is not what determines if they vote R or D or independent in any given election. People vote based on, we've talked about this over the last few weeks because there's on mom-doney. They vote based often on their immediate economic interests or their families, immediate, urgent interests. And it's not everyone again, but I think Ben is correct.

that most people aren't sort of spending their time like I do in the online fever swamps, picking apart every little detail and trying to peel back every layer of the Epstein onion to get to the truth. At the same time, it is a non-inconsequential part of people who care deeply about this because, one, now the FBI is saying thousands of people were victimized by Epstein. Ken Klippenstein actually put in a comment request. with the FBI and said, why is this suddenly a number in the memo they released suddenly on Sunday? Why is this number suddenly so much higher? We've heard dozens from the FBI in the past

that Epstein had dozens of victims. And now we see that number is thousands in this memo. What happened? And the FBI didn't give any answer that shed light on the question. So there's a lot going on here. The potentially thousands of victims of a very serious crime by a man who has immense connections to very powerful people and could frankly still be influencing our foreign policy one way or the other, whether it's in Russia, whether it's in Israel. We don't know. I'm not saying either of those things are true.

But the credible allegation here, we talked on Monday night about how Vicki Ward said she had four sources on the record that said Epstein belonged to intelligence. You have a former U.S. attorney in Miami and Labor Secretary under Trump, who said he was told. to go easy on EPS him because he belonged to intelligence. These are not crazy people throwing this stuff out there. These are serious accusations. And when somebody that powerful is so many powerful connections potentially belongs to

intelligence, what's the reason for that? Well, it's to control them. And I would commend to everybody, my colleague Sager and Jetty's conversation about this with Tucker Carlson on his podcast just in the last couple of days because I think they went through how this could be affecting our foreign policy very effectively. But it's not a crazy thing for people in the MAGA coalition who saw, as we talked about with Taibi earlier, how the FBI and the CIA weaponized their surveillance powers.

How, for example, they didn't follow. They lied on a FISA application for an intelligence surveillance act. Or something that came during the church, after the church committee as a reform that was not sufficient in this case to hold back the nefarious behavior of our intelligence community. That's why people in the MAGA coalition care about this issue. So I disagree with Ben that it's understandable. That Trump's frustration here is understandable. I think he said openly that he would look into all of this and be transparent about all of this. And the people he appointed to these

positions said that they would do the same. Pam Bondi in particular he should be very upset with. So, yeah, I think it's well worth keeping an eye on the story not merely for the palace intrigue and that it could very well be something that pulls the coalition more permanently apart, but because also it does matter to people. And it goes to this question of trust and character that, you know, of people who are saying, you can't trust anyone else. So trust me. You can't trust the Jeb Bush Republican Party, and you can't trust the Hillary Clinton Democratic Party,

so trust me, who are then engaged potentially in another cover-up. So it's not an immediate kitchen table issue. I get that. I think Ben's right about that. And I think it's an important point for people who are capital T, capital O, to online like myself, to keep in mind. on the other hand it's not also something people

have zero concerns about I saw someone post and forget who it was that they don't have anybody they don't know any like real person who's not you know super online who really cares about this issue and I just don't think that's true I don't believe that at all

maybe you can comment and send emails as always I'm Emily at devil makearemedia dot com at Emily at devilmaycaremedia.com I think I've responded to almost every single one of your emails. I do read them. I do appreciate them. So if you disagree, let me know.

But I think this is something that absolutely resonates in a time of just cratering institutional trust. It is not only a serious issue on and of itself, but it's also a symbol of this transpartisan untrustworthiness that if you're, I'm not done Ziam. But if you're Gen Z and you grew up after 9-11 and you were born into the Great Recession era and then spit out into the Russia Gate era and then spit out from that into the COVID era. My goodness, you just have grown up in a very different country than every generation before you. So that's why I think this resonates. And we'll keep talking about it here, of course. So make sure you're tuning in Mondays and Wednesdays. I hate ending the Wednesday shows now because I know there are so many days until,

the next show on Monday. We're here Mondays and Wednesdays live at 10 p.m. We are so grateful to everybody in the audience. Make sure that you're subscribing. It helps a ton and make sure you're ready to watch live at 10 p.m. Mondays and Wednesdays. Thank you and we will be back with more on Monday.