Breaking News from Pod Save America - BOMBSHELL REPORT: Trump NAMED in Epstein Files

Episode Date: July 23, 2025

Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau discuss the new report from the Wall Street Journal that Trump was told by Pam Bondi that his name is in fact in the Epstein Files. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, John, we have some massive breaking news. The Wall Street Journal just reported that in May, Donald Trump was told by Attorney General Pam Bondi that his name is in the Epstein files. I can tell you... Obviously. Obviously. The story says there were, quote,

many other high-profile figures in there as well. Bondi reportedly told Trump that the files contained hundreds of other names, but that in the meeting, DOJ told Trump that they didn't plan to release any more documents related to the investigation because the material contained sexually explicit images of children and personal information about the victims. Holy shit. So it turns out the cover up was for exactly the reason you'd most expect. Trump is covering his own ass.

And DOJ saying, therefore, they won't release any files, makes no sense. Like, obviously you don't put out explicit images of children or their identities, but there are more than 300 gigabytes of material in the Epstein files. Why suppress all of it? Maybe someone powerful told you to? Every step they have taken since we first heard about this makes total sense. And at the time, if you read between the lines, remember, we talked about this in the initial statement from the, from the Justice Department, when it was like, well, there's no credible

information, there's no incriminating client list, right? Like, they were very carefully worded to be technically true. But obviously omitting the fact that even if there wasn't an incriminating client list, the fucking president's name. and many other names are in there, and even if they don't want to release sexually explicit images, that does not prevent them from releasing a bunch of names. That has nothing to do with sexually explicit images.

This, I also jumped out of me from the story. The journal says, quote, FBI director Cash Patel has privately told other government officials that Trump's name appeared in the files, according to people close to the administration. Now we know who Elon Musk's source was when he tweeted Trump is in the Epstein files. Now we know why fucking Dan Bongino had to take a mental health day. Several.

Because he probably knew that too, and he's like, what is he, what's he going to do? And like, so, you know, Stephen Chung, I think the White House Communications Director is like screaming at the journal denying the story. But in a statement to the journal on Friday, Bondi and the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said nothing in the files warranted further investigation or prosecution. And quote, as part of our routine briefing, we made the president aware of the findings, they said. So clearly they're confirming that they briefed Trump on this case. also Trump was asked like directly did she tell you that your name was in the files

did she brief you on the files specifically did she tell you that your name appeared in the files ABC asked Trump on July 15th no no she's given us just a very quick briefing he said unbelievable so he lied unbelievable and also the grand jury testimony thing makes sense because probably

Trump's name didn't appear in the grand jury testimony because they were just talking about witnesses and the traveling so he knew that By the way, a judge just denied DOJ's request to release the grand jury transcripts, which I'm sure DOJ assumed they would do because grand jury transcripts are under seal for a reason. Again, those are separate than the 300 gigabytes of information that they have that aren't the grand jury transcript. So that was just, so I hope the base understands. Not only did they not want you to know it was in the files, they fucking lied to you. The whole thing has been a fucking plot to keep this from you.

They're all in on it. They all know what they're in on it. Ash Patel, Dan Bongino, J.D. Vance, every single one of these officials who sold you this lie that Trump was going to come into office and release the Epstein files. They are now lying to your face and they know it. Yep. Okay. So we're recording this like minutes after this journal story came out. But this story comes as Trump and the Republican Party is so desperate to change the subject from Epstein to anything else.

It has reached a truly authoritarian fever pitch. So earlier today, the White House trotted out the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to the press briefing room to once again accuse Barack Obama of treason. It's a pretty big gun to wield out. And then on Tuesday, John, so yesterday, Speaker Johnson sent members of Congress home for the summer early because he was so desperate to avoid a vote on releasing the Epstein files. We've literally never seen anything like this. Literally shut down Congress. Shut down Congress. Literally like running out of town.

For weeks. Left town just to avoid. a vote that he knew he would lose because enough Republicans would have said, yes, we want the files. A few of them have a conscience. We're going to get into all of this, but first, here's a clip from that bizarre Tulsi Gabbard press conference today. Let's watch. It's a brief summary of the details that you'll find within the House Majority Staff's report in their investigation into the Obama directed January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment that leads us to the very same conclusion that we announced in the release of our documents on Friday. The implications of this are far-reaching and have to do with the integrity of our Democratic Republic. It has to do with an outgoing president taking action to manufacture intelligence to undermine and usurp the will of the American people in that election and launch what would be a year's long coup against the incoming President of the United States, Donald Trump. Thank you.

Love a good monotone fascist there. The thing about a coup, can it be years long? Doesn't it be years long? And I guess Obama just seeded the coup and then he left then he like left office. Can you do a coup if the guy you're cooing is governing for four years? Anyway, do you want to unpack why this is such bullshit? Yeah. Honestly, though, now that this this Wall Street Journal story hit, it's like, it's just so obvious what they were trying to do here.

And they had to, you know, it's not just, first it was John Brennan is doing this and this. And then Trump himself has like, you know, people keep talking about other people. It was Obama. It was Obama, and it wasn't just Obama doing something wrong. It was Obama treason because he has to up the ante in order to get the headlines to change. We could go down a rabbit hole. I was thinking about this. You and I have been talking about this all day.

All you have to do, if you want to know what's really going on here, read the Senate Intelligence Committee's report, better yet. Even the summary. Ask Chat GPT about the Senate Intelligence Committee's report because Marker Rubio led the current Secretary of State, current National Security Advisor. So he's read into all the DNI stuff, right? He's the archivist too. He's the archivist too. I'm sorry. Sorry, Marco.

They're also the archivist. And what they concluded was that Vladimir Putin himself ordered the hacking of the DNC servers to disseminate emails and interfered in the election. To help Donald Trump. No, no, no, hold on. I don't think it's fair to suggest that the Russians hacked the DNC and John Podesta, a top aide to Hillary Clinton, that that means it was helping Donald Trump. Right, yeah, right? And so that's what the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded, with Marco Rubio leading it. They also said that the intelligence assessment that she's now talking about was excellent statecraft.

And they looked at all the intelligence that she put out. So if you go through Tulsi's documents and then you go through what the Senate committee, you'll realize that the whole thing is fucking crazy. And then they'll tell you, oh, the steel dossier, the steel dossier was used. And again, the Senate report concludes the steel dossier, which appeared. in the annex of the report actually didn't make much of a difference in the assessment at all. And that without the Steele dossier, they would have had the exact same conclusions. As we discussed on Pazave America, the episode that came out Tuesday,

Yvgeny Progoshin, the Russian oligarch, in charge of the interference effort admitted it on the record. And so I don't even know what we're talking about anymore. I mean, we started to prepare this little YouTube exclusive before this Wall Street Journal came out, the story came out. And even then, like, my reaction to watching Tulsi was like, my God, whatever is in the Epstein files about Donald Trump must be bad. Is it photos of him with minors? Is it money laundering? But like, if you're hitting the Barack Obama did treason button, like something is real bad.

Them with like, you know, first of all, it's like mostly MAGA reporters in the briefing room now. They were like Ed O'Keefe, Caitlin Collins had some good questions, right? But they've gotten lazy, the Trump administration. They've gotten fat and lazy by like getting rid of reporters. and not having to answer tough questions. And, like, that's what showed with Tulsi today. Like, I thought she was going to bring more. I thought she was going to, like, have some evidence.

Maybe she doctored some stuff. Maybe she could, she couldn't explain her own evidence, her own documents. All she said was, like, I refer you to the documents because she doesn't fucking know. And I just think, like, if anyone wants to come sit down with us, any of the MAGA influencer who believe this, any of the people in the White House, anyone who want anyone on Fox and talk about this, it would fall apart in five minutes. I'm happy to debate it with anyone. Thrill.

Fucking Matt Taibi. any of these fucking people, it's so embarrassing. So I also, look, this is clearly just an attempt to create a new narrative, a distraction for the magazines, right? We're going to prosecute Obama. This is like their little fever dream. I actually think that even Tulsi's press conference today, before the journal story dropped, created more problems for the White House than it solved.

And it was because of this exchange, which, of course, was the last question she got, because it's always the last question that gets you. But let's watch Tulsi here. I'm Jeffrey Epstein. Can you rule out that he was connected in some way? to any kind of intelligence, either foreign or domestic? I haven't seen any evidence or information that reflects that. If anything comes before me, that changes that in any way, support the president's statement,

loud and clear. If any credible evidence comes forward, he wants the American people to see it. So that comment is going to land like a nuclear bomb in the MAGA media world, because, as we've discussed before, a lot of people, especially on the right, but some on the left, too, are convinced that Jeffrey Epstein worked either for the CIA or the Mossad for Israeli intelligence or both. And they think basically that Epstein ran a blackmail operation for the Mossad. Now, Ben Rhodes and I tried to walk through the actual evidence, such as there is behind this theory on a recent Pod Save the World episode, I'd refer you there.

But the gist is Gleine Maxwell's dad apparently had ties to the Israeli government, maybe it was Mossad, so some people say. Epstein had close ties with former Prime Minister Ehud Barak. and there was a report that Alex Acosta, who was the U.S. attorney who gave Epstein a sweetheart deal in 2008, said during his vetting to be the Secretary of Labor that he was told to go easy on Epstein because of his ties to intelligence. Now, that was like one background quote and one report that's never been confirmed by anyone else. So it's pretty thin. But that is going to infuriate the like Alex Joneses of the world.

Well, I got a few follow-up questions for Tulsi on this one. So she said, I haven't seen anything. I know. It's not a no. It's not a no. She could have said no, right? And it wouldn't be hard to figure this out. And then she was, well, I haven't looked into it. Oh, you haven't looked into it.

You had time to go back and declassify emails in the Russia Gate thing from 2016, emails that didn't show anything new that didn't give us any new information. You had time to do all that, but you didn't have time with all of the swirling over the last 16 days to look into whether Jeffrey Epstein's name came up in any of the Intel information that you have now that you're running DNI, you just didn't look for it? You don't want to just call over to the CIA. Hey, did this guy work for you? No. Okay. Never crossed your mind. Never crossed your mind to look at it. Enormously close working relationships between the U.S. intelligence and the misod. You don't just call, lobby in a call, maybe check in. And again, maybe there's absolutely

no connection at all. Maybe he's never worked for intel. Then you should just tell us, no, I've looked and there's not. Not remotely convincing answer. And this is the problem with a lot of this stuff. Again, like Ben and I talked through the evidence such as it exists. I don't know that I'm convince that Jeffrey Epstein was some sort of of Mossad, acid, nor does he need to be. But, like, he's got a ton of wealth.

None of it has explained. The Ehud-Brock relationship is weird. So there's just, like, a lot of smoke there. And that answer, that ain't water. That's not putting it out. Nope. That's just going to, you know,

fan the flames of the fire. We should just talk for a minute about how Republicans are so scared of taking a vote on releasing the Epstein files that they literally left. They didn't just, like, go home for the weekend. They went home for summer. The summer.

Like, schools out for the summer. It's like six weeks. They're just gone now. Also, it's a weird strategy because I realize that everyone's attention span is like that of a fucking amoeba. But did they think that when they come back in the fall that all of a sudden everyone's going to be like, oh, that Epstein thing? And we don't have any questions about that. Are they planning on holding town halls? Even the ones in super, especially the ones in super safe red districts, they think that their constituents are going to be like, eh, no big deal.

I understand that you just needed to get home really fast and you couldn't take a fucking vote to. release the files. And they were going to vote on things that these guys all wanted, the Republicans wanted to vote on. They were going to do like a bunch of votes on hardline immigration policies. They were going to roll back a bunch of environmental regulations that Biden put in place. Like this is all stuff these members want to say they did, but because all the Democrats and a few principled Republicans came together to say like, hey, let's vote to release the Epstein files. They literally had to skip town. Yeah, they had to skip town. It's remarkable. Okay. So even before, this journal piece.

The MAGA kind of media world, this last two weeks is not sitting well with them. Here's a kind of representative clip of Alex Jones talking with a comedian named Tim Dillon who's voted for Trump, but he's, you know, I think sort of Bernie

Trump, you know, a bit of a horseshoe guy. And Alex Jones is describing the political implications of Trump's handling of the Epstein files on Tim's show. Let's watch. So this is a is Harry Carey. This is Sepakou. For those that don't know in Japanese, that means suicide.

And I had the head of Rasputson polling on the best polling agency, the most accurate on record today. He said Trump has lost 14 points with independence, five points with his main base. Like Steve Bannon said a week ago, that'll lose him before Rasputson reported it. His dead reckoning was right. 40 seats probably in the midterms in a year and a half. This is Trump self-harming. I mean, it's really interesting that like a lot of. of the kind of mainstream pundits are like trying to yada yada yada away this and be like no one cares but but steve bannon's out saying where they're going to lose 40 seats the closer you get to the mega elite

you know you're charlie kirk's your mcgian kelly's right all the people who's raised questions at first now they're sort of like eh we got to stay on the team go see the team but alix jones he's not anyone's team they don't care yeah also like tim dillan's not on anyone's team right yeah so uh listen to tim dillon talk about the links to which the white house is gone to try to spin him and silence him. When Bondi said we have 10,000 hours of video, she said we have 10,000 hours of video. I had dinner last week with the vice president.

He told me that that was commercial pornography. They do not have videos of any powerful person in a compromising position. That's the party line that they're going with. If that's the case, why would Pam Bondi call it ever? Why would she say it's evidence? She's not an idiot. She's the attorney general. Why would she say she has files on her desk if none of these implicated anybody? It just feels like they're covering something for sure. 100%. And I feel like they're telling a story and the story doesn't make any sense. The White House flew a stand-up comedian and podcaster, like a popular one, I'm not trying to diminish him, but they flew this guy to Washington, D.C., to have dinner with the vice president of the United States, to spin him face to face, and they failed miserably to convince him. What has J.D. Vance been doing? He's meeting with the Murdox. He's doing this. He's like, he finally tweeted today about the Obama treason. He had like sort of a lame. retweet of a John Solomon story.

He's barely said anything else about the Epstein files now because he, like, he's a, he, he's really trying to hide under Iraq here. So, um, for what it's worth. And it's Alex Jones. So it's not worth a lot. Alex Jones also says in that interview that he thinks the Israelis are blackmailing Howard Lutnik. And that's who Trump is covering up for.

I know. I know. I know. But really interesting, John. So like, Tim Dillon's been one of the ones pushing for, uh, the, the, the White house to get Galane Maxwell to testify before Congress. Congress. He asked Alex Jones what he thinks about that. And even Alex Jones is like, look, man, you can't really trust Galane Maxwell. Like, she's in jail. Like, she's going to say whatever they want her

to say if it gets her some leniency. So Alex Jones is still pushing for full transparency of the entire G. Epstein files. And also, Tim Dillon says that he said to J.D. Vance's face, if you don't disclose everything, then you're done. And he said, Vance agrees with me. So J.D. Vance and Donald Trump are not in the same place on this. Which is amazing. Also, we should say, say that right before we start recording, the House sent a subpoena to Gleine Maxwell to testify. And so, which I think is important because if it was just the Justice Department that talked to Gleine Maxwell, they'd probably do it behind closed doors and no one would ever fucking know what was said. But I do think at least if she is now under the penalty of perjury in Congress,

and we have Democrats asking her questions as well as Republicans, that could yield some interesting information. Yeah, I'd love to hear that. Tim Dillon also called for Cash Patel and Pam Bondi to be fired. And he said they are morons who need to go back to podcasting. He said they need to bring in real TV people. Get Megan Kelly as agey. Makes it very fun. Okay.

Well, yeah. He makes a good point about the podcast. All right, man. Anything else? What a day. What a day? Unbelievable. Massive breaking news.

Fucking Donnie Trump in the Epstein files. Yeah. Who would have thought? Everybody. All of us. Okay. That's it for us. Thanks for watching this Positive America exclusive on YouTube.

as you guys know, the right wing is killing us on YouTube. They have huge accounts of Daily Wire. It's got like seven or eight million people. Benny Johnson added over two million subscribers in the last three months. That moron. 2.2 million subscribers to Benny Johnson's YouTube in the last three months. This is a guy who got money from the Russian government. Like last year, two years ago?

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