Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/17/26: Epstein Files Coverup, ICE Caught Lying, Trump Election Takeover
Episode Date: February 17, 2026Krystal and Emily discuss the Epstein files coverup, ICE caught lying about shooting, Trump election takeover. Will Creeley: https://www.thefire.org/about-us/our-team/will-creeley &...nbsp; Jasper Nathaniel: https://www.infinitejaz.com/ To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.comMerch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Good morning everybody. Welcome to breaking points. Emily, great to see you.
Ho-show. Yep, that's right. We're both in the gardening. That's what it's about though.
People think sometimes it's another thing. It's not. Oh, really? Yeah.
Get your minds out of the gutters people. I'm just the messenger. Don't take it out on me.
Soger is recording an Epstein episode with Andrew Schultz.
So that is why I get to have the lovely Emily here with me on Tuesday.
And there's a lot to talk about, including we are starting with a bunch of Epstein.
Revelations.
Bannon talking 25th Amendment with Jeffrey Epstein.
There's a, Bannon, I feel like, has escaped a little bit of scrutiny in this.
But we've also got all kinds of other crazy revelations, Tom Barack, who continues to be, you know, he's in this administration, long-time friend of Trump.
He is all over the Epstein files.
He and Trump were buddies with Epstein.
you know, at sort of the peak of Epstein's whatever.
We've got Trump making some new comments.
We've got new revelations that the government may be lying about how many of the files exist
and what they have released.
We've also got a bunch of DHS news.
They are making it official that they're not going to share any of their evidence
from the investigation into Alex Prattie with local officials.
At the same time, they're also having to acknowledge they lied about yet another shooting.
So break that down for you.
Christy Noem is making more comments about how,
they need to get the right people to vote.
A lot going on there with regard to the 2026 elections.
Randy Fine, doing Randy Fine things, you know, posting just the most disgusting comments
you can imagine.
And Emily getting a little bit of a back and forth here with the Babylon B folks.
Yeah, and you know, we'll have an interesting discussion about the backlash or, I mean,
relative lack there of backlash to what Randy Fine said.
It's a good glimpse that things that are either changing or at least.
least up for grabs on the right now. So there's much to be said. Okay, I'm looking, I'm looking
forward to hearing your take on that one. And then we have, we have two great guests. We've got
Jasper Nathaniel going to join us as Israel moves to just overtly, you know, it's being called a
mega land grab in the West Bank. So we want to keep our eye on that. And then we have someone from
Fire, the Civil Rights Organization that is joining us to talk about their lawsuit against Pam Bondi
and Christy Noam. They have been, this government has really been pressuring tech.
companies to take down any sort of anti-ice accounts, also to reveal the identities of any anonymous
accounts that are, you know, opposed to ICE. So a real assault here on civil liberties. And just
breaking last night, we're going to see if we can ask them about this as well. Stephen Colbert
revealed that the FCC, Brendan Carr's FCC, which was the one that previously like came down on
Jimmy Kimmel, told them they cannot interview James Talarico, or at least CBS felt pressured that they
should not interview James Talleygo candidate for Senate in Texas. So yet another, you know,
sense of crushing of any sort of dissent. So we'll get their take on that as well.
Yeah. And that one, it's actually, I'll be curious as more reporting comes in because this is
just coming to us. But I'm really curious if it's more CBS than the FCC.
Well, I think that could be interesting. You may be right. I think it could be that,
so apparently they threatened the view after they had James Talleyco on.
La Rico's just like the wrecking ball.
I don't know.
They're very sensitive about this man.
I mean, it is kind of telling that they feel like Texas may be in jeopardy.
If they didn't see him as any sort of a threat, then I think they wouldn't care what what shows he appeared on.
So in any case, I think it probably does come out of his appearance on the view, the government action that was taken there.
And those government actions, that's exactly what they're intended to do, is to make others think twice.
Equal time to his, whether it's John Cornyn or whatever, that's the line that the FCC is pushing.
I wonder in this case if CBS is scapegoating
if they're like trying to mess with Colbert.
We'll get into it.
But if they're trying to mess with Colbert
and they're like, well, listen, the FCC pressure at ABC,
so we've got to be careful.
Yeah.
It's hilarious that Tala Rico is at the center.
Ends up at the center.
I mean, it's great for him, honestly.
Oh, fantastic.
Because Colbert made a whole thing of it on his show.
Tala Rico, I think, posted the interview
that should have aired, et cetera.
So, I mean, great publicity for him.
If you were looking to, you know,
to quash this guy's prospects, congratulations.
You've just absolutely elevated.
him. Before we get into the Epstein news, want to thank everybody so much for your support. You know,
I think people have been really interested in the Epstein coverage. As you guys know, this is very,
very fraught politically in terms of YouTube monetization. We're able to do this kind of coverage
and not really have to worry about those things because of your support. If you can become a
premium subscriber, breaking points.com. And also, last note here, wanted to mention and reflect on
the life and now the passing of Reverend Jesse Jackson, who, of course, civil rights leader,
in segregated South and South Carolina was an acolyte of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
went on to be a presidential candidate for the Democrats and really ran on this message of
multiracial unity and solidarity and really pushing that idea that we have to have this
broad coalition, a sort of universalist coalition, to fight for social and economic justice.
So obviously, you know, it's a message that is very important to me and very inspiring to me in my own politics.
And you probably had a chance to meet him a couple of times.
Met him once or twice, you know, in passing at MSNBC.
And so certainly, you know, his legacy is a large one.
I pulled up one of his speeches is a patchwork quilt speech from 1988,
Democratic National Convention.
And just to give you a sense of some of the messaging here, he talks about seeking common ground.
and this is in the context of trying to pull Democrats together to fight alongside one another.
And he said that we need to build a quilt like the one that his grandmother would patch together.
He says, farmers, you seek fair prices and you are right, but you cannot stand alone.
Your patch is not big enough workers.
You fight for fair wages.
You are right, but your patch labor is not big enough.
Women, you seek comparable worth and pay equity.
You are right, but your patch is not big enough.
Women, mothers who seek head start and daycare and prenatal care on the front.
side of life, relevant jail care and welfare on the back side of life, you are right, but your
patch is not big enough. Students, you seek scholarships, you are right, but your patch is not big
enough. Blacks and Hispanics, when we fight for civil rights, we are right, but our patch is not
big enough. Gays and lesbians, when you fight against discrimination and cure for AIDS, you are right,
but your patch is not big enough. Conservatives and progressives, when you fight for what you
believe, right wing, left wing, hawk, d'b, you are right from your point of view, but your
point of view is not enough, but don't despair. Be as wise as my grandmama, pull the patches and the
pieces together bound by a common thread. When we form a great quilt of unity and common ground,
will have the power to bring about health care and housing and jobs and education and hope to
our nation. Reverend Jesse Jackson, may he rest in peace. Also was on the balcony when Martin Luther
King Jr. was dying. That's right. He was there. Yeah, so a piece of history, for sure,
that now has passed away, and that's a tether from one generation to the next, especially in the left.
Which is an interesting point, because I know Jesse Jackson mentored many, many young, especially young black leftist.
His impact is, and Ryan could probably speak to this better than, you know, better than many.
His impact continues to be felt on the left of the party in particular.
Well, rest in peace, Reverend Jesse Jackson.
Chris will, let's move to up soon.
Yeah, so we got some new comments from Trump on, I guess this was on Air Force One, about how he viewed the release of the files and what we have learned there. Of course, he feels he's totally exonerated, Emily, and let's take a listen to that.
So Hillary Clinton said in an interview today that she and her husband are getting pulled into the Epstein matter to divert attention from you and that your administration has something to hide. What's your response?
I have nothing to hide. I've been exonerated. I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein.
They went in hoping that they'd find it and found just the opposite.
I've been totally exonerated.
In fact, Jeffrey Epstein was fighting that I don't get elected with some author, a sleaze bag, by the way.
And I've been totally exonerated.
No, no, they're getting pulled in.
And that's their problem.
I don't know, they've got to see what happens.
But I watched her in Munich, and she seriously has Trump derangement syndrome.
You think that she should publicly testify?
You know, I've been totally exonerated on Epstein.
And it's really interesting because they've been pulled in.
Think of it. They've been pulled in Clinton and many other Democrats have been pulled in.
So there you go. Totally exonerated. Let's talk a little bit more about that.
This was an important investigation, I think, from Channel 4 News. And something that I've been wondering as well.
I can put this up on the screen. So they are saying that based on emails within this latest release,
the actual quantity of data and files that exist within the government vaults within the government archives,
are likely much vaster than what they have led on.
And they're saying potentially just 2% of the information
that the FBI retrieved from Epstein's homes
has been released.
That's based on previous information
that the government was indicating within these files
about just how much was taken in the various searches
of his residences.
And like I said, this is something I was wondering about
because everybody just seemed to like take the government's word for it
about how many files.
And I'm just like, what are we basing this on
other than their word that, oh, well,
there's six million files, we release three million, and that's all you're going to get.
And I've always wondered, okay, that six million number, first of all, you should be releasing
all of that because that is what you're legally required to do. But also, are we just supposed
to take your word for it, that that is actually all that there is, and this raises significant
questions about that. Yeah, this is interesting because even by their own word, they said there
are some six million documents files. What constitutes a file or a document, by the way,
nobody has ever defined to my knowledge.
So that's interesting, meaning is each email a document?
Because there are threads.
So is each thread a document, or is it each email?
That could completely change our concept of actually what's out there.
Because if, per the Channel 4 investigation, for example, you have all of these other emails
on the thread.
Sometimes when you're going through the files, the threads stop.
They have more emails than the thread.
Do they just have sometimes the Epstein side?
Do they have more? There's just a lot of questions that we don't have answers to. And at least even by their, again, even by what they've said, there's six million files. That means we're supposed to believe three million fit the national security designation or the victim designation, meaning that they can't even be released on a redacted basis. So that's a big question because when Thomas Massey was here, Crystal, he told Ryan and me actually that, and he's gotten flack for the act that enabled this recent file.
release, but he was saying you actually can in a different administration come in and potentially
prosecute Trump officials if they are out of compliance with the law. It allows for that.
So it's not just a casual matter of them saying, eh, we're redacting this or that. They have to
meet a burden of proof that they're actually keeping things for the right reason. Otherwise,
you could easily see a Democratic Attorney General coming in and saying, oh, sorry Pam Bondi or
Todd Blanche, looks like you were out of compliance on the Sepsstein Transparency Act.
Yeah, and it wouldn't just be them either.
You know, I'm sure they can imagine that they would be pardoned by Trump and they would
perhaps be in a position to escape free.
But if you're any of the, you know, low-level employees who are doing the grunt work of
redacting things improperly, then you could also be exposed, which is one of the message I know
Roe has been putting out there like, listen, you don't want to get tangled up in this to do
Trump's dirty work. He's not going to be loyal to you. You know, he would throw anyone under the bus if it serves him.
So I think that's a, you know, a very important note here. And as part of why when Massey and Kana and other
members of Congress have gone in and viewed the redacted files, they've been able to put pressure on the
government. I was like, look, I viewed some of these files. There's no reason for this name or that name or
the other name to be redacted. And they've actually been successful in, you know, unredacting some of this
information because of the force of this law and the concerns about being out of compliance
with it. Speaking of Trump and the entanglements here, you know, we've obviously covered extensively
the various allegations against him that are contained within these files, all of the various
mentions and entanglements, et cetera, but some of his top, top aides also very, you know,
very prevalent throughout this entire document dump, Steve Bannon being one of them. And this was
kind of a remarkable exchange, because Bannon, of course, is supposed to be big Trump buy,
big Trump loyalist, et cetera, et cetera. And here you have Marjorie Taylor Green sharing,
actually, this text exchange between Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein, where he's talking about
the 25th Amendment for Trump. And I sort of assume this, so this is right after the Republicans
performed very poorly in the midterms. And I don't know what was exactly going on then that caused him to,
that caused them to trigger this like discussion about.
about whether or not 25th Amendment was appropriate or not.
But in any case, they're saying, hell of a year.
We could put this up on the screen.
We either own 2019 or it will surely own us.
Back in the F&B biz only, F&B director, no, it does not stand for F word and blow.
Spoke to my Dems this weekend, and this is Jeffrey Epstein.
Boy, our emotions running high.
Bannon says, going to blow him up right out of the box.
White House has zero plan to push back Fort Apache with no cash.
cavalry en route. And no soldiers in the fort. He is really borderline, not sure what he may do,
Epstein says. Bannon says, I think it's beyond borderline, 25th Amendment. Yeah, yeah. I mean,
it feels like a throwaway line from Bannon, but either way, either way. I mean, that's just me
trying to interpret it years later. But either way, one thing that's clear when you're going through
these emails and text messages in the Epstein Library is Epstein's relationship with Bannon was
actually very close. And if you're like reading the raw files, you're just seeing, I mean,
Epstein talked, had had relationships with many people, obviously, but when he's talking to
Bannon, it's very browy. They had a really, like clearly a very, very warm, friendly relationship,
as everybody can tell just from the mirror selfie, of course, that they took, popped up in the
files. But that's, for Bannon, I mean, this is a fascinating conundrum. Like, there are a couple of potential
explanations that aren't excuses, but could maybe be explanations?
Is, are they both intel?
Is Bannon doing intel for one person or another?
Is that behind it?
No idea.
Bannon hasn't supplied any excuses other than it was part of documentary that has not
been delivered, except for a part of an interview that was released, was compelled to be
released by the files.
Yeah.
So is it possible that Bannon, he's constantly, like, ribbing Epstein over populism and
like trying to get him to like come to the like light side and joking about him in that sense.
Is he trying to manipulate Epstein for his broader international populist cause?
Is he trying to drive a wedge in Trump world?
That's what some of it seems like, that text message that Epstein sent Bannon along the lines of
this is what keeps Trump up at night knowing that we're friends.
I think that was Epstein too Bannon.
But we have no idea.
And Steve Bannon hasn't explained it yet.
I mean, Bannon wants to be a power player.
Yes.
And Epstein is the type of person that can help facilitate those power plays.
And at the same time, Ryan said something interesting about the Chomsky entanglements.
Yeah.
Which were, I mean, Chomsky, there were thousands of emails with Chomsky and, you know, his wife had to come out and put a statement, et cetera.
And Ryan's take was basically, and you guys can go back and watch.
to get his words precisely, you know, Chomsky is an anarchist, and in some ways it sort of validates
the left-wing criticism of anarchists of like, yeah, they're kind of, you know, this whole, like,
laissez-faire attitude is too close to liberalism, and it's too safe to the system.
Yeah.
And then when you see these entanglements with Epstein, who is obviously, you know, from what we've
learned, this incredibly influential node in this secret power system that is actually incredibly
influential in the way the world actually works, it kind of gives credence to that view. And I feel
sort of the same about Bannon here is it gives a lot of credence to what is my view, that right-wing
populism, while it may cause, you know, some mild problems for the billionaire class or the Epstein
class around the edges, it's not really a threat to them. And which you can see from how delighted
Epstein is with Trump being in office. You know, it's not just because Trump is his guy and now he
feels like he's going to have this access and connectivity. It's also, yeah, he thinks this is going to be
beneficial for him in terms of the type of deals that he can do around the world, the type of disaster
capitalism that he can engage in, which he talks about routinely with a variety of figures,
including Ehud Barak. So, you know, I sort of see it in that lens. And then I think also,
not only is Bannon want to be a power player, but also he would have a motivation,
since he is in the Trump circle to keep Epstein close and keep tabs on him and how he's feeling about things
and whether he has any information that could be damaging to Trump, allegedly Bannon said that this is the one guy he thought that could destroy Trump's presidential prospects back in 2016.
So there's all sorts of motivations for him there to be to be cultivating this very close friendship with Epstein and even to the point of trying to rehab his image.
Well, I think we still have to get to the money trail as well with Bannon because it wasn't, I mean, if you look at some of the stuff, Bannon is clearly advising Epstein and it's public relations advice. He was in the room with Kathy Rumbler, the Obama White House Council, as they're advising Epstein basically on how to rehabilitate his image. And it seems like Bannon was using this documentary with Epstein, which is not really, I mean, it's not necessarily an act of journalism. If you are, you creating this.
I don't know that anyone was accusing Bannon of being a journalist, but it's a, that means
you're collaborating, basically, on an image rehabilitation. And this is long into the 2010s,
and we're talking like 2018 that a lot of this was going down. And so you can see Bannon going
back and forth giving him advice on X, Y, and Z. Bannon is holding his ground in most of the text
messages on populism, but the throwaway line about the 25th Amendment, back in, again, like
2018, 2019, and then Bannon is now joking about third term for Donald Trump.
To your point, the heart of maga populism, you start to see who's pulling the levers,
and it brings us to the, I think it brings us to the Tom Baroque story.
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To your point about why Epstein was delighted about Trump world coming into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue,
one of the reasons is that people like Tom Barack were suddenly empowered by their relationship with Donald Trump.
Yeah, that's right. So let's put this up on the screen, some reporting from CBS News.
Hey.
All right. Let's go. Trump insider, Tom Barak, kept in regular contact with Jeffrey Epstein for years' file show.
I'm going to read a good bit of this because there's a lot of important revelations. I do recommend you read this entire article because it would be too long if I read all of it.
In any case, Tom Barack, who was a longtime friend of Donald Trump, he is now the U.S. ambassador to Turkey.
He is also a special envoy to Syria. He was in the first Trump administration. He actually was, what was he put on trial for?
Some foreign entanglements or something.
Farah. Fair. Fair. Ryan did a lot of reporting on this.
Yeah, a jury found him not guilty of those allegations. In any case, he is described in the CBS News article as a, quote, globe Trump.
prodding billionaire certainly fits with the Epstein class tag here. But in any case, he and
Trump and Epstein were really close in the 80s and 90s hanging out together. And what they say
in the piece is how Barack first met Epstein is unclear. But in the book Fire and Fury,
Michael Wolf described Trump, Barack and Jeffrey Epstein as an 80s and 90s set of nightlife musketeers.
Epstein's emails indicate that both Barack and Epstein had served as sources for Wolf's book.
Mr. Trump called the book full of lies, misrepresentation sources that don't exist. Mr. Trump has also said he cut ties with Epstein years ago.
The Barack Epstein friendship appears to have continued undeterred by Epstein's alleged fall from Grace in Florida after he was charged with sexual misconduct involving teenage girls.
In September 2009, just months after Epstein's release from the Palm Beach County Jail, Barack wrote to him, quote, thinking about you, hope you're good, and life is calm again.
a sentiment that marked the beginning of an extended period of contact between the two.
Over the following years, Epstein encouraged meetings and facilitated introductions between
Barack and individuals, including Palantir CEO Peter Thiel,
former Israeli Prime Minister Ahad Barack, and Russia's UN ambassador, Vittali Cherkin.
During the 2016 presidential campaign in the early months of 2016, after Mr. Trump surprised
the political world by winning the New Hampshire Republican primary,
Barack emerged as one of a select group of insiders helping to show.
Trump's outsider bid for the White House. As the Trump momentum grew, Epstein emailed his friend
Barack a greeting and a reminder of their shared past writing, Hope You Are Well, Photos Look Good,
FYI, I receive many calls a week about both Donald, redacted, Marla, beauty contest, Mar-a-Lago, etc,
and Clinton from reporters. Less so recently with Clinton, but my answers are always,
I have nothing to say, or I try to ignore altogether. A few times I've been ambushed.
on the street with questions, but I'm more careful now. Barack replied,
hope you're good. Let's catch up. Epstein then asked for a photo of Barack's newborn baby writing,
send photos of you and child, make me smile. creepy. In April 2016, with Barack Deepley
enmeshed in the Trump campaign, Epstein reached out again this time with a warning. He forwarded
an email about a potentially damaging lawsuit just filed by women using the pseudonym Katie Johnson.
In the civil complaint, she alleged Epstein and Trump raped her in 1994 when she was very young.
The lawsuit was withdrawn. Mr. Trump denied the accusations, but Epstein wrote he considered the legal claim nuts, but I thought you guys should know.
Documents do not indicate if Barack acknowledged or replied to the email. I think that email where, and it goes on from there, you guys should take a look at, you know, it's an extensive set of communications over years. And clearly he knew, because he's, you know, querying Epstein, hey, I hope you're good after your, you know, sweetheart deal jail term is finished.
Clearly he knows what happened here and they had been close friends previously.
But that email right, you know, during the 2016 campaign where he's like, hey, you know, just so you know, getting all these questions from reporters.
To me, that is his way of saying, like, you know what I know and you know people are starting to reach out.
It's his way of insinuating himself and holding out the threat of, you know, there's some things I could, there's some tales I could tell that would be.
And that's how I read that, oh, Marla, Marlago, you know, getting a lot of questions here about Trump.
Interesting.
I mean, one of the things that Ryan has reported with Barack going back to the first Trump administration is what we were talking about, the Farah charges.
So that's the Foreign Agent Certistration Act, meaning if you are acting on behalf of the UAE, he was accused of not registering under Farah as an agent of the United Arab Emirates.
He is now our ambassador to Turkey, which we should mention that irrelevant to all of this, the current.
ambassador to Turkey, a NATO ally, as they say. So Tom Barack is going through in these emails.
It's not just some of the social stuff that Crystal mentioned. They're also very clearly having
politically significant, politically freighted conversations, like the Teal conversation that you
mentioned, but also then Epstein invests a million dollars in what was his firm was called
Colony Capital after they talked one day. Yeah, so here, the day after the meeting with Teal
was scheduled, Epstein wrote to Barack, I love Teal's suggestion regarding women and children,
that every time you're saving lights, et cetera, I think of the tens of thousands of the tens of
women and children that died as a direct result of your careless interventions.
That's likely a reference to Teal's sort of like libertarian perspective on things like USAID, quote-unquote,
libertarian perspective on that. I'm assuming that's what he meant.
Yeah.
Teal was talking about.
But the day after that, CBS reports, Epstein purchased approximately $1 million of stock in colony
capital, the publicly traded company founded by Barack.
So if you think that it's a coincidence the day after they had a meeting where they are discussing Peter Thiel's suggestions or Peter Thiel's thoughts, theories on how the world works, and then Epstein goes and purchases a million dollars of stock the day after. I mean, I think that's obviously ridiculous. They were also having lunch.
So I think you mentioned this, according to the CBS report, with Ehud Barak.
Epstein, Ehud Barak, Vittalini, Chirkin, all at the same time.
So to act as though Barack, or this will be hard for the Trump administration to act as though Tom Barack's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was purely social because clearly it was also business of politics.
Yes. Yeah, that's exactly right. And DropSight has another report about the power plays that were being made with Jeffrey Epstein. And this is another, you know, business deal or a series of business deals with former Israeli Prime Minister Ahou Barack. We can put this up on the screen. Here, the focus was on Africa.
You know, the TLDR here is that they saw a genuine crisis in Nigeria.
There's an extraordinary email.
I'll try to pull it up, but from Epstein where he says, you know, all of this chaos in the region, this is kind of great for you, isn't it?
And Barack replies basically like, yeah, but it's hard to turn it into a cash flow.
Well, they managed.
They managed to do it.
So in any case, you know, Nigeria is struggling with this Boko Haram terror attacks.
And Ehud Barack wants to position himself as this businessman who can help deal with security issues.
This is, of course, a lot of Israeli tech is geared towards because they try it out on Palestinians
and then they sell it to the world.
And so that ends up being therein.
And they start with this small sort of like pilot project and then they're able to gain a larger foothold.
And eventually there's able to secure various infrastructure deals as well.
And you can see the way that Epstein in all of this is acting as a facilitator and a connector
and a strategist for Ehud Barak to help him position himself as this, you know, expert on technology and security
and offer his services to a variety of countries.
Yeah.
And I think that's an important point.
Also the Epstein-Bannon relationship, important point in this context, meaning the reason,
and this is in the most fundamental basic sense, the problem with public.
corruption when you put public policy up for sale, whether you're a pedesta or whether you're
Tom Barack, Donald Trump, Jared Kushner, what you're doing is creating corrupt points of entry
into public policy. And the reason that you saw people just in total action, wheeling and dealing,
we've seen it throughout the second Trump administration especially. This is what was happening
behind closed doors we now know in Trump one. A lot of this is happening in front of everyone
in Trump two. And the reason for that is they all know.
know each other. They've all, you know, traded capital. They've all probably traded secrets and
spent social time together. And so they've got this self-perpetuating machine right now. And it's
burying. Like, it's printing money for them. Yeah. One of the things that I really have taken away to
is just how explicitly they see chaos, death, disaster, terror attacks as business opportunities.
Like, it's just, it's very naked.
I mean, I obviously knew about disaster capitalism and all of that, but just to see it
spelled out of like, hey, all these wars are really great for you is really something else.
I mean, I think that's been my, the thing I keep coming back to is that while I had an understanding
of the existence of these power structures, I did not understand just how explicit it was.
and that's what's wild about reading through these emails.
This next one I pulled because I specifically wanted to hear your thoughts on this.
And it's been a piece that I've been sort of, you know, thinking through.
Epstein went out of his way to cultivate a lot of scientists and a lot of academics.
Obviously, Chomsky being one of those, but there were many others besides.
The New York Times did an article on this, which I thought was not really great.
It would be unsurprised to learn.
But in any case, it's the headline here.
as Epstein's ties with academics show the seedy side of college fundraising.
Professors and presidents are often eager to raise outside cash.
Some are now facing blowback after connecting with Jeffrey Epstein.
And the framing of this article is basically like, you know, while some of these elite
institutions, they have these gigantic endowments, but those are very restricted.
So they're still sort of like desperate for cash.
And that leads them, especially if you're, you know, professors trying to get a grant for
this or that to do the study, it leaves them vulnerable to.
being preyed upon by someone like Jeffrey Epstein.
And the reason why I don't love the article is because I think it sort of, it lets them
off the hook in a sense.
It's a way to sort of seek to rationalize why, oh, there's an innocent, you know,
there's a somewhat innocent explanation for what's going on here.
Now, that doesn't mean I don't think that the fundamental premise that, like, yes,
that desire for funding for their research, et cetera, certainly does leave them vulnerable.
But to me, it doesn't fully answer the question of why Epstein was so indefstein.
interested in cultivating these academics and why many of them had, you know, extensive back-and-forth
relationships with him over years, especially according to the New York Times reporting,
a lot of the funds that he would promise or sort of float for these various institutions
never actually really came through.
So he'd kind of, oh, I'll make a multimillion dollar gift.
And then he's sort of stringing people along and it never really fully comes through, et cetera.
We also cover on the show, did you see this him getting his girlfriend?
into the Columbia Dental School and all of that.
And it was for, again, I mean, this is for normal people, large sums,
but for him nothing, it was like, you know, a few hundred thousand dollars that he was giving
to the school and able to get in his girlfriend who did not have the requisite experience
or credentials to be able to get into this school and sort of easing her path all the way through.
And Ryan reported on the relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and Alan Dershowitz
and how they collaborated to undermine Meersheimer while.
Dershowitz was, I think, at Harvard.
That's right. And part of this is,
I mean, on some
level, it's just, it makes sense
that if you're a billionaire who's hoping to
influence policy and particularly
scientific research in this transhumanist
direction, having
seduced all of these
academics and getting them in their orbit, on the
one hand, you feel like you've consolidated an
influence because you can bring people into your townhouse,
which the emails, and we already
knew this show, was happening over and over
again. We now have a more complete picture
of exactly what was happening, but also the Bill Gates relationship. He was, in fact, probably
because giving this money brings you into the circles. I mean, giving money to academia gets you
invited to all the fundraisers and dinners. That's where you meet the people like Bill Gates and
others. That's currency. I guess it's huge currency to be able to say, why aren't you looking at this
or why are you looking at that? Or when you want to be connected with an NSA codebreaker, you can email
Bill Gates is second in command and say, hey, introduce me to someone at the NSA, and the guy's like,
oh, yeah, no problem.
And it takes care of it, which we know, this Boris Nikolich fellow, as DropSite reported recently,
that's what was happening.
And so you make it easier, you're greasing the skids for your grand plan with this money to academia.
I agree the Times is kind of letting them off the hook.
It is pathetic to see some of the academics and the emails begging, basically, all but begging,
Jeffrey Epstein for, you know, they're flattering him. Oh, what a wonderful time. What an interesting
idea. It's disgusting. And that's happening over and over again. Now, I think for some people,
it really was just research. I actually see that. I know we're about to talk about Peter Attea.
I look at the Atia emails. He's a good example of somebody who you're like, okay, you were sucking
up to Jeffrey Epstein. If you Googled him, as Rogan did, Rogan talked about how someone he had a guest
who was trying to introduce him to Epstein. He's like, I just Googled the guy in like 10,
seconds later. I was like, no, I'm not meeting this guy.
You know, after he's in prison, Peter Atia sucking up big time to Jeffrey Epstein over and
over again. And all I can say after going through many, many of these messages is many such
cases. Many such cases. It's all over the place. And it just... Well, it fits too with your
reporting on his eugenics obsession. And there's actually, we can put A-10 up on the screen
because this fits with this. New Mexico legislators have just passed legislation to launch the
first full investigation of what happened at Zorro Ranch, where the late U.S. sex offender,
Jeffrey Epstein, is accused of trafficking, sexually assaulting girls and women. And Zora Ranch seems
to have been at the center of this eugenics scheme. And I don't know what could be discovered at this
point. Hopefully there's something there that could be found. You know, obviously this search should
have happened long ago. But, you know, we have no idea how far he got down the road of these
eugenics ambitions. We do know that there are some emails from, I remember I think it was like
Fergie and the UK, like some of the British royal types congratulating him seemingly on the birth
of a baby. And as far as we know, he doesn't have any children. So there are some things in there
that are not any kind of definitive proof, but are like question mark.
There are some allegations from victims.
One girl alleging that he offered to buy her baby.
Things extremely disturbing things of that nature.
And again, Zora Ranch.
In an email to him, by the way.
Yes, that's right.
You offered to buy my baby in an email to Jeffrey.
That's right.
Yes.
And Zora Ranch, this was reported by the New York Times years ago,
was the center of this whatever this eugenics scheme truly was.
Yeah.
And we still don't have that.
This is one of the big enduring mysteries.
I feel like even though the most recent release,
it has made the picture more complicated and more interesting.
But I feel like we haven't even gotten significantly closer to understanding what went on at Zorro Ranch.
Because it seems to have been, I mean, everything is pointing to it being the dark place
that it's is kind of legend for having been, unfortunately, that it's notorious.
for having been.
So that part.
The other thing I want to mention about academia
is Tyler Austin Harper
had a fantastic essay in the Atlantic.
He is so good.
He's such a good writer,
but about how the Mellon Foundation
has basically controlled a monopoly
on funding to academic institutions
on the humanities
over many, many years.
And that's interesting too
because it just goes to show,
well, if you're close with people
in Mellon,
Hmm, guess how you can get money for X, Y, and Z, right?
It's just the consolidation of our supposedly democratic society.
That's right.
In the hands of so few powerful institutions and the people that lead those powerful institutions,
that's what they're getting off on throughout these emails.
That actually gets to the kind of premise of some of Anan Giridartis's work about the dark side of philanthropy,
where it's exactly that, where, you know, if it's the Gates Foundation or the, you know, the various Walmart,
Ares or the melons or whoever it is that are doing the investing in scientific research or
funding various philanthropic projects, then yeah, you're going to be pressured to suck up to
them and the work that you engage in is going to be very much influenced by whatever their
tastes or interests happen to be. In Jeffrey Epstein's case, one of those interests was eugenics.
And so that was the sort of thing that he was looking to, you know, facilitate relationships with
and potentially provide funding for.
And everyone else is cooperating, by the way.
They're fully on board with this total anti-democratic oligarchic effort to change the human race.
Yeah.
Like that's, it was normal to them.
They're all just like, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, cool, interesting, interesting.
Again, we're in their sandbox.
That's how they look at it.
The rest of us are in their sandbox.
And still, look at how Elon Musk talks about, like, his, you know, breeding project.
And, I mean, there's a Chinese billionaire who was revealed to have, like, hundreds of children or something.
like this. So it's a natural, a naturally unnatural development from a class of people who thinks
they are better than, who have various supremacist ideologies that justify that view.
You know, Epstein clearly from the language that he uses in a bunch of these emails is a Jewish
supremacist. You know, Elon has his own like IQ supremacist view, et cetera. But many of them have
some ideology which causes them to believe they are different.
from the rest of the species, which is what enables, that dehumanization is what enables the abuse
and the, you know, grotesque behavior that we know occurred in the case of Epstein.
We've got a, Naomi Campbell was present in these files quite a bit.
We could put A6 up on the screen.
You know, there's a, this is a new one.
Obviously, she's high-level model.
Makes sense in a way because she was one of Victoria's secrets.
most high-profile models. Epstein is connected to Victoria's Secret via Les Wexner.
He apparently would like name drop her with some of the young models that he's looking to cultivate.
You know, it appears that this modeling pipeline from Eastern Europe was one of the ways that abuse was enabled.
So, you know, that is an interesting piece of the puzzle in terms of how he's able to, you know, persuade these young girls that like, oh, no, I'm legit.
in the modeling industry and I'm going to make your dreams come true.
Well, you've been going deep on, like, over years now on the modeling ties between Jean-Luc
Brunel, Wexner, and Epstein. I was curious when I saw this. And Trump, right. I was curious
when I saw this. How, what is your sense of how the models were aware of any of this?
It's a good question, and I don't think it's really answerable at this point. I mean, we have some
indications from the emails.
We have some indications from actually some old
documentary footage about
these contests. We know there was
at least one party that was held
at Mara Lago where girls were promised
like, oh, there's going to be all these VIPs
here, you're going to be able to
network, and then they show up and it's just Trump and
Epstein. So
the modeling world is infamous
for being a pipeline for
human trafficking and for sex trafficking.
And Casablanca is who
Trump really admired and wanted to
emulate was a known abuser. I mean, he had a relationship with, what's her name, Stephanie
Hirsch, is that her name? Stephanie Seymour, there we go, when she was 16 years old. And so this was
all, this was all known. I mean, it's disturbing to me that he put his own daughter, Ivanka,
into this world when she is a young girl 14, 15 years old. And this is why he wants to start
his own modeling agency. Obviously, Epstein, I think this is part of why he latches on to
Les Wexner because he sees this connection with Victoria's Secret and holds himself out. He was actually
rebuked internally at one point because he was holding himself out as he was a Victoria Secret
like recruiter. Yes. And that was not, not technically. To women, right? Yes. Yeah. That was not
technically the case. But, you know, I think they believed a lot of the promises. There were probably
some upfront like, oh, I'll provide this for you. I'll provide that for you. And you're also talking
about, you know, a lot of poor girls from Eastern Europe after the Soviet Union collapses
who are kind of desperate and who are put into this incredibly, you know, vulnerable,
vulnerable situation.
Mm-hmm.
All right.
Let's go ahead and take a look at one piece of this.
This is A8, which speaks to what you're talking about here, Emily, in terms of how he's
interacting with these girls who are aspiring models.
So she's asking, I think she attended some dinner with him or whatever, and he's giving her
this advice on how she should conduct herself in the future. He says, it's time you start an
education. I do not say fuck to anyone except in bed, especially not at the table. Number two,
you are 22, only ask questions of men. They are not really interested in your opinions until you are
30 and then only marginally. That's great advice. Ladies, that's great advice. Luckily,
we both make the cut for at least marginal interest in our opinions. That's what the girl show is.
We should call it the marginal.
Marginal interest.
Yeah.
Zone of marginal interest.
It's also, oh, shit, Crystal.
It's also our band.
Anyway, it goes on to say, I'm very respectful.
You've not been taught 21st century science,
so you can be forgiven in believing the world is flat.
The sun revolves around the earth,
or there are energy fields,
or you can get sick from air conditioning,
or magnets can tell what type of yoga poses to do.
Or Santa Claus exists,
or if you think positive thoughts,
positive things will happen,
or things are meant to be fate, destiny,
angels.
I realize you have the potential to understand.
you've learned very old-fashioned ideas that country people believe. It's now time you take your life seriously.
Actors slash model is not freedom. You have time. Try them on for size. Look around. They are not free.
Winning the lottery is not a good strategy to bet on. Start learning a skill. If you need help, I will be there.
So he, and I believe. Subject line, by the way, clouds taken by me, exclamation point. Amazing.
Yeah. What does that mean?
I'm assuming it was like a picture, but who knows.
Anyway, so, you know, this is, he grooms these girls. And then I, I'd,
believe this is one of the ones that ends up in some sort of, quote-unquote, relationship with
Leon Black. So he's grooming them how to be with the various rich and powerful men, and then
he uses them as currency. And he's, well, I shouldn't say grooming, but he's also coaching
Larry Summers, for example, on how to have relationships with these younger women who are often
mistresses. Yes. It's disgusting. Yeah. All right. One more, just to, you know, to make sure we're all
deeply disturbed before we move on to the rest of the show. TMZ with some reporting here,
and by the way, Sager messaged us this morning that he did confirm this reporting too.
Jeffrey Epstein asked about zombie drug plants he kept at nursery.
Jeffrey Epstein may have had a collection of highly poisonous plants known to produce a drug that blocks
free will in its victims, according to newly discovered emails.
And one of the uncovered messages, Epstein sends an email asking about his, quote,
trumpet plants at nursery for background.
Angels' trumpet plants are extremely toxic.
They produce a drug called scopolamine, which is known to basically turn humans into zombies, wiping them of memory and eliminating their free will.
Severe intoxication reportedly may even cause paralysis and death.
Even more alarming, scopolamine reportedly does not show up on toxicology reports.
And if you're wondering if Epstein was aware of this, there's an excellent chance he was.
In another email, he was sent an article.
all about the effects of scopolamine and the plant that it comes from.
Yeah, as soccer said he confirmed these emails existed, as Crystal mentioned.
So that's as disturbing as you'd expect it to be.
Not surprising, actually, at all, based on the various projects he was getting into in this email inbox.
But what that can be used for is it's chilling.
Yeah, completely.
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Let's go ahead and turn to the latest with regard to DHS and the mass deportation effort,
and especially in regards to several high-profile shootings.
So let's put this first element up on the screen.
The FBI is now officially announced.
We kind of knew this already, but now it's been completely confirmed that they are not going to share Alex Pretty shooting evidence,
according to Minnesota authorities.
Minnesota law enforcement authorities have said the FBI is refusing to share any evidence into its investigation in the death of Alex Pretty,
the man killed by federal immigration authorities in late January.
Prady was shot on January 24th by CBP officials in Minneapolis.
His killing came just two weeks of course after Renee Good was shot and killed.
On Monday, Minnesota's Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, a state-level criminal investigative
law enforcement agency said the FBI had formally notified it that it would not share any
information or evidence related to Prettie's shooting.
Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has demanded an impartial investigation
into the shootings in Minneapolis.
Trump's left hand cannot investigate his right hand, he said on Monday, in a response to FBI's
refusal to share evidence, the families of the deceased deserved better.
And obviously, this is, I mean, it's completely, like, there's no defense of it.
It's unjustifiable.
And the American people want to see overwhelmingly, including many Republicans, want to
see a real investigation into this, want to see charges brought, you know, against the two
CBP agents who shot and killed Alex Pruddy, who was, you know, was nonviolent. It was unprovoked. And
many shots came after he was already lying, you know, probably dead on the ground. So, you know,
it's outrageous. It's an outrageous abuse of power that they're just saying, nope, there's going to be
no accountability here. We're going to handle this and we're not going to cooperate whatsoever.
You know, to your point, it's not surprising. This is where we are. It's actually not surprising to me
that either walls and fry or the Trump administration, neither camp trusts the other camp
anymore. So that doesn't surprise me whatsoever. I don't think it surprises anybody whatsoever for the
administration. On the other hand, this is the case that they, I think most prominently,
I mean, this is the case that started to really, after Renee Good, this was the snowball effect
on public opinion. And it was already moving against them. But this really blew it all.
up. And why? Well, in no small part because they put out absurd stories at first. And so if they want
people to trust their investigation while also not cooperating with local authorities, the big problem,
as far as the public is going to be concerned, is that this administration misled the public
immediately. Yeah. And even to the point where the president has disagreed with some of the early
statements actually has openly disagreed with some of the early statements that were made by his own
administration. And so if you want to have, I mean, I think, I remember saying about this case,
this is where you're, if you want to carry out mass deportations, that's your political goal.
You need to have a lot of public trust in order to do that in a way that politically makes
sense, but also in a way that you can logistically be in these communities and actually be
engaged in deportation. The public trust in this case was broken in a way that was flagrant.
Like it was so the saying that he wanted to massacre people.
That's what their early story was about Al's Prattie.
They said he brandished a gun.
And it clearly came to the thing to massacre people.
Yes.
That was their line.
And so like you can be on either side of the Prattie thing and look at what the Trump
administration did and say, holy, like you guys don't have trust on this.
You don't, you do not have the public trust.
I think it also shows how thin the, you know, change in stance is because they, obviously
they sent in Tom Holman instead of Greg Bovino.
now they've signaled, okay, we're done with this surge of agents in Minneapolis. We're moving on to other things. And yet on, you know, this shooting, which was, has been the most high profile. I think you're right. It's really been a turning point in terms of public sentiment. There was already a major degradation of trust. There was already a lot of horror what had been done. But this was really a galvanizing and horrifying moment for many, many millions of people. And so on this critical case, there's still not
budging an inch effectively. Another one that there was another shooting shortly after Alex
Prattie was killed by CBP agents in Minneapolis that we covered here on the show because immediately,
well, first of all, I don't trust these people at all. So when they come out with the story,
I'm like, they're probably lying and that instinct has been justified every single time thus
far. In any case, there was another shooting. This person ended up surviving. But the government
story and some footage that was released by the family where they were calling 911,
immediately there were contradictions in what was going on here. So the government story was that
the immigration agents were assaulted by multiple people. One had a broom, one had a shovel,
and in fear for their life, they fired shots, et cetera. They filed charges against the
people that they said had been involved. Well, now those charges have been dropped.
And they're admitting that the agents involved lied about everything that occurred here.
So we can put this up on the screen from NPR. DHS says immigration agents appear to have lied about shooting in Minnesota to federal immigration agents involved in the shooting of a Venezuelan immigrant in Minneapolis last month appear to have lied about the details of the incident.
The agents have been placed on administrative leave after a joint review by ICE and DOJ of video evidence that has revealed that sworn testimony provided by two separate officers.
appear to have made untruthful statements.
That is from Trisha McLaughlin.
The rare acknowledgement of potential missteps by ICE agents comes after the agency's acting director,
Todd Lyons told Congress on Thursday ICE has conducted 37 investigations into officers' use of force
over the past year.
He did not say whether anyone has been fired.
McLaughlin said the agency is investigating that January 14th shooting of the Venezuelan
immigrant, the officers involved could be fired or criminally prosecuted for any violations.
So they're even holding out the possibility that they could be charged for lying in this sworn testimony.
And you definitely get the sense that what happened here is kind of similar to what happened with Mar-Mar-Mar-Martinez in Chicago,
which is obviously we've obviously covered extensively here on the show as well,
is that once there was video evidence that was just fairly definitive that what they said was a complete and total lie,
they had to drop the charges against her and they had to back off.
Now, she has filed a civil suit against the people who were involved here and possibly against the government itself because she was shot five times.
And the body camera evidence shows that they were the ones who instigated the confrontation, that they were not in danger, that the basic facts of them claiming that they were blocked in by a variety of cars totally and completely false and made up.
And so now we have another instance where they got their hands on some kind of video evidence and were like, oh,
this is not going to hold up in a court of law.
So, and this is another example where the public trust is extremely important because it is true
that there have been some efforts to resist deportation and there have been some, like,
violent efforts to resist deportation.
That is true.
And so when you lie about it, you make it less, you make your entire argument less credible
along the way.
And on top of that, is it possible that they're being lied to by their own,
agents in the field, by the way, who aren't in mass wearing body cameras.
Some of them are wearing body cameras, but ICE has a ton of money.
They can afford to put every single one of them in body cameras.
So is it possible that if you're sitting at DHS in Washington, you're getting information
about what happened, you have your agents say, this is what happened.
This guy came to massacre.
This person was fighting us.
This person was violent.
And DHS puts out a statement trusting you, then it all blows up.
They're a mess. I mean, they're very clearly a mess. This type of thing, it's understandable that it would, when you're engaged in what you and I disagree on the deportation efforts, no matter what, that's going to be chaotic. But they are even by that standard, they're a mess. They're all over the place. They're making their own work more difficult, very clearly.
It's so, I mean, you're right that I, you know, totally agree with the entire project, but it's so easy to just say. Disagree.
Yeah, we just said.
I was like, whoa.
I was like, whoa.
I haven't won you over yet, Emily.
I'll keep working on it.
In any case, it's so easy to just say, we're investigating.
We're looking into it.
Because if that's the problem that their agents are lying to them, and I think you are right.
On the Alex Pretty one, I looked into it enough that it seemed like the agents on the ground were like, he bolded gone on it.
And they just believed it and ran with it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And, you know, and they wanted to.
And they don't care ultimately if they're lying to the public.
They don't care if their statements are truthful.
What they care about is backing up their thugs on the ground in every instance that they possibly can.
So if they're given a colorable story, they're happy to run with it.
So put the next one up on the screen, just so you can see how Noah framed this quote-unquote attack originally.
She said what we saw last night in Minneapolis was an attempted murder of federal law enforcement.
Our officer was ambushed and attacked by three individuals who beat him with snow shovels
and the handles of brooms, fearing for his life, the officer fired a defensive shot.
Mayor Frey and Governor Walls have to get their city under control.
They're encouraging impeding an assault against their law enforcement, which is a federal crime, a felony.
This is putting the people of Minnesota in harm's way.
And so now they filed charges against these individuals who allegedly tried to murder federal law enforcement official.
Those charges have been dropped because they found out all of this total and complete garbage in a lie.
Again, we've so rarely gone back to what happened in Dallas when there was an attempted
shooting on ICE officers that, by the way, ended up hurting migrants themselves.
It's not out of the question that people are trying to harm ICE agents.
It's a politically polarized issue and it's bringing crises out.
So it's no question that that is happening.
The degree to which is happening is more debatable, but there's no question that that's
happened. So when you take advantage of that to lie and spin, you lose the public trust.
And how many people who are Fox News Watchers are going to only hear the original, oh, they tried
to murder law enforcement with brooms and shovels and never hear the, by the way, that was all
garbage and we could no longer sustain these lies because there's video evidence and we had to
drop the charges. Oops, we're moving on. Well, I think that was a problem in the Preddy case because
As soon as, I mean, that Fox was playing, I had Fox CNN, MS on, like, constantly.
I was watching them, Fox was playing that footage all the time.
And if you are, you know, a gun-owning conservative, you saw that footage, and you saw what the administration said.
And so I think the inescapability of the videotape is part of the trust problem for DHS.
And that they say one thing, the video comes out.
So even people who may otherwise be insulated from the follow-on stories have seen it.
And that probably does explain. I mean, American Compass had a really good piece from someone in Ohio, Amber Lap, who was talking to people in her very blue-collar area about what they think of Trump voters, about what they think on immigration. And a lot of them, like, we don't like seeing what we're seeing.
Yeah. People being pulled out of cars and the crackdown. Now, that wasn't true of everyone. But it is, like, the video is, that is pervasive. Like, that is seeping in everybody's news diet.
And it's part of why they have been so aggressive about you have all of these organized citizens who are out there in the streets to observe and record and why they've been so offended by that and so aggressive in their tactics against those people who are just standing there with iPhones recording.
At the same time, there's a funding fight. DHS is actually shut down right now because Democrats are holding the line for some kind of changes with regard to this, you know,
you know, immigration enforcement.
They are funded on a stopgap measure because of something that was in the one big beautiful bill.
That's right.
Yeah.
So, I mean, let's be clear here.
In the short term, ICE CBP, they're not going to suffer.
They have plenty of funding.
They're functioning as usual.
Yes.
And most of DHS, frankly, is functioning as usual because most of the function of DHS are considered to be essential.
So even in a shutdown, they continue.
In any case, this is CNBC you can put up with unscreen lawmakers.
And the White House offered no signs of compromises.
Sunday in their battle over oversight of federal immigration officers that has led to a pause in funding for DHS.
Partial government shutdown began Saturday after congressional Democrats and Trump's team failed to reach a deal on legislation to fund the department through September.
Democrats are demanding changes to how immigration operations are conducted.
Congress on recess until February 23, both sides appear to be dug into their positions.
And I think from it's hard to see how this gets resolved because from the Democrats perspective, they're like,
you know, why would we give in why we, the base is really demanding that something be done here.
And they don't have the problem they had in the previous shutdown where you've got the whole government
shutdown and there's real pain that is happening for workers and the Americans are experiencing
the impacts of the shutdown and you've got air travel screwed up and all of that. Like, you don't have
that, which is why I personally think it was a mistake to, you know, to go along with this idea of,
hey, we'll pass all the other funding bills and we'll just separate out this piece because that
pressure is important point of leverage. In any case, so they don't have that pain point that was
a problem for them holding their ranks together. Republicans are like, well, we don't care
because ICE and CBP still have all of their funding. So why would we bend an inch? Why would
you give you anything that you want? And so I think this could continue for quite a while.
It can be 5 up on the screen. Ryan Cooper made the case for what he says, keeping ICE and CBP
defunded. He says Democrats should not provide one thin dime to Magistorm Troopers and argues that,
yeah, okay, they've got this money from the big beautiful bill. It gave ICE $75 billion more than
seven times its annual budget, much more money than any military in the world except for China's and
Americas. CBP also received tens of billions of dollars in its own right. Both agencies can draw
on this money continue operations during a shutdown. That said, he says, denying baseline annual
funding is still a substantial cut for ICE and CBP, and the longer it persists, the
deeper the funding reduction will be, Democrats should stick to this line. As long as Trump is in
office, these agencies should get no funding through the traditional budget whatsoever. After all,
they already have more than they need. And so his argument that I think a lot of Democrats will find
compelling is basically like, no, you shouldn't be providing any funding to them at all. And yes,
they have plenty of money to operate. But if this goes on for years, then, you know, every year,
there's less and less for them to be able to work with, and it creates more and more difficulties,
the longer the time goes on. I do think one problem that Democrats should be aware of is,
a political problem for them, is that the policy of deporting people who are not supposed to be here,
the public is still pretty split on that. There's still pretty significant public support,
and it's a mid-term year. Now, Democrats are in primaries right now, which means they're focused on the base part of the election,
and actually midterms period are base elections,
meaning you want to electrify your base.
And one of the ways to do that would be to give clearly
what the Democratic base is demanding,
which is defunding ICE.
And just putting up a fight too,
we talked about that when the government,
when Hakeem Jeffries led his half-hearted government shut down
and it was the most pathetic display.
But it was rooted in finally acknowledging
that so many dumb voters just want to see you fighting.
Like, just do something.
Like, do something.
We know that you're still supportive of Netanyahu.
Half of you just took a picture with him, like, smiling.
Like, we get it.
But, like, just show us that you're listening and that you'll fight at all.
So it's an obvious base move, but you have to play it carefully because, you know, members of the public,
they still want to see a sane immigration policy.
And I do think that's a problem for Democrats coming to the table with something that's better
that's not just outright stopping deportations.
And even if it's defunding ICE,
then explaining what that would mean
for people who are not supposed to be here.
I mean, the polling indicates that completely abolishing ICE,
which is not what this would be.
It has gone up, yes.
It's a plurality position now.
I don't think it's achieved outright majority support,
but it is the-
But it has among Democrats, has that?
Oh, yeah. Among Democrats, it's like overwhelmingly popular.
But among independents, it's also quite popular.
And the, you know, I think overwhelmingly the public has moved towards Democrats on seeing this as extremely abusive, wanting, I was looking at the polling yesterday on, you know, the checks that they want to see, you know, things like body cameras, some 80, 90 percent want to see body cameras, them being unmasked. It's like some 75 percent say, yes, they should be unmasked. You know, all of these basic accountability metrics, overwhelmingly popular. And so for Republicans,
to dig in on, no, we want to keep our masked thugs in the street with no body cameras or
accountability. I don't see that as a winning political position for them. And so I think for
Democrats to stay dug in on this matter and really push the issue, no, we're not voting for
this as long as you have zero accountability for these people who are not even cooperating
the Alex Prattie investigation. I think that's like a clear-cut political winner for Democrats.
And it's the right thing to do, too, by the way, which also matters.
Yeah, I mean, I think the masks and they should be looking, and I think in fact they are looking at independent voters, which is why they said they were putting body cameras on the Operation Metro Surge guys a couple weeks ago. Obviously that operation is now over, I guess. We'll see what happens. But yeah, I think that was a response to looking at independence, especially after what happened with Good and Prattie. A New York Times headline from a few weeks ago, voters are split on deportations, but disapprove of ICE poll fines. So this is according to a time, a recent time, Siena poll.
So, yeah, that's what I'm saying is I think you're right, Crystal, that the politics of anti-ice on the left right now are really powerful.
Yeah.
I just think politically for Democrats, voters do want them to have an answer that isn't just anti-Trump on immigration.
And that was a problem.
I think that'll matter in 2008.
Right now, I think just being in the opposite.
And I would like to see that as well.
But I think right now just being opposed to what is happening is, you know, is enough for people.
It's enough in a mid-year.
And I just pulled up 92% support for requiring.
body cams, 86% for detention facilities to meet basic standards, 85% requiring DHS to verify someone's
a non-citizen before arresting them, 81% for independent investigation, 77% requiring DHS to show
warrants before entering private property, 76% for requiring DHS agents to identify themselves,
71% for ending racial profiling, 67% for banning DHS agents from engaging in areas around
schools, hospitals, courts, churches, etc.
So, you know, I think they feel they're on solid ground.
And, you know, given how, like, finger in the wind, the Hakeem Jeffries of the world are,
I don't think they would be going down this path if they didn't have, like, 90% support on a variety of these measures.
Yeah, I guess I was thinking of the Senate.
Like, I should go look and see what Dan Osborne has said about some of the stuff.
Like, the Senate races in either red or purple states where Dems have a real chance of toppling a Republican.
I mean, if Democrats want to retake the Senate with a level of,
unpopularity that Trump has, it's there. I mean, I think people are skeptical of it. They would have to
take like four seats. Osborne has been, has been quite unspoken about the violations of constitutional
rights. Interesting. You know, Second Amendment, Fourth Amendment, et cetera. In fact, he came equipped to
our segment we did with him with a pocket constitution. Oh, that's awesome. For him to be able to
whip out to talk about that. We actually didn't get to that, but he was like, afterwards, he was like,
oh, I didn't get to use my pocket constitution, because you didn't ask me enough about ICE.
So that's where he is.
But then I also think that would be a good race.
Maybe we should have back on, but that would be a good race where voters want to say or want to hear you say.
But here's what I think actually should happen.
Yeah.
And he talked about Comber.
He did talk to us about comprehensive immigration reform.
Sager was pressing him a bit on that sort of stuff.
So he's been, you know, I think he's been fairly outspoken about seeing these abuses as unconscionable.
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Let's go and move on to more potential constitutional violations with the voting rights,
with the Trump attack on voting rights and whatever they're trying to do to mess with the midterms.
We got some new comments from Christy Noam talking about how they need to make sure they're getting the right voters to the polls to vote for the right people.
Let's listen to that.
And elections is another one of those critical infrastructure responsibilities that I have as well.
And I would say that many people believe that it may be one.
one of the most important things that we need to make sure we trust is reliable and that when
it gets to election day that we've been proactive to make sure that we have the right people voting,
electing the right leaders to lead this country through the days that we have, knowing that
people can trust it.
So the right people to vote for the right candidates.
And this is, comes amid a push from Trump in a variety of direction.
Obviously, they seized the Fulton County ballots as part of some Stop the Steel, conspiracy.
Tulsi Gabbard was there for some reason.
They've been suing states to try to force them to hand over their voter rolls.
They're trying to pass this, what's it called, the Save Act, is that what it is?
And that would require very stringent, not just like a regular driver's license and you'd have to have a real ID or passport.
They've also closed down a bunch of passport offices to make it harder to get a passport if you need that.
In any case, let's go and put Trump's truth up on the screen here.
He says the Democrats refuse to vote for voter ID or citizenship.
The reason's very simple.
They want to continue to cheat in elections.
This was not what our founders desired.
I've searched the depths of legal arguments.
Oh, I'm sure he has.
Not yet articulated or vetted on the subject.
Can't just imagine him in the law library, Emily, late at night, researching.
The depths.
The depths of legal arguments.
And we'll be presenting an irrefutable one in the very near future.
There will be voter ID for the midterm elections, whether approved by Congress or not.
Also, the people of our country are insisting on citizenship and no mail-in back.
with exceptions for military disability illness or travel. Thank you for your attention to this
matter. So not only pushing the SAVAC pieces, but also saying I'm going to unilaterally get rid of
the mail-in ballots, which of course has been a nemesis of him since 2020, et cetera. And, you know,
I don't know what case he's going to make here to put forward. It's pretty clear cut that the
states are responsible for running the elections. They're allowed to have whatever rules,
including rules around mail-in ballots, that they pass through their legislature or whatever their process is.
So we'll see here, but this clearly comes as he is engaged in, I think, throwing whatever he can against the wall to try to mess with the midterm elections as his approval rate continues to plummet.
And he recognizes he's in trouble in terms of, you know, how the population feels about him, how they feel about the Republican Party and how the midterms are likely to go.
Yeah, I mean, I hate the way Trump talks about elections.
and part of that is because of what we were discussing even with ICE,
which is that I tend to think there are some real concerns.
I mean, so non-citizens can vote in Washington, D.C. elections, for example, in Washington, D.C.,
I think that's wrong.
There are other laws that allow non-citizens to vote in elections around the country.
I don't think that's right.
And I think it's common sense that people should have to show IDs.
Everything is real ID now, unfortunately.
So that stuff, you know, there's a question of federalism.
and the power of the states, to be sure.
I don't have a problem at all with the SAVE Act.
I think actually it could help boost people's trust
and especially like MAGA people's trust in elections
and in a way that's ultimately healthy.
On the other hand, to act as though this is some sort of significant threat,
like that there is, you know, that in the 2026 midterm elections,
there could be a significant threat from non-citizens flooding elections and throwing them to Democrats,
that I think is irresponsible.
And I think it's partially irresponsible because, again,
you do have non-citizens who are being able to register to vote,
and so then you may have problems where people are registered to vote
and vote not just in the local election or the federal election.
That stuff does get confusing.
So I think partially it's irresponsible because there's a legitimate problem for my
perspective, at least. So I hate the way that he talks about elections. I mean, the way Ben Sass put it
after January 6th was that Trump had been, quote, playing with fire in the way that he'd discussed
what happened that November. And I think that still applies. Very much so. The impact of the SAVE Act
would be that millions of people are unable to vote. And there just isn't- Well, they're able to get their
IDs. I mean, it would be a hurdle. It would be a significant hurdle. But it doesn't mean they're
unable to vote. But it would be, I mean, and it's intentionally designed as a significant hurdle
to make it so that there are fewer people able to vote. And it's a reasonable hurdle.
Not in the case of what they're actually demanding here, which is, again, not just like your
driver's license isn't enough. It has to be a real ID. And that is fairly expensive. So you also at
the same time are closing passport offices. So passport is, would be considered valid, but it's
much harder to get a passport. There's a huge backlog, et cetera.
So I think, you know, it's an intentional, it's an intentional effort to limit and restrict the number of people who can vote.
The assault on mail-in balloting, same thing.
You know, it's an attempt to this is known now that more Democrats mail in their ballots.
So guess what?
We're going to go after mail-in-balloting.
This has been a switch in the dynamics post-COVID.
And to solve a problem that doesn't really exist.
I mean, I understand the theoretical case that you're making.
There are very few instances that have been identified of non-citizens.
who were actually able to cast a ballot.
So why are we de facto putting up hurdles
in the way people exercising their right to vote
to solve a problem that doesn't exist?
And at the same time, I also just think it's like,
I just don't think that it's even useful
to really talk about what Trump is doing here as legitimate
because at the same time, you know,
I mentioned how they're suing states
to get their voter rolls.
And all the Republican states have already sent in their voter rolls.
And they're using this tool on it to supposedly identify non-citizens who have been, who are on the voter rolls for them to purge.
And this tool is a total incomplete disaster.
So we can put C3 up on the screen.
This was some reporting from the Texas Tribune federal tool to check voter citizenship keeps making mistakes.
It led to confusion in Texas.
They say when county clerk Brianna Lennon got an email in November saying a newly expanded federal system had flagged 74 people on the country's counties' voting.
voter role as potential non-citizens, she was taken aback. Lenin, who had run elections in Boone County,
Missouri for seven years, had heard the tool might not be accurate. The flagged voters registration
paperwork confirmed Lenin's suspicion, the form for the second person on a list bore the initials
of a member of her staff who had helped the man register at his naturalization ceremony. Later,
turned out more than half the Boone County voters identified as non-citizens were actually citizens.
A similar situation has been playing out in Texas where county clerks have likewise found numerous
examples of misidentified voters across the state. This is out of the playbook that has been used
most extensively, I think, in the state of Georgia, where Georgia passed a law where any person
can challenge the voting rights of anybody. And so you had a group of activists who would
challenge like thousands of people at a time. And they would get de facto thrown off the voter
roles. And you would have situations where they would go through, states would go through also,
and try to do this automated, you know, matching of, okay, let's see if this person is genuinely
citizen, whether they've changed addresses, et cetera. And some of the names that you're talking about
here are very common names. So, you know, if you've got a guy named Juan Carlos and one of them
is a citizen who's rightfully registered to vote in Fulton County and the other is not, they would
kick them off the ballot. And it caused all sorts of incidents where, you know, the ballots with all
these legitimate voters were purged from the rolls. And now this is what the Trump administration is
trying to do in states across the country. As I said before, Republican states are going along with it.
Democratic states are resisting this direction. The Trump administration is suing them to try to get
access to their federal rule so they can make some case. They can analyze the data and make some case,
oh, my God, there's all these illegitimate voters. And it's part of a larger scale attack on the
midterm elections. You know, some of these things are like within the bounds of what are
ugly and at times undemocratic politics are like the gerrymandering fight. And some of them are
completely out of bounds. Like when Steve Bannon suggests, hey, let's have ICE agents at the
poll to intimidate people so that they don't show up. Or when Trump suggests, hey, we should
nationalize elections. Hey, I've decided that I've come up with some legal argument that would
allow me unilaterally to end in mail-in ballots, not even through an act of Congress, but just
me, myself, and I through an executive order. So, you know, obviously there's a lot of reason why
people are deeply concerned about what this is going to look like for 2026 and 2028 going forward.
No, I mean, count me among them. I'm one of the people that feels like, I mean, some of this
started in 2016 with Hillary Clinton flirting with this idea that the, there was a Russian
effort to mess with voting and that some of the election had been thrown. There were a lot of
Democrats who were flirting with that idea at the time, even to the point of saying voting machines
might have been a problem, but nothing compared to what Trump did after he lost the 2020
election, and from there it just exploded.
You know, Georgia is a, basically there's nobody who denies that Georgia had so many people
who voted in their prior area of residence incorrectly that it was more than the margin,
which was like 11,000.
There were like 15,000 people who voted that.
And it doesn't mean that their votes were not legitimate votes.
Right.
There were legitimate votes, but they were done incorrectly.
And that's the type of thing that makes people say, oh, hmm, fraud would be easy to do.
in Georgia, and so people lose trust in the system. And that's where I actually, honestly,
think there's a case for the SAVE Act from that perspective that you have so many people
on the right who now distrust elections. Like, it's almost like how Procana talks about
his billionaire tax being anti-revolutionary. From my perspective, a case for SAVE where you have,
you know, if we allowed everybody to vote on their phones, that would be mass enfranchisement
of voting. I don't agree with that. I think voting should happen on the same day.
but it should be a national holiday, everybody should get it off, and all that kind of thing.
That's not what Trump is pushing, of course.
So, yeah, it's partisan politics.
And the distrust doesn't just come out of nowhere.
And it's not just because, like, oh, things were messy in Georgia.
I mean, every election, because it's run, because it's, you know, federalized or it's, you know.
It's states.
Yeah, it's not run nationally.
And so you're always going to have some, oh, something weird happened here.
The line was too long there, et cetera.
It's the nature of our elections.
The reason that Republicans have lost trust is because Trump told them that 2020 was rigged
and spun up an entire election conspiracy and tried to put fake electorates, electors forward
and, you know, incited people to, you know, January 6th and all of that.
Well, he was platforming Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani's Dominion voting.
Which he continues to do.
And, you know, I mean, that's the other piece of this is you've got Maduro sitting in prison.
And I no longer think that it's crazy at all.
Imagine.
Not at all.
They're going to strike some deal with him where he claims, oh, yeah, I totally rigged
the 2020.
You're right.
You got me.
Me and the ghost of Hugo Chavez.
Rigged it against you and for Biden.
And use that as a pretext to say the whole thing is fraudulent.
It's all rigged.
I'm declaring some sort of a national emergency in trying to seize power.
And it's an open question, how much he's able to get away with.
But that's what he's constantly testing.
What can I get away with?
Can I get away with sending in the national guard?
Can I get away with the third term?
Can I, yeah, can I get away with the third term? Can I get away with seizing, you know, the ballots in Fulton County and spinning up this fake thing and sending in Tulsi Gabbard? Can I get away with having ICE go to the polls and intimidate people? He's constantly pressing like, where is the limit? Where is the limit? Where is the limit? And then he'll have to, he'll get checked like he did in Minneapolis and have to pull back a little bit. But then it'll, you know, he'll just continue pushing forward. And this term, he only has people around him who were in support of those.
most maximalists aims, or who are actively, like Stephen Miller, in favor of the most maximalist
approach to these things. I found it very chilling when he told the New York Times, I regret not
sending the National Guard in to seize the ballot boxes in 2020, but I don't know if they'd be up to it.
My guess is that he thinks that ICE would be up to, you know, something like that. And that's why,
you know, they've got so much funding. So they're DHS secretary talking about it.
That's why the DHS secretary is talking about it exactly, right? Yeah. No, I think that's true.
Let's put this ProPublica report up on the screen speaking of Georgia.
The headline here is the conservative researcher being linked to the FBI seizure of election records in Georgia.
Their lead is a conservative researcher whose theories have often been rejected by Georgia election overseers
and who once pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of voyeurism is emerging as a central figure in the investigation that culminated in the FBI's shocking seizure of 2020 election records from Fulton County, Georgia in late January.
That's what Crystal was just referencing with Tulsi Gabbard.
Yes.
So this is a total crank named Kevin Munkla.
He's a lesser-known crank than like Sidney Powell or Mike Lindell.
Yeah, I didn't even know his name.
Some of the well-known cranks from 2020.
This is a lesser-known crank who I think is affiliated with that, you know,
Stop to Steel affiliate organization, the Election Integrity Network, which has been very
influential in terms of personnel placements within the Trump administration.
And so not only are they relying this guy whose theories are, of course,
completely discredited. Oh, by the way, he was found guilty of this voyeurism charge for putting
cameras in his own bathroom to spy on the house guests that were staying with him, including...
Oh, no, they were in his house. In his own bathroom, including two young children.
So this is the quality of the people that they are relying on here for some of their theories.
Man, like you said, cringe, or not cringe, fringe cranks that combined them into cringe.
But cranky, fringe people.
Yes.
I guess you could call it cringe.
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I'm in a lick Lamouba.
Listen to the A building.
on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Bowen-Yin.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
During this season of the Two Guys Five Rings podcast, in the lead-up to the Milan-Cortina
2026 Winter Olympic Games, we've been joined by some of our friends.
Hi, Boen, hi, hello.
Hey, Matt, hey, Bowen.
Hi, Cookie.
Hi.
Now, the Winter Olympic Games are underway, and we are in Italy to give you experiences
from our hearts to your ears.
Listen to Two Guys Five Rings on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.
14 years in prison for killing a young woman.
A 15-year sentence for a crash that caused three deaths.
Twelve and a half years for killing a child and critically injuring her mother.
All true stories.
All caused by marijuana impaired drivers.
No matter what you tell yourself, if you feel different, you drive different.
So, if you're high, just don't drive.
Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council.
This is an IHeart podcast.
Guaranteed Human.
