Bulwark Takes - Why Republicans Are Terrified of The Emails

Episode Date: November 17, 2025

Sam Stein and Will Saletan dissect Sen. Barrasso’s messy defense of Trump amid new Epstein-related revelations, soaked in both contradictions and political awkwardness.

Hey, everyone, it's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the Bork. I'm joined by Will Salton, who's, I don't know about his sitorial choices, honestly. What is this? A black t-shirt with a black hoodie? What is going on here? Last time you had the hoodie, and this time I'm doing the hoodie, and I'm slumming it? Come on, man. You're slumming it.

Give me a break. Couldn't get in your Sunday best. I'm in my Steinware here. Come on. We're going to talk today about John Barrasso, mostly about the weird episode. Christine politics that are about to descend upon the United States Senate. We don't enjoy watching the Sunday shows per se. Maybe Will does.

But we watch them for you so that you can get the digestion of them here. All right. Well, so Barras was on the shows. He says a bunch of stuff. What stood out to me, I guess, is how he's approaching the Epstein saga. And so he's pressed on this because, you know, Donald Trump's now in this whole, this is a hoax. We don't, you don't have to spend your time doing this.

move on. This is a distraction, yada, yada, yada. At the same time, Donald Trump is saying, investigate all the stuff when tying Epstein to any Democrat. So it's a hoax, only like to a small degree. Everything else is legitimate. And John Barras was kind of pressed on this point. This is how he explains why the DOJ is following Trump's orders to investigate people, even though the DOJ had previously said there's no evidence to investigate people with respect to the Epstein. Let's take a listen. President Trump this week asked the Justice Department to investigate Jeffrey Epstein's involvement in relationship with some top Democrats. And yet in July, the Justice Department and the FBI released a memo about the Epstein case that said, quote, we did not

uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties. Senator, if there wasn't evidence to justify further investigation in July, why is there evidence now? I'm not sure what evidence is out there. What I do know is that the House is going to vote this week, try to make a decision, and we'll see if they send something to the Senate. And if they do, we'll take a look at that. But we want transparency and accountability. What I also know is that Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted sex offender, and he is dead. and President Trump threw him out of Mar-Largo 21 years ago. All right, it's hard to follow that. Okay, so, all right, Sam, there's two parts of this.

I really want to talk about that last line. When DOJ put it, that was July. DOJ said, hey, there's no, we don't have a basis. They were protecting Trump. They were like, that whole thing was for them to protect Trump. And then Trump does this thing. He does this on a lot of issues where he just, a lawyers call this arguing in the alternative.

I'm going to throw everything at you. never mind whether it all contradicts everything else I told you, right? Like, so one of them is there's nothing to see here, folks, right? Which is what DOJ said. Like, hey, don't look at me. Don't look at anybody. Nothing to see here. The other one is, hey, look at everyone but me.

Like, there's got to be something suspicious. Like, I don't know. As a Democrat, I would take the deal. I'd be like, let's have an open investigation of everybody. Yeah, I think they're overstating how much Democrats want to protect Bill Clinton and and Larry Summers. Go, have fun. Go. Go do your thing. Yeah, I'm happy to, I'm happy to throw him under the bus. Any Democrat is connected. You went to the island 20 times. You explain it. I'm happy to do that in exchange for the president of the United States having to explain.

Okay, so let me come to the last thing that Barrasso said. He says, hey, forget about this whole Epstein matter for two reasons, right? Number one, Epstein's dead. And number two, Trump threw Epstein out of Maralago. Okay, first of all, Epstein's dead by suicide under highly dubious circumstances. And even if you believe that he killed himself, which I do, the, you know, the sort of the whole situation of what who Epstein could have ratted on. We have now the emails in which one of the people Epstein could have ratted on, he claims, was Donald Trump. And then the guy commits suicide. Sam, I don't recall that when it was Vince Foster and Bill Clinton and Vince Foster committed. I don't recall Republicans saying, hey, this guy killed himself, nothing to see here. He's dead. It was all

the suspicious suicide. Okay, so that's one thing. Wow, I did not, I did not anticipate the Vince Foster. Sorry, we're going, we're playing the oldest today. I'm sure there's, I bet you that we can find five other scandals where somebody committed suicide and like the other side said, like, hey, very suspicious. Okay. So that's one thing. The other thing he's like, Grasso says, Trump threw Epstein out of Mara Lago, and this is supposed to exonerate Trump. Sam, he threw Epstein out of Mara Lago by his own, Trump, by his own admission, because Epstein was, quote, was stealing employees from Mara Lago. And the employee that he stole was Virginia Jufre. I know.

The stolen, you know, persons that include Virginia Jeffrey? I don't know. I think she worked at the spa. I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her. Who was 17? Who would know that Virginia Jifrey was 17?

Oh, maybe her employer, Mar-a-Lago, maybe Donald Trump. So he knew that Epstein was stealing underage girls from Mar-a-Lago to be his, you know, everything that he knew about Epstein, right? Dude, yeah. He knew that's the thing. is the new information. It's not that Trump is like tied to some girl necessarily. It's Epstein saying in the in the emails, Donald Trump knows about the girls. So he knew. And that's why it doesn't matter if, if he threw him out of Marlago. What matters is did Donald Trump know about

this stuff? Yeah, but the fact that he threw him out isn't just irrelevant. It's incriminating. Because like Sam, okay, wait, think about this for a minute, the Catholic sex scandal, the sex abuse scandals, right? If you, if you were a Catholic, a local Catholic official and you had a problematic priest and you sent that person to another parish and then we find out that he's an abuser. The fact that you sent him to another parish is not exonerated. That is not. That's incriminating, right? Yeah. It shows you knew. There was another point where Trump said that he got rid of Epstein. He kicked him out because he was behaving like a creep. I think that was actually the White House that put out that statement. He's a creep,

so I got rid of him. He was taking underage girls from Mar-a-Lago, so I got rid of him, all of which says Donald Trump knew. And the fact that he kicked Epstein out of Marago shows he knew about it and he didn't do anything other than kick him out of his club. Let me just quickly say in the time that you know I were talking, I googled Donald Trump and Vince Foster just because I had a suspicion. And it's not Donald Trump. It's Donald Trump Jr. has promoted a far-right conspiracy theory sharing a tweet that linked former president Bill Clinton's firing of an FBI director to the death of his then-Aid, Vince Foster. So they have dabbled in these conspiracies before a shock to hear that. But let me just, let me just say one thing about this whole defense that is

contradictory. So I just want to summarize if I can. On one hand, the FBI and DAJ has argued that they found nothing that could sustain or support further prosecution of anything related to Jeffrey Epstein. On the other hand, they, Donald Trump has called it all a hoax. And then on another hand, it is enough, not a hoax and not nothing, to sustain an investigation into only the Democrats. So those are their three planks. And it gets me to what I think is like sort of not the fundamental issue for Trump facing him, but like clearly the problem, which is as, you know, it's a cliche. The cover up is always more impactful than the crime itself. Now, in this case, we don't know what the crimes might have been. But the cover up has been incredibly haphazard and

disjointed. And it gives the sort of intoxicating aroma of him being guilty as hell because he's doing things that don't make any logical sense, just throwing whatever he can at the wall. And he's sticking people like Barrasso with the cleanup duty. And Barassau looks foolish right now, saying, oh, yeah, he's dead. He's a bad person. He's dead. Maybe we should investigate this. Maybe we shouldn't. I might vote for it. I might not. And it's just like it would be a lot easier, for instance, if they could just be like, yes, let's be transparent about it. DeBarras was saying there's nothing to see there. Meanwhile, we have backstage Trump, the White House,

literally calling in Republicans in the House to like beg them to don't release these files. Like you couldn't have a more incriminating action by the administration in terms of that there's something to hide. And so this is going to go to the House this week. The expectation is, I don't know, dozens of House Republicans will vote for it, even though Trump has gone after Marjor Taylor Green revoked an endorsement. and launched this like hideously nasty attack on Tom Massey over the death of his wife.

Really nasty shit. Barrasso's asked about what happens when it comes to Senate because it's going to pass the House. It will then go to the Senate and John Thune could just sit on this thing or he could bring it to a vote. This is what Barrasso says about what might happen if it goes to the Senate. Senator, if the EPSC measure passes the House, will it get a vote in the Senate? It'll come to the Senate. We'll take a look at it.

If it passes the House, we'll see what it says. and we all want accountability and transparency, but to me, this is not about truth. It's not about justice. This is about an attempt by the Democrats to make President Trump a lame duck president, and I'm not going to aid and abet them in their efforts. It's not about truth. It's not about justice. That's him talking.

That's him. Like, he's decided unilaterally. I don't take this in good faith. But this is, Sam, this is an evidentiary case. This is like, what is the evidence? And let's get the evidence out. His response is, I'm not going to. going to treat this like it's a matter of truth or justice.

I mean, quite literally, it's about saying, give us the files. It's like that's it. It's just give us your FBI. You can redact victims' names. You don't have to, you know, put anyone in a bind if they don't want to be in one. But like, just give us your files. And that somehow is not truth and justice. It doesn't make any sense.

Well, in the guise of saying that the other side is playing politics, he's openly admitting to it. He's just saying, I'm not going to treat this as. Yes. And we saw this before in the Trump impeachments where there were people. Republican senators saying, I'm just, I don't take this seriously. It's all an attack on the president. I'm going to protect him.

But isn't I'm saying, isn't I'm saying it's an attack on the president and an attempt to make him a lame duck president itself, just an incredibly damning thing to say? Absolutely. Absolutely. Like, you know, this is an attempt to make Trump a lame deck president. Look, if Trump's not in these files, if there's nothing incriminating, this doesn't make him a lame duck any more than he was the day before. The only way this makes him a lame duck.

is if there's something really bad in there. So I think it's a confession by Barrasso. Yeah, no, totally. All right. Last clip from Barrasso, again, on the issue of weaponizing justice and the Epstein files, again from his interview on Meet the Press. I fully believe that had there been something here that the Biden administration could have used to go after President Trump the last four years, they had have gone after him

with double barrels. But this is an administration, the Biden administration, which abused justice. They have gone after eight United States senators, spied on them, went after their phone records, targeted them. So they have abused the laws of the land. And I think they would have gone after President Trump if there was anything there to me, this Epstein matter, as well as this shutdown. I can't even. I can't.

Okay. I'm just like, I want to bounce off the walls about it. This is a total catch-22. This is one of those heads. So Barrasso is simultaneously saying the Democrats weaponized justice. They weaponized law enforcement. They went after these Republican senators, and that shows that they're abusing the system. When the Democrats don't go after somebody, which is they didn't go after Trump about Epstein, the argument is, oh, well, if they didn't do it, well, then he must be innocent.

You can't have it both ways. You can't say it. Well, you can, I suppose, right? in theory, it's like they're just, if your view of Democrats is that they are just like, nasty, you know, Machiavellian, power hungry, willing to warp the Justice Department only to meet their ends, it therefore means that if they didn't do it, they couldn't have found the, it's sorry. Plus, the other thing, Sam, is this is new stuff. This stuff from the Epstein estate. Of course. This is like, these, these, the emails that just came out this week, this is the new stuff. And like, they didn't have it before. So it's, don't, you know, But like, don't pretend that like, it's every accusation is a confession too, right? Because he's saying this while San Mutinously is the Trump Justice Department acquiesce into

Donald Trump's orders to investigate only the Democrats that are mentioned in this new round of emails that were let from let up by the Epstein estate. Again, not the Justice Department, the Epstein estate. And so, you know, Barrasso is a pretty skilled spinster, but he's working with some pretty bad material here. Yeah, I mean, the Republicans are complaining. that the Democrats are somehow like, oh, they're playing politics because they only released three out of 20,000 emails and they were the most damning ones.

Well, of course you would. But, you know, meanwhile, you have the president of the United States literally putting out there investigate, I'm directing the government, like all this stuff about Biden weaponizing the Justice Department was like speculation. Most of it was like debunk. In Trump's case, it's like, I'm doing it right at there. Pam, investigate these people, Justice Department. And she did it.

Within four hours. Like immediately she follows it. The corruption is right out there in the open. No, it's madness. All right, man. I appreciate it. This is just, you know, sometimes it's just really painful to go and sit through these Sunday shows. But you do it with race.

I suffer for you, Sam. I suffer for you. For all of us. And one day we will pay you back. I just don't know how. And let's say thank you to all the viewers who suffered through this portion of it. all right will salton ladies and gentlemen thank you guys for watching us