IHIP News - New Bombshell Probe Into Epstein Activities Has MAGA Terrified; Billionaires Desperate?

Episode Date: June 20, 2026

Representative Ro Khanna joins us to discuss update in the fight to get justice for Epstein's survivors.Pre-order Jennifer’s new book Not Today, Fascists today: https://linktr.ee/ivehaditpodcastFollow Us:I've Had It Podcast: @IvehaditpodcastJennifer Welch: @mizzwelchSpecial Guest: Ro Khanna: @RoKhannaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The president of the United States continues news cycle after news cycle to talk about how hot he thinks the men that he meets are and he just did this with the Egyptian president. Play the clip. It's a big deal for me to be with the great president of Egypt, but not as big as it used to me before I ran. So he was in a hotel and I met him and we fell in love, deeply in love. And he didn't even want to see Hillary. He said, you're going to win. I don't want to meet her. She said, you're going to win. He didn't want to see her. Remember that? So we had a good relationship right from the bit. No, we met. We didn't know each other before that. We had great chemistry. And I stayed twice as long as I was supposed to. Took. Interesting. Here to discuss this with me, of course, is our progressive fighter, a warrior, Congressman Roe Kana, who represents California 17th congressional district and is serving his fifth term. Congressman, how are you today? Good. Good to see you again. I don't know how you find these clips. Pretty out there. I feel like we're just like a new cycle or two away from him moving Melania out and moving somebody new in.

He's like, I say he's in his deathbed confession era where the dementia has lowered his inhibitions. And he just keeps, you know, like your old grandmother in a nursing home, like, I really liked your little sister better than you. And this is what we're witnessing on the global stage. Seriously. I mean, he was talking about Modi, who is the Indian prime minister and how he was a very good looking man and is a killer inside. But he went on and on about Modi's looks. I mean, it's just bewildering what he bases his decisions on. But it would be comical if it weren't for the fact that it has real consequences and let the 14 service members' debts in the case of Iran and all of us paying higher prices for food and gas. Let's switch gears here to Elon Musk. And this is just, it's unfathomable what is happening.

He is now worth at least $1.3 trillion. Pop this up, Kylie. Elon Musk, if he lost $1 trillion, congressman, he would still remain the world's richest person per Bloomberg. And we're seeing reporting that Elon Musk has made more money. in the last 24 hours than Warren Buffett has in his lifetime. This is just unfathomable that this, that we have a system that allows this.

It really is. And he has more money than Sweden, the Taiwan, than countries' entire GDPs. I mean, it is a absurdity. And people say, well, don't you believe in entrepreneurship and innovation? Sure, but that doesn't mean, you accumulate a trillion dollars. That's because we've had low corporate tax rates. That's because

we haven't taxed stock buybacks. That's because we haven't had collective bargaining. That's because we haven't had appropriate marginal tax rates. So it's a lot of things in a rigged economy that have allowed for this kind of accumulation. And then when Bernie Sanders come around and I'd say, let's have a 5% tax every year on these billionaires and trillionaires, people, they get all upset. They ran a primary challenge against me because of that. I mean, the guy got 6% of the vote. But still, but think about this, Jennifer, for 5% tax one time on Elon Musk, you could have universal childcare in America $10 a day for every family.

That's one person, one time, 5%. And he wouldn't even miss it because the market would grow by 15% and his wealth would still grow. And yet they're opposed to something as basic as that. You know what bothers me is when we talk about taxing these obscenely wealthy people, we have to throw in these caveats and they'll still be rich. We have to placate the feeling and he'll still earn more and his net worth will still be big. We always have to placate and defer to their feelings. And if you think about Elon Musk and how he is online,

not to mention the back-to-back Sig Heels that we all witnessed with our own eyes after Trump won. Then he regrams or reboots or retweets all of these like Holocaust deniers, white nationalists. And then his own former BFF, Donald Trump, the one who just fell in love with the Egyptian president, said that Elon Musk gets more subsidies from government than anybody else. When Elon Musk was like, hey, the reason that when they broke up and it was like, hey, the reason the Epstein files aren't coming out is because Trump is And Trump's like, hey, Elon Musk wouldn't be rich without the government. And so it's amazing to me how we have a system that allows people to universally bash the government all day long, regram, retweet Nazi shit on a site that he had to pay $40 billion

for, however much it was. And he is profiting from the very system that he benefits from, not to mention per MAGA's ideology. This isn't my ideology. This isn't your ideology. But Burr-Maga's ideology, we can't let immigrants come in here and take our money and our jobs. And Elon Musk is a fucking immigrant. It's just, I can't, I feel like my brain is spiraling over this.

Well, he's the right kind of immigrant from their perspective. They don't want immigrants from certain countries coming here. But of course, South African, they're fine with a white South African. But the reality is that you're, You're right. I mean, Obama made Elon Musk. I mean, that's not exaggeration. I was in the Obama administration. They gave him a loan of hundreds of millions of dollars for Tesla. Tesla was going bankrupt. And Anna Ash, who was no longer in Congress who represented Palo Alto, will tell you that Elon Musk used to call her every week, begging her. Can you please do something from the Obama

administration? I'm going to go bankrupt. Literally used to call this member of Congress. So Obama gives the loan. There's a mistake made when we gave that loan. One, we didn't require him to have labor neutrality. So he builds Tesla without union labor. That was a mistake. And that we did not take some share, some part of Tesla for those loans. And so he builds all this wealth on the backs of taxpayers. And he acts like he's totally self-made. The other thing is that Obama's Defense Secretary, Ash Carter, helped him get the SpaceX contract saying that we wanted you to him to have the contract instead of Lockheed and Boeing. And he's got no acknowledgment of any of those contracts. And then out there saying, well, he is a better allocator of capital. This is the

thing that drives me the most crazy. I mean, that Elon Musk is an allocator of capital and the government can't do anything. The government's the one that invented the internet with Vince Surfe at DARPA. The government is the agency that has led to a lot of the fundamental scientific advance that these tech billioners are capitalizing on. So it sounds like you're saying our system creates this situation. Our system has created this. Obviously, we are attaching these horrific personalities and they're like so easy to hate on Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos. They're super easy to hate on. But regardless of their individual personalities, we have a system that is enabling and creating this unchecked wealth and also a system that then we feel like we have to placate

and cauddle their wealth. And I remember back in the day, like when I was really young, people had a sense of patriotism about giving to the country. And that seems to be completely gone. And And the merger of these tech oligarchs with government, it's hard to find where they begin and end. And here's an example. Pop this up, Kylie. The Pentagon used Elon must GROC AI to fire 2,000 missiles at Iran. And if you might remember, Congressman, GROC AI, Elon, whenever he either either, in my opinion, takes too much ketamine or is having a narcissistic crash out, he gives GROC a lobotomy. And GROC had this lobotomy where you could ask it, like, who's more athletic, LeBron James or Elon Musk.

And Grok responded, Elon Musk, which is just insane. And we're giving this guy Pentagon contracts. It's this is like, I feel like the demise of our country is such an accelerating rapid rate that we are rewarding, un-treated addicts that have AI lie to their users and say that Elon Musk is more athletic than LeBron James. Yeah, let's give him 2,000 missiles to fire Iran. Am I a crazy person? Like, can we check this? You're not. And then it has life or death consequences. I mean, I don't know whether they use GROC or some other AI or what they use, but, you know, we did strike that school where young schoolgirls were killed.

And we don't have a Pentagon willing to have guardrail saying that we need human judgment before launching missiles. So it's not just that we may have a biased AI. We have the most lethal military in the world dependent on AI that's leading to life or death consequences. But the problem with Musk is that you have, first of all, three times the concentration of wealth, than in the gilded age. So 19 billionaires have about now trillionaire two, have about 12% of the economy. That was in time of Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Morgan, only 4%. So we got three times

of wealth concentration. And whatever you thought of Rockefeller and Carnegie, and they were certainly not angels, they built things like public libraries. They built University of Chicago where I went to school. What are these billionaires doing? It's just like they hang around some of them with Epstein. they're trading money. It's not like they're engaged in civic projects of here's, we're going to build universities, we're going to build hospitals, we're going to build libraries, we're going to take care of people who are homeless. And that's, I think, part of the other anger here. They've got wealth concentration, they're buying off politicians, and no one thinks they're really doing things for their community or country in terms of a civic way.

Yeah, and then like Elon Musk is just like chronically online. I mean, it would be sad if he didn't have the money to get the help to treat all of his many disorders. But moving along, another billionaire that's fun to hate on and just delivers up hateable statements all the time is, of course, Jeff Bezos. And here is a video of him speaking at a conference today where he says AI won't cause labor shortages. Play the clip. Concern that many people have, including many smart people, that AI is going to make humans redundant, and so on. I totally disagree with this point of view. And I think, in fact, AI is going to create a labor shortage because it's going to make it possible for people to identify more problems. We have an

endless set of things to invent. Okay. That's a jet stream of bullshit, clearly. I mean, it's just utter bullshit. Furthermore, this guy started a bookstore. And kudos to him. He built this big, you know, global retailer, whatever. He's not an economist. He doesn't understand. He's not an expert in this field. And this is a fundamental cultural problem with America and our unregulated capitalism as we attribute intelligence and areas of expertise to anybody that is rich. And like-

Yes, you're absolutely right. Jeff Bezos is not an expert in this. Elon Musk isn't an expert in defense. And we as a culture attribute, oh, he's rich. He must know about everything. And it's such a fool's errand on our part that we attribute to their e-lon-eastern. goes and we enable all of the worst impulses of these men. But what do you have to say about him, in my opinion, lying about AI, not wiping out the workforce?

Which I have from first year, insight is absolutely right. That's how we got Donald Trump. I mean, we give people who have wealth or the appearance of wealth, this deference that somehow they know about foreign policy or economic policy or morality. And it's the arrogance of some of these folks that offends me the most. They think they think they know it all. But look, Bezos is obviously wrong on AI and jobs. He's wrong in a just anecdotal set to go to any university campus and ask young folks, do they have concerns about the job market? And they'll all tell you they have concerns about being hired. I mean, he would have been booed if he had given those comments at any university, as you saw all these commencement speakers being booed.

He's got no self-reflection. I'm not saying that. I'm not saying that. What he did with Amazon didn't have value, but he's got no self-conception of all the local bookstores that were put out of business, the retailers that were put out of business, the hollowing out of rural America. And so they only see one side of it, the wealth accumulation. And yes, consumers, maybe there was ease and lower prices, but they put a lot of folks out of business in doing that. And then with AI, you just, even Dario Amadee and the people like Sam Oldman at

AI are saying this is going to displace jobs. Yeah, it may create certain types of jobs, but jobs that are entry-level jobs, jobs which are dealing with accounting or law or bookkeeping that customer support are going to be eliminated. And it's just no credibility to deny that. If he had said, look, there are new jobs that are going to be created, et cetera, but we're going to have massive displacement or possible displacement as well. He'd have credibility. But, you know, he's just out there talking about what's going to be good for the capital class.

Completely. And he has a Supreme Court that is not really protecting Trump as much as it is him and all of the oligarch interests. Everybody knows that, I mean, I call Donald Trump, instead of calling him a lame duck, I say we're in the dementia duck phase of his presidency. And the Supreme Court, they're young, at least the Trump appointees, and they're going to be installed for a long time, and they consistently deliver for this class of people and not for working class people.

And in the same interview, Congressman, he actually was sitting there talking about wanting to colonize the moon. And I think it's just so detached from the American experience. People are like colonize the moon. Like, of course, if you are not flying commercial and you're not seeing like, oh my God, then flight I normally take was $400 round trip. Now it's $1,100 round trip.

And my gas used to be 40, $30 a tank. Now it's $80 a tank. You know, then you're completely out of touch and he's talking about colonizing the moon and Elon Musk colonizing Mars. I don't know about you. I wish they'd both just get on with it and move up there. But I want to shift gears to Zorro Ranch in the Epstein files. This is something that I think is really interesting. It's my understanding that there was never a thorough investigation of this property of Jeffrey Epstein's. And you've been on the forefront of fighting for their survivors and trying to shine a light on these injustices. And the Zora Ranch was very, very isolated.

And I am not a crime detective, but I watch a lot of true crime. It seems like if you wanted to commit a lot of crimes, you would have isolated spaces. And we know of the island and that we also know of this ranch. And pop this up, Kylie. The Wall Street Journal is reporting New Mexico investigators have sent letters to J.P. Morgan, Google, and more than two dozen companies ordering them to lock down records tied to Jeffrey Epstein and some of his associates, a sign of the widening criminal probe into his Zorro ranch. You have been in the forefront of this. Tell my viewers and listeners what the status of this is. Well, I met with the New Mexico Attorney General, and I'm glad that they're pursuing this. First, I said he has standing, actually, to sue the Department of Justice to get the files. I mean, the reality is that, you know, Massey and I passed that law. Three million files have been released, but they're still sitting on three million files.

Well, now you are the New York Attorney General. You actually have standing saying, I want to be able to look at what happened in this ranch. want to be able to conduct criminal investigations. And the Trump Department of Justice is withholding certain documents and violation of the law. So I appreciate how aggressive he is being, but it has been a totally undercover story. There was abuse on Epstein's Island. There was also a lot of abuse on this ranch. And it needs to be investigated.

And these men who did this need to be held accountable. Is it true? I read that a like Trump super donor bought Zora ranch, and currently owns it? I am not sure of that. I had read the same thing, but I don't want to confirm it without facts, but I had read that there,

I know it was owned by someone. I didn't know whether there's a link to Trump there. Okay. Last question. As we had into the midterms, the Democrats are, primaries are rolling out all over. And the Democrats look primed to take back the House,

possibly the Senate. How worried are you about some of these red states like Texas where Trump has a situation that he wanted with Georgia in 2020? He has made, he has, he has primed the soil in Texas and some of these red states. One thing he is is he learned his lesson from Trump 1.0 to remove guard rails. Susan Collins is right. He did learn his lesson. He learned how to be a better criminal, Donald Trump. Trump. He learned how to skirt the system better. And so I'm very worried about these red states.

What kind of oversight in Congress are y'all doing anything? Do you have your eyes on this that you can tell my listeners because I do not want, we have to talk about this, but I also don't want it to suppress voter turnout. I'm very concerned. I mean, Texas basically admits Abbott and Paxton that they do things to make the vote harder. And it doesn't have to be like stuffing ballot boxes, if you close polling places in certain places, if you use ICE to intimidate, if you clear out the voter rolls, if you make it hard in terms of what ballots actually get counted, in terms of disqualifying ballots and technicalities, you can really impact the results, especially when in a state like Texas, it's going to be a few percent.

So I'm confident in states like California, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. Jersey in Virginia where we have Democratic governors. But where we have Republican election officials, Republican governors, we need to be very, very vigilant. What does that look like? We need to have relationships with local election officials. We need to have huge amounts of volunteers out there. We need to make sure that we're coordinated with the local media.

It needs to be a full out campaign. Now, the good news is that every week, Hakeem Jeffrey does convene, convene a, meaning specifically on this issue of what are we going to do to mobilize and shine the light on elections across across the country. And it's going to take all of us. So instead of just worrying about it, if you have the time in the last couple weeks in October and November, say, I'm going to go to a red state. I'm going to be an election observer. I'm going to work with local election officials, local media, and let's get the type of turnout on those, on election day like we've had at the No Kings rallies. That's really what it's going to take.

Yeah, I had fascism expert on my podcast, Jason Stanley, and he said that in order to overcome these types of authoritarian-style governments that are rigging elections, like a, what do they call it electoral um yeah electoral autocracy or democrat where they rig the election we have to win by like 25 points like they did in hungry and i think considering our country has such a low voter participation and that's by design you know with a lot of the republican uh voter suppression laws and tactics but i really want us to continue to talk about this because we have to turn out in a manner that's too big to rig to give you guys in the house the ability to go after these people. And if you, if Jeffries gets the hammer down on them in the house.

Well, absolutely. And the first time I heard the too big to rig was on your show. I don't know if you coined that phrase or others did, but you're absolutely right. And we have the opportunity to do it because people are really upset at the war. They're upset at Epstein. They're upset at food prices and gas prices. They want to vote them out. But we need to come out in huge numbers. And I do believe that once we take power, there has to be accountability. There needs to be accountability for Elon Musk. You know, they're celebrating that he created 4,400 millionaires,

but they don't talk about the 4.5 million children around the world who he possibly sentenced to death by dismantling USA. He needs to answer for that. He needs to be a subpoenaed. He needs to face investigation. He needs to answer for what he did with Doge. that it's not just let's move on. And we will use the Oversight Committee and the Judiciary Committee to hold people accountable who violated the law on ice and abused power with ICE, who violated

the law and killing people on boats in the Caribbean, who violated the law when it came to Iran and some of the strikes, who violated the law with Doge. There will be accountability. There needs to be accountability before reconciliation. And certainly there are voices like Robert Garcia, Jamie Raskin, myself, who are for aggressive oversight and investigation, including of the Epstein class. That's why the three of you are some of my absolute favorites. I love that we need to keep pushing the talking point that you just had, that we don't need to celebrate Elon Musk making other people millionaires. If you are the party of pro-life, like you say you are, MAGA, he's killing millions of the poorest people on the planet.

And so I think that hypocrisy there is something really stunning. Congressman, thank you so much. I hope that you come back to New York sooner. Maybe I'll come to Washington, D.C. Keep fighting the good fight. We need you out there, Jennifer. Thank you. Thanks for having me.