Morning Wire - Epstein Files Freed & Campus Competence Crisis | 11.19.25

Episode Date: November 19, 2025

Congress overwhelmingly votes to force the DOJ to open its full records on Jeffrey Epstein, markets tumble this week amid concerns about an AI bubble, and a new investigation suggests academic fraud in higher education. Get the facts first with Morning Wire. Good Rancher: Visit https://goodranchers.com for an additional $100 off your first three orders– $40 off your first, $30 off your second, $30 off your third– with code WIRE and free meat for life when you become a new subscriber! Shopify: Go to https://Shopify.com/morningwire to sign up for your $1-per-month trial period and upgrade your selling today. - - - Wake up with new Morning Wire merch: https://bit.ly/4lIubt3 - - -Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lawmakers in Washington overwhelmingly vote to force the DOJ to open its full records on Jeffrey Epstein. Without objection, I'm sorry. Senate has now passed the Epstein bill. We talk to our White House correspondent about the highly anticipated release of the files, and what happens now. I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howell. It's Wednesday, November 19th. This is Morning Wire. Markets tumbled this week after major investors signaled concerns about the AI rally. Could the AI bubble be bursting?

I think that AI is very real. I think AI is going to continue to change the world that we live in. And a new investigation is shining a harsh light on alleged academic fraud in higher education. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know. With the holidays coming up, all those dinners, those moments around the table with family, I want to make sure that every meal is special. That's why I use good ranchers. All their meat is 100% American raised on local farms and delivered right to my door. The quality, truly incredible. Whether it's a holiday roast, bacon for Christmas morning breakfast, or chicken for a nice family dinner,

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Congress overwhelmingly voted to release all Justice Department files tied to Jeffrey Epstein and with President Trump's support. Joining us now in studio to break down what this vote actually means is Daily Wire White House correspondent Mary Margaret Olehann. It's great to have you in person. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. Let's start with what this vote actually means. What was just passed? Yes. So this is a massive deal. We've been waiting for this for weeks, if not months, if not the entire Trump administration. It's called the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and it's sponsored by Thomas Massey and Roecona. and it effectively calls for the release of all of these files.

It's specifically on calling for the Justice Department to release materials that relate to Galane Maxwell, Epstein's cohort and lover. And so all of this will supposedly release details that Americans have been waiting for for a long time. Now you said supposedly there, there is some concern that this won't be all of the information. Is it possible that the DOJ will actually continue to withhold some information on Epstein? Absolutely. There's totally a chance that the DOJ could retain some name. redact some names, keep certain files from us that they feel like the public shouldn't see. This is something that we've seen in the past already. And we even saw Democrats recently released files redacting the name of Virginia Goufrey,

who's one of Epstein's victims. And we already knew her name. And this was something that they chose to redact anyway. So there's a lot of different discussions of how these documents will be seen and what details we will or won't have. But in the meantime, it's a huge step in a different direction after what we've been hearing for a long time. Right.

And as Trump has pointed out, you know, tens of thousands of pages of documents have already been released. I wanted to get to the Trump side of this next. You've been in the White House reporting on the ground there this whole year. You've seen the pressure building. You've seen the sort of tone shift from the White House. What exactly has that been like? What's been the change? It's been very interesting to see, for example, Caroline Levitt from the White House podium, very restrained, very careful, telling the public that Democrats are pushing for the release of

these files in order to weaponize them against Trump. Their messaging has been this whole time that Trump hated Epstein, that he kicked him out of his Mar-a-Lago club, that he no longer was friends with him because he was a creep. Their messaging has also been that Democrats want to weaponize these files and that if there was anything against Trump in them, it would have been used under the Biden-D-O-J, which is a very valid point accepted on both sides of the aisle. Now the pivot has been more that Trump is realizing that his base wants the files. He's also realizing that House Republicans and Senate Republicans are supportive of releasing the files. And so at this point, he's kind of just throwing his hands up in the air and saying, fine, let's do it. Let's get this over with. And also, he's already

seen a bunch of different items released in the files where people have tried to say, this is incriminating to him. This is this or that is incriminating to incriminating. And I think what we're seeing is none of it is actually incriminating the president in wrongdoing. There might be items that are emerging that are distasteful or upsetting to some of us. But at the end of the day, none of it is implicating the president in anything that Democrats would like to implicate him in. So I even have email right here in front of me. The White House is messaging on where the Democrats' transparency on Epstein is. And there's multiple bullet points here where the White House is saying, why haven't Democrats shown the same transparency and what else are they hiding? And they just

go through multiple examples of Democrats who are talking to Epstein, who were taking money from Epstein and are now not under scrutiny the way they believe they should be. So they're really going full throttle at the same time that they're slightly pivoting. They're also saying, look at all these Democrats who are implicated with Epstein. Here's information for all you reporters now do your job and cover this as well. Thank you so much for joining us in studio and reporting for us. Thanks for having me. Running a small business is anything but small. For business owners, it's all consuming from day one. Every decision feels massive and new challenges arise daily. What makes the biggest difference,

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Daily Wire, Senior Editor Cabot Phillips is here with more on what's driving the sell-off and what it means for the economy more broadly. So Cabot lately when you've reported, we've talked about the market reaching record highs, but that's not the story this week. What's going on? Yeah, throughout this summer and fall, millions of Americans were ecstatic every week to open up their investment portfolio as markets were soaring. The Dow, S&P 500, and NASDAQ are all up by over 10% this year, and those gains were driven largely by excitement over artificial intelligence. It's not hyperbole to say at this point that AI has been one of the greatest things ever to happen on Wall Street. As new applications and technologies emerge month after month, investors have gobbled up shares of anything even remotely related to AI.

But in the past week, markets have begun to look a bit shaky. The Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P 500 each down by over 3%. and tech stocks in particular have been hit the hardest. So what's causing the sell-off? Well, the biggest and most obvious concern is simply that a bubble has been formed and that all of the frenzied investors pumping trillions of dollars into AI stocks trying to get in on the action, drove prices far beyond what they're actually worth. Keep in mind, most AI companies at this point are still in the research and development phase

and are not actually making money right now. MIT, for example, recently surveyed 300 AI companies and found that 19, 95% of them have not yet turned a profit, despite taking in a combined $40 billion in outside investments between them. We've now seen a number of high-profile famous investors and venture capitalists betting against AI stocks now. Michael Burry made famous in the big short after he made billions of dollars betting against the housing market ahead of the 08 financial crisis, has now put about a billion dollars against Palantir and Nvidia, shorting them essentially, betting that their prices are going to fall. Elsewhere, billionaire tech founder Peter Thiel,

and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, each liquidated all of their Nvidia stocks, sparking even more concern. But it is worth noting here. Not everyone is worried that we're in a bubble right now. There are still plenty of bulls in the market. And what are we hearing from them? Why are they confident in AI? So take Goldman Sachs, for example. They released a report this week, expressing confidence that the market is, quote, in their words,

correctly valuing the benefits from AI and the valuations are not at, quote, bubble levels. Two of their lead analysts wrote in that report that, quote, simple arithmetic shows that markets are running well ahead of the macro impact. In other words, they're arguing that the market has already priced in the future profits that are going to come, even if they haven't come yet, from AI technology. For more on that angle, I spoke with Kenny Polkari, the chief market strategist at Slate Stone Wealth. While I think that valuations are stretched, I am not in the camp that I think we're in a bubble, right? A bubble suggests something very different. This is the fourth industrial revolution. Everyone had to be in.

So they talked it up. And now it's exhausted, you'll see kind of prices adjust. And so it's going to probably feel uncomfortable, but I'm not in the camp that I think it's a bubble. And again, Poucar, you heard there, did concede the prices were bound to correct at some point, though he does not envision a true bubble popping scenario. But he does say that in his view, this all represents a long-term opportunity. for the average investor at home. What ultimately will happen, it will present itself to be a great, I think,

what's going to end up being a great buying opportunity if you're a long-term investor. You know, this is not dot-com bubble 2.0. It absolutely is not. Look, in 1999 and 2000, when the dot-com bubble happened, the business has way out of here. We're really nothing more than websites with Super Bowl commercials, no revenue model, no products, right? You can't compare companies like Invidia and Palantir and Google and Amazon and Microsoft and IBM and AMD along with all the others that generate real cash.

They build real infrastructure. They serve real demand. Worth pointing out, NVIDIA's latest earnings report will come out later today. Based on what they show, we could see even more activity on Wall Street. So buckle up. Well, I'm personally just going to hang in and not do anything with my stocks. Cabot, thanks for reporting. Absolutely.

Colleges are increasingly admitting students who struggle with middle school-level academics. Daily Wire investigative reporter Luke Roziak took a deep dive into one such school this week and wrote a book related to this. He joins us now in the studio. Hey, Luke, good to have you here. Hey, John, good to be with you in person. So what is happening with college rigor these days? All right. First thing, John, pop quiz.

Seven plus two equals blank plus six. Three. You got it. Oh, thank goodness. We didn't even need the Jeopardy theme song playing for too long. So a quarter of students at the University of California, San Diego, did not know the answer to that. Oh, my goodness. The school put out a report this month on the, quote, steep decline in the academic preparation of its entering first year students.

It said between 2020 and 2025, the number of freshmen whose math placement exam results indicate that they do not meet middle school standards. grew nearly 30-fold. And worse, it wasn't because they hadn't taken the courses. They actually did take the courses, and they actually got sometimes good grades in those courses. And, of course, if you're not ready for college, you're likely to fail out, be stuck with debt, it seems like it's not in anyone's interest

to allow students that are not prepared to go to college. Yeah, it definitely doesn't help anyone, including the students, minority, or otherwise. And the dumbing down of colleges have also led to inflation, where now you've got to waste precious years of your life going to grad school to prove you're as smart as what in previous decades would have been established by getting a bachelor's degree. Now, some but not all of this has been driven by racial politics, and I did a story this week on a historically black college and university

or HBCU that really underscores those concerns. The University of Maryland Eastern Shore admits 90% of students who apply and has only a 17% graduation rate. There's been four separate lawsuits filed against it just in the last couple months, alleging among other things that the school has almost no standards and actually condones cheating in order to keep its graduation rate from getting any worse. For example, one lecturer, Q Fang said most students failed her advanced computer science class, which she found something that you'd expect. It's a logical result of basically making college students out of people who barely graduated high school. Now, her department chair, Assad Azimi, she says, pressured her to pass them. And then he wound up kind of taking

over the class and every single student passed when he was in charge. So she says in this lawsuit, quote, Azimi encourages cheating and apparently fraudulent practices to maintain a false facade of enrollment to pat his salary and deceive the federal government. Right, because ultimately the federal government is the one funding these student loans. Yeah, I mean, a lot of these students are, they're taking out loans to go to school. And if you're not really cut out for college, you're not getting a degree where you're going to have a great career, you're going to default on that loan and taxpayers are left holding the bag. So it really goes on and on with the lawsuits alleging really serious misconduct at this one school in Maryland, a public school that's part of

the University of Maryland system. So that's just the tip of the iceberg, too, with this particular HBCU. Four separate lawsuits say that after the faculty discovered serious misconduct at the school, the DEI office was used to retaliate against them with bogus cases. And just to be clear, so this HBCU has a DEI office. Yes, it's an intentionally racially segregated school that also wants diversity and inclusion, but it turns out the head of it left his previous job after being accused of sexual assault. And the lawsuits say he now functions essentially to retaliate against whistleblowers, most of whom are non-black faculty that are like, what is going on at this college?

I reported a few weeks ago that the president to the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore, a woman named Heidi Anderson, had copied her PhD dissertation from somebody else. Really just egregious academic conduct, and nothing has really happened to her. So in other words, the lack of standards comes from the top, it appears like. Apparently so. And I mean, President Trump has steered quite a bit of money specifically to so-called HBCUs. But it may be time to start treating them the same as any other college, where, whether it's UCSD or HBCU, if you barely graduated high school, we need to.

to ask whether you should be going to college and what's the benefit of having a college that caters to you. Right. And ultimately, the employers who hire them believing that their degrees actually meant something when they maybe don't. Luke, thank you so much for reporting. Great to have you in the studio. Thanks for having me, John. Thanks for waking up with us. And if you're listening to the show, now you can watch for free on Daily Wire Plus. We'll be back later this evening with more news you need to know.