MTracey podcast - Surf's Up! It's the Summer of Epstein!

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.mtracey.netWhether we like it or not, it’s the Summer of Epstein. Trump keeps denouncing his own supporters for fixating on the issue — today even going so far as to disown what he now calls the “stupid” MAGA Influencers who refuse to shut up about it. I keep getting requests to write and talk about Epstein mania, throwing a monkey wrench into my plans to cover ot…

Hi, everyone. I'm here today. Again, with Michael Tracy. We are here to discuss all the latest craziness with the Epstein files. Michael is, you look like you're in witness protection. What's going on with you? Well, that's what us truth tellers have to resort to in these certain. Did the pedophile hunters get to you? I'm looking behind my back. I'm sleeping with a revolver under my pillow. Yeah, gripping your pillow tight. Exit light. You know, it occurred to me that unexpectedly and fantastically, we are in the midst of the summer of Epstein,

whoever would have thought that 2025, the summer would not be defined by some surfing rock and roll hit or Sabrina Carpenter she got last summer this year is the summer of Epstein so in that spirit I'm wearing my

summer style sunglasses actually the real reason is that my normal pair of glasses are screwed up and I have a backup pair that I've been wearing but the prescription is slightly off and so it's just a little bit easier for me to wear my sunglasses at the moment.

Wait, why do you, the sunglasses don't help you see better? No, the sunglasses are prescription. I have a backup pair of regular glasses that have a slightly a few prescription, so it's a little bit of going. Okay, yeah, you sound like Trump, yeah, why are we still talking about Epstein? Yeah, and to think that this would be like... I'm happy to keep talking about it. For as long as people want to keep talking about it, let's talk about it.

And that it's a liability... for Trump is interesting. I mean, these people are, you know, I'm surprised. Like, I've always been on the kind of idea that the Trump cult is just like unshakable. They care about Trump. But there are a few lines he kind of can't cross. So I saw like Betty Johnson, like Curtis Highstrap, like Betty Johnson is kind of like an extreme case of just like a mindless zombie. And these people are listening to the audiences.

And they're mad. I mean, they are not letting him drop it. They have an incentive or, you know, some kind of. of a compulsion to keep talking about this. And so, yeah, this is still going. This is like, you know, a new story. I just saw Politico. I think it was a Politico push notification.

Like, Laura Lumer says that, like, Trump needs to, like, get right with the base or something. And it's like, you know, just what Laura Lumer says, it's kind of a push notification for Politico. The, you know, it's kind of a, the media's having a field date with this, too. I love Laura Lumer. I'm exempting her rather, sorry, from any, criticism I might level at other Trump flunkies

just because she's so amusing. Yeah, I have feelings for her too. And I know her personally. I'll admit that. So I'm going to just arbitrarily exempt her from criticism. With Benny Johnson, it's interesting. So you've got to think, what are Benny Johnson's incentives? Benny Johnson has a commercial incentive, obviously, to just be an amplifier of all things Trump

and cater to a certain online demographic that sustains his livelihood. So I think to the degree that he's going to criticize Trump, it's going to be about attempting to keep together the so-called Maga coalition that comprise his demographic that he is appealing to, right? Charlie Kirk, the same thing. So it's not like these people suddenly discovered the ability

to criticize Trump. They're maintaining their imperative to keep cohesive as possible the Trump support base because that's their commercial base. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They don't love, like Charlie Kirk and Benny Johnson don't just personally worship Trump. Like, Laura Lumer might. I don't know. But, like, you know, they have that. She's special.

Yeah, she's special. They sound like they have bronze statues in their room, right? if they have to choose between the audience and supported Trump, they're going to go with the audience, obviously. And so, yeah, I'm just, I'm just what I'm surprised about or what I find interesting is not these people exactly, but what it says about the audience itself, which has just like kind of had enough, had a kind of awakening. I mean, it's like, it's like if Trump, you know, when he stands up and he says, this is just like the Russia hoax, this is fake. It's like if he woke up one day and said, like, closing the border and stopping a legal. immigration is like a Democrat plot that's something Biden and Hillary have been trying to do for years. And like it's something me and my base have always stood against, right? It would be like,

there's some limit to like just the kind of nonsense that he can say. And I think we've reached this limit. What he says like, you know, he just, it's a tick. It's like Biden, you know, Comey, Christopher Ray, Steele Dozier, Russia Gate. And then he just adds, oh, yeah, Epstein Files do. They're like, wait, what the hell? This is the thing we've been waiting for, for like, It's, it's, we've been talking about it. It's our base, the people you brought it to the administration, Keshe Mattel and Dodgne-Modgino and like J.D. Vance and Trump himself has talked about the Epstein files. And it just, it finally reached the place where like the audience, you know, the audience is just not there.

It's like there's just one bridge. It can't cross. Yeah, you know, what's fascinating about this is if Trump really wanted to just move on from this story, for whatever reason and we can speculate as to the reasons in theory there would have been a way for him to do so artfully

I'd mean this earlier but there would have been a way for him to just kind of gracefully to the degree that he's capable of doing that move on from the story but instead he's decided to clear on the story what would you say if you were if you were

trouble to do it gracefully. I mean, the funny thing is, like, he doesn't even make these perfunctory offerings of sympathy to the, quote-unquote, victims of Epstein. Like, you can imagine a more conventional politician saying, this has been a horrible episode, we sympathize with the victims, we hope that they can find peace, etc. But he doesn't even make that perfunctory gesture.

Like, have you heard him offer sympathy with the quote-unquote victims ever? No, do you remember? remember when Jis Lane was arrested and he was like, you know, I just wish her well. I mean, it's tough to be in jail. Yeah, it was exactly the opposite, actually. But instead, he's decided to, like, disown his supporters.

Yeah. Like, he posted on Truth Social today that the Republicans who have been duped by the Democrat Epstein hoax are now to be considered his former supporters. So it is really, really funny. So I think what we should maybe do,

Richard is actually as a thought experiment entertain the kind of maximalist conspiratorial explanation for what's going on right now and then maybe we can poke holes in it afterwards.

But like, just as an exercise in trying to have some empathy with why lots of people feel the way they do, let's do that. Let's finish that thought to see if there was a way for Trump to gracefully move from it. Okay, so he would start by

expressing sympathy with the victims, and then he would say what? He would say something along the lines of the victims, you know, we don't want to traumatize them further. There's bad stuff. He maybe would say there's bad stuff in there, but we can't prove anything in a court of law.

Like, and then, you know, releasing it would re-victimize it. It would be something like that. Releasing what we had, releasing what's yet to be released would re-victimize the victims. That's sort of what Pam Bondi is Trump, you know what I would do? I would play into the Q&OND thing, and I would just be like, oh, they've been handled.

Like, don't worry. Like, they've met their end. And it would just be like this Q&M thing where he secretly executed, you know, the pedophiles, which they believed anyway. You could just basically repeat what Pam Bondi has been saying, which is that the materials that have yet to be released consist overwhelmingly of, like, some kind of child pornography or what have you. And we are steadfast in protecting the privacy rights.

of victims. And this was a horrible episode. Jeffrey Epstein was a notorious predator, etc. Trump doesn't even say that. Yeah. Yeah. And the worst I've heard of say lately is that Epstein had a

quote, a lot of problems. Yeah. He had problems. He had a few issues in his life. Like, yeah, he did have problems. He was in jail, so he had had a problem. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, something like that. Right. He could have.

But he made. He makes it a, he goes all the way. He makes it a litmus test for the, he makes it a litmus test for his supporters, right? He's like, you are a disloyal MAGA at this point. If you are not. He's getting ratioed on truth social, which is incredible. Yeah, I mean, you have to.

It's a site you only go to. The YouTube video on it with his latest comments from this morning or afternoon. He's getting ratioed on Fox News videos. Yeah, the truth social thing is incredible. It's a website that only. exists for Trump superman. Nobody would use it for any other reason. And you have, now it's like more crazy than before because you actually used to be able to

just go on the side and look at it. Now they want an email address. I tried to give them a fake email address. I don't want that spam. And then they wanted a phone number confirmation. And so like, I couldn't get, I can't get to truth social anymore. I'm a true social user. I did create an account just so I could follow Trump's.

You know, maybe I should create an account. Do you ever try to like go troll there? Maybe if you thought to get it. I've never posted on there, but like, I think around the time. when it was first launched, this was early 2022. I did create an account, so I have it on my phone, so I get the Trump updates. Okay, maybe I should, maybe I should do that, and maybe I should just have some fun with all the, all the magas there. But, yeah, so, yeah, so he's lost the audience.

So, yeah, let's do your exercise. Okay, so let's do the exercise. So I'll just stipulate up front that I had been increasingly wary of the veracity of a lot of aspects of the story for a long time, but It wasn't something that I was really that interested in making central to my identity. So I did some investigation, let's say, meaning I would read through court documents and talk to people here and there. But I didn't like dive all encompassingly down the Epstein rabbit home. And my interest was piqued initially.

Like people, I think mostly didn't start following it from this point. I basically did because in late 2014, Virginia Gufrey, who became like the premier accuser, filed this sensational document when she accused all manner of prominent individuals of sex trafficking or that she claimed that she had been sex trafficked to all these prominent individuals, including Dershowitz, Brins Andrews, etc. And Gawker actually published a version of Gislai Maxwell's little black book, which came to sort of form the foundation of what people believe the Epstein list was or the Epstein

like the core Epstein file was. So I've been sort of peripherally aware of this from like an increasingly skeptical. Wait, so Galker got their hands on what? Gislane's like actual Leckbook, like actual They posted like the address book or the contact book of Gislayne Maxwell. And how did they get that? I forget what year it was exactly. I'm going to say 2015, but I'm not 100% sure.

And how did they get that? Somebody got their hands on it and gave it to them. The story is, I think the, I'm forgetting the journalist's name now, but he got it like two or three years before that. He just sat on it for a while and ended up getting published on Gawker. He gave it to Gawker. I didn't get a conversion on how exactly that happened, but that's basically what happened. But like as I've looked more and more into it, the questions about various facets. arise. So I do want to at least

entertain the scenario whereby the people who have the most kind of grievous apprehensions about this story. Someone says a housekeeper stole it, by the way, in the comments and tried to say. That might be right. That might be right. So, for instance,

I was not fully aware of how intimately involved Steve Bannon was with Jeffrey Epstein toward the end Epstein's life. Apparently, they met in 2017, and it came to pass that after there was this tsunami of renewed interest

around Epstein post the 2018 Miami Herald series, Epstein and Bannon became close confidants. To agree that, as recounted in Michael Wolfe's book, I think it's called Too Rich or something like that. Bannon took part in like media strategy sessions with Epstein.

So question number one, and maybe this is out there in the public record and is yet to be known by me, but was Bannon paid by Epstein for these media strategizing services? Epstein paid like anybody and everybody who was in his orbit, right? Because he just had endless money.

and I don't know I would think that Bannon because he was seen as this vangali of Trump's 2000 election victory would have been a hot commodity and would have had a big price in terms of participating in strategy sessions right? Or was in the case

that Bannon was just so enthralled with Epstein that he did it pro bono? I'm not sure. That's question number one. So the book doesn't say this. It doesn't explain why like Bannon was like doing, giving him all. How much time did Bannon give him?

Maybe Bannon just had a few phone calls with London as like a buddy. Like how involved was he trying to rehabilitate him? Well, he was on, you know, as chronicled in this wolf book, he was on at least one elaborate media strategy session about how to come out and publicly try to address the charges that were rowing into a fever pitch against Epstein. This was before Epstein was indicted. in 2019 and after the Miami Herald series.

So between like November of 2018 into between November of 2018 and July of 2019. So he took part in this one media strategy session and it included Bannon by phone. Michael Wolfe apparently just sitting around there recording everything. Oh, he says he recorded it.

He recorded the... Yeah, he... Michael Wolf has like 100 hours of tapes or something. Oh, Michael Wolf, he's the one who came out where Epstein said Trump was his best friend, right? Yeah, he released a little snippet, but it's like a tiny percentage of what Wolf still has. So included in this media strategy session were Steve Bannon, Jeffrey Epstein, Epstein's lawyers, Ehud Barak, the former prime minister... and and yeah and yeah that's basically it i mean i think there might have been like um so epstein had what like wolf describes as gallery girls around

so there would be women younger women attractive women who would just kind of like be set pieces in the environment because as wolf describes it these sores at epstein's new york mansion and amazingly, it does seem to have been the largest or most expensive mansion in all of Manhattan. Mansions don't even exist in Manhattan, but he had one. But he kind of describes as those like gentlemen's clubs almost. There would be,

occasionally be a woman there who was sort of like idiosyncratic. But by and large, they were like gentlemen's clubs where they could get together in like a man's environment and talk about stuff and they would have these younger attractive women as gallery girls, quote, quote. So one thing leads to another.

Bannon does come to the mansion in New York and records 15 hours or 16 hours of prep interviews with Epstein. Because the idea is that Bannon's going to assist Epstein in preparing for some media interview that he's going to do with 60 minutes or Gail King. or some other kind of like, you know, network news show. And according to Bannon, this would require months and months of arduous preparation. So why isn't it, and we talked about this a little bit last time, but why isn't it that Bannon has ever released anything more than like a 20-second excerpt of these interviews in a trailer for a documentary that he claimed was coming out about four years ago and then just nothing happened with it? Could it be that Bannon, for instance, asked about Epstein's relationship with Trump, how could he not? The whole idea was that Abandon was going to prepare Epstein for any possible line of

questioning that would be foisted upon him by these network TV interviews who would obviously at that point be asking about Trump. Yeah. And so, like, is there some kind of like more smoking gun revelation having to do with Trump that Epstein could have articulated in those interviews. We mentioned that Wolf claims that Epstein displayed to him like Polaroid photos or snapshot photos that he kept in a safe of Trump

like consorting with these younger women. Do we know if they were minors? No, but they seemed to be young enough that maybe it would have been embarrassing for Trump to be on to have that photographic evidence of him contorting with them in you know like 25 years ago or something or them pointing yeah pointing and laughing at a stand on his pants i mean that's a pretty that's pretty incredible and now but and now trump really does seem to be so he's come

up angry up this brand new explanation that he never mentioned before that the whole epstein issue is not just something that like you know it's all been said and done like it's been years since the guy's been dead or what have you. We should move on. He's now saying that it's a Democrat hoax. He's now saying that Epstein issue or files or something. It's hard to ever know because it's not like Trump speaks in precise, lawyerly rhetoric.

The whole thing is a creation of Obama and Comey and Hillary and Biden or whomever. And it's in the same pantheon as the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax or the steel dossier. or what have you. So in that respect, like, there's a reason to believe that to the degree that there are files that have yet to be publicized,

they actually would, if not implicate Trump in like underage sex trafficking, still prove to be some kind of political liability. I think that, I think that's plausible. Yeah, did Trump, did, did Epstein ever do the 16th

minutes or mainstream media interview that he was preparing for. Not that I know of. I don't think he ever did it. Because he probably got indicted, it was like, yeah, was it? And then Michael Wolf also recounts another time where he was, he, Michael Wolf was at Epstein's, you know, luxurious apartment in Paris. And Epstein was trying to hire some kind of PR firm to handle this prospective, media tour that he was going to go on to try to clear his name. And most of the prominent PR firms in the United States and elsewhere were not interested,

but they ended up convincing a PR firm in Britain to come and at least have meetings with Epstein about what their strategy might be for some kind of media rehabilitation effort. and it was sort of in the works like Epstein paid a lot of money to this PR firm but then once he was arrested by July the PR firm essentially gave up and said there's not really that yeah this is too crazy

yeah there's nothing the people the people want blood the uh the the Epstein yeah okay so the um Trump the pictures, like there's pictures, he's hanging out with him. What do you make of this manga argument that, like, if that was true, Tucker has said this and other magas have said this, the Democrats, Biden would have released it?

I don't know. We're talking about a different scenario in the Biden administration. Like, Merrick Garland was appointed by Biden as Attorney General because the idea was that Biden wanted to show that there was, he would restore some degree of independence to the DOJ in contrast with what he claimed Trump did. So the idea was that Trump wanted the DOJ just to be a prong of his political operation, even though he had some problems in his first term with his succession of attorney generals, Jeff Sessions, Bill Barr, etc.

But Biden was going to restore norms, right? And the norm is that the DOJ is independent of the president. And so there was a lot of, a lot of growing frustration in democratic circles about what they perceived as Merrick Garland's lack of urgency in prosecuting Trump over January 6th. There would be like signal sent, like Biden would grouse about things. I mean, short answer. And that would be like a signal sent to sessions.

But it was different than like Trump like directing Pam Bondi to do something. It's mega projection. They imagine that like the Biden administration works in the way that like the Trump administration does where it's just basically they're all just trying to do whatever is in the political interest or follow the whims of the dear leader. Yeah, I agree with. I do think that there was political pressure brought to bear on Merrick Garland to move more expeditiously on the Trump prosecutions, but it was more indirect than what what Trump would be disposed to do. So I don't know. I mean, like, what's the idea here that like if those Polaroid pictures could be found,

that like Biden would tweet them. Biden would have had a press conference and been like, yeah, like Mara Garland or something. I'm not sold on that really. I mean, maybe they could have been leaked. I mean, people are right that there was, there would have been a big incentive to get that out. Yeah, no, I agree. I agree. I think it's MAGAs are projecting.

Magas are imagining that Biden administration basically works where Trump, the Trump administration works where it's all about personal loyalty and that's all they care about. And like, yeah, I think that's, I think that's right. But why was, but why was Vannon so, okay, so this would be a, prong of a conspire. I don't like to use a conspiracy because people think that you're being dismissive when you even use the term.

The grievous suspicions that people have. A prong of those suspicions that I don't think of that have really ever been fully explored is the Bannon component. Like Bannon left the first Trump administration in August of 2017. In a fairly short period of time, he somehow became a consultant to Jeffrey Epstein on media strategy. did these like priceless interviews with Epstein that never that had never appeared in any other format

like a one-on-one TV style interview that were under the auspices of a prep session and there's this one remark that Wolf reports in his book that the first time that Bannon met Epstein Bannon said to Epstein like you were the one guy I was scared of during the 2016 campaign Meaning that Epstein was the one guy who might have had something damaging.

Really? That's amazing. But Epstein kind of was kept quiet or was mysterious. That's amazing. So the Epstein and Trump connections were so taken for granted among Steve Bannon that he just went to Epstein in 2016. Before people were thinking that much about Jeffrey Epstein and said, you could have brought down the campaign. This was post-2016. This was the first time that Epstein and Bannon met.

if my recollection is right. So I think this was late 2017. Okay. So they're talking, so Fann is referring to the, the campaign from a year prior and saying to Epstein, you were the one guy that I was there.

Now, the way that this is sort of characterized in Wolf's book is it was kind of like a little bit tongue and cheek, a little bit joking, right? But there could have been

a grain of truth to it. Yeah. Jokes, yeah, jokes are sometimes, yeah, Jokes are sometimes, you know, reflect a reflected truth. Yeah. And it is true.

So when people say that Trump promised to, quote, release the Epstein files in the 2024 campaign, it's a little bit nuanced in that Trump, as far as I know, in the past many years, never on his own volition brought up the Epstein matter at all. He would be asked about it here and there on these like, you know, anti-establishment podcast that he went on. And he would say, yeah, sure, release the Epstein files, maybe we'll see. But he was always kind of noncommittal. It was something that he would ever go around overtly campaigning on, on his own accord, right? He did, once he integrated, especially once he integrated RPA Jr. into the campaign operation, which I think will go down as one of the

most effective kind of like political propaganda triumphs in terms of, broadening the Republican electoral coalition to appeal to a certain demographic that is heavily online, younger, kind of conspiracist in their just mental orientation in that they have a conspiracyism is their epistemology. Like, not that they're wrong about every last conspiracy that it could ever be asserted, but, like, conspiracyism is sort of an ideology that flows through like a Joe Rogan, Theo Vaughan, et cetera, and all these kind of like ancillary podcasts

that spring from that network. And that's what they had to appeal to to especially cater to like younger men or maybe mostly a political but consume that form of media. And so Trump did, would overtly say, yeah, we're going to release the JFK files. MLK UFO.

The Art Luther King files. But on the Epstein files, he was never as quite as committal as people like now want to sort of retroactively think. And so why would that be? It's because like maybe he had some inkling that there was something that was implicating of him, buried somewhere in one of the files. So, you know, actually Elon Musk has said, you know, he, he did that explosive tweet when he had his big falling out with Trump. The Trump was in the Epstein files. That's like, was neither here nor there because like even the, even the bachelor's, you know, of old files that had already been in the public domain

that Bondi released in February when she distributed the stupid prop souvenir binders to the influencers. Even in those files, you can go on the DOJ website and find old flight logs where it says Donald Trump on a flight log in terms of him having flown on Epstein's jet. But those have been out for ages.

Like that wasn't even like really in dispute. So Musk was really referring to something that didn't even necessarily reflects some hidden truth about Trump. And then Musk also says that Bannon is in the Epstein file. That could be true, but like Musk is the least credible person, you know, in the world. Musk was superficially correct about Trump being in the Epstein files, depending on how you define Epstein files. Because there are flight logs that have Trump.

I mean, he calls everyone he disagrees with a pedophile. I mean, this is kind of like who he is. But Bannon also did have a tight relationship at one point with Epstein. So is it inconceivable that Bannon's name would have been on some file somewhere? Yeah. Like why wouldn't the FBI interview Bannon about Epstein? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you're right.

I think you're right. Yeah. So this is interesting. You need to, you should write about this. You should write about the Bannon connection. I mean, this is like a terrible oversight from the media. You should try to publish something like this somewhere. Yeah, you know, I'm sort of annoyed because on Fourth of July weekend, I did a bunch of interviews with Trump supporters about the Iran stuff.

And I was going to do a whole thing on that. Like I still saw some footage of the interviews that I did. I was basically going to be the store, the angle was going to be, I'm actually going to jot down that note. Bannon Epstein write something. And the thesis were going to be like this supposed. the divide that was asserted to exist within quote unquote Laga about the Iran bombing was always

like a media creation essentially where they over extrapolate from like a handful of influencers and act like those people are representative of like the Republican base when the actual polling data shows that the Republican base

was overwhelmingly supportive of bombing Iran. They had been even before Israel launched a preemptive strikes against Iran with the U.S. backing and after Trump directly intervened and bombed Iran, the numbers went even higher. And that's exactly the opposite of what you would have assumed if you just based your understanding on how the quote unquote base perceives this Iran issue, if you're just like going based on social media or whatever, which is a hugely skewed picture of how the base operates.

And I was like, you know, working on that. And then all of a sudden this Epstein memo drops on the Sunday night, a 4th of July weekend. And I get all distracted. So I haven't even published this thing that I've been meaning to publish. I'm going to have like a version of it now that like ties into the ups and stuff. But yeah, you're right that the ban and angle ought to be more explicated, especially if he's going to like act like he's banging the drum for accountability and transparency.

Like one of the main figures here who's been. untransparent. Yeah, he's such a bad character. I mean, generally bad character. I mean, the fact that he's trying to use, like, Epstein to, like, indict the media, while he's, like, the closest person to Epstein. I mean, it's kind of really, really bad.

But you asked, you asked before, like, what could have Trump done if he just wanted to sort of artfully and carefully move on from the issue without causing this whole explosion of a resentment and furor within his support base, right? Well, why did they even? even have to release that memo in the first place. Yeah, they could have just let it go.

They could have just let it all sort of dangle out. Like, they didn't have to make it into this acute issue stemming from the memo. They just could have, like, said nothing. Yeah. Yeah, it was a better than it. It's not a DOJ or FBI to put out a mem, like a synopsis style memo of that kind. Yeah, yeah, that, that's right. The media, on the media not covering the ban on connection, do you think that they're just

like they've been polarized because Magas talk about, Epstein all the time. The media is like, oh, this Epstein thing is just stupid. It's too conspiratorial. And even though if it's like a Trump connection, they're just like, whatever, we're not going to touch it just because like we assume that this is something stupid people and magas are into. I don't know, maybe. Michael Wolf certainly talks about it a lot. He's a little bit of a bestselling book after bestselling book. He was on, I saw him on the Daily Beast like podcast or something where he talked about this at length. So there's been some media interest, but you would think it would like spawn additional inquiries.

Why don't you ask my, I mean, do people ask him the questions you're asking now? Like, did, you know, did Epstein Paybannon, like, what was the relationship or the relationship? Maybe I'll ask you. Thanks, Richard. You're giving me all these ideas. I'm helping you. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, well, I mean, I would think that the people interviewing him on Daily Beast podcast or whatever would ask him these things now. I don't know they ask the question of Epstein paid Bannon. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, I haven't read that entire book. There was like one sort of vignette or chapter. that deals with Epstein and Bannon

in these media strategy sessions with Ahud Barak. Okay, so let's talk about the Ahub-Barrac thing. Again, we're trying to entertain the more maximalist interpretate. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. He was close, I mean, we have to say it's interesting.

He was close to an Israeli prime minister. So when people say that Epstein was an intelligence asset for Israel, okay, so how...