The Chaser Report - What's In The Epst- Oh My God Look At That Distraction!

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

Trump has had a big week burning through his next six months worth of media distractions, all to keep everyone talking about... What was it again? Something files? Omg did you see Trump's AI video arresting Obama? ---Listen AD FREE: https://thechaserreport.supercast.com/ VOTE OPTICS FOR A LOGIE: https://vote.tvweeklogies.com.au/Follow us on Instagram: @chaserwarSpam Dom's socials: @dom_knightSend Charles voicemails: @charlesfirthEmail us: [e-mail] CEO’s Super-yacht upgrade Fund: https://chaser.com.au/support/ Send complaints to: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gadigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Charles, a proper episode to finish off the week where we're actually talking to microphones at the same time, not in some sort of weird moving vehicle. We didn't get John Delmenico and Loughlin to do our job for us. We're actually both here. And that's good because there's one of your favourite subjects.

Talk about Charles, along with many other things, in the orbit. of Donald J. Trump and Charles I know you're a scholar of defamation and you've in fact handed out awards for defamation and I've just been reading an article which makes one of your favourite points which is that I think a lot of people who decide to sue for defamation don't understand how it works and in this case particularly if you're Donald Trump and you're suing Rupert's Wall Street Journal and indeed Murdoch himself for the sum of ten billion dollars for the outrageous decision to publish a apparently entirely concocted letter to Jeffrey Epstein wishing him happy birthday and saying all sorts of creepy things about secrets plus drawing a woman

with your name is her pubic hair if that's something that they do Charles there's a thing that Donald Trump may not be aware of and it's called discovery yes this is where legally each side gets to request from the other side any documents that are relevant to of the case. In this case, presumably it would be, you know, Rupert Murdoch's legal team would be able to ask Trump's legal team for any documents that relate to Trump's relationship with Epstein, especially dating back to when the letter was published back in 2003. Yes, and also relating to dating, which is kind of the problem here. And legally, yeah, and legally, what is supposed to then happen is that the team is supposed to go through all of Trump's files and find

all that stuff, and then hand it over to the Wall Street Journal to have a look through. So in other words, the Epstein's files, which Donald Trump seems to be trying fairly hard to conceal either that or independently Attorney General Pam Bondi simply doesn't feel as you can release them because there's nothing interesting in there or whatever it might be. Or maybe they don't exist. I don't know. They have to be produced in court, Charles.

Let's just take a moment, have some ads and think about the implications of all that. By the way, we've now fixed the thing whereby Apple Podcasts wasn't doing the ad-free thing at the right time. So there shouldn't be issues with that. If you have any issues with an ad-free subscriber version, email podcast at chaser.com. You all sort it out. So yes, I mean, in theory, all the documents should now be released forthwith. So, Charles, haven't you observed over a number of defamation cases that this part of the process,

finding all the files and all the other things that the person did that have any relevance at all, That's the thing that kind of kills you, even if you win the case. Yeah, this is the wonderful thing. This is why the sort of Ben Robert Smith and the Christian Porter and all those wonderful cases that we had in Australia backfired so spectacularly because, you know, discovery was a wonderful thing. And the point is, even if you win, you lose. Like, it doesn't really matter because once you get all the sort of salacious details, that can then leak. out into public as well. It's a beautiful own got. That's why I love defamation. It's also true, Charles, that even if you, sometimes if you lose, you lose. And Bruce Lehman

has some experiences relevant to that. But no, so a lot of things are going to come out about the Trump-Ebstein relationship. But also, Charles, I've just realized there's some major differences between U.S. and Australian defamation law, because we know Australia is the defamation capital of the world because of our kind of plaintiff-friendly lawsuits. But In the US, this is according to Slate, you've got to show that libel plaintiffs acted with actual malice. So they had to be certain at the journal that they would have had to have known that the story was not true and then proceeded anyway to be found liable.

So the bar is much higher than it is in Australia, which I think is fascinating. The only thing is, Dom, I think you're sort of assuming that this is a game which is going to go the whole way, right? Like, isn't the whole game that Trump's playing with media organisations is he suits them for completely spurious reasons? Like, it wasn't the 60 Minutes suit that Paramount recently settled was just literally, it was just a completely fanciful suit that didn't have any basis at all. I couldn't have seen how he could have possibly have won this.

This was claiming that in the Kamala Harris interview with, that 60 Minutes recorded, that they edited it to be favourable to her. Now, you'd also ask Charles, what were the damages given that he won the election and got to be president anyway? Like, how do you kind of, there was, even if it was true, it harmed him in no provable way at all. Yeah, and so he's been going around launching these deformation suits. And then the whole point is, it's a shakedown, right?

because you go, well, you know, while we're suing you, we can't possibly give any government contracts or we can't give it, you know, like, you know, these large companies have to interface all the time with government. And it suddenly becomes more about, well, do you want your relationship with our increasingly authoritarian and autocratic regime to be, you know, one where you can make money? Or do you want one where we're going to use the full force of the Justice Department to come at you and, you know, go through all your tax files or, you know, like, it's a shakedown, right?

Like, and so that's why, you know, like everyone's going, well, he's got no chance, but, you know, with Paramount, he didn't have any chance, and still he got $16 million and Colbert X. But in that case, Charles, at least, I mean, they definitely needed the Trump administration because they're trying to sell the remains of CBS, whatever they are, to Skydance for whatever is $8 billion. US dollars. John Stewart made the point that they're not, if they keep axing all the good shows, it won't be worth anything anymore. And if they keep nurturing 60 minutes, but I presumably

they don't give stuff about any of that. So yeah, look, Murdoch may be up for this, but who knows, his relationship with Trump's been so bizarre over the years. I mean, he spent about a year trying to destroy Trump and promote Ron DeSantis. But now Fox News is the key cheerleader again. So they've had this weird cognitive dissonance of trying to take Trump's side. against their own boss and the two people they are least keen to alienate in the world are going to court. It's kind of bizarre. Well, I think the one truth

about Rupert Murdoch over the years for all his incredible evilness and faults and everything is he does read the win. Oh, very well. You know, like he, like even dating back to the 1970s, he's made his name backing prime ministers both in Australia and the UK

like at every election. Like he literally went, There was a sort of 40-year streak where every time the wind shifted, he'd go, oh, you know what? Like, you know, I'm going to now back, you know, like with Blair and Rudd are the two obvious ones. Blair is the obvious one. Rudd is another one. But also, I think he backed Whitlam up until 1975. Yeah, he did.

And he shifted to phrase it. Like, it was really, really on. It's one of the key moments in that I listen to that whole podcast that the ABC did about Whitlam. It's a dismissal. It's a fantastic listen. The fact that the point where Whitlam ignored Murdoch and basically thought he didn't need him anymore was a key stuff up on Whitlam's part. Curiously enough, the Murdoch papers endorsed Morrison over Albo. Yes, but that's one of the ones where it went wrong.

But Lockland Murdoch, now remember, so in the last two elections, the Murdoch press in Australia has done a very poor job of influencing the election. And I don't know whether you remember, but Lockland Murdoch. actually flew in before the last election and said he was going to be overseeing all the sort of election coverage. And it was a real passing of the baton from Rupert Murdoch to Lockland. And he totally fucked it up.

It was the first person to not, to not, you know, yeah, he did a one tell on reading the wind. Like he went, oh, well, Morrison's got it. He'll win against this elbow. It was pretty hard, though, to know that Albao was going to win when every single poll said that he was going to win in both 2022 and 2025. I mean, when are polls right these days? Anyway, we're getting off Donald Trump.

No, no, but the whole point is, like maybe the point is, for all Rupert Murdoch's fault, is he's reading the wind on this Epstein. Well, he is with the Trump base, which is fascinating. Actually, you know, this is the point at which you can sort of switch side. Like, he is the ultimate kingmaker. Like, he across the English-speaking world, has for more than one generation, like for two generations, essentially been the kingmaker in politics.

And the idea that the wind is shifting against Trump, it sort of seems plausible. It does. And that's partly, Charles, because since, I don't know, at least 2015, or it may have started after Trump first took office, but the Q conspiracy, which is sucked in so many of those on the right, has made everyone think that Donald Trump is this vanguard of this battle against pedophiles.

And so it seems that we may have finally, and I know this has been said many times before and proven wrong immediately afterwards, there may finally be a line that Trump supporters won't put up with, a blatant pedophilia in the case of Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. I mean, if you read that letter, the Wall Street Journal letter, it's one of the most extraordinary things. It's kind of creepy 101. talking about the wonderful secrets that they have.

So, yes, the one thing that Trump supporters seem unable to have cognitive distance and think that this man is a wonderful paragon of moral virtue about is the pito stuff. They've absolutely ropedo stuff. But there is also the game of distraction. Well, yes, let's talk about the distractions after distracting audience with an ad, shall we? The Chaser Report. Less news.

often if you pay not to have ads. Thank you. Yes, the number of things Trump's thrown out there in the past couple of days in an attempt to try and change the subject. Look over here. It is his favourite game. It's really everything. What's been your favourite? There's been so many. Well, I quite liked the one where he put a video of like, it was sort of like weird Facebook video posts that he put up on Truth Social, which included like a woman catching a snake. Did you see that one? No, I didn't see that one.

That was like, 20 or 30. Yeah, it was sort of like literally sort of, it wasn't AI slob. It was like Facebook slop video. Wow. Of all these different little clips of just funny, you know, and weird, fascinating sort of things. And there's no, but there was no sort of agenda behind it. It was just literally like, look over here. Here's a woman catching a snake.

Like, it was so, what I'm fascinated by is, I really do. don't know whether Rupert Murdoch with his sort of institutional power and ability to sort of actually shape a narrative and he's you know that he's been doing for 50 years

will win over Trump's ability to sort of distract and disassemble and survive. So the thing that I think is most fascinating here is right like the whole reason why Trump has never fallen into a scandal before.

with his base is because no matter how guilty he is, he has no shame about what he's done, right? So, you know, if he's, you know, ripping off people, he just goes, oh, yeah, I did. You know, like, if he's appointing, you know, some best friend, he just goes, oh, well, I'm appointing my best friend. Like, there's no, he can do anything illegal. And the reason why it doesn't work in the press

is because he's not defensive about it. No. He just goes, oh, yeah, that is what I'm doing. And he has a reality of distortion field. Like he says things that he wants to, you know, I never had sex with Tommy Daniels. And I think no one in his base would, I presume I think he's a legend for having sex with Tommy Daniels. But no one really believes he didn't do that. And with this, it's, has he trained them not that when he denies something, it doesn't mean anything?

But I think the thing is that he, he has tried to cover something up. Like for the first time, you're actually saying some slither of shame, or at least his actions betray some level of shame, which is he's trying to cover it up. And it's that classic thing ever since Watergate, the adage is it's the cover-up that gets you. It didn't matter that Nixon went and got a whole lot of, you know, federal agents to go and, you know, steal secrets from the Democrat Party. It was actually the cover-up that got him in the end because he then looks guilty, right? Same with Trump. Like, it's the withholding, like, I almost think that even if there are incredibly

guilt, you know, like terrible documents and terrible videos and terrible sort of stuff, he would have been better off just going, oh, yeah, but that was, that was 20 years ago. It was a wild time. Locker room behavior. Yeah, but is the smoking, but it is, look, I don't know, but maybe there's something really, really salacious out there that, or the appearance of it, that he wants to hide. By the way, just as we've been speaking, Charles, Columbia University's paying the government $200 million to... As a shakedown.

As a shakedown as a way of getting federal funds back. So, yeah, I mean, another one just collapses. But yeah, just on the distractions, some of them have been, if you wanted to run the thesis that he's absolutely desperate and clutching for any straws, what have we had? We've had, and part of this is credit to Josh Johnson, by the way, is doing a very good job with The Daily Show this week. His first week, he's excellent on YouTube, go and check him out. But, yeah, I mean, the AI images of Obama being arrested. Did you see that?

Yes. So, I didn't know about that. It's getting better at AI. And my son, my 14-year-old, saw it on TikTok. And he showed me and my wife last night. And we were going to, what the fuck? What the fuck is going on? But yeah, it's like full-on distraction mode.

Going back to 2016. And it was so good. Suddenly you're talking about how good he is at AI rather than the fact that he's a pito. Then there's Coca-Cola. He's ordered Coca-Cola to use cane sugar in the States, the way that he did in Australia, rather than what's it, corn syrup.

And so there's a whole beat on that. He's released the MLK files. So it's 230,000 pages on Martin Luther King. I don't think anyone's actually read them to know what they say. I've tried to find a quick summary. I should ask ChapT. His family's been opposing that for years. Because MLK, it's widely known, was, you know, a bit of a stark.

A pants man, slept around as every man in that era. Yeah, we've all seen Mad Men. Yeah, the Reverend. Well, I suppose as a church man as well, he was a pants man. But yeah, I think that's what's going to come out there. But I think that the implication is that he slept with consenting women, which is slightly different. Yeah, no, that's, I've never heard anything to the contrary of that. Yeah, I've just asked chat GPT what the new documents reveal.

It just says they reaffirm what Scholar's already new. So if that's true, then kind of nothing, Berger. What else has he done? He's, oh, hasn't he gone after Hillary Clinton again as well? And that's a really deep cut, going about even reminding people Hillary Clinton exists. Oh, no, and also he, they're criminally charging Jerome Powell. That's the other one. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

For corruption over the Fed Reserve building, which is well, you know, this wonderful distraction. Yeah, yeah. And, oh, the other culture war red meat thing is he's demanding that the Washington commanders change it and back to the Redskins. Yeah. Do you think he's sort of blowing his load here a bit? Like, it feels like that sort of six months of worth of distraction. Yeah. Some of those are high-quality distractions.

Yeah, I mean, bringing back the football thing. I mean, where do you go from here? Like, what's the next distraction going to be? He even said, make Indians great again, a term that no one is using except him anymore for Native Americans. I mean, presumably Narendra Modi was very confused by that. Yeah, it does feel as though the whole back cupboard's been emptied out, doesn't it? I mean, what can he bring up next?

He's already gone after all of his favorite targets. And in the first month of the Trump administration, he's already, I mean, he's done a prodigious amount of culture war smashing to things. I mean, he's kind of been through the whole US government by this point. Another way he could do it is just go against his own people. Because that's the other thing that you do when you're a weak leader, is you start having purges, right? You know, just if you're looking at Stalin or Mao, whatever, if you're facing internal descent and you're weak from within, another way to get everyone to shut up is to start killing them, right?

And, like, if I was Pam Bondi, I would, who's the Attorney General, who's in charge of that list and everything, who has actually this morning admitted that Trump is mentioned in these Epstein files. You know, like, her shelf life, you know, has to be pretty short. And you'd be guessing that would be a nice distraction to sort of make it all about Pam Bondi. And he could even accuse her of being the one who's stuffed it up and covered it up. Like, isn't the point that what you want, like, all he's got to do is keep throwing stuff out there until he lands on a narrative that sort of, I think his first thing is to just survive, because the truth is that any scandal will fade given a long enough amount of time. Like, like, stories have to evolve. If you just keep stonewalling for months and months and months, in the end, people go off and find some other subject to start talking about. So, you know, like I think, you know, starting to kill your own, you know, lieutenants would be a good way to go.

I'm just spitballing here. Just a bit of breaking news to leave you with Charles, which potentially provides a fantastic precursor to this. Apparently back in the spring, so what we're looking at three months ago or so, Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, and who's the incredibly loyal Trump lawyer, he represented him in one of the many attempts to convict him last year. I can't remember which one. She informed Trump that he was in the Epstein files. Yes, yes. The New York Times is just reporting this now, so that we apparently we definitely know,

like Maggie Habman and the full. The full teams published this, so we can assume the New York Times will be sued. But, yeah, it's an amazing excuse to Sackerel. I reckon Pam Bondi. Pam Bondi will be sued. Like, I reckon she's a goner. Like, she's going to Epstein herself.

Well, Charles, we haven't seen the, we haven't seen the, oh no, there was a window. right there and look what happened phase of the Trump presidency. Perhaps we're heading into that. Stay away from the windows, Pam Bondi. That's my advice. Okay, so there we go. Look, we'll be back on Monday.

If you're desperate for more exclusive stuff on the weekend, you can always subscribe and get our exclusive weekend edition for subscribers only. Otherwise, we'll catch you next week. I think you're solving capitalism again this weekend, aren't you? I'll catch you then, Charles.

Yep, we're part of the Oconiclass Network. Catch you later.