The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Epstein Journalist Says New Files Show No Evidence of Sex Trafficking Ring

Episode Date: February 13, 2026

While Noam is away, Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by investigative journalist Michael Tracey to discuss the latest developments in the newly released Epstein files. Tracey asserts that the popular narrative of Jeffrey Epstein running a vast international sex trafficking ring—especially one involving “elite” clients—is not supported by credible evidence. He says that the factual record doesn’t substantiate claims of a sprawling organized network. They discuss ulterior motives, questions about victims and what's fact and what's fiction. Tracey has contributed to a wide range of publications across the political spectrum, from The Nation to The American Conservative, the New York Daily News to the New York Post, and many more.

This is live from the table, the official podcast of the world famous comedy seller, available wherever you get your podcast, available on YouTube, of course. And this is Dan Natterman. A gnome's not here. He's in Mexico, or he's on a plane or wherever he is. He's not here. So it's just me and Periel Ashenbrand who joins us. Hello.

And we are joined with independent journalist Michael Tracy. Hello, Michael. Thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen. And we're here to talk about what everybody's talking about, not women's luge, but Epstein. Well, I described the Epstein files. The Epstein files.

I was shocked when you told me that was the topic you wanted to be discussed tonight. I never could have imagined. I thought we would be talking about, I don't know, baking. I described you as Epstein expert, and you said that you were... I'm going to take these off. Yeah, you could, yeah. Yes. Oh, yeah, I should put Epstein expert on my business card.

I mean, imagine me actually. going around and earnestly self-declaring. Hello, sir. I'm not just your friendly neighborhood Epstein expert. But with all of the noise out there, you really are somewhat or not somewhat an expert of this. I mean, you've... I feel I probably have a greater command of the source material than your average commentator on this subject. Sure, that's probably... You say that there's now a conspiracy theory where Epstein is still alive, according to some people. There's always been theories percolating that he must be still alive or he was never did at all. He was extracted. I saw the guy who runs Rasmussen polling, like one of the polling firms who just

slightly more right-leaning say just randomly that. So we're giving it an 80 or 90% odds that under the first Trump administration, Epstein was extracted from that jail and delivered to Israel, right? It's like, wait, what? Based on what new information. Recording in progress. Well, was I, recording. People just random, pit tended to vaguely believe something like that. Well, they, you know, I mean, they believe Tupac's alive, people believe that, and Elvis and all that. But, and then there are people that believe he was murdered,

not that he didn't, it's hard to believe it's been since 2019. Boy, it really went fast. Can't believe, I can't believe, it's been seven years since we lost Jeffrey. Time flies when you're having fun with pedophile theories. I could have sworn it was after the, the pandemic, but in any case. No, some people make me feel like an idiot. when I say that I think he was murdered. You don't believe he committed suicide?

I don't know, and I'm not really a conspiracy theorist, but... Yeah, so whenever I'm asked about that, I will always say, I'll repeat it now. But this is the one sort of tenet of the whole Epstein mythology, as I tend to call it, where I'm much less confident that, let's say the conspiracy adjacent take is incorrect. in that, you know, there's reasonable doubt as to what the circumstances of the death were. So I wouldn't be willing to say one way or another definitively that, yes, he committed suicide or, yes, he was killed. And so, for example, I've spoken to his brother, Mark Epstein, who was his next of kin after he died because he didn't have a spouse and didn't have children. So Mark Epstein, his younger brother, had to handle his affairs,

and he hired an independent pathologist to conduct an autopsy immediately after the death. And it was this celebrity pathologist Michael Badden, who's been controversial over the years for the various high-profile cases he's been involved in. But he did find that I'm not a pathologist, so I can't really say one way or another, whether I find the conclusion to be warranted.

but he found that the injuries Epstein sustained were more consistent with homicide than suicide. I read that. Two and a half weeks prior to his death on August 10th on July 22nd, there was an incident in which Epstein was seriously injured and he told the prison psychologist, some of this has come out from the most recent releases,

but this has been known since at least 2023 when an Inspector General report was released, but details have been filled in. He told the prison psychologist at the time that he had been attacked by his soulmate and he would never commit suicide. For among other reasons, it would be against his Jewish faith.

I think that might have been a slightly tongue-in-cheek remark on his part because he always struck me as a secular Jew. But either way. Well, you know, we pick and shoes. Yeah, yeah. Either way, that's what he said, but then he retracted the statement saying he didn't remember.

remember what happened? Just remember in prison, what's the culture? No snitching, meaning you can't rat anybody out to the cops, as they call them, meaning the guards or the government. The screws. Yep. And so it's unclear what exactly went on during that first episode, two and a half weeks before. And it is true that one of the cameras was disabled, didn't, so we never got a clear view of the cell door to see who was coming in and out. There was. are other cameras that show other angles, but we don't have the angle to tell conclusively if anybody in it. How many people would have had to be, I mean, you know, the thing about conspiracy theories is

you have large groups of people trying to keep a secret, and that's generally untenable. How many people would have had to be in on an Epstein suicide? Homicide. Or homicide. Yeah, well, that's the thing. I mean, so I'm just sketching out some reasons why I think there could be some reasonable doubt, or at least reason why we shouldn't be overconfident. as to the ultimate explanation.

But that doesn't therefore necessitate leaping to the most salacious possible conspiracy that might have given rise to his homicide if we're going to stipulate that, that's maybe what happened. Because like it need not have been some elaborate, yeah, Mossad, Trump, Clinton's, whatever thing where they sent an assassination squad to infiltrate the jail

and took him out because he knew too much or something like this, right? I've always reminded people that Epstein's reputation alone at that time would have made him under mortal threat because he was perceived rightly or wrongly, I would say wrongly in the main, but he was perceived as the most notorious pedophile in America. And pedophiles get their ass kicked or killed in prison all the time.

And you're not saying he wasn't a pedophile at all. You're just saying he wasn't the most notorious. I've never seen any evidence that he had pedophilic attraction. sexual attraction. If we're talking about what the clinical definition of pedophilia is, if you look at all the medical literature, which is sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Not that he wasn't guilty of sex with minors. Not that he didn't engage in sexual activity that was unlawful by statute in the state of Florida, where the age of consent is 18, with 16, 17-year-olds. There was a handful of outliers who were younger. Some of them lied about

their ages and instructed other girls to lie about their ages. Some of them had fake IDs and so forth. But ignorance to the true age is no excuse under the law. So you can't say, hey, this 17-year-old lied to me about her age, therefore I'm not guilty according to how the statutes are written. So yeah, that took place. However, if we're going to call that pedophilia, that would have to mean that if you go one state north in Georgia where the age of consent happens to be 18, like pedophilia is state sanctioned and just allowed to proliferate unpunished, that would seem odd. So I don't call that pedophilia. I think there's been concept creeped around the concept of pedophilia.

And believe me, I'm not somebody who in any other context would be really eager to litigate the precise definition of pedophilia. Like nobody comes away from that discussion looking particularly good. It's not like something that really just gets me going and something I want to have feverish debates about. However, it happens to be relevant. So you have to be precise if we're going to have like a giant, all-consuming political controversy around this thing.

Okay, so let's be precise. The one question, the first question that I think we have to get on the table is, what is the best evidence that any prominent person was up to no good with Epstein? By the way, that's Noam's question. That's right. Insisted that we ask. Up to no good. That's a little bit vague.

Can we specify what we mean by Up to a Go? No, good. I mean, elicit sexual activity with children or something? Well, I mean, or young women. just like yucking it up and telling dirty jokes. I mean, there's a spectrum there of what... No, not yucking it up and telling dirty jokes. Like, up to no good is up to no good.

You want to call it illegal activity? Illicit sex with underage women. I've seen no credible evidence, really, to that effect, ever. There's a lot of claims and rumors and innuendos and assumptions that have just swirled and allowed to go unrebutted. But I've seen nothing in particular. Even one of like the hallmarked, allegations to that effect.

Prince Andrew, right? Yeah. Now, the former Prince Andrew, although I don't care what the royal family officially decreed, I'm still calling him Prince Andrew until further notice. If you want to go after me under British liberal law, so be it. I know it's more stringent than the United States, so I'll just invoke the First Amendment. But so Prince Andrew is accused of having sexual relations or engaging in sexual contact

with this one particular accuser who is basically the progenitor of what I've taken to call him the Epstein mythology. So she's the one who introduced the concept of a wide-scale child sex trafficking operation enforced by blackmail. Epstein surreptitiously recorded lots of prominent people in compromising sexual encounters by hooking up secret cameras and his properties, et cetera. And it also implicated all sorts of VIPs who we would know of, such as Prince Andrew. and she also accused Alan Dershowitz and then also John Luke Brunel, the French sort of modeling magnate in that initial 2014 filing. But she's the origin of what people just kind of like take for granted. Must be true about the Epstein story. And she did accuse Prince Andrew and then like years later she filed the standalone lawsuit against him that the royal family ended up, I would say foolishly settling, but they settled it.

But even then, the allegation would have been that she had sexual condescary. with him when she was 17 years old, which would have been legal in the United Kingdom, in England. If it was consensual, now if she's going to be claiming or if it's going to be claimed of her that she was somehow a sex slave, which she did claim, then, okay, I guess that just inherently wouldn't be consensual, but there's not a whole lot of evidence that she was like in literal enslavement. That seems a little bit hyperbolic. But again, even if as sort of not egregious as that would have been, or at least not nearly as egregious as people imagine the act

would have had to have been if Andrew were guilty of it, there's still never really been any evidence presented that it ever happened at all, other than some vaguely circumstantial stuff having to do with a photo of them together, which, you know, the problem of which is disputed. Prince Andrew, you know, was renounced his title. Is that any evidence of guilt? Didn't Prince Charles strip him of his title? He was stripped of it.

It was rescinded, I don't think, with his consent. With his consent? To me, it doesn't prove anything as to the guilt regarding the underlying allegations of sexual impropriety. It just shows that some of the institutions around the world, especially the British royal family, which if you had to just close your eyes and imagine, okay, like, what is the most feckless possible institution we can imagine in terms of how they would handle something like something? PR level, it would probably be the British royal family because they've always shot themselves in their own foot since they've been embroiled in this. They settled with Virginia Roberts Gufrey, who was just a confabulatory nightmare. And they gave credence to her outlandish and totally unsupported, uncooperated allegations by settling and thought wrongly that

in settling with her in early 2022, that was going to put an end to the matter, which it clearly did not. It only accelerated it. Is no good evidence implicating anybody that did anything illegal with underage women from these... In pedophilic sex crimes, no. I mean, one of the fallacies of this whole thing is that to the degree that Epstein ever was involved in engaging in sexual activity with females who were not above the age, of 18, it was confined to that Palm Beach phase from roughly 2002 to 2005, where girls

ended up recruiting amongst themselves to... Teenage girls. Yeah, teenage girls. There were some that were a bit older, let's say, mostly from like 16 to 20, something like that. But girls ended up recruiting one another to go to the house. they went on their own volition. They, again, would advise one another if he asks or if you mention your age, make sure you say you're 18 because he assumes we're all 18.

Well, he wasn't exactly checking ID. No, he wasn't very scrupulous about checking. So, again, that gets to his poor judgment for even putting himself in that situation. Or he was illfully blind. He might have known. Yeah, that might have been partly the case. Gileane Maxwell has said in her proffer interview with the Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, And there was also a proffer in our view that she apparently gave,

and I didn't know this until like two days ago, to the DOJ in around 2020, where she says that she observed around this time a behavioral change in him where it's becoming a bit more impulsive, reckless, and he was taking large doses of testosterone. And that correlated to what Maxwell observed as his behavioral changes. So, yeah, that's all true. But in terms of even the worst of what was alleged

in terms of the underage sexual contact. During that period, there was never any real allegation that involved anybody else other than Epstein in terms of a prominent person who could be implicated. So it was just him himself? Based on everything that I've seen, it was basically his own little weird secret. He was obsessed with getting massages multiple times a day.

What was the catalyst for the theories that we're seeing that there's this, you know, huge number of prominent people that were involved. I guess the catalyst was just that by virtue of him having this genuinely astonishing range of connections and associations and relationships with all manner of high-profile people from all manner of different industries and fields and countries, that because he had been involved in that Palm Beach situation, people could extrapolate that there must have been something akin to that going on in his dealings with the other high-profile people.

But there was never like really an evidentiary basis for that supposition. As far as I could tell, there was just something that people found it exciting to want to believe and then weave theories around. Although, so my understanding is that there have been tens of millions of files that were found and only three million that were released. I'm not sure where you get the number tens of millions. Last I heard, according to Rokana and Thomas Massey, who were the co-sponsors and drafters of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which is the statute that required the production from the DOJ that we're now seeing with the latest massive tranche being released on January 30th. They maintain that there are still around 2 million files that have yet to be released. Now, I don't know how true that is.

Like, some of them could be duplicates. Some of them could be found to not have been relevant. Like, there are multiple layers of review, or like documented retrieval and then review that the DOJ says it did in order to determine whether a certain file was responsive under the act. So, but, you know, there's, I wouldn't be shocked at all if there are still more files, documents, records, et cetera, yet to be revealed because this story is just so sprawling

and it has, you know, tentacles in so many, different institutions that there's just a ginormous amount of material and even was prior to December 19th when this first round of Epstein files from the DOJ was released. Was there any reason to believe that the unreleased files contain some sort of smoking gun that they're not being released for a reason? It haven't been released for a reason. I would put it this way. There's been unbelievably voluminous journalistic investigation on this story for how, depending on how you want to quantify it at least like eight seven eight years you could go back even further to like 2006 seven eight I mean for a long time not quite with the same tenacity as now but like enough

and it was a big it was a very big story in 2019 when he died et cetera and then the maximal trial etc there'd been a huge amount of journalistic output on this there has been an absolute unbelievable avalanche of civil litigation that somebody could spend a lifetime attempting to read through and full and probably not finish. There has been civil proceedings, criminal proceedings. There has been, you know, a huge quantity of files that were available even before this first round of Epstein files for people to pour through. And through all that time, from what I could tell, from what I can gather, nothing even like approximating a smoking gun has been made evidence. So shouldn't that, obviously, like, in strict logical terms,

the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. But like, at a certain point, if the thing that you're sure there must be some smoking gun evidence around to substantiate is not forthcoming like then don't you revise your estimate as to the likelihood that something for that effect actually does exist

like there should be some evidence of this large scale child sex trafficking operation at some point right like how could you know if that did happen how many people would have had to have been involved and how could they all kind of be how could they all be perfectly covering it up

in coordination with one another for this long. Well, isn't a bunch of stuff, like, redacted that, like, aren't we not seeing part of this? Yeah, way too much is redacted. I've always said in terms of what my own personal view is, I'm in favor of maximum disclosure and transparency of everything. Whether it's records in the government's possession, which we're now getting from these disclosures, or even in the possession of a private entity, I've personally myself filed FOIA requests to different government agencies locally, state level, and

federally for different materials. One of the files I was trying to get actually was this draft indictment that was known to have been in existence that was created in 2007 when the feds were trying to determine what they were going to do to resolve the outstanding prosecution against Epstein in Florida. They formulated a draft indictment to kind of use his leverage against him to compel him to accede to a non-prosecution agreement where he would then have to plead guilty to two state-level prostitution charges. But that full document hadn't been out forever. And I had a pending FOIA request for it. And it finally did just come out on January 30th. So I'm in favor of maximum disclosure, but of everything. And the people who claim that they're in favor of maximum

disclosure and transparency, by and large, are really not. For all practical purposes, they're in favor of selective transparency and selective disclosure. The alleged victims, and I'm sorry people are offended, but whenever I utter the word victims now, I'm going to qualify it in some way because I'm sorry, I don't think it's good practice to just declare that someone who's a victim using no verification criteria whatsoever. So somebody's just a victim if they self-declare it, like they don't have to have anything whatsoever about their claims tested for veracity.

I actually don't think it's a workable standard. And there's a lot of sort of contrary evidence about a great number of these alleged victims that cast extreme doubt on the veracity of what they have claimed over the years. So bear with me in terms of that probably slightly annoying qualifier. But the alleged victims and their lawyers

who, by the way, have made a killing financially over this whole thing for a number of years. I've revised my estimate upward that if we want to give a rough total of what the so-called, what I've called the Epsing industry is worth, it's like a billion-dollar industry. Wow.

Or nearly a billion, I would say. Well, I think this podcast makes it make about $5. And, you know, there's been, obviously, there's been a financial incentive that just gets never discussed anywhere in terms of like if you're dangling over the heads of people millions of dollars tax free if they can establish even the most tangential possible connection to Epstein based on their purported recollections from like 15 or 20 years in the past don't you think that might incentivize them to i don't know maybe embellish things or dramatize things or recast or reframe things and then they can get a giant financial payout. I would probably do that if it was available to me because it seems like a human nature sort of thing. And yet no one's supposed to be cognizant of it

on this story in particular. I don't really understand why. But there you have it. Anyway, in terms of the redactions, right, the alleged victim's lawyer who's kind of been the paramount legal antagonist of Epstein going back 20 years and is one of the lead lawyers

on many of these class action lawsuits that then generate the very lucrative settlements from the Epstein estate, from J.P. Morgan, Deutsch Bank. They're now suing, again, Bank of America and Bank of New York Mellon as of last October, hoping to get, you know, a couple hundred more million. And they've been in court petitioning the judges in the Southern District of New York

to require that the DOJ impose the most expansive possible redactions on the files. Why? They claim that it's intolerable if there's any victim identifying information, they say, that is published. Now, to me, you're either for transparency or you're not. I'm sorry, these alleged victims are no longer children, if they ever even were, because a lot of them were adults at the time of their claim victimization. But isn't that standard operating procedure for rape victims and victims of sexual abuse

that they're, like, guaranteed some kind of anonymity? Not necessarily. This was a standalone statute. This could have required the production of files using whatever criteria the drafters of the law wanted to use. But they included a carve-out at the behest of this very same profit-seeking victim's lawyer, Bradley Edwards, who conferred with Rokana and Thomas Massey on the composition of the language of the text for the statute. So you're saying that this is all like. financially motivated by this Edward's guy. There's a huge financial motive, yes. Because he's getting a

percentage of whatever these women are getting. Yeah, effectively, yes. Again, it's not strictly financial. Look, people also strongly believe that anybody who could even be claimed to be a victim of anything in terms of sexual abuse should be immunized from any public transparency or exposure until the end of time. My view is that if we're going to have this mass indiscriminate production of files that wrongly impugn a great number of people as having been complicit themselves in child sex trafficking offenses, that's something that is a bit worrying or not something that you necessarily want to have happened in a vacuum. But my view is always, look, this story has such unique public intrigue attached to it and it's causing such massive political and cultural

ramifications all throughout the world. I mean, the British government might be on the verge of dissolving soon over it, which is crazy. It's caused giant upheaval everywhere. Almost everywhere you can imagine. It's crazy. Like there's something, there's like a huge, it's the biggest, it's number one's the way right now in Norway. So why then? So then, in light of that, I was saying it's, it seems. I think in Norway, the biathlon would be the number of, one story. It seems like an exception being made is tenable. So we

actually get legitimate full disclosure and transparency. We can finally get to the bottom of everything as everyone's demanding, even if it means certain people get wrongly impugned as child sex, trafficking criminals. But that transparency is okay with everyone, but not transparency for the

alleged victims who are now wealthy, received all this tax-free money, get their health care paid for for free through another settlement that was set up by the U.S. Virgin Islands over the course of litigation with J.P. Morgan, they get showered with accolades wherever they go. Nobody asks them a single, even like lightly challenging journalistic question about anything. Some of them were ruled to have actually endured no illegal sexual activity whatsoever.

Okay, but I'm assuming that. Why are they, why are they, why do they get to impose these exceptions to transparency? Why at their command are public records being blacked out? But are you saying that these women are not actually victims or we don't know that they're victims? Like, their identity is protected from the general public. But I'm assuming within these court hearings, they're being vetted, interviewed. Like, you can't just raise your hand and say, like, I'm a victim of Jeffrey Epstein. There's a million dollars.

You pretty much can, believe it or not. Well, I'm going to try it then. It's like stupefying. No, I mean... Is that true that like, it... It's not quite literally that, but like, they do, they do... They do get granted the ability to participate in civil litigation anonymously. And what if they are really victims?

Then should they be granted this anonymity? Or you just not... I guess it would depend on the severity of the victimization. Like, I don't know. If this is of such major public interest, why should this be... concealed with everyone for perpetuity. Some of the victims who, purported victims, who have decided to come out in public and become political activists, lobby Congress to pass legislation, say they're going to launch what they've called a survivor-focused political advocacy movement and put their

name to it and go on podcast constantly, and MSNBC and CNN, and they were just today at Pam Bondi. I saw that. Pam Bondi, I haven't gotten a chance to watch it. I'm sure it's a It's a thrill. Yeah, I love it. But, so their names are public. They voluntarily chose to make their names public, and yet in these DOJ files, the names are still presumptively redacted. And not just the names, but any information that might be construed as somehow identifying them in any way. Which means whole pages are black.

But the ones who have themselves chosen to become public, their names are still redacted. Yes, and that's what they demanded. By the way, somebody sent me an email with my name. I don't know if it was real or not, but apparently the seller sent out a mass email. Well, seller sends out mass emails all the time, but Jeffrey Epstein was on the email list. Okay. And so I was on, say, hey, come to the comedy seller. Here's the lineup.

And I was on the lineup. Does it make you a pedophile? No, certainly doesn't. Do you want your name redacted? That's okay. You know, I'm just, I'm just happy to someone's talking about me. People were also. Wait a second.

Wait. People were also denouncing me as being in the Epstein files because they searched my name because they figured that I must be trying to cover something up, which is why I take the view that I do on this whole Epstein thing. So if you type of Michael Tracy, I do come up twice. And it's in two, like, daily rundowns of, like, press coverage by the FBI's communications department. It's just, like, a summary of a random article that I did on a completely different subject.

But that makes me know in the Epstein. Well, you're getting a lot of flat, just because you're not defending Epstein in any way. You're just saying he wasn't, there's no evidence of pedophilia, and there's no evidence that others were involved in pedophilia, and so that you're being sort of accused, I guess, of, uh, I'm defending the facts and evidence and not to be pompous, but truth in reality as best I can approximate it's a price to be paid for that, obviously.

And, and I can, you know, it's fine. I can, I can deal with it. I've, I'm wired a little differently. If you're a normal person and you have like normal human relationships and you

feel normal human emotions and things, it might not be pleasant to be inundated day and day out with accusations that you are personally a pedophile. I can't tell you how many hundreds of thousands of times I've just been called a petto just by embittered strangers. And it's like a little bit of a bummer, I guess. But at a certain point, I get a nerd to it. Because, you know, I've been seen as having controversial perspectives on things in the past, Russian agents or whatever. so it's not big deal with me, but it does give some insight

into why there's so little rationality allowed on this subject because if you do try to inject a little bit of a rational corrective to some of the mania, this is what you can expect to be well, it may well be that in the comments of this episode.

I'm sure it will. Every comment section is like at least 95% against me. Let me read you. Just to tie up the point really quickly like two sentences. Sure. I don't think virtually any,

who's commenting on this subject now, and everybody has to have a take these days, virtually no one that I know of has done the research necessary or filed the corporate proceedings that would inform them, that it's really not an exaggeration to say that to the extent that there's an impediment to full disclosure and transparency, and to the degree that we can attribute these over-wieldy redactions to anything, it is the demands of the alleged victims and their lawyers. But even given the redactions, as you said before, there's still, you know, after all the research that's been done on this and all the investigation, there's still no evidence of some pedophilia ring. Well, you know what?

But again, that whole notion ultimately stems from this one accuser, Virginia Roberts Giffray, who, by the way, last October, had this internet nationally bestselling book that was number one on the Amazon Sharts. The only wish I trust is my own? That's Perry Lowe's book, I'm sorry. That's my book. Go buy it. I have not gotten a chance to read that one.

It's very good. If I do say so myself. I feel like I'll be incriminated in something if I read that. It'll be used against me on the internet. That whole theory, which people just take for granted as having been established at some point by actual facts or evidence, really stems from one person who is, was so fatally non-credible that the DOJ, like the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York that were, who were desperate to successfully prosecute somebody in lieu of Epstein after he died because they were essentially humiliated that he died in government custody. and they had to

They felt obliged. Allegedly. Maybe still walking around. Yeah, we were just talking about maybe he was the one who kidnapped Savannah Guthrie's mother. Oh, God. Okay.

He's in the ski mask. And he brought him, he brought Mrs. Guthrie to an underground layer where Jimmy Hoffa and Elvis and the Lindberg baby and Amelia Earhart are also hiding.

You seem to enjoy that. That's funny. Joke of mine that I came up with on the fly. And Tupac. And Tupac. But just to wrap things up, because, like, although I would prefer there to be much more unredacted disclosures in these files than there has been. There has been some stuff that's been very illuminating, although not from the angle that

some of these more maximalist type people in terms of the perspective on Epstein would prefer, there was an internal memo from prosecutors in the Southern District of New York from December 19, 2019, where they memorialized an interview that was conducted with this Virginia Robert's good phrase. And bear a mind, again, they are desperate for even the flimsyest evidence they can possibly locate that would allow them to successfully prosecute Maxwell at that point. So is she, okay, one second, though. Sorry. What?

So you're saying that the- And they said she's not credible, just to wrap up that point. Like nothing, none of her most sensational claims had the slightest bit of corroboration in terms of being trafficked, implicating prominent third-party people, the blackmail, the hidden cameras, et cetera. That was all. It is very delicate when you say of someone that alleges a sexual crime that they're not credible, but sometimes, sometimes they're not credible. You know, we heard that to believe all women, you know, that movement several years ago. Right, which I thought people on the right were like the most skeptical of.

And yeah, at least for a phase of this, they were the most fervid in their determination to, quote, believe all women if those women were alleged Epstein. victims because I don't know, they got some kind of ideological vindication out of it. So one of these stories is that like this whole thing is being covered up because Trump is somehow implicated in all of this. And that's really at the end of the road, that's what we're going to find. How long is this road? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. How many more files? Two million more files. However many more, I don't know. What are we not seeing? I don't know what those files consist of. Like, would that be shocking?

Like, if we uncover, like you're saying right now, there's no real evidence that anybody major was to quote, no, I'm up to no good. So I'm asking, like, would it be surprising? Well, you, what are the problems is that, like, up to no good is in the I have the beholder. So let's say, no, no, we're defining it very clear. No, I got you. But, but again, why?

One thing that's never made clear to the average media consumer is that to the degree that there are Epstein victims, including the ones that have become public advocates, a majority of them, as far as I could tell, were adults at the time of their claim victimization, but they get conflated with victims of pedophilic abuse. So is it possible? I know. I'm saying so, but is it possible that there was some VIP? who attended like a swore of Epstein's at some point. And there was an adult, like a young woman, but an adult who was present, it ends up getting into some kind of sexual scenario with him. Sure.

But that's only up to no good if we buy into the whole premise that we can reframe everything that happened 15 or 20 years ago as some kind of sex trafficking, even if the participants in the sexual act contemporaneously thought of themselves as engaging consensually. I do want to get to the Tonya Kyanov article because Noam sent it to us and I think... Yeah.

You didn't read it. I guess it's in the free press. I have not read it. So she went through all these videos that were, you know, part of the Epstein files. And, you know, she makes... She says, she talks about that they're disturbing and hard to watch. One video was like toddler,

that Epstein was like... And why does she find it? a disturbing? Well, I don't know. It's just a toddler. Is the toddler being sexually abused? No, no, no. Wait. It's just a toddler. So what's disturbing about it? Well, I don't believe it is disturbing, but she then, she then says, and there was another video where Epstein had a paternity test, and she says, and that makes me wonder,

who's the father of that child? I mean... So, I mean, we're at the comedy seller. Do people don't understand that people in their private lives and private communications can sometimes crack jokes or make sardonic remarks? No, but I think that what she was saying in that free press, piece is that it's disturbing and all of these videos are disturbing because they're looking at them through the lens that everybody is a potential victim. Everything we see here is presumptively sexually illicit or predatory to children. Yes. Which is a faulty framing. I'm sorry. It just is.

And the child could, I don't know who that child was. Maybe it was Epstein's nephew, was a child of a friend. I don't know who it was. Like there's, there's, so Epstein was the godfather of his former girlfriend Eva Dubin's daughter. Epstein had a long-term girlfriend. I'm not sure if they were monogamous, as I doubt it. He was a lot of thoreo. He refused to marry her. What is it with the girlfriends of infamous people named Eva?

Good. Well, there's only two that I can think of up. But anyway. Well, speaking of Hitler. Yeah. But I'm... I mean, Epstein really is like this modern person.

who embodies all evil now. So he is sort of like a Hitler-esque figure in terms of how he operates, how he's perceived and what his, how he functions in the public arena. I've called him like, he's just like, I guess, Hitler and Satan combined.

Anyway, there's this, there's this, so photos have occasionally come out, not as I, not as far as I know in this most recent production, but like last month, in December, people resurfaced old photos and kind of give it, gave social media the impression

that they had just, you know, dramatically been published finally in the Epstein files for the DOJ. There was actually old photos that have been published with a Daily Mail where they blur out the face of this actual child. So she looks maybe about eight, nine, who's sitting on Epstein's lap. And they're kind of like playfully cuddling. And everybody took that to me and that this girl was pedophilivoli

preyed upon by Epstein. But her mother, Eva Dupin, was like in the literally, in the photo, in the background. She was his goddaughter. Okay. There's another video. And so everybody's like searching through these files now, the new ones. Right.

For any fleeting reference they can define to like an actual child in like millions of files. So you could expect like at some point there would be some references to children like in references to virtually everything. Well, Michael Jackson's victim's parents were there too. I don't think that that exonerates. No, not unto itself. Just that their mother was there. And by the way, wasn't there like this whole Lolita thing going on?

Was there like some videos of or drawings on girls' bodies of like the first line of the Lolita novel? I'm not sure I haven't seen that. I know that people claim that Epstein's plane was nicknamed the Lolita Express as though Epstein himself named the plane the Lillita Express and like painted La Lillita Express on the side and like would fly around saying all aboard the Lita Express. and then like the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and like Florida aviation officials just said, hey, Captain Jeffrey and the Lillita Express, welcome home. And he just flies him without a problem even though he's a registered sex offender as to report all his movements in like an incredibly onerous way to every jurisdiction he travels to. Like, Chris Hedges, do you know who that is? He's this like left wing journalist guy, although he's like crankishly left wing.

I don't even know how to describe my ideologically anymore. But he came out and denounced Nome Chomsky, his like longtime idol, saying, Noam must have known that he was riding aboard the Lolita Express and all these children were being brutalized. And it's just like he thinks he's absorbed this myth that Epstein himself must have referred to the plane as Lolita Express and flew around with all these friends and, you know, conspirators aboard it. Hell that he might have referred to it like that. He never did. It was that nickname, quote unquote, was the invention of a tabloid newspaper in the United Kingdom. Okay.

And just made up. But do you think that Chomsky didn't know that anything illicit was going on? What elicit was going on when Chomsky became acquainted with Epstein? No one can explain that to me. They met between 2013 and 2015. Okay. Epstein was never even accused, at least in a criminal context, but to my knowledge, also has been a civil context, which is much more liberal evidence standards.

but at the very least, I'm certain in a criminal context, he was never even alleged to have committed any illicit sexual act against any person below the age of 18 after the year 2005. So if Chomsky becomes acquainted with him in 2013, 2013 or 2015, then what was Chomsky supposed to have known in terms of any ongoing predatory activities that he was supposed to, like, prevent or put a stop to or call the cops on. I mean, I'm just saying, just because he hadn't been caught, doesn't mean he wasn't doing it or that, like, the men, the brilliant men that were hanging out around him didn't know that

there were, like, teenage girls sauntering around half naked, no? Don't you think there would be, like, a scintilla of evidence that's come out to that effect? Is there not? There might have been some... since, meaning illicit sexual contact with a person not, under 18, under 18 since from 2005 onward? No, not the number of it.

Okay. People think it's illicit that he might have had these little romps with like a 19 or a 20 year old or a 20 year old or something. And that would count in terms of what we're trying to establish in terms of what if it existed. But you're saying 19 doesn't count. It doesn't count legally. Is that penitulia?

No. Is that even illegal? Not to my not. No, but maybe the trade table wasn't stowed. I mean, don't hold... Watch out. Maybe it will be criminalized soon enough. Speaking of the plane,

so a lot of people make a lot of a hay out of the fact that where the hell did Epstein get all this money? You know, he must be involved in something with the Mossad or some, some shadowy, you know, something or other, to own a, I don't know what kind of plane it was, but like a seven, it's a big plane. Wasn't a little Cessna going, yeah, so people wonder,

where did this guy get all that money? People who ask that question, I find, don't actually want to know the answer. They just want to be able to constantly ask the question because it insinuates that there must be some sinister hidden answer that they don't want us to know about. Ju-Jewy, kind of Jewy, shadowy. Well, it may or may not.

They, like, never has to be defined. Like, it's just them out there. They are doing things. Some of it may be anti-Semitism, but a lot of it isn't. I mean, I mean, there is, I'm not somebody who's bought into a lot of what I would call anti-Semitism hysteria, especially since October 7th. Please, let's not get sidetracked into that. But I've been a critic of a lot of those narratives, but it's impossible to deny that,

especially in terms of the online, let's say, discussion around this matter. Yeah. There is just open anti-Semitism that's incredibly virulent and that I think does fuel a lot of the interest. Not exclusively, obviously. Oh, sure. It's definitely a huge factor in what keeps us at the top of the algorithm when you log on. It's very embarrassing for us Jews that Epstein not only is Jewish, but he has a very Jewish name. He also sounds Jewish.

It's also embarrassing for me as a social and cultural Jew just by virtue of having grown up in Northern New Jersey and gone to like 13 apartments. Well, you know, it's okay when a Jew does something bad that's not stereotyped, you know, that doesn't play into old tropy stereotypes. Like a Jewish mobster, that's fine. But, but a Jewish. So you got a Jewish pedophile. You got a Jewish money manager. Yeah, that's an accused sexual predator. But that's not like an anti-Semitic trope pedophilia.

Not pedophilia necessarily, but sexual preying upon non-Jewish women is a very old. where Jews are trying to tear down our moral standards for society by introducing sexual debauchery to Hollywood and to other industries and like Epstein's an embodiment of that or something. That would be the claim. Can we at least say or agree. Oh, yeah. So we can talk about Epstein's money. Okay. Now, I know the answer because I've heard you discuss it, that he just was a very talented money manager.

Another anti-Semitic stereotype. Sometimes the stereotypes are true. I have to admit it. Yeah, I mean, I do think, so people don't want to acknowledge this, because if you acknowledge that Epstein had any aptitude at anything, then that's taken to mean that you're condoning everything he ever did in his life. Right. And you're also pro-pedophile.

No, but that's why there's no rational discussion of any of this allowed, because people will always make the most condemnatory possible, condemnable possible inferences or the most repulsive possible. conclusions. Yeah, I mean, I think there is a lot of evidence that he actually was above average intelligence person. I mean, I think that's pretty established as like a material fact, right? Okay. So, yeah, he had some aptitude at innovating certain financial maneuvers at a time where Wall Street was sort of like reth inventing itself and ended up being able to come up with tactics for high net worth

individuals to structure their wealth such that they could have to pay as few as possible taxes, which is like not something I'm always that happy to endorse. I don't understand these arcane technical maneuvers necessarily. That's what he specialized in. And he was able to have a boutique money managing firm that didn't require that many clients in order to be very profitable because if you're catering your services to some of the wealthiest people in the United States like Leslie Wexner. that's the Victoria's Secret limited guy.

Exactly. Or Elizabeth Johnson, the heiress to the Johnson & Johnson Fortune, or Leon Black, the hedge fund manager, etc. Like, how many of those clients do you really need in order to be pretty well off? In one of these like 14 hours or 10 hours or whatever it was, a video that I was trying to parse through yesterday before we did this show, there's a two-hour video in there of Steve Bannon interview. him and Bannon asks him like are there any Harvard professors or Wharton professors or anyone on this

planet who like is better at finances than you are or who understands the like financial structure of how money works better than you do and Epstein goes well there must be but I haven't met him yet Kind of, yeah. Well, one of the things that's fascinating about the Chomsky relationship, and that actually is one of the genuine revelations, at least for me. Like, I hadn't known until last November when records from Epstein's estate started to be published by the House Oversight Committee because they subpoenaed the Epstein estate in August and gradually released batches of them.

I knew that Jomsky had some dealings with Epstein, but I didn't know the extent of it. Nor that. What was the nature of... They seemed to have had a genuine friendship. And Chomsky stated many times that he genuinely found Epstein intellectually stimulating and that he would facilitate what Chomsky found to be very valuable experiences for him. How bad. Not sexually, okay?

He was like 89 years old. I'm sorry. Do you really think that that was what was in the cards for Noam Shomsky? I don't know. I do know, and the answer is no, that's not what he was talking about. He was talking about that Epstein would set up these little confabs where he would gather people who would otherwise never likely have encountered one another, such as Noam Chomsky and Ehud Barak, the former Prime Minister of Israel,

or Woody Allen at all. Okay, really, you are really stacking the deck here against. Or others, well, you know, and... Nobody who would ever be. ever engage in any inappropriate. Well, can you imagine another scenario? No, no, no, that's not what I meant. I'm sorry.

I'm just saying he's Woody Allen like you opened. No, no, no, sorry. I miscommunicated. I meant Epstein gathered people who probably otherwise would never like attend a social function together. By the way, no, what's going on with the sound? Noam Dorman does the same.

Another great noam, Noam Dorman, but it does the same thing. There you go. You're like a facilitator or like a networker. But I'm sorry, like, Michael Moynihan and, uh, but I'm sorry, if both, Alan Dershowitz and Noam Chomsky found this guy intellectually stimulating and, like, appreciated his input on things and would send him stuff to review and, like, wanted to hang out with him.

I'm not disputing that. Can we, and Dershowitz and Chomsky were like these bitter rivals who hated each other. And yet they both, bizarrely enough, were united in their affinity for Jeffrey Epstein. Does that not tell us anything about, like, what this guy is? I'm not disputing that this guy was brilliant and probably charming. all of the other things. I'm just saying that adding like a bunch of like young, hot like 17 or 19 year old Russian girls, nobody was running out of the room from that. I don't, do you know that any 19 year old Russian girls attended the Chomsky,

Ehud Barat? They might have just been interested in linguistics. And the universal grammar. I mean, are adult women, like adult women or not? That's something I also don't understand here. Like, why is it now that, first that we were talking about pedophilia, which, like, had a certain definition, which has just been obliterated. But now we're talking about women in their 20s. I grant you 100% that we should not conflate 19-year-old women with 9-year-old girls.

And sometimes these were sophisticated, like, college students who went to NYU art school and stuff. I mean, give me a break. Okay. Just to talk about the victims for a second, you said you didn't have a chance to watch the Pam. Bondi. I had not yet. This is my third podcast of the day, and I had to finish an article and do another thing. So I'm saving that for tonight.

Okay, so you will save it for tonight. So you can bring up something if you want. So they had a house judiciary meeting, right, while you're on your other podcast. I'm going to fill you in here. And Jamie Rasky, who's the top, what? What is the, when you do this thing? Gagging with a spoon. For those of you who are listening and not watching, like a record show.

Jamie Raskin was coincidentally, one of the most hardcore Russiagate proponents, meaning like Trump-Russia collusion. And it just so happens that everybody who was the most invested in that pale is equally invested in this one. And it's like Epstein has supplanted Russia collusion as the number one oppositional narrative to Trump in his second term. Okay. Don't, let's not get sidetracked with Russia.

I apologize. So for the record, for those of you who are listening and not locking, Michael just stuck his finger down his throat like he was making himself a quote why are you saying that though you dislike this guy immensely yeah like he's like an adam shift type and he thinks he's such a brilliant constitutional scholar because he taught some constitutional law course and he's a little bit more articulate than your average congressional democrat but he's very sleazy and his involvement in this whole epstein story has been incredibly incendiary and it's all just about saying the most inflammatory possible thing he can conjure on any given day about Donald Trump.

He's not actually motivated by some underlying principle. It's just whatever political opening he can exploit to bludgeon Donald Trump, just like why he happened to be so fervently invested in the Trump-Russia collusion story. Like, what's the connection between Epstein and Trump-Russia collusion? Nothing really. And yet it was just somehow his burning passion. Okay. I understand the...

What did he say today? Do you want to read that? Well, you brought it up. You can read it. You're capable. Also, your handwriting that I might not be able to read. Your quote, you're siding with the perpetrators and you're ignoring the victims, he said. This is to Pam Bondi.

Yeah, this is what he said to Pam Bondi, who apparently shed her back towards the victims. She wouldn't even look at them. There was. Alleged victims. To the alleged victims. I'll tell you about some of the victims who I spotted who were in that background seating area. Elvis? What?

Amelia Elhar. Can it close? Okay. That will be your letter. unless you ask quickly to act quickly to change course. You're a massive Epstein cover up right out of the Department of Justice, close quote. Okay, so I have a few questions. Okay. I'll try to remain calm. Yeah, please. Yeah, because I was told by someone, you're going to have a heart attack if you watch this hearing or blow your brains out, which is often how I feel throughout an average

day. I would ask him, okay, what is being covered up? So, people could just assert a cover up, but they don't even have to, like, give a rough sketch of what they purport is being covered up. You're citing with the perpetrators, which perpetrators? Who is he suggesting? Well, Trump, I think, is the suggestion. That there's a matter-

What was Trump the perpetrator of? Well, I don't know because every- No one does. No one does. So he needs no evidence to just assert that there are perpetrators who are having their crime-spers, breeze covered up, like, what kind of standard of rational inquiry is that? That's maybe you might say

putting the cart before the horse or maybe there's some other hokey metaphor I can use to explain why that's a presupposition of something for which he has no evidence, nor does he need it, because everybody just assumes that there must be this cover-up of what? They can't define it. Like, I'll give you an example. On Monday, what is? Today's Wednesday, right? That's right. On Monday, Rocana and Thomas Massey, you know these guys, right? They came out and said, hey, look, everybody, we found out that the DOJ under Pan Bondi,

who, by the way, I'm not defending in any respect. She's a total bimbo. And she mishandled just in terms of like a tactical approach, every aspect of this from the beginning. So she's ridiculous. But Rokana and Thomas Massey came out and said, hey, the Department of Justice, has maliciously redacted the names of six powerful men, which leads people to believe what? They've redacted the names of, quote, perpetrators of something.

And then the DOJ actually then proceeded to unredact those names in the file that Thomas Massey was complaining about. Because, I mean, look, there are millions of files. They had, they used, they diverted 500 lawyers, they said, in the DOJ, over the holidays, over Hanukkah, Christmas, and New Year's, they said. to day in and day out, spend their time on this Epstein document production beat to analyze each individual document for potentially victim-identifying material. And so you had like people not looking into organized crime for six weeks and instead

doing constant Epstein document analysis. But there's still going to be like screw-ups. It's like millions and millions of documents. And like there's not ever, there's not really consistent redactual. criteria. So stuff might be screwed up or maybe over-redacted. And look, I wish there were no redactions. It would have been very simple to address this problem from the beginning, put in the bill, no redactions whatsoever, and then we get everything. So why didn't they? Because of this dogmatic deference to the alleged victims who claim that, like, one of them got on some podcasts

last Friday and said, she has been raped again by the Department of Justice. Because, because some peripheral stuff having to do with her was released. Even though she's out in public under her real name, she had already testified in open court. Like, she herself had not attempted to shield her full identity, and yet she wants public records that are like the taxpayer's property, theoretically, to be even further imposed with concealments than they already are. Look, I don't know.

But just to finish up. So Massey says, hey, look, we have these six guys' names who have been perpetrated, they've been wrongly redacted because they got to go into the DOJ building and look at unredacted versions of some files, although they said there are still some other documents that are even redacted within this little area that they set up for the members of Congress to go in and look. And then, so the DOJ unredacts that the names. The comedy's not a lineup.

We get the names. Rokana reads them out on the floor of the house, and there's not a shred of evidence that any of them are guilty of anything. So, you tell me what to make of that. It does seem out a little bit McCarthy, I have to say. Do we have calls, by the way? We do have calls. We do have calls.

You have one more point to make. Corey is first, Corey. Oh, well, we can take a call. Okay, okay. She has one more point. It may be just a repeat of a previous point. Well, why do you think that I don't have a new point? And feel free to rein me in aggressively,

because as you could probably tell, I could go on all the people. No, I just think that, like, Well, if Noam were here, you know, there would be a lot more raining going on. Well, what do you think that Noam would say? Well, noam would have a lot more to say. Well, I think we have kind of... But if Noam would probably go heavy on his just general conspiracy theory, his whole thing about conspiracy theories in general,

because he's always ranting about the rise of the conspiracy theories. Yeah, we bonded over our mutual disdain for Daryl Cooper, although for maybe slightly divergent reasons. What do you mean that would be raining? What does that mean? Raining in. Oh, I'd be raining in. He would be raining down opprobrium on me.

No, I'm sure he would agree with probably everything you've said. So we have a caller. Yeah, Corey. Corey. Hi. Hi. Do we get an image or just sound? Hello, Corey.

Yeah, I had a question for you, Michael. Yeah. But you sort of just answered it right before I got on to ask it. but maybe you can get into a bit more. The recent filed out Massey and Rokana, they got unredacted with Lex Wexner on there. The big thing about this is because it's listed at the top that they're co-conspirators, right? Only Wexner, not the other five.

Right. So what's the claim that the FBI, whoever was making a document that he was co-conspirating with whoever about? about. Do we have any... Go-co-conspirating context for that? I gotcha. Okay, so this is another misconception people have, and it's an understandable one if you're not well-versed necessarily on how to interpret the investigatory files of federal prosecutors or the FBI, which ordinarily would never be released in mass to the public.

This is a very unique situation. And the only came about because of the passage under a very unique statute under very unique circumstances. Okay, so over the course of their investigation of Epstein from 2018, 2019, and then it sort of transitioned to Maxwell after Epstein was dead into 2020, 2021, they contemplated the prospect that certain co-conspirators of Epstein could be charged as accessories or complicit in the sex trafficking conspiracy that they later charged Epstein with having masterminded, and then Maxwell with having been in a better of, or the madame of, right? And so most people just assume that when they saw these lists of redacted

co-conspirators, that must meant these guilty men are yet again being allowed to get away with their crimes. But what they don't understand is that the majority of those co-conspirators, as far as I've been able to glean, or the contemplated co-conspirators. So, like, when you see these lists, it's not anybody in the DOJ or FBI saying, we hereby believe we have proof

beyond a reasonable doubt that X, Y, or Z of these co-conspirators is guilty of a sex trafficking conspiracy. It is a phase of their investigatory process. So what on that list is, Elaine Maxwell. And she was charged because they determined that they could furnish sufficient evidence to convict her at trial, although I think that trial was incredibly shambolic and she ought not to have been convicted, but that's another issue. I'd like to hear a little bit about that.

Okay. Let me just finish this point, though. So people misinterpret these lists of apparent co-conspirators as the writer of those lists or the people who were passing those list around somehow being of the belief that the people are guilty of crime. Sometimes they use that as a point of leverage to extract things, right? So one thing that they wanted to extract was to get those potential co-conspirators to cooperate and potentially maybe testify against Epstein, testify against Maxwell. So Leslie Wexner, for example, who actually was listed as a co-conspirator, to my knowledge, the other five on that random list were not.

I don't know what the hell those other five did. Like, one is a sultan. One has a, they have like, you know, seeming the Eastern European or even Arabic names. I'm not even sure. Leslie Wexner did cooperate in that he, his lawyers, provided a proffer statement, it's called, where certain conditions are negotiated between the counsel for the individual,

the targeted individual, and the government, to provide just a recollection of their experience. or just to describe the conduct that the government wants them to describe. And then the parameters of that proffer interview tend to be, look, if everything that you tell us is truthful, then it won't be used against you in a forthcoming criminal proceeding, but we can use it against our paramount criminal proceeding that we're pursuing, which was at that point either against Epstein or Maxwell. But Wexner was found to have engaged, as far as I can tell, and no criminal activity.

Bradley Edwardsho was talking about earlier, this highly suspicious lawyer, at least by my highlights and who has become filthy rich, which is accused of Epstein, but he's filthy rich too now. He said in 2019, he was asked about this, hey, do you know if, well, Leslie Wexner was ever guilty of anything? Because it's been known for ages that Wexner had this relationship with Epstein. And he said, based on his own investigation, he has no reason to believe that Wexner had any knowledge of any of Epstein's sexual activities at all, much less that he was complicit in them in a criminal way.

And Edwards is the last person on earth who would make that concession if he didn't have to, or if the evidence didn't just incontrovertibly point toward that. So that I think is a misconception in terms of how a lot of these documents are being construed. But I understand why if the layman just sees co-conspirator on some internal FBI email or memoranda, they don't really have the context to understand what that means or what phase of the investigation. in or what it should tell us about the spectrum of alleged sex criminality perpetrators. Do you want to take another call or answer your question about Julian? And in fact, those are those five, those guys have kind of been defamed now because it's

just been like insinuated and then beamed across the world that they seem to be potentially implicated in pedophilic sex trafficking. But of course, there's no evidence. Allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. Do we have any other callers, Steve? Yes.

Yes. Hi. Hi. Who are you? Hi, I'm Joe. How are you doing? Hi, Joe. Hey, I just have a quick one just to kind of summarize here. I've been following Michael Tracy for some time.

Also, big fan of your show. Thank you. But correct me if I'm wrong, Michael. I don't know if you're still there. Yes, here. But it seems like this whole narrative can be boiled down to, at least people want to seem to believe that basically this rich man, and his rich man's network in this all global, powerful, you know, interconnected world

are all being blackmailed by this one man, which is also interconnected, and some way through Israel, some way through the Mossad, in some weird way. And there are people, like comedian Tim Dillon, he's been obsessed about this for, like, over five years. And there's many more like him.

And to them, as the finals come out, it's like finding out Santa is real. And it's, I don't know. I mean, it's, but really, this all comes from maybe two women. I mean, am I wrong on this? It depends what you mean in terms of like what stuff can be attributed to. But in terms of like the mythological aspects of this that have come to be so ubiquitously believed. Santa is not real.

Wait, what? in terms of like the core tenets of it right that people just assume must be true the large-scale child sex trafficking the blackmail the ensnarement of prominent individuals right and the the secret recordings of these prominent individuals in compromising sexual situations that all originates with one person at virginia roberts gufrey who again i have to say is probably one of the least credible people who have ever walked God's green earth. And it's amazing that no one seems to ever just note that for the factual record. But like any mythology, it has morphed and evolved over time, right? Or gone beyond the initial confines of it or contours of it. This whole thing sort of give you insight,

I would say, in terms of how certain world religions have developed where like it's like 12 million games of telephone going on. Like one person has told something. Cargo cult, yeah. I mean, well, one thing I would like to ask Tim Dillon to the degree that he would want to have like a reality-based conversation about this. And I think I said last time I was here,

Tim Dillon is one of the few quote comedians that I've actually found funny recently. But he is fixated on this issue. And so one thing I would ask him is, okay, so is your belief in this stuff falsifiable? Meaning, could you ever imagine a circumstance where you would be able to concede that the thing that you thought must be true is actually not true. And in fact, your theories have been falsified. And the answer is no.

Then we are operating in a realm of religious belief. Well, he wouldn't say the answer is no, because then he knows that that implicates him as just somebody who's not being rational. He would say, yes, of course, there's evidence that could convince me. Or how about the continued absence of any credible evidence, even after we've got millions of documents that have been specially produced just to satisfy this public uproar? What's his take? I don't know what he's been saying. I don't know the full take. I just know that he amplified people like Whitney Webb

in the early phase of this around 2020 and like christened her as the most important journalistic authority in America or something because you know so much about Epstein. and people were demanding and berating me to engage with the corpus, the magisterial corpus of Whitney Webb, and I would be shown the errors of my ways and would apologize and disgrace. And, you know, I look into it, and it's just like...

I think that's a good question in general that we should all ask ourselves on any issue. Is there anything that would change our minds? Is there any evidence that we could imagine changing our minds? And I think... I think that's just a good thing to ask yourself. A hundred percent. you should ask yourself that about everything.

If the answer to that is no, I mean, then you're a moron. Look. What could possibly, but if you're not open to seeing evidence, like fact-based evidence that would show you that you're wrong about something, I mean, unless you're, like, extremely religious, right? You have to ask yourself that question honestly, because I think there are people that would not believe, no matter what evidence were presented. Well, you know, you know why people would not accept that,

their dogmatic convictions around Epstein are falsifiable, even if maybe in the abstract, they would say, yeah, of course, I'm a rational person. I would accept that. But when it comes down to it, they wouldn't because they would simply argue that the continued absence of any credible evidence that would validate their theories is just a function of a continuing cover-up. Well, it's really not falsifiable in practice. It is a red flag, right? Like, we could admit that, you know, having black squares over. a bunch of people and places and things and words, I mean, does raise your eyebrows. You're like, what is not being shown to us?

To your point, even, like, if we had full transparency, it would be much easier to believe that there wasn't some crazy thing going on here. If you just show me everything. I agree, but why do these true believers seem to evince no cognizance that by and large or far away, the main reason why it is that there have been these excess redactions is, as I said, the demands of the victim's lawyers and the DOJ adopting the criteria that the victims and their lawyers have demanded be adopted to govern the redaction process. So I'm going to answer that for you.

Because it's not just the victims that are being redacted and covered up. But by and large. Let me ask you this. If I'm asking my husband to see his phone because I think he got some sketchy text message, and he keeps telling me there's no sketchy text message, but I'm not going to let you see my phone. I'm not sure I follow. Dan?

You're likening your husband's one cell phone to millions of... Yeah, I'm saying if you won't show me something, like I'm going to be skeptical. Maybe nothing is there. Maybe the woman at the supermarket didn't actually just text you something questionable. Sure, but you should at least also do the basics of familiarizing yourself with why it is that these redactions have come about, right? You can read the public court documents where the victims and their lawyers are making these impassioned pleas for more redactions and less disclosure. Like, isn't that relevant to understand what's going on? There'd be other evidence if something horrific were being covered up.

Oh, so that didn't really happen. in with my husband's cell phone. Which I was going to say. Is he in the files? So like on January 30th, right when this most recent batch was produced by the DOJ, Tom Blanche, the deputy attorney general, got before the TV cameras in a press conference and announced something that had already been stated in the DOJ filings to court, but he really crystallized.

He said that what the DOJ had done in the interest of maximum deference to any potential victim anywhere ever is that. that they were going to presume that essentially any woman who was depicted in any image was a victim and would therefore have their facial imagery redacted. You'd have to believe also that the DOJ is covering up these horrible sex crimes. Well, maybe they are. I don't know. Wait a second. Do we have any more callers? Yeah, we have Stephen. Let's take one more and then we have to wrap up soon and I have a question for you. Steven, is this Stephen?

The hammer's going to drop on me. We got you, yeah. Do we have any video or we're just going to hear his voice? I can turn my camera on a few. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. No, no, you don't have to see you. Okay, so.

Unless you're really good looking, I'd like to see you. I appreciate that. Michael, I've been following here. Are you nude? For a while on this. And I think, thanks to that, I've sort of got the same brainworm. And I've been actually reading through the process. interview that Todd Blanche did with

Gillane Maxwell. Excellent. Everybody should read that if they want to be minimally conversants on this subject. Yeah, and it's really interesting. I mean, it's hard to know just from reading a transcript, but she comes across is fairly credible to me, but I know that

you've read basically all the documents that you've not read all related to this. All like 12 million documents again. There's three million, you know, but as much as you can that you've read through this stuff, I know you've read through the trial transcript. So I was wondering if you could shed some light. In the proffer interview, they talk about these multi-million dollar payments that were led, the government

alleges Epstein made to Ms. Maxwell, I presume, for the purposes of this sex trafficking thing. I think you might be a little bit mixed up on that, but finish your point. Well, I was wondering if you knew anything about that, what you could shed some light on what the government actually alleged in the trial those payments were about. They mentioned, you know, a $5 million payment, another multi-million dollar payment, you know, and Gilae Maxwell talks about having something to do with a helicopter. I mean, she's not sure what the money's referring to. So I'm curious what you know about that. Okay, so I thought you might be referring to this claim that I had known about for some time, but Gilein Maxwell put into a habeas.

petition in December where she asserts that there have been this universe of secret settlements that were brokered between alleged perpetrators and alleged victims. And she claims that the concealment of that information during her trial disadvantaged her because she could have called the parties to the settlements to testify. that came from Bradley Edwards on a podcast over the summer and where he says that these secret settlements have been brokered with an unknown sort of expansive individuals and you got to remember that settlements are done for a variety of reasons

like look at the publicity fallout from anybody who has even the most remote association with Epstein even if they exchanged a few jocular emails like 12 years ago, they're being rigged over the cold. So in order to just stamp out any of that adverse publicity, people would mean, you could imagine wanting to settle, even if that doesn't mean that they were necessarily guilty in any child sex crimes. So that's what I thought you might be referring to, but I think you're referring to the payments that the government alleged that Maxwell received from Epstein, right? Some of which were large, like in the millions. Okay, well, she was a salaried employee of his for a time. Like, she was his house manager.

She manages properties. She handled logistics and day-to-day upkeep of these numerous and fairly complicated properties to oversee. So you got the New Mexico ranch, you got the Palm Beach house, you have the New York mansion or townhouse, you have the Virgin Islands house, and then the apartment in Paris. And she used to get girls all the time, too, didn't she? Well, that was the claim. I think that claim has been vastly overstated. but that's the claim of the government. Is that not true?

Are you saying that... Not really. Not as far as I could tell. Or it's been so drastically exaggerated to fit the government's narrative because remember, they were desperate to lock somebody up in lieu of Epstein who was dead and they had to amend.

Allegedly. They had to make amends for having allowed him to perish under their supervision in the federal jail facility in Manhattan. Anyway, so those payments, they were cited by the government just to establish that Epstein and Maxwell

worked in concert with one another or had these relations with one another that then could be cited as showing that they were party to a conspiracy with one another. So yeah, so there was one instance where yeah, they mentioned this, I think in the proffer

interview where she wanted to purchase a helicopter, right? And because she was like training to be a helicopter pilot. I think she actually did get her license. to be a helicopter pilot. And Epstein purchased a helicopter basically for her. And then to make that purchase, funds were transferred with one of her accounts as a go-between.

Epstein had like a million different entities that were set up to handle different aspects of his life in terms of when he wanted to dispense or receive money. And yeah, I think that's what they cited at trial. And there were also other methods by which Maxwell would receive monies that wouldn't necessarily go to her, but would be transferred by Epson so then she could use him to purchase something or other around the house maintenance or some other task.

So I think it's what you're referring to, right? Or was it something more than that? I mean, that pretty much, I think, covers it generally. It's not clear in the interview, at least to the extent that I've read it. I'm on to the second day. I think they've moved on from that. But yeah, that more or less covers what I was talking about. Because I think a lot of people will hear that.

oh, you know, Maxwell has these got these million dollar, you know, funds moved into her account. That must be evidence of some kind of impropriety. As far as her recruiting people, I know Maxwell, at least in the interview, says that she would send masseuses and masseurs, you know, Jeffrey Epstein's way because she says he was constantly looking for new, you know, people to give him these massages. But as far as she testifies, there was no, she never saw any impropriety.

I have one last question, sort of, Michael, and it's more so just your personal opinion, having looked into all this as much as you have. Why do you think they decided to re-indict Epstein in 2019? Do you think it was just a result of the public uproar and the pushing from Bradley Edwards and the victim's attorneys? Do you think it's possible that Epstein himself might have had some kind of inappropriate contact with minors after? the initial Palm Beach phase. I mean, you know, a guy like this, he's got these proclivities, you know, that much is clear. I mean, it's certainly possible that he was engaging in those behaviors, you know, after post-conviction. And I guess, you know, it never went to trial.

So we have no idea if there's evidence of that. One point of factual clarification for you. If you go read that indictment, have you read it by any chance? I had not gotten to that. So that indictment, the July 2019 federal indictment, does not even allege any illicit conduct by Epstein against a minor after the year 2005. So 14 years before, it's the same time period for which he had already been investigated very intensively and then required to plead guilty to those two state-level prostitution charges. it's the very same time period. So a lot of it was a rehash of the old Florida charges.

They then added a component in New York to try to establish a federal nexus or to establish why it was in the federal ambit to bring those charges. They made a cockamamie claim around interstate commerce, which when they finally had to test it at a trial, ended up being that they claimed Maxwell had perpetrated an inter...

traffic conspiracy with the requisite element of interstate commerce simply by virtue of there being a massage table present that had been originally manufactured in California but was used in Florida. That was really what they argued. And they got the jury to buy it amazingly. So yeah, that's a misconception because people would assume, right, at first blush, if they're recharging him, he must have kept up his evil ways. He must have never learned his lesson. He must have been incorrigible. But go read it. specifically says that the time period in which this conduct is alleged to have taken place is at the latest year 2005.

So you asked a good question. Why did they federally recharge him? I wish I had a full answer to that. I think I have some guesses. Some of it does have to do with Bradley Edwards. So if you read his widely unread book, Relentless Pursuit, it's like a memoir from 2020, he brags that he had been he had been in regular contact with Epstein he was almost like a weird social acquaintance of his where they like meet at Starbucks and like they knew they were supposed to be adversaries but they ended up getting along and he was charmed by him it's a very bizarre tale but he would he was behind his back because he had outstanding civil litigation with Epstein that they were Epstein was trying to resolve that had dragged on for years since 2009 by this time it was 2018 right and Edwards behind his back was colluding with the southern district of New York to

reprosecute him because like one thing that Edwards was trying to do with his, with another litigation, you know, saga of his was to get the non-prosecution agreement overturned because he claimed there was a violation of this, I think, somewhat pernicious statute called the Crime Victims Rights Act. And the idea was that the non-prosecution agreement was illegal and should be invalidated or noified, and that was rejected. No judge ever agreed to that. And so you have, on the one hand, him colluding with the federal prosecutors. You have the Me Too political and cultural climate, which the author of the Miami Herald series that caused a huge national sensation, Julie K. Brown, credits Me Too, as having been integral and reenlivening the

Epstein story in the public mind. If you go look at the original installment of that article has like a whole Me Too little banner on it, you have changing norms or changing expectations around quote-unquote believing women or what constitutes trafficking versus prostitution. Because even if you look at the early civil litigation that some of the Jane Doe then Epstein alleged victims brought in like 2008, 9. they themselves refer to their conduct with Epstein as prostitution.

So they're self-identifying their own conduct as prostitution. By 2018, it's seen as like a grave moral affront to characterize anything ever, any alleged victim ever did as prostitution. By then it's like trafficking. Now, anybody in their mother can be trafficked if they move a few paces. It's unbelievable. So that's another aspect of this. So stuff that would have been ordinarily conceived as prostitution in 2008 by 2018,

could be repurposes trafficking, and therefore the feds could charge it because they could use the federal trafficking statutes that are not available for the most part or as easily in the states. But there are emails that have come out since December 19th with the first round of the production of these Epstein files where you see prosecutors in the office of the Southern District of New York sending around links to this Miami Herald story saying, hey, can we get on this? and they're like, yeah, we'll look into it, but keep it on the download for a while. And now we find out that it was December 19th, I think, 2018

that they had formally reopened the federal investigation. So there are lots of stuff. Some of it was anti-Trump. The SDNY was notorious for, like, looking for anything that they could come up with that might be able to embroil Trump, right? There was a lot of, like, Russiagate stuff going on in that SDNY office for a time,

like, meaning it's almost like... Southern District of New York District. Yeah, yeah, ancillary things. It was pre-Pahara for a while. I don't know if you recall that, but it was seen as like a ballwork within like the federal law enforcement or DOJ apparatus to push back against Trump.

And because of the Trump perceived Trump connections, like his labor secretary was the one who gave the quote unquote sweetheart deal, it could then become a big political controversy for Trump. And so I think that is a big reason. Those are some reasons why he was federally re-prosecuted. felt like they had to atone for this illish or intolerable way in which the whole thing was dealt with eight years ago, and it became a huge political and cultural controversy.

I don't know if that fully answers your question, but I'm trying to sketch out some reasons why, and they all kind of converge together to give the impetus for that. Okay, that is... We would take one more call, apparently? No, I think we got to... I'm down. I'm down if you are. I mean, you can.

Well, I would take... Wow, you have to go? Yeah. Okay. Well, then we'll... It probably wouldn't have to be a bit of... I'm going to wrap it up. But I do.

Some lackey of mine. I mean, the breadth and depth of your knowledge is impressive. I'm wondering what you're going to do if all of this comes down. What else do you like about anything? Wink, wink, wink. What's going to, I'm curious what's going to happen. You want to take a trip down to the U.S. Virgin Islands? Yeah.

What's his island called? A little St. James. Little St. James. He called it Little St. Jeff as a nickname. Is that true? Shut up. That is.

that's not that crazy yeah i guess it's i guess it's not we had two he had two islands yeah yeah one island that was more like a nature great great saint james and little something like that what's gonna happen if this all goes away you're gonna have to find somebody else to be this interested in right like i mean you can't just be this interested in like one thing you're gonna have to how about you i'm how about gnome i mean i don't see it going away anytime soon do you it's like the number one issue it seems now i don't know i'm curious we're going to have to have you back in a few months when all of this stuff uh people have been telling me for months this one last yeah for years probably well but especially since last july because that's what like this latest

round of it that i would consider us still in the midst of began after the FBI and doj put out their memo saying sorry everybody whoops no client list no blackmail no third parties against whom there's a predicate to charge. And then everybody went crazy. And that led to then the furor that then led to the passage of this bill, and here we are. And I just think that, you know,

there's so much material. The furor? The furor. I'm kidding. He said it was like Hitler. Okay. Well, I do have other interest in life. I just want to make that clear.

Like my, I never really, I didn't wake up one day in July up 2025 and said, you know, it would be great if my entire existence could revolve around analyzing the sexual proclivities of Jeffrey E. Epstein. That was never a thought that crossed my mind. It just seemed like... Is that on your Bumble profile?

Epstein... Epstein Expert. You know, I've actually advocated for a new app where I could satisfy my lust for under... I shouldn't even complete this joke, so I wouldn't use Bumble. Yeah, Epstein Expert, it's not like the sexiest intro, I think. How should I say it? I need to come up with something compelling. A defender of... No, independent journalism.

Oh, you found something that you... I just say journalists. Journalists, generically, yeah. That works. I mean, you found... I don't need bills and whistles. You know, you found an issue that you feel that the truth is being trampled upon. Yeah, and it's not just like something arbitrary that I've chosen that I've determined needs to be focused on.

Like, I do think there are really damaging repercussions that flow from it around. civil liberties around like rampant misdiagnosis of political problems because if people think that everything that goes wrong in society, whether it's foreign policy, which I covered quite a bit, I was on here for the first time talking about Ukraine, remember? Yeah. Everything is attributable to the presumed existence of this sexual blackmail operation. I think that causes people to have a faulty perception of how to actually take rational political action. And I think just mass hysteria and moral panic unto themselves are harmful. Like we see just

people being randomly accused by only the most flimsy association of having been complicit in something that's not just criminal, but like what people think is the most heinous criminal activity that anybody can ever participate in, which is like pedophilic sex crimes. And it's just unbelievable. So I mean, really, Noam Chomsky now, we're, We're supposed to believe that his reputation is in tatters, and he should be banished after 70 years of contributions because he enjoyed the company of Jeffrey Epstein, apparently, and he helped him resolve a financial dispute

that he had within his family with his adult children over access to his estate, which Epstein did. I tried to get Chomsky to write the intro to my first book. Yeah, I emailed him. He wrote me back. Oh, really? Yeah, I have the email. Did he do it, or did you just give it the email? He was like, I don't think so, honey.

I don't think so. Jeffrey's calling. He's got my priority right now. But I thought it was really nice that he wrote me back. Well, he was renowned for writing everybody back. What happened to the Lollita Express? Who owns the Lillita Express now? And did they repaint over the Lillita Express on the fuselage?

Donald Trump sank it to the bottom of the sea alongside the wreckage of that subversive vehicle that tried to tour the Titanic a few years ago? Oh, yeah, I forget where it is now. Do you know that somebody... Maybe they sold it to the Mexicans who were dumb enough to buy it, and that's from Wall Street. Anyway...

Do you know that somebody fell into the river today in the Hudson and this, like, whole team of rescuers? Somebody dove in to, like, save this person? That's what he felt? Like, a pedestrian fellow? Yeah, like a... Yes. I just thought of this because he said it's sunk to the bottom of something.

Did they rescue the person? Yeah, I mean, I don't know. They were rescuing them. Maybe a spared airlines bought it. Anyway... Were they above the age of 18? Let's just be clear. Let's the most important question.

Okay. Thank you so much. Michael Tracy. It was one of all the impressive people we've had on this show. You're certainly among, you're right there. But I'm... And let us know how we did without Noam. Yeah, I mean, it was a very different type of show.

Noam would have had a lot more to say. This is the first time you've done it totally. No, no, no, no. No, but this is the first time we've had a weighty guest without... Oh, okay. Usually without Nome, it's either just us or we have somebody. you know, that's a little casual banter.

Don't make us sound like we're, but this is like a really, this was a weighty discussion and Noam, I think, was a little bit nervous that we wouldn't be able to handle it. How do you think we did? Well, thankfully, Michael did most of the talking.

Which is a problem for me, which is I try to warn, forewarn people to rein me in. But I think it was, I think anybody would find it interesting, certainly. I mean, I think that we held our own, I have to say.

Thank you for joining us. I applaud you. I applaud myself. I applaud this great nation. That's it, everybody. We'll see you next time. Bye, bye, bye. Now, would you like to have dinner and more see you?