7/7/25: Texas Hit By Massive Floods, Elon Starts New Party, DOJ Says There Is No Epstein List

18:47Jeremy Scahill:Are you still planning to phase out FEMA? Well, FEMA is something we can talk about later. But right now, they're busy working. And so we'll leave it at that. Go ahead. And Emily, to me, it's particularly sick because Trump ran aggressively on the response to Hurricane Helene, claiming that the Biden administration didn't do enough there, which there may well have been failures from the Biden administration. You know, FEMA, I'm not I'm honestly not certain if there was more that they could have done there or not. But he really positioned himself in closing days of the campaign as someone who is going to be better on disaster preparedness and disaster recovery.

19:24Jeremy Scahill:and then as soon as he gets in office, runs in the polar opposite direction. And not only has he been talking about getting rid of FEMA altogether and just sending it to the states, they're also diverting FEMA funds to, for example, building Alligator Alcatraz right now. So again, you not only have the Doge chainsaw that came in and cut the National Weather Service, cut NOAA. This has been a longtime conservative priority, by the way. It was in Project 2025. This didn't just come out of nowhere. But not only do you have that.

19:52Emily Jashinsky:That's A9, by the way.

19:53Jeremy Scahill:Yeah, we can put that up on the screen. This is something actually Sagar and I were talking about. I think you were talking about it, too. Even before Trump got elected, when we were talking about Project 2025, there was an ideological project, you know, an attack here on the National Weather Service, which comes both out of an ideological commitment to just cutting the government overall, but also out of ideological opposition to doing anything about the climate crisis. And that's spelled out, you know, quite clearly here, that they feel the National Weather Service is a key part of what they call the climate change alarm industry.

20:26Jeremy Scahill:And so there was, you know, a concerted effort to go after this. And so sometimes, you know, I think some of the Elon cuts, Doge cuts were sort of random and haphazard. This one was planned out. This one was messaged in advance. Not that they talked a lot about it on the campaign trail. But, you know, Trump, of course, they're just shifting it to the side and saying, actually, the water situation there is somehow Biden's fault.

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22:21It's not clean unless it's OxyClean.

22:26Emily Jashinsky:What's interesting also about this is people remember the leaked video of Russ Vogt talking about how the goal was to demoralize bureaucrats. So we talked about some of the cuts, Crystal, earlier this year affecting tornado warnings. And I pulled up an Associated Press article from May that said as of March, some of the Weather Service offices issuing tornado warnings Friday and Sunday were above the 20 percent vacancy levels that outside experts have said is a critical threshold. So those are offices with 25 percent, 29 percent, 32 percent vacancy rate in, for example, Wichita. And what's interesting about that vacancy rate, that's positions that are unfilled that they are trying to fill.

23:08Emily Jashinsky:That is not positions that were cut, which is really the sort of public marketing of Doge is that we are slashing, kind of permanently slashing. The idea was the size of the federal government. These are people who were in all likelihood to the point that we were just talking about in the Kerbal area. They were driven out of the work. They took early retirements. They decided to go work in the private sector. And so I think it does, Crystal, reflect on Doge overall when you say these are positions that are actually not being cut. They're just vacant. They're just completely like they're some of these.

23:48Emily Jashinsky:If it's a vacancy. Right. That implies that they don't want to get rid of the position because they're still actively filling the position. Right. Which is very different from just slashing the size of the offices totally.

24:00Jeremy Scahill:Well, it also speaks to, so for this individual in particular who was known for doing the local coordination and was a veteran and took the early buyout, it also speaks to the fact that a lot of the people that were pushed out were some of the most effective, some of the people that you would actually want to keep and prioritize keeping. So all the language about Doge, oh, we need to get back to Merit, et cetera, et cetera. But then the actual program that they used to go about doing this was almost tailor-made to push out some of the most senior and most valuable individuals throughout the federal government who would be the most difficult to replace.

24:41Jeremy Scahill:And I went and looked this guy up. He's on LinkedIn. He's now doing, yeah, private consulting. He went to private industry. Yeah, that's exactly what happened here. And so those vacancies continue to remain. But there's a hiring freeze at the agency. So it's not like they have the possibility of hiring to fill these positions even. And then they also things like the member, there was that freeze on any sort of expense reimbursement so that there was an inability to travel to coordinate between, you know, from the state office to the local communities, et cetera. so you know i i was telling you i um i was watching the this is going to seem like a total diversion but i promise it connects i was watching the titan submersible right um documentary on netflix and when you see that dude stockton rush who went down with the ship the way he went about doing things and just like there was no cost to all of the like i'm not going to get my submersible classed and inspected by the federal government.

25:40Jeremy Scahill:I'm not going to play by the rules. I'm an innovator. And he talked about how he molded himself after Elon Musk. There were so many personalities, similarities there where it's just like these guys think that none of this stuff matters. Like there aren't going to be any real world impacts of their willingness to cut corners and do things however they want to do them. I mean, you see it with Elon too, with like the USAID cut season, total denial that that has impacted anyone's lives. Obviously, even if you're someone who doesn't like USAID, you have to be honest and admit, of course, when you pull funding for medicine away from kids who need it, that's going to impact people's lives.

26:20Jeremy Scahill:And so there were huge warnings here about what this could ultimately mean for life and death. The living heads of the National Weather Service, all of the previous heads, they put out an open letter. We can put this up on the screen. This is A7. Warning of exactly this. They said that NWS staff will have an impossible task to continue their current level of service. Some forecast offices will be so short-staffed they may be forced to go to part-time services. Not only are there fewer forecasters, there are fewer electronic technicians who are responsible for maintaining the critical next-rod radars.

26:53Jeremy Scahill:Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed there will be needless loss of life. We know that's a nightmare shared by those on the forecasting front lines and by the people who depend on their efforts. So they warned of this. There was actually a warning from a Florida forecaster, again, a veteran meteorologist down in South Florida that went viral at the time and is now going viral again because he also is sounding the alarm about what these cuts could mean as we, you know, head right now, we're already into hurricane season. Let's go ahead and take a listen to that.

27:28When is it going to turn? John, It's not turning. It's coming straight to us. It's going to turn. The turn will come Monday afternoon, Monday evening, into Tuesday. Remember that? That was about six years ago. That was Hurricane Dorian as it was absolutely devastating. The Northwest Bahamas as a Category 5 sat over that region for two days. It was headed straight west. Lots of people in Florida were concerned the hurricane was heading here. Confidently, I went on TV and I told you, it's going to turn. You don't need to worry. It is going to turn. And I am here to tell you that I'm not sure I can do that this year because of the cuts, the gutting, the sledgehammer attack on science in general.

28:19And I could talk about that for a long, long time. Let's talk about the federal government cuts to the National Weather Service and to NOAA. Did you know that Central and South Florida National Weather Service offices are currently basically 20 to 40 percent understaffed? From Tampa to Key West, including the Miami office, 20 to 40 percent understaffed. Now, this type of staffing shortage is having impacts across the nation because there's been a nearly 20 percent reduction in weather balloon releases, launches, that carry those radio sands. And what we're starting to see is that the quality of the forecast is becoming degraded.

28:58There's also a chance, because of some of these cuts, that no hurricane hunter aircraft will not be able to fly this year. And with less reconnaissance missions, we may be flying blind. And we may not exactly know how strong a hurricane is before it reaches the coastline, like happened a couple of years ago in Hurricane Otis in Acapulco, Mexico. What you need to do is call your representatives and make sure that these cuts are stopped.

29:24Jeremy Scahill:So there you go. Dire warning there. That was, I think, back in February from that South Florida forecaster and the immediate wake of these cuts. And there are a lot of questions about what happened here. And I think it's fair to say we don't know at this point whether the cuts made a difference here or not. But a lot of questions you can't help but ask. to the cuts to the National Weather Service, these local offices, these vacancies, these individuals who had longtime expertise in this community, longtime relationships in this community. Could those people have made a difference here if they hadn't been pushed out, if these offices were not, you know, understaffed with these significant vacancies?

30:05Jeremy Scahill:And it's horrifying to see. And certainly this won't be the last time that these questions are raised either with regards to the National Weather Service or anything else. And, you know, Emily, this is anecdotal, but I will say we were, you know, we were at the beach last week. We tried to plan out like our daily schedule. The forecasts were the worst I have ever seen. They were. When I was looking on the weather app, which gets all of that information, comes from the federal government. And it was just like wildly wrong every single day. Yeah. And look, again, weather forecasts in the best of funding times can be wrong.

30:36Jeremy Scahill:But I look at them like this could be doge. Like this could the reason that this is all wrong could very well be that they just don't have the resources to accurately forecast the way that they used to. And it's, you know, contributes to the sense of it also like the loss of life here is obviously the critical thing to focus on. And the fact that this is a major possibility, again, as we head into like the worst of hurricane season, I think this is a dire warning for the country about the track we're on. And it's also just this sense of decline, like things that we used to be able to do, used to be able to keep planes in the air without like, you know, crashing into each other, crashing into a helicopter or whatever.

31:14Jeremy Scahill:We can't forecast. We can't prepare the way that we could even a decade ago. I mean, that is it's with horrifying and tragic consequences.

31:24Emily Jashinsky:Well, and I'm very curious to see if this creeps into the abundance conversation at all, given that Texas is such a focal point of the debate between Texas, California as an argument for abundance, because Mike Baker in the New York Times runs down. Yes, he's been running down. He has a thread on X-ray. He's running down all of the apparent, ostensible local cracks that led to the situation that transpired on Friday. And it's pretty interesting. You know, the people didn't want to, for example, pay for what they saw as way too expensive warning signs or warning sirens. So there are a lot of, I think, important questions that are going to be asked because of all of this.

32:09Emily Jashinsky:The quick thought on the political component that we were just talking about. I mean, I'm sure that there are defensible cuts to the National Weather Service. I have no idea how many they are. I don't even know what they look like. I'm sure you can find an argument that there would be a more efficient NWS or NOAA or whatever with a couple of precise cuts. Scalpel, not sledgehammers. Not what they ended up saying is those was sort of teetering on the brink. But the Musk mentality has probably damaged the project of making a more efficient federal government for a generation. because now it is inextricably, emotionally, viscerally linked with everything that happens afterwards.

32:52Emily Jashinsky:Sometimes it'll be fair. Sometimes it won't be fair. But either way, the way that he, I just wanted to make that point about Stockton Rush that you brought up. I think that's super incisive because it's this people who come from the tech world who are super online or the highest echelons of business and their heirs. I think Stockton Rush was an heir, right? Yeah, he was, yeah. Right. And to start tinkering with life and death in a way that I think lacks the gravity and the consequence of the decision-making. And that, I don't know the project of actually shrinking the scope of the federal government will ever recover from at least in the next couple decades.

33:34Jeremy Scahill:Not to mention, I mean, Elon will tell you, first of all, they didn't save any money. No, nope. None. They cost the federal government money to make it worse. They made the federal government worse and less efficient, and it cost more money. Right. And they just passed the big, beautiful bill, which is going to blow up the debt and the deficit. So if there was any pretense of, oh, this is all to get our spending under control, you know, because we have such a large debt and deficit. I mean, no, you just you just made things worse. That's it. That's what you accomplished. What it sounds like when you road trip to the iHeartRadio Music Festival in the all-new Hyundai Palisade Hybrid.

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35:38plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy see terms that is the perfect

35:43Emily Jashinsky:segue into our next block which is the uh america party is now i guess official crystal we're going to learn more about filings and such um in the days ahead but let's put the first element on the screen um elon musk on the 4th of july tweeted independence day is the perfect time to ask if you want independence from the two party some would say uniparty system he started tweeting like trump It's interesting. Should we create the America Party? You know, just to pause on that, sorry.

36:09Jeremy Scahill:One of my biggest pet peeves on the on the left, one of my biggest pet peeves is these people who all talk like Obama.

36:16Emily Jashinsky:Yes.

36:17Jeremy Scahill:Forever Pete and Beto and Cory Booker and there's Josh Pierre or whatever on the right. The way everyone posts like Trump and tries to talk like Trump is so annoying and grating. Like, can people please have their own personality?

36:32Emily Jashinsky:It's not only annoying and grating, it is also, I don't know, Crystal, a little homoerotic.

36:42Jeremy Scahill:Sometimes I see a post from— How about all the daddy posting about Trump? How about that?

36:48Emily Jashinsky:It's a lot sometimes. But sometimes you see a post from, like, I don't know, Charlie Kirk. He's really bad about it. He posts like when Trump started getting more and more popular back like 10 years ago now, his style changed so conspicuously on Twitter. Anyway, this is entirely beside the point. But it seems like Elon is playing that game as well now. But his poll results on X, this is another super Trumpian thing. Right. Crystal, remember when Trump during the 2015-16 debates against other Republican candidates would constantly be citing Twitter polls like in the debates and in media hits? This time, remember, he was citing that cat turd poll?

37:28Emily Jashinsky:Here you go. By a factor of two to one, you want a new political party, Elon Musk says, and you shall have it. Because people who follow Elon Musk on Twitter, he apparently got 1.2 million votes, said that they want a new political party. Now, that is not a question that says they want an America party necessarily. It says, you know, we live in a one-party system, not a democracy. So that could mean a lot of different things. But it's really there's no point in parsing the seriousness of this poll on social media. But Trump responded to this. And this is our next element. This was B. This is B1B with a very long post on X where he says, I am saddened to watch Elon Musk or on true social.

38:12Emily Jashinsky:Elon Musk go completely off the rails, essentially becoming a train wreck over the past five weeks. He even wants to start a third political party, despite the fact that they have never succeeded in the United States. The system seems not designed for them. Seems. Yes. Excellent. Never is an overstatement.

38:29Jeremy Scahill:Anyway, go ahead.

38:30Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. He is from the Republican Party, after all. Which was a third party. Yes. And then he goes on. I mean, this is like a 300 word post on True Social. He goes on to talk about the EV mandate. He says, my number one charge is to protect the American public. So they were trading barbs all weekend, basically. Musk then went on to say the Republican Party has a clean sweep of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches and still has the nerve to massively increase the size of the government, expanding the national debt by a record$5 trillion. dollars. So, Crystal, this all happened after, as promised, after Donald Trump on the 4th of July.

39:13Emily Jashinsky:He got his perfect ceremonial moment, signed the one big, beautiful bill at the White House on the 4th of July. That is what Elon Musk said basically would be the impetus for the America Party. And just very quickly, the next element, he is now saying that he could target just two to three Senate seats in eight to 10 House districts by basically as this person he interacts with a lot on ex-Mario Naufal says, skipping the national circus, hit where margins are razor thin. Now, that's actually a very smart political strategy.

39:48Jeremy Scahill:But - That's a smart political strategy if you want to hand Democrats those two to three Senate seats in eight to 10 House districts. There it is. Yes. That's exactly what will in all likelihood happen. Yeah. And by the way, Elon interacted with this post, which gave me the sense that this was at least somewhat in the ballpark of what is actually happening here because Nothal is not always the most reliable character. And it drives me crazy. Like, so many digressions today. But the downgrading of links in the Twitter algorithm has made it so obnoxious so that, you know, people like you can't go and check easily what people are actually saying with the used to be that you posted the link so you can go actually see anyway, whatever.

40:30Jeremy Scahill:So the Trump post is still very interesting to me because, yes, it's long and goes after Elon and says he's gone off the rails or whatever. It still feels so mild to me compared to what he says about, you know, remember how humiliated Ron DeSantis came to me and tears at his eyes. I mean, he just like he knows how to absolutely humiliate people. And he doesn't really do that. But in fact, to be honest with you, I don't like either of these guys. I hope both of them fail. The points he made about Elon were pretty reasonable. He's like, oh, he's mad about his EV subsidies. Right. And he's mad that he didn't get his handpicked guy into NASA so that he could get whatever he wanted for SpaceX.

41:16Like, true.

41:17Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, true.

41:19Jeremy Scahill:Perfectly reasonable points there. And so, I don't know. It's just interesting to me. And then this will tie into the Epstein block, too, since Elon had floated previously like, hey, Trump's in the, you know, a pedo, basically Trump's on the Epstein client list. And then once they sort of like calmed the waters, he deleted those posts and said he had gone too far. So I don't know. But in terms of the America Party, do I think this is going to be some successful effort to supplant either of the two main parties, which is what a third party actually has to do in order to find significant success?

41:54Jeremy Scahill:No, I don't think so, especially because what is it even? Like, what is the ideology here? I mean, it's austerity. I got he's talking. Yeah. Deficit reduction. OK, then, like, what are the other pieces that go along with that? and very unclear because Elon's ideology has been kind of all over the place. I saw we could put just to steel man the argument for this sort of like neoliberal austerity direction of a third party, which is not a new idea. I mean, go talk to the no labels people. Go talk to the third way people like this is their whole bag and there's very little public support. While I think there is massive public support for like, hey, we'd like we're frustrated with this political system.

42:37Jeremy Scahill:We are frustrated with these two political parties. We would like some options other than D or R. That would be great. But then when you actually get down to the details of, oh, it's going to be a neoliberal austerity party run by and for a billionaire, then that seems like a little bit. Who makes his money in China. Right. A little. Right. The America Party. Yeah. By a billionaire who makes his money in China. I guess that is very American, actually. But in any case, you know, the public support for that starts to dwindle pretty quickly once you get into that territory, especially at a time when Elon Musk has completely nuked his own personal favorability ratings, certainly with liberals but also with Republicans, with MAGA Republicans at this point.

43:18Jeremy Scahill:Nate Cohn did an analysis saying, hey, you never know. This was from a little while ago. This is B5. Guys, we can put this up on the screen. Yeah, this is really interesting. Saying, again, to steal him in the case, this is Nate Cohn's analysis. He says, listen, if the two major parties truly go in this more populist direction where, you know, you're doing tariffs and you're doing industrial policy and you're doing, you know, big spending. And, you know, maybe the Democrats actually go in a sort of like Zoran AOC direction. This was pre-Zoran. But anyway, maybe the Republicans, you know, they actually go in this more populist nationalist Steve Bannon type direction.

43:56Jeremy Scahill:and then you're left with these neoliberal business market types who don't really have a home, then maybe there starts to be some logic for this centrist third party. But, you know, to me where that analysis falls apart is like I think neoliberals already have two parties that continue to serve them. I mean, this giant bill that just passed is a big tax cut for the rich. You know, the tariffs have ended up certainly not being the revolutionary change at this point. that Trump had originally advertised. He's backed off the most maximalist position. And he's very responsive to the needs and desires of billionaire oligarchs.

44:34Emily Jashinsky:By the way, that was big news over the weekend. And it's unclear exactly what's going to happen as of right now. But they moved the July 9th tariff deadline to August 1st. And they're saying many more deals are going to come. So far, They have the U.K., Vietnam and China. But they right now are even, as we speak, actually like trying to do what they've been doing since April at this point. Right. There was a July 9th deadline and now it's suddenly August 1st, a couple of days beforehand. So it just underscores exactly what you were saying.

45:07Jeremy Scahill:Yeah. And then so there's both the fact that I think, you know, neoliberals have plenty of places politically or not politically homeless. far from it. And we'll see what happens to the Democratic primary in 2028, whether there is any sort of significant shit. I think it's possible. I think there's a real rupture over a kind of actually litmus test around Gaza that may end up shifting things. But that's another conversation for another day. But the other question is like the public is done with this. So, yeah, you may have a lot of like rich business people. And this has always been the thing with third way and with no labels and whatever.

45:40Jeremy Scahill:The problem is not getting a bunch of rich business people to be like, hey, let's have tax cuts and deregulation. The problem is to have public support for that at a time when the ideology of, you know, standard Reagan, Clinton neoliberalism is so broken and failed. And what people are desperately questing for is something different that is actually going to work and be responsive to the concerns of the modern age.

46:02Emily Jashinsky:Well, and this is where I think Nate Cohn's analysis, the history of it was, I think, really helpful context. But he says over the last few years, a new constituency has begun to emerge. For now, it does not have a home in either party and it's not clear that either party will be able to easily accommodate its demands. He says it favors things like deficit reduction, deregulation, free trade, and high-skilled immigration. And Crystal, I do not think that is a constituency that exists outside of Wall Street and Silicon Valley. That is not a mass constituency. And that's really the problem with quote-unquote America Party.

46:35Emily Jashinsky:It's not that most Americans are satisfied with a two-party system. Basically, nobody is satisfied with the two-party system. That doesn't mean it's still the, it doesn't win in a lesser of two evils versus some type of different system like UK or a lot of Europe. But at the same time, this idea that there's a massive appetite for, what does Cohn say, deficit reduction, deregulation, free trade and high-skilled immigration. This is also interesting because that's basically the Republican Party that Donald Trump changed forever. Like if you describe it like that, deficit reduction, deregulation, free trade, and high school immigration, that is what every other 2015-2016 Republican primary candidate was saying that they were in favor of.

47:20Emily Jashinsky:Donald Trump created a third party within the Republican Party, essentially, and its success is still post-Trump up in the air. Like, we actually don't know what's going to happen to the Republican Party after Trump, and there's certainly no constituency for the old Republican Party. So the idea that maybe a bunch of billionaires, this is exactly what you're saying, could create AstroTurf, another no labels or third way. Of course you can. I mean, you can pump a bunch of money into it. You can maybe win a couple of, yeah, you can win a couple of house races, whatever. That doesn't mean that he's breaking the third party system.

47:55Emily Jashinsky:I just think that's the idea that that's actually going to happen is obviously absurd, but he's got a lot of money.

48:01Jeremy Scahill:Yeah, no, he does. And listen, my fondest hope would be for all of the people that you mentioned to basically put themselves in some fringe third party and consign themselves to irrelevancy. And elect Democrats in the process. Yeah, do that. Go ahead. You're going to have Andrew Cuomo. You're going to have Michael Bloomberg. You're going to have Mark Cuban. Speaking of Mark Cuban, put B6 up on the screen. He's very open to this. Let's see it. Andrew Yang also. Come on, Andrew. I have so much affection for Andrew Yang. You have a soft spot, yeah. I absolutely do. And I genuinely, you know, and I still talk to him, like semi-regularly.

48:35Jeremy Scahill:Like I genuinely think his focus is like, we need to change that. Like this system is not working. And so anybody who's like, let's do a thing different thing. It's like, yes, let's do it. But then Cuban, I mean, it's just too, it's just too perfect. Cuban is out there like, oh, I can help you get ballot access. Good. Go for it, buddy. Do it.

48:55Emily Jashinsky:Do it. Well, see, this is one of the problems that Cohn identifies is that typically people who are dissatisfied with the two-party system don't agree on much. Therefore, there's never a route really towards a third party because to cobble together the people upset about left and right, you have to also have some type of thread. You have to have some type of unifying factor other than we just don't like the other two parties. And if Musk thinks that it's the national debt, that's insane. Like, it's another thing that people are upset about, of course, but it's nobody's priority. Right. Again, if you polled most Americans and said, is the national debt a problem and do you not like the two party system right now?

49:35Emily Jashinsky:People would be like, yeah, yes, don't like the two party system. National debt is a big deal where, you know, we wish that the nation had its fiscal house in order. Most Americans would absolutely agree with both of those things. That doesn't mean that it's their top voting priority or that they're going to be coerced into voting for a third party when other people are speaking to their priorities.

49:54Jeremy Scahill:Not to mention, OK, yeah, in theory, just like the Doge was kind of popular at the beginning. Yeah. Oh, should we cut the spend? Sure. Yes. Should government be more efficient? Sure. Yes. Should we gut the National Weather Service and FEMA so that, you know, little girls die in a flood? Should we do that? Or should we push the most experienced people out? Should we? Do you want your Social Security cut? Do you want your Medicare cut? because Musk, again, is a gigantic federal government contractor with the Pentagon. So it's not going to be the military budget, I can tell you that much, which also did not happen under Doge.

50:31Jeremy Scahill:There were cuts, yes, to National Weather Service, no cuts to the military whatsoever.

50:36Emily Jashinsky:BBB just put a bunch of money into the military.

50:38Jeremy Scahill:That's exactly right, which is why, just to go back to your point about Trump, you know, I think it's both fair to say he changed the Republican Party and fair to say that there are a lot of just ramping up the previous Republican Party priorities in Trump. And I think BBB is the perfect example of that, the one big beautiful bill where you get, you know, cuts to social safety net, very Paul Ryan-esque cuts to social safety net. You get a very Paul Ryan tax cuts, literally drafted by like Paul Ryan and his accolades, tax cuts that predominantly benefit the wealthiest among us. You get a massive escalation in the military budget.

51:17Jeremy Scahill:Again, these are key Republican priorities. And, you know, Republicans have, I think he has significantly upped the rhetoric and the, I would say, cruelty surrounding the immigration and deportation program. But that's also not entirely new to the Republican Party. I think that is the part that maybe is the biggest break from the Republican Party of the past, because, I mean, making ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency, making that budget larger than the military budget of many significant countries like Brazil and Israel, like that, I mean, that is truly different. Now, I think things like the tariffs, the, you know, difference, different approach to China, those sorts of things are a genuine break.

52:04Jeremy Scahill:But it also can be overstated how much the Trumpian approach is truly a break from the Republican past when you've got cuts to social safety net, tax cuts for the rich and a giant national security state. That seems pretty consistent with the Reagan era Republican Party all the way up till today.

52:22Emily Jashinsky:But Trump voters are probably not going to be super satisfied with it. And that'll be interesting to see how the Republican Party deals with going forward. They're going to get on board with it. Well, the Trump base is different than like the people. Dependents. Right. People who voted Trump or typical Republican voters, whatever it is, or people who went like Obama, Trump and are not big. Like they're not going to the rallies. But then they realize the man who promised not to cut Medicaid now has a plan in place that requires them to jump through all these hoops. Plus, they lose their Medicaid, something like that.

52:53Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, we'll see, because I think that's one of the biggest unanswered questions. open questions in politics is what happens after Trump to the Republican Party? What does it just revert? Because one big, beautiful bill suggests potentially reversion in the future. Now, on the other hand, we got to roll this clip B3 of Steve Bannon, because this gets to the question of what happens to the Republican Party after Donald Trump. One person who's not going anywhere is Steve Bannon, and he has a new nickname, and it's Elmo the Mook. That's always human nature. This is what you have here in the United States.

53:26You have MAGA. You have the hardest core opposition to MAGA. And you have a lot of people kind of in the middle of seeing which way. The buffoon, Elmo the MOOC, formerly known as Elon Musk, Elmo the MOOC, he's today in another smear. And this only a foreigner could do this. Think about it. He's got up on Twitter right now a poll about starting an America party. A non-American starting an America party, no, brother, you're not an American. You're a South African. And if we take enough time and prove the facts of that, you should be deported because it's a crime of which you did among many.

54:12Emily Jashinsky:And so Crystal Bannon, I would say, is arguably more so than Trump, the sort of primary gatekeeper champion of what the MAGA agenda should look like based on his sense of the MAGA base. and he has been critical of Doge. He's been critical of one big, beautiful bill. And, you know, ultimately trusts Donald Trump, as he would say. But at the same time, it's sort of signaling. He's like waving the red flag, the warning flags, and being like, this is veering off course. So the idea that Elon Musk, I mean, it all is so naive. And I think this is a fair criticism that Andrew Yang has gotten over the years.

54:55Emily Jashinsky:There's like a bunch of Mark Cuban. There are a bunch of guys in the business world who for years have said, like, we just need to run the country a little bit more like a business. We need a break from the past. We can do this cash infusion and disrupt and all of that. But it's like turning the Titanic around. And Elon Musk thinking that because Donald Trump sort of surgically attached him to MAGA meant that the MAGA base wanted to prioritize austerity austerity and actually putting the debt first and foremost above anything else. That was just, that was always crazy. Like the idea that the Republican Party was ever going to actually cut the debt is completely insane.

55:36Jeremy Scahill:Well, and here's the other thing is Elon Musk is not genuine about this. He doesn't have any problem with his subsidies that he gets for the federal government. He says he does, but he doesn't. Right. I mean, look, Obama rescued SpaceX and Tesla. Tesla, And, you know, Elon is look, I think the EV credits are good. I think we should have the EV credits. I think we should be doing industrial policy around electric vehicles and the energy generation of the future. Like Elon and I are aligned on that. But, you know, these guys don't actually want small government. They want a government that gives them what they want.

56:08Jeremy Scahill:And that is exactly the problem with the government is that is way too responsive to billionaires. It has created these billionaires who have been able to generate. I mean, most of these billionaires, they have been able to rig the system and create monopolies. So it's not like they really want a fair and competitive playing field. Quite the opposite. Many of these people absolutely despise Lena Kahn and her efforts to try to create actual market competition. And the other big problem at the core of this government that I'm talking about, I'm not just talking about the Trump administration, I'm talking about over decades, is that they have outsourced any sort of values and principles to market logic and thought that the markets would just figure it out for them, you know, to the, like, extent that even the FAA, basically, like, the airlines regulate themselves.

56:58Jeremy Scahill:I mean, this is the sort of thing that happened during the neoliberal era. We went way too far in the direction of catering to the Elon Musks and the Mark Cubans of the world. So that's what people are revolting against. The idea you're going to have any sort of grassroots mass support for this type of effort I think is preposterous. But none of this is to say that it can't have some significant impact when you're talking about, look, what's the House margin at this point? It's like three seats or something. It's very close in the House. There's another retirement, a guy in Tennessee is retiring, something like that.

57:32Jeremy Scahill:Anyway, there's another House Republican retirement. It's very narrow in the House. The Senate is also fairly narrow, although there's a bit more of an edge for Republicans there. Look, if you field some candidates in a couple of key seats, that can absolutely be enough to take away, let's say, 4 percent from the Republican Party and hand some seats to Democrats. So I'm not saying that it won't have any impact. What I am saying is that it will not have the impact that Elon Musk is purporting that it will have.

58:00Emily Jashinsky:If it has impact, it will be disproportionate to the actual national appetite for what he's calling for, because it'll be like massive cash infusions that throw races in one direction or the other. Not that capture the imagination of millions of Americans who want the debt to be prioritized in their political lives. And it's one of the saddest things about the situation our political elites have put us in is that you now have, for example, Trump voters who are on Medicaid, who, again, just as an example, let's say they think the national debt is way too high. But at the polls, you now have a billionaire demanding that they put this abstract question of the national debt, which, you know, I agree with Elon Musk and others that it has a serious effect on inflation.

58:53Emily Jashinsky:I don't think you can really say it doesn't. It's pretty obvious that the higher the debt goes, the more that our budget is paying interest on the national debt, that, yes, prices are higher because of all this. And that is a significant problem. But you're asking people then to table their immediate urgent interests as the billionaire who can afford to feed his family, even though it's massive, and put food on his table and pay all of his bills, saying that the American people should table their immediate everyday kitchen table issues in the interest of this abstract question of the national debt.

59:31Emily Jashinsky:That just is not a constituency that exists. And they're going to ask you to sacrifice.

59:35Jeremy Scahill:Yeah. They're not going to sacrifice. Well, yeah, of course. They're not going to sacrifice their federal government subsidies. They're not going to be willing to pay any more in taxes. It's all going to come out from the people who can afford it the least, which is why it's such a thoroughly, should be a thoroughly discredited political project.

59:51Emily Jashinsky:And when they fuck up, they get bailed out. Silicon Valley Bank. I mean, it's over and over again. Yeah. So it's insane. Finally, Musk did complain. Well, he's had some a couple of interesting moments of self-awareness. Like you could just see like a glimmer of self-awareness a couple of times since he's gone back to posting a bunch on X. And one of them was him saying that the chainsaw in retrospect actually looked like it lacked empathy. No kidding. Dancing around with the chainsaw at CPAC. But another one was him saying that Trump was happy to have him when his poll numbers were higher. But now that they're lower and Musk is less popular, you know, Trump is less inclined to keep him around.

1:00:31Emily Jashinsky:And Nate Silver does have an interesting net favorability of chart of Elon Musk dating back to before he endorsed Trump starting in 2024. And he is he does have a higher net favorability. It was up around like at its highest in 2024, seven plus seven percent in January 2024. Right before he endorses Trump, it's like plus four percent. And it actually, though, declines after the Trump term begins. So it sort of stabilizes between the endorsement and the election. But after Trump takes office and Doge becomes an actual government program, which was only supposed to be this outside advisory council, it starts to dip precipitously.

1:01:08Emily Jashinsky:Like that's when it starts is really when Doge becomes real. So Musk, you know, kind of has himself to blame for the situation he finds himself in. I would say so, for sure. What it sounds like when you road trip to the iHeartRadio Music Festival in the all new Hyundai Palisade Hybrid. Wow, this is really nice inside. The Palisade Hybrid has more luxury than ever. Whoa, this sound system is awesome. Turn it up. More tech than ever. Sweet. You got the available built-in dash cam? And more range than ever because the Palisade Hybrid gets up to 600-plus miles of range on a full tank. So do we ever have to stop for gas?

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1:02:20It's not clean unless it's OxyClean. You're the best field operative I've ever had. you were born for it in 81 the embassy went down we go 25 million in the wall where hotel tehran this is bad like run for the hills do it now i don't have the money but i've got something more valuable you shall know the truth the truth don't make it free the fix in theaters september 11th All right.

1:02:56Jeremy Scahill:Should we talk about this latest with regard to Epstein? Because this is just you can't make it up. And as I said before, it connects to Elon because he threw out there, oh, by the way, Trump is on the Trump is in the Epstein files, which Trump and Epstein were friends. Trump was on Epstein's plane multiple times. Trump is pictured at parties with Jeffrey Epstein. So he is in Epstein files. Exactly what that entails may be another matter. In any case, We now have gone from the Trump administration promising, doing their big photo op with the influencers. Remember this? Where they got their binders, Epstein files, phase one, and Pam Bondi out there saying, I've got the client list on my desk.

1:03:35Jeremy Scahill:I'm reviewing thousands of hours of videos. We're going to get you the truth. To now, let's put this up on the screen. They're saying nothing to see here. Nothing to see here whatsoever. The DOJ and the FBI conclude Epstein had no client list. There was no client list. No client list. He committed suicide. Absolutely no indication that he was killed and that he had, you know, any sort of black material on any powerful people. They say specifically investigators found, quote, no incriminating client list of Epstein's. Pause right there. Yeah.

1:04:12Emily Jashinsky:The language. This is written by lawyers. The Department of Justice. this. No incriminating client list, which is not the same thing as no client list. Incriminating is a very subjective term, which could mean that there are a bunch of names in the Epstein book. Basically, we know this. And it's true that not all of those people are incriminated by Jeffrey Epstein mingling with them at a Harvard business fundraising lunch and taking their number down. Absolutely. Absolutely. That is a hell of a wiggle word right there.

1:04:48Jeremy Scahill:So no incriminating client list, no credible evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals and no evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties. So and this there you go.

1:05:02Emily Jashinsky:As by the way, Pam Bondi said just a couple of months ago that the Epstein client list was on her desk. Now, the DOJ is saying there's, quote, no incriminating client list, which has been interpreted as them saying there's no client list, understandably, because you would think that a client of Epstein would be not just a financial client of Epstein, but it's implied when Pam Bondi says she has the, quote, unquote, client list on her desk just a couple of months ago, that is sex trafficking clients of Jeffrey Epstein. That's what she was implying when she said it. So for the DOJ to now just a couple of months later say there's no incriminating Epstein client list is a incredibly suspicious, I don't even need to say it, but it's an incredibly suspicious flip-flop that is being done with some careful language and absolutely nobody is buying it.

1:05:58Emily Jashinsky:People in MAGA world are not buying it. Nobody is buying it. The question is how important it is to the people who are not buying it. And I think it's going to be pretty damn important. You think so? Yes, I think so. Based on what I've seen so far. What have you seen? So, Robbie Starbuck, Mike Cernovich, a lot of these online MAGA influencers are absolutely furious. And of course, they're taking it out more on Pam Bondi than they are on Donald Trump. Of course. Because Bondi has so far, and some of that actually might be reasonable. Julie K. Brown, who has done some of the most important Epstein reporting posted back in February.

1:06:32Emily Jashinsky:It's interesting to note that Pam Bondi was Florida's attorney general from 2011 to 2019, a period of time when Jeffrey Epstein's plane records became public. Victims lawsuits were filed and a lot of new evidence against Epstein surfaced. So questions should be asked about why she didn't take up the case or launch a probe when she was attorney general in Florida. And this is a persistent problem for the Trump administration. This happened, actually, the suicide, the quote-unquote suicide of Jeffrey Epstein happened on Trump. And by the way, Bill Barr's watch, Bill Barr's dad, was the first person to give Jeffrey Epstein that job at a private boarding school, despite the very strange qualifications he would have.

1:07:12Emily Jashinsky:Very, very strange. It happens on Bill Barr's watch when he is attorney general of the United States. Alex Acosta, Donald Trump's first labor secretary, was involved in the sweetheart play deal in Florida and said at the time he was told Jeffrey Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone. Pam Bondi was AG from 2011 to 2019. Trump himself was obviously, as Crystal mentioned earlier, very friendly with Epstein. Epstein said they were besties for a decade. It's the evidence is to suggest that there's something deeper going on. My personal theory, Crystal, is not that it's related to Donald Trump himself.

1:07:52Emily Jashinsky:I think it's very unlikely that Donald Trump himself was out there talking about how Epstein, openly talking about how Epstein, like, quote, unquote, likes him young and hanging out with him when NBC News was profiling Trump at Ma-a-Lago and is personally implicated. But the Bill Barr stuff goes way deep. I mean, we're talking like way decades. That stuff goes decades back. So I think it might be more like Trump's orbit and people that he's protecting that he's hired because it comes back to him for having hired them. That it happened on his watch that they just released what footage of surveillance cameras.

1:08:31Emily Jashinsky:I pulled up an inspector general report from 2023.

1:08:34Jeremy Scahill:You can put MBT2 up. This is the video from outside of Epstein's cell. They released like 10 hours of video that shows no one going into the cell that is supposed to definitively prove that he did, in fact, quote unquote, kill himself.

1:08:47Emily Jashinsky:And this is the available footage that, again, an inspector's general report from 2023 talked about. They said the available recorded video footage from the one SHU camera captured a large part of the common area of the SHU and portions of the stairways leading to the different tiers, including Epstein's cell tier. thus anyone entering or attempting to enter Epstein's tier from the common area would have been picked up by that video camera and Epstein's cell door was not in the camera's field of view and reviewed the video and found that between approximately 1040 and 630 no one was seen entering Epstein's cell tier from that common area so again we've known this stuff since 2023 the question is if Epstein's cell door is not on the camera's field of view what is going on The question is why, if you look at the letter that the DOJ put out, they say that they are not going to release any of the allegedly thousands.

1:09:37Emily Jashinsky:They say they have thousands of videos of Jeffrey Epstein and images, some of which involve victims. They say they're not putting any of it out because it would be inappropriate to put basically this disgusting material into the public view, re-traumatizing victims. Absolutely true. But to say that we are literally closing the case and you are not getting a single, single shred of evidence from this trove that we apparently have, some of which is just Epstein, I guess, talking to a camera. That's insane. Right. We don't even need to say that it's insane, but it's worth saying like this is so insane.

1:10:11Jeremy Scahill:Well, OK, so we've got a few things going on here. We've got, number one, the Trump Epstein connections, which, you know, look, Steve Bannon himself said he thought that Jeffrey Epstein was the only person who could take Trump down. So they're, you know, long relationship. Who knows? OK. And you have, as Emily very effectively put out, all of these different Epstein-connected people in the first Trump administration and in this one. And you also have, so you've got the battle with Elon Musk erupting again. And Elon had threatened previously, basically like, oh, by the way, Trump's in the Epstein files, actually accusing him of being a pedophile.

1:10:48Jeremy Scahill:And then you have Bibi Netanyahu in town. And there are a lot of suggestions that what Epstein was really up to is he wasn't just freelancing as a horrifying sex trafficking pedophile monster. But he was linked to Mossad specifically and was trying to gather information about various powerful people so it could be used to coerce and influence American policy and foreign policy around the world. We know that, you know, he had connections with Ehud Barak, invested in some Israeli defense startup. Ghislaine Maxwell's father appears to have been linked to Mossad. Yes. So there's that's always been sort of I mean, the part about what powerful people were and stare.

1:11:37Jeremy Scahill:Obviously, that's important. That's like criminal mass enterprise. Obviously, that's important. But even more significant in terms of our ongoing foreign policy and the type of tactics that would be deployed would be information around whether he was, in fact, in a Mossad asset who was, you know, trying to entrap people and coerce them and be able to drive American foreign policy. So it was also not lost on me that this nothing to see here, no incriminating client list, case closed, comes the night before Bibi Netanyahu arrives into town. And at the time that he is having this blow up with Elon Musk, that timing seems so incredibly suspicious.

1:12:20Emily Jashinsky:It is also quite interesting that on a Sunday night, they gave Axios the exclusive on the story. It is beyond bizarre. Alex Eisenstadt, obviously good for him for getting the scoop. But on a Sunday night, the administration gives a memo saying they're just closing up the Epstein file to Axios. They just have their big victory, one big beautiful bill, generational piece of Republican legislation as they see it, that they sign on the 4th of July a couple of days earlier. They have Netanyahu coming on Monday. What a great time if you're a political strategist to bury a piece of news like this or to attempt to bury a piece of news like this.

1:12:58Emily Jashinsky:And the Mossad connections cannot be understated. I'm reading from the Times of Israel here. The Times of Israel mentioned that Robert Maxwell, who many people actually think was killed by Mossad, but we don't have to even go down that rabbit hole. He is buried on Jerusalem's Mount of Olives. Many members of the Israeli intelligence community attended his funeral. So did Yitzhak Shamir, Israel's then prime minister. Shamir eulogized the British tycoon for the political connections he brought to Israel during the 1980s and for the money he invested in it. That's obviously Gillian Maxwell's father, as Crystal noted, is someone that Jeffrey Epstein knew well.

1:13:36Yeah.

1:13:37Jeremy Scahill:And for people out there who would say, OK, well, if there's anything, anything bad about Trump in this information, why wouldn't the Democrats, why wouldn't Joe Biden have put this out previously? This is the answer. It's because they also, I mean, first of all, it's a bipartisan affair. Like we know about Bill Clinton being on the plane and whatever as well. Right. But second of all, no Republican or Democratic administration is going to want to reveal the truth. If the truth is, in fact, that Jeffrey Epstein is a Mossad asset or was a Mossad asset. Yeah. So I don't know, guys. I mean, just to me, too, just the the political stupidity.

1:14:17Jeremy Scahill:It's so it seems so suspicious to be like on the eve of B.B. Netanyahu coming to town. while I'm having this fight with Elon and after my base has been really very interested in this whole case to just, oh, nothing to see here. Case closed. We're not giving you any evidence and we're moving on after, by the way, we didn't play this up, but Pam Bondi had literally said just months ago, I have the Epstein client list on my desk. She said it on Fox News. On Fox News, she says this and, you know, it indicates she's going through thousands of hours of material and it's all going to be revealed and the influencer binder situation that was just phase one and she's going to get to it.

1:14:56Jeremy Scahill:And now she's gone from client list on my desk to there was no client list actually.

1:15:01Emily Jashinsky:And Kash Patel and Dan Bongino were pretty vocal members of the MAGA community insisting that there was something weird about Epstein going on and that if they were put in government, implications that will come in and will be transparent. We're going to reveal the truth. And yeah, tell the public. Even though Trump himself was always very, very squeamish on that country. Interesting. Yes. On the question. Rachel Campos Duffy asked him that question on Fox News. And you could see the squeamishness from Trump at that point where he said he was going to be open about RFK files and JFK files and MLK files.

1:15:40Emily Jashinsky:And then Epstein, well, maybe we'll take a look at it. you'd have to go back and watch the video, but it was conspicuous at the time. And they edited it to make it look like he was just like, yeah.

1:15:50Jeremy Scahill:But he goes, yeah, well, we have to look and private people may be involved. And that's a tougher one.

1:15:57Emily Jashinsky:That's a tougher one. And he also, people remember, as we're just like listing all of the interesting moments and connections from Trump world and Epstein world, he wished Ghislaine Maxwell well when he got a question about her being in prison. This was, I want to say this was early 2020 around that time. It was towards the end of his first administration. And then you have, yeah, Kash Patel going on Joe Rogan and Dan Bongino and Kash Patel doing that joint. I think it was a Fox News interview together looking like they were ashen faced and pale and just insisting that they absolutely, there was nothing to see, no there there.

1:16:33Emily Jashinsky:I mean, it's just, Crystal, you started this by saying you couldn't write this. Technically, you could write this. It's just that everyone would be like, they couldn't, they wouldn't be that dumb.

1:16:44Jeremy Scahill:Right. Like, they couldn't be that dumb. They got to do a little bit, a little bit better than this.

1:16:48Emily Jashinsky:You would think the strategy would just be to, like, not, just say you're working on it. Yeah. Just over and over say you're working on it, and it'll wear thin, but it's not a two-term administration in all likelihood. Just try to run out the clock from a political, cynical political strategy perspective. Can't even do that. Incredible. Incredible.

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