Trump's Epstein Nightmare and the Myth of Mechanical Jurisprudence

0:28This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. World Trade Center at Lower Manhattan. This is Newsweek Radio with your host, Jesse Edwards. Today's top trending headlines at Newsweek.com. Links are in the descriptions depending on where you're listening. Republican says Trump may be covering for people linked to Epstein. Gee, do you think? Quote, I actually don't think he's done anything criminal. I think he may be covering for some rich and powerful people that are friends of his. Unquote, said Republican Representative Thomas Massey. And look, I've shared similar thoughts on this program for weeks, and I'll say it again that Trump loves to attack Democrats for any reason.

1:02Obama, Biden, Hillary, but he's always been very, very quiet about Bill Clinton, his old golfing buddy. And that's who I think Trump is covering for, for whatever reason, and I don't know why, since we are simply left to speculate. Trump is calling the uproar over the Epstein case a hoax. This is a Democrat hoax that never ends. Yeah, Trump calling this a hoax is a boneheaded move, to say the least. And it's not going to age well. This guy who brands himself as the world's greatest counterpunch suddenly forgets how to throw one. Why isn't he pinning this squarely on Bill Clinton and every other powerful name that shows up in the public logs and reporting?

1:38It's baffling. And the bigger point is that none of this goes away until we stop chasing myth and start demanding the government's receipts. Not the fictitional little black book. That doesn't exist. I'm talking about the official findings of the Epstein investigations, what prosecutors actually corroborated. Publish a top 10 list of the most substantiated associates and what evidence exists. Redact the victims' names and let the facts speak for themselves. That's it. This is so simple that even Marjorie Taylor Greene gets it, and she absolutely deserves credit for being on the right side of history in this case.

2:09Let's take a listen to what Marjorie Taylor Greene has to say about it. These are some of the richest, most powerful people in the world that could sue these women into poverty and homelessness. Yeah, it's a scary thing to name names, but I will tell you, I'm not afraid to name names. And so if they want to give me a list, I will walk in that Capitol on the House floor and I'll say every damn name that abused these women. I can do that for them. Good for Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene for representing her constituents and these women. I mean, love her or hate her, she's actually got a bigger set of balls than our president does on this one.

2:47At least she's willing to say out loud what millions of Americans are thinking. This isn't a hoax. It's a cover-up. This is a Democrat hoax. And the people responsible need to be dragged into the light, even if it implicates half of Washington leadership. But that's not going to happen. And you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to see why, for some reason, speculation is all we've got. Because Trump doesn't want this information to get out there. He doesn't want people talking about it, and he doth protest way too much. This is a Democrat hoax. As he continues to double down that this is just a hoax.

3:16This could be and should be the easiest win of Donald Trump's political life. Just acknowledge the survivors, call out the monsters who abused them, put the spotlight on Clinton and Gates and the academics and the billionaires and the celebrities and whoever, show leadership, stand with the victims and turn the flamethrower on your enemies. But instead, Donald Trump is refusing. He's deflecting and he's doubling down on calling it a hoax. This is a Democrat hoax. Trump has held the Smithsonian Museum more accountable than Jeffrey Epstein. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years.

3:49And if you don't know that the government absolutely knows who was doing what on Little St. James, then I'm not sure why you even follow politics or law or human nature at this point. Anything short of a definitive government verified list is a lie, period. And if you can't admit that because you're too wrapped up in your own partisan comfort zone, you're proving the very point. Just give any one of us professionals the raw data, and we could easily do what Washington refuses to. I'll have a definitive list for you in four hours. Don't tell me it's complicated. Don't tell me it's impossible. And don't tell me that justice has to wait decades while billionaires hide behind their lawyers.

4:26We all know the government has the receipts, and the only reason we don't see them is because the people holding the receipts are protecting themselves and not the victims. I think this is what scares people like Trump the most over a case like this, aside from the potential of his own personal involvement, is that it's one of those rare moments where it truly does not matter to most Americans whether the bad guys tied to Epstein were Republicans or Democrats. For the first time in a very long time, this scandal has the power to slice through the tribalist polarization that has infected our politics like a cancer.

4:56And if the powers behind the scenes are as big and ugly as many of us fear they are, the last thing they want is Americans uniting over a single issue like this, because that's all it would take to unmask them and to throne a hidden power that has been allowed to thrive only so long as we keep hating each other more than we demand the truth. You can't handle the truth. Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why customers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay and they'll show you options that fit your budget.

5:30So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options. Visit Progressive.com. Find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Next headline in Newsweek, Amy Coney Barrett reveals her distasteful to cast Supreme Court vote. Supreme Court Justice ACB revealed in a new book excerpt that she once cast a vote that she found distasteful. tasteful. Writing about the Boston Marathon bomber case, Barrett admitted that she could have looked for ways to slant the law in favor of sparing Dokhar Sarnaev's life, but chose instead to affirm the death penalty.

6:12She framed this as fidelity to the law, quote, swearing to apply the law faithfully means deciding each case based on my best judgment about what the law is, not what it should be, unquote. Well, that's admirable, and not to take away from Barrett's integrity, it's also a load of crap. Because the truth is that Amy Coney Barrett is a human, last I checked, and all nine justices supposedly are too. There's no such thing as making unbiased decisions as a human being. One can strive for impartiality, but nobody's biased proof. And to pretend otherwise is to step into the myth of mechanical jurisprudence, the fantasy that judges can simply apply law like a machine.

6:50They don't, and they never have. And Barrett basically admitted as much in her own words. She just said she uses her best judgment, and that is the variable. That is the bias. It's the human element that decides whether someone lives or dies, whether a law stands or falls. Every law itself was also written by mortals leaning on their own best judgments. It's people in costumes making human decisions. The robes don't cleanse away bias anymore than putting on a cape makes you a superhero. So yes, Barrett did her job in Tarnayev's case, and yes, she may have even reached the right conclusion. But when she suggests that she is merely a neutral vessel of the law, she's hiding behind the bench, and that is nothing but theater.

7:31And the sooner we admit that our justice system is carried out by fallible, subjective, gut-driven humans, the sooner we can have an honest conversation about how much power we've placed in their hands. And who could blame her? I mean, this is what every other Supreme Court justice writes about, isn't it? Because there's really nothing else to write about yourself in that chair. What do we expect her to admit? that she leans on her personal biases to dictate the law, come to think of it, you know, that might actually have been interesting, even refreshing. At least it would acknowledge our human condition instead of pretending that these black robes are invisibility cloaks from Harry Potter.

8:02Of course, we can and absolutely should strive for mechanical jurisprudence, but let's not kid ourselves because it assumes that judges are capable of 100 % accuracy every single time, which is a standard that no human being can meet, which is exactly why I generally do not believe in the death penalty. I don't trust our government or any other human organization for that matter to get it right every single time. Now, you could probably convince me that Sarnayev deserved his own pressure cooker treatment, but for the most part, his case is the outlier. There's clear evidence, there's premeditation, there's no reasonable doubt, but a lot of capital cases aren't like that.

8:35Far too many prisoners exonerated after decades of wrongful imprisonment. They weren't freed because the system worked. They were freed in spite of it after years of indifference and incompetence, and in some cases, outright corruption from the very judiciary and prison systems that insist they are above human error. So yeah, Barrett can tell us that she faithfully applied the law, but when she paints that as neutrality, she's writing a fairy tale. And the truth is far less comforting, that our justice system is run by other humans wearing costumes, doing their best, and sometimes failing spectacularly, while pretending they're impervious to the very flaws that define the rest of us.

9:13To me, it all comes down to the logistics of the human condition, which is why I have so little faith in governments or large gatherings of people at all. To borrow Tommy Lee Jones's line from Men in Black, a person is smart, but people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it. And 1500 years ago, everybody knew that the earth was the center of the universe. And that hits the nail on the head for me. I love individuals. I trust individuals. But the minute you stack enough of us together into a government or a committee or a courtroom, the hive mind tends to take over. And what you get is less about wisdom and more about conformity, with a collective Borg-like instinct that smothers independent thought.

9:50And of course we need some sort of system to survive. And yes, this is the best one we've managed so far. That does not mean we have to like it, or that we couldn't do better. So when Amy Coney Barrett tells us that she applied the law faithfully, I don't doubt her sincerity, but sincerity isn't the same thing as truth. The truth is that every ruling and every precedent and every faithful application of the law carries the fingerprints of human judgment. I actually feel sorry for Barrett and her colleagues on the Supreme Court. Their work is unimaginably difficult and the stakes could not be higher.

10:20But I'd rather hear a justice admit plainly the bias is inevitable, that she wrestles with her gut and her conscience and her culture and her own blind spots than to be sold the fiction that law can somehow be applied in a vacuum. Because in the end, justice in America is not the product of divine wisdom. It's people in costumes making human decisions. And the sooner we stop pretending otherwise, the sooner we can hold both our leaders and ourselves accountable to the messy, imperfect reality of being a human being. Until we can do it again, it's Newsweek Radio. I'm Jesse Edwards. Catch you next time back.

10:52And we say bye-bye. Newsweek Radio is a member of the Trust Project. Humans, for the most part, don't have a clue. They don't want one or need one either. They're happy. They think they have a good bead on things. Well, why write a big secret? People are smart. They can handle it. The person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it.