Trump and Bondi pull the ultimate Epstein con

23:04The question is, are they going to stand up and say so? Are they going to do something about it? You know, I still have hope that people on the other side of the aisle can have a moment of courage here and do the right thing. I'm not ready to give up on that possibility. But we as Democrats should be prepared for a scenario where they don't stand up. And that means that we've got to fight back. So we can't wait on Republican courage. We can hope for it. We can pray for it. But we certainly can't wait for it. And so I'm hopeful that Democrats, both here in Texas and honestly across the country are going to react to this and meet the moment and stand up to this power grab.

23:46Brian Tyler Cohen:Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the speaker of the Texas state house get elected with the help of Democrats? Is that correct? That's correct. So so isn't there some leverage that Democrats have here in terms of helping this Republican stay atop his position? Wasn't there is there some basic agreement or understanding that that was struck between the Democrats and and the Speaker to be able, you know, to determine the extent of the abuse or the limits to the abuses of his power that he'll that he'll usher in? Well, you know, I think that all remains to be seen. Unfortunately, I don't think a lot of us saw this coming.

24:27Maybe we should have. But I honestly didn't anticipate a mid-decade gerrymandering attempt. I didn't have that on my bingo card, unfortunately. But, you know, as you mentioned, here in the Texas House, we still have some shreds of bipartisanship and Democrats are a very large minority. You know, a lot of people have this conception of Texas as this deep red state when actually it's a lot more purple than it is red. And Democrats control about 42 percent of the seats in the Texas House of Representatives. So we're a substantial minority. And with those numbers, you can you can cause a lot of chaos.

25:04us. And I would prefer not to do that. I would hope that our Republican colleagues, I would hope the Speaker would work with us to prevent this power grab from moving forward. And, you know, we should say, Brian, that if they're going to do this in Texas, because we are increasingly a purple state, by getting greedy, they may draw these districts so thin that we can end up flipping a lot of these districts if 2026 is a good year. So I do know that some of my Republican colleagues recognize that political danger, that by getting greedy, they actually may be handing Democrats an opportunity to win.

25:40It doesn't mean this power grab is acceptable. It's incredibly dangerous. It's an incredibly bad precedent to set, and we should stop it. But there may be some unintended consequences if they move forward.

25:50Brian Tyler Cohen:Yeah. I mean, look, it's not just the unintended consequences within Texas, but we spoke about California looking to gerrymander this state that I'm in right now. There are other states that Democrats have that could potentially be weapons on the left. We have New York, we have New Jersey. And so, you know, the greed of Donald Trump and Greg Abbott in this scenario may very well usher in a situation where not only would those maps, those lines be drawn so thin that Democrats themselves would flip them in a good year, which 2026, at least the polling would suggest, may very well turn out to be.

26:25Brian Tyler Cohen:But it in California, in New York, in New Jersey, and other states across the country also go much more blue by virtue of these gerrymanders that were done in a retaliatory fashion. And I just want us to pause and recognize that this is not how the system should work. Right. You know, voters should be picking their politicians, not the other way around. And right now, politicians are attempting to pick their voters by crafting the districts they want to guarantee the outcome they want. And that's just a fundamental disruption to the democratic process. And again, it insulates politicians in both political parties from accountability, from consequences for their actions.

27:06And that again is incredibly harmful to this American experiment. So although we need to match energy and we need to fight back and we need to stand up to these bullies, we should all recognize that this is not how things should work. This broken redistricting system is the rot at the core of our broken political system. And it's why I filed a bill in the last two legislative sessions to create a independent citizen-led redistricting commission in Texas so that we can take the power to draw political districts out of the hands of politicians and put into the hands of the Texans we seek to represent.

27:45So that should be the ultimate goal. We can't unilaterally disarm, unfortunately, but that should be what we're working toward in the long term.

27:54Brian Tyler Cohen:And actually, the unilateral disarmament part is kind of what I want to dig into for just a moment. I believe there is a California Assembly member named Alex Lee. He's a member of the Progressive Caucus. He came out in defiance of Gavin Newsom's proposal to usher in our own special session so that we would be able to do mid-decade redistricting here as well. And he was against it and basically suggested that if we do this, this will just descend politics into a worse state than we were in before. And I push back against this online, suggesting that this isn't, you know, this isn't us kicking off a cycle of gerrymandering because we're in it.

28:33Brian Tyler Cohen:And Republicans have gerrymandered Ohio and North Carolina and West Virginia and Utah and Florida and looking to do the same thing in Texas right now. They've done it in Wisconsin. So there are so many states across the country where this has happened. And yet I feel like there's this mentality among Democrats that that like we have to so long as we sit atop our moral mountain, even if we're thrusting ourselves into political obscurity, that somehow that somehow derive some benefit for us that we that we're going to, you know, I don't know, maybe confer that that if we act in a certain way, that it will be reciprocated by a Republican Party that has thus far shown no desire to reciprocate, that if we confer goodwill onto them, that they'll reciprocate that goodwill, even though they've not done it.

29:17Brian Tyler Cohen:And so I'm just curious for your reaction, because, you know, look, you're a progressive Democrat as well. And I get the moral stance that somebody could take against this issue. But practically speaking, I'm just curious how you would respond to legislators here in my state who would be against this. Well, this is a balance we have to strike. You know, Dr. King and the civil rights movement told his his movement to have a tough mind and a tender heart and to hold both of those things together. And for me, you know, having a tender heart means knowing why we're doing this, having that moral clarity, knowing what the vision is ultimately that we're trying to get to and not getting lost in the back and forth that we're seeing today.

30:03But then having a tough mind means, you know, being smart and strategic and realizing when our politics is already descending in this direction. We have to stand up to those folks who are destroying this American experiment. So we have to do both. We have to remember why we're doing this. We have to remember what we're ultimately trying to get to. We're not just trying to win for the blue team. That is not our goal. Our goal is to is to get political power to make people's lives better. That's the ultimate goal.

30:35Brian Tyler Cohen:Right. But to do that, you've got to be smart and strategic and tough. You can't lay down. You can't. We've seen that appeasement doesn't work, especially when you're facing fascism. So you have to be tough. You have to be strong, but also protect that that that moral clarity, that moral compass at the center of our work. That's not easy to do, but we do have to hold both together if we're going to get through this. literally could not have said that better. That is exactly right. And I think that has been a problem for Democrats for so long that once we get into power, it feels like we lose our way and begin defending the processes of government as opposed to remembering why we're there.

31:21Brian Tyler Cohen:It is not to defend the filibuster. It's not to defend the status quo. It's not to defend the maps or or to defend a system with least change. It's to help people have health care and for women to have reproductive rights and for us to combat climate change and make sure that kids aren't getting gunned down in schools. And and so often, you know, far from protecting the institutions of government, those are the impediments. So break those down if it means that you can get closer to what you want to do. But, you know, look, people get into government. You think that, like, I'm here to defend good government.

31:54Brian Tyler Cohen:And look, I my whole thing in the lead up to the 2024 election, perhaps naively and certainly not strategically in retrospect, was to to appeal to people's sense of wanting to protect democracy. But really, it's it's not just this nebulous idea of democracy or our institutions that that are moving people. It's the things it's it's going after, you know, again, health care and reproductive rights and climate change and and unions and jobs and the pay that they take home at the end of the day and making sure prescription drugs are affordable. all the things that you actually run for, the things that impact real people.

32:31Brian Tyler Cohen:And we have to remember to, you know, not lose sight of that, especially with folks who, you know, get stuck in these political processes and are surrounded by all of it. And just kind of, I don't know if it's like beltway brain or whatever you would call that at the state level, but that seems to be what it is. Yeah, too many Democrats are defending the status quo. And I understand the desire, especially in this Trump era, to protect our institutions and our norms. I get all that. But the reason that I'm a progressive, the reason I'm a Democrat is because I want to change things. These systems, these institutions don't work for a lot of people.

33:11And if we're not out there articulating a vision of how they should be different, how they should be better, then we end up just defending the status quo. And I'm not interested in doing that because the status quo doesn't work. And, you know, Brian, I was a public school teacher before I ran for office. And it's the issue I'm most passionate about. And sometimes people in my party end up defending public education as is. But I'm not satisfied with the way our public schools are performing. I'm not going to be satisfied until our Texas public schools are the best in the country. I'm not going to be satisfied until every single child has the ability to fulfill their God-given potential.

33:47That doesn't mean I want to privatize public education or tear it all down, but I do want to improve it. I want to change it. I want to make it better and make it work for people. So we just got to, we can't fall onto the trap of defending broken institutions, broken systems, or defending the status quo. We've got to be the party of change, which is our historical heritage. Right.

34:08Brian Tyler Cohen:James, you were you were on Joe Rogan show this past week. And, you know, that that that obviously is a space that Democrats have have. There was a lot of a lot of coverage, a lot of focus on the fact that Democrats haven't gone into those spaces, haven't been on the same podcast that these Republicans went on, haven't been able to reach the breadth of audience that that these Republicans were able to reach by virtue of going on these shows. So first and foremost, I'm curious and I listened to your whole episode and it was great. And not only was it a great conversation, but but it seems like like Joe Rogan himself.

34:44Brian Tyler Cohen:I mean, you got a ringing endorsement from Rogan and I wrote it down. He said, you're the kind of person I want in politics. And so I feel like, you know, there has been this sense of like fear among Democrats to go into these spaces because they're somehow hostile or dangerous. But I'm curious, in the aftermath of your interview with him, did you have that mentality going in? And what is your mentality now about going into these spaces? I think it's absolutely necessary that Democrats meet people where they're at. You know, before I went on Joe Rogan's podcast, I went on Fox News and I've been on the Christian Broadcasting Network, been on the 700 Club.

35:23You know, I'm trying to to go into places where Democrats don't typically go because politics is about addition, not subtraction. So if you just want to if you want to maintain a small, pure, insular group, then you don't want a political party. You want a social club. And that's fine. But if you want a political party that can win and gain political power to make people's lives better, you have to create a winning majority, a winning coalition. And that should include a lot of Joe Rogan's listeners. I mean, I sat down with with Joe for two and a half hours and there was so much common ground, so much that we agreed on.

36:00We both agree that the political system is broken. We both agree there is way too much influence from big money and billionaire mega donors. We both think that there should be more freedom and more opportunity for more people. I mean, that that is a lot of common ground. I'm not saying we agree on every single thing, but I do think we agree on the big stuff. And so if Democrats aren't going on to these shows and speaking to these these listeners directly, then we run the risk of folks not hearing about our values and hearing about our vision. And and that's that's a real danger, as we saw in the last election.

36:35So, you know, I'm going to keep going into these places. I'm going to keep sharing why I do this work and why I'm a Democrat and why I think we need change in this country. And hopefully we will see the fruits of that in 2026.

36:48Brian Tyler Cohen:Did you hear from anybody in the aftermath of your appearance that maybe somebody who is in the center or on the right or just somebody who didn't vote for you, somebody who doesn't vote for Democrats, who is more willing to be open to Democrats or who just straight up said this is, you know, this has changed my perspective on politics altogether? I can't tell you, Brian, just in the last minute, this episode came out not even, you know, 24 hours ago. And I've already been inundated both on social media, but also here in our Capitol office with calls and emails and messages from Republicans and independents who listened to the episode and said that they found a lot they could agree with.

37:33And we're very thankful that they heard from this different perspective. It's a little strange to have, you know, folks on Twitter with MAGA stuff in their profile picture saying nice things about you. But I do just fundamentally believe that that our politics is is is not really left versus right, but top versus bottom. You know, I just think that we are all getting played here by these billionaires and special interests that are dividing us on purpose. I mean, the culture wars in a lot of ways, you know, are a smokescreen. These divisions are manufactured. They divide us by race, by culture, by gender, by religion to keep us from seeing all that we have in common, to keep us from realizing that there is far more that unites us than divides us.

38:23because once we do realize that, then we're going to come together across party lines, across racial lines, across cultural lines to take power back from the billionaires who are pitting us against each other. And that's the real threat to the people in power.

38:38Brian Tyler Cohen:You know, the one small irony, and I know that you just push back against the culture wars and you're right to do that. The irony of the Epstein stuff is that a lot of Trump's base decided to vote him in his own warts notwithstanding because they believe that he would be the person to expose the systemic corruption that would allow somebody like Jeffrey Epstein and all of his clients who, you know, are thus far unnamed to get away with heinous crimes. And yes, it's his heinous crimes, but also it's what he represented. It's an entire echelon of people who are unaccountable, who are bound by a different system of justice, a different tier of justice.

39:18Brian Tyler Cohen:And so they wanted him to come in because they thought he would be the person to to expose that systemic corruption, to break it down. And the irony now is that, in fact, he's the one entrenching it by by, of course, refusing to release the Epstein files. But when you when you talk about like this, this top versus bottom, it's not left versus right, it's top versus bottom. That is the ultimate irony. And what we're seeing very much be the I don't want to say downfall because, you know, I think that would just be too convenient. But but a major splintering of Trump's own base is that is that that's what he ran on.

39:53Brian Tyler Cohen:And yet now he's entrenching the very system that he promised to break down. Well, and you can't blame him because, I mean, that's what Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and all these people told told these folks that of course, yeah, that's what they were going to do. And and so, you know, I know that the appeal of Donald Trump is that he's not a typical politician. I get that. You know, I do find even as a as a Democrat, I find some of the ways that Donald Trump speaks, you know, to be a little refreshing because he doesn't sound like the typical poll tested consultant driven politician. And and so I get why that was appealing.

40:30But now that he's in office, you see that, you know, he's cutting taxes for himself and his rich friends. He's kicking his own voters off their health care and off food assistance. And he's not even releasing the Epstein files that could shed some light on this on this issue. And so I think that that ultimately actions speak louder than words. And I hope that people are realizing that Donald Trump is a con man, always has been, always will be. He says the right things. He pushes the right buttons. But ultimately, when it comes down to it, he's going to protect himself and his powerful friends.

41:09And I hope that's a realization for folks. But we as Democrats have to provide an alternative. And what we're providing right now, what we're offering to voters is not going to cut it. So our party has to have some deep introspection about what went wrong, how we need to be different, how we need to get back to our roots of fighting for regular people. And only when that happens are we going to be able to turn this country into a better and more healthy direction.

41:38Brian Tyler Cohen:Perfectly put, as always. James, I'm grateful for the work you're doing, reaching other audiences, getting out of the usual liberal bubble in our bifurcated media ecosystem. So grateful for the work you're doing to reach other people right now and, as always, for your voice. James Tallarico, appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. I'm joined now by Congressman Jamie Raskin. Thanks for joining me. I'm psyched to be with you, Brian. So we have just found out that Donald Trump and Pam Bondi are asking a judge to release the grand jury testimony. This is not the Epstein files. This is something completely different, really, that no one is asking for.

42:17Brian Tyler Cohen:You have you have thousands upon thousands upon thousands of files. They opted not to have those, even though they're already in their possession and are instead saying we're going to go through this lengthy process that may or may not work out where we're going to get some testimony that we can then choose what to release from within that testimony if a judge even opts to grant it. So for those Trump supporters and honestly, you know, left, right and center, people who want this information, are they being conned by virtue of what Trump and Bondi are offering them right now? Well, no, because I don't think anybody's buying it.

42:50I mean, I think you just did a great job debunking it. The only thing I would add is that the grand jury files relate only to the prosecution of Epstein himself for what he did and of Maxwell for what she did. But it doesn't include the whole universe of other people and criminal organizations and business organizations that we're interested in. But isn't that the whole point?

43:21Brian Tyler Cohen:Isn't that what we're looking for here? It's a complete distraction. It's a red herring. It's a, oh, don't look over here, look over there kind of thing. And, you know, even for that tiny subset of the materials we might be interested in, and they're pretty, pretty much peripheral, but even within those, Rule 6E will provide that much of it will have to be redacted to protect victims and other people. So, look, all of that is just a decoy. They've got the materials within their possession and they can release everything, just redacting the information that would be identifying information for the victims, which is the only thing that should be redacted.

44:06And that's what the Democrats have been asking for. All we're saying to Donald Trump is be true to what you've been asking for for years. Release the information in the possession of the government.

44:16Brian Tyler Cohen:And so can you talk about what efforts, knowing full well that all he wants to put forward is this decoy, what can Democrats do? What are Democrats doing right now to compel this information? And I ask this because we've seen multiple efforts where Democrats have have sought have sought votes in the House, both in the Rules Committee, on the House floor, even the Senate floor to compel the release of these files. And two times in the Rules Committee, Republicans voted it down. Two times in the House, Republicans voted it down. One time in the Senate, at the hands of Ruben Gallego, Republicans voted it down.

44:50Brian Tyler Cohen:And so what are our options here moving forward? Well, we've also, in the Judiciary Committee, the Democrats have demanded a full bipartisan hearing where we subpoena all of this information and we subpoena witness testimony from Attorney and General Bondi from FBI Director Kash Patel, from the Deputy Director Dan Bongino. So they come forward and everybody tells us everything they know about this whole nightmarish scenario. So that's one thing we can continue to press that. Now, Chairman Jordan's answer was, well, yes, we're going to have her in to talk about everything, implying, therefore, we can ask about those questions.

45:30All right, he said before the end of the year. And then when we were saying this is ridiculous, we're not waiting till December, people started saying September we could do. So who knows? We'll keep we'll keep pressing on that. But here's the other thing I want. I got to salute my counterpart over in the Senate, who's the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Durbin, who has discovered apparently from a whistleblower. I'm not quite sure how, but that you remember they had they had actually conscripted a thousand FBI agents to be working around the clock, 24 hours, going through more than 100 ,000 of these Epstein documents in the files and apparently told them to flag any mentions or appearances or pictures of Donald Trump.

46:22anything that appears there of Donald Trump. They're supposed to flag it. Well, what were they supposed to do after they flag it? And we also heard separately, this was a couple weeks ago, that the FBI Director Cash Patel was using lie detector tests against the FBI agents. And I wonder whether, you know, these two things are related to each other. In other words, somebody finds something relating to Donald Trump, they turn it over, are they then asked, Are you loyal to Donald Trump? Will you do what we ask you to do? Are you going to turn this over to anybody else? You know, this might be one of the most massive cover ups in the history of the United States unfolding before our very eyes, because Donald Trump is obviously freaked out about some stuff that's in there.

47:11And then the idea that you create this army within the FBI to scrape through everything just looking for mentions of Donald Trump is quite unusual and fascinating.

47:23Brian Tyler Cohen:Yeah, I mean, what does it say? Look, I'm no political genius here, but what does it say when you have to conscript a thousand people to scrub through these documents, all who answer to Donald Trump to search for Donald Trump's name within these documents? It probably doesn't send the message that you think it's sending. It's worth asking, too, here. A lot of the pushback to all of this stuff is, and Trump has said this, too, in so many ways. Granted, he's kind of muddled his own message because he's also claiming that all of this is a hoax written by Biden, Comey and Brennan and Obama. So kind of his message is whatever errant synapse fires in his brain at any given moment in time.

48:05Brian Tyler Cohen:But if there was a mention of Donald Trump in these files, why the Biden administration wouldn't have released it previously. So I'm curious what what your response is on that, because it's a talking point that we I mean, it's it's a it's a pretty unconvincing talking point because Trump is the president right now. He ran on this. But I'm still curious what your thought is on this. In other words, OK, well, let's start with this. Up until Donald Trump, everybody tried to respect the independence and the integrity of the Department of Justice. Up until Donald Trump, nobody was telling the Department of Justice what to do.

48:41And the Department of Justice under Biden brought the prosecution against Maxwell. So obviously Biden wasn't trying to suppress anything. The GOP stories today make no sense. They're totally conflicting. They're saying on the one hand, Biden and Obama made all of this stuff up about Donald Trump, but then they never released it. Why did they make it up if they never released it? Right. And then they say to us, after Donald Trump campaigns on this, that there's all this stuff in there that he knows about. And he should know, considering he was Epstein's best friend for more than a decade, that it all should be released.

49:24After they're campaigning on it, we say, fine, let's go ahead and release it. You seem to know there's all this stuff in there. And then they say, no, why didn't you release it? I mean, it just it makes no sense what they're saying. They're just pointing fingers in 100 different directions. The bottom line is, here's what we do know. Epstein was a convicted sex offender. There was a federal, a 60-count federal indictment waiting for him. And then Donald Trump's later labor secretary, Alex Acosta, who was then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, reduced that 60 count federal indictment on conspiracy, sex trafficking, prostitution, pimping, all of this stuff, reduced it to one state count of solicitation.

50:14That was the sweetest sweetheart deal, perhaps, in the history of federal criminal prosecution. He gets this tiny, gentle, I don't even want to say slap on the wrist, a massage on the wrist where he spends half of the day free, half of the day spending the night in a slumber party at the jailhouse. OK, and then he also gets a get out of jail free card for four of his unnamed associates who were named and theoretically would have been either indicted or unindicted co-conspirators. Somebody put the fix in for the guy. We want to get to the bottom of that. Then later, a federal prosecution starts over again.

50:58That's when he's in jail and that's when he takes his own life. And at that point, a lot of people were asking questions about whether this was truly suicide or not, including Donald Trump. Then it's Attorney General William Barr, Trump's attorney general, who goes over and says this is a perfect storm of mistakes and mishaps. But he declares that it was a suicide, even though there was, you know, the momentary lapse in the videotape, which turns out not to have been one minute, but I think three and a half minutes. It's since been discovered. There were two people who were assigned to watch his cell who disappeared.

51:37So who knows? I mean, you know, at this point, we're in like the fog of their conspiracy theory and a very strange sequence of events. Indeed. So Maxwell gets prosecuted. She's sentenced to 20 years. And then the third co-conspirator in that particular case also takes his own life. This is the French guy who takes his life. All right. Then Trump runs around the country saying, we've got to release the complete Epstein file. J.D. Vance says that. Pam Bondi says that. Cash Patel says that. In fact, it's curious that all of the people who were talking about it suddenly get put into key positions in the Department of Justice and the administration.

52:20And now they do perform a complete U-turn and they want to sweep the entire thing under the rug.

52:25Brian Tyler Cohen:Right. Just as a quick aside, what is the point of the sweetest of sweetheart deals for Jeffrey Epstein when normally these deals are given so that prosecutors can work their way up the ladder so that they can get as close to the big fish as they can? Epstein was the big fish in this scenario. And so what do you get by like is the whole point to try to get people like him? And so what benefit do you derive as a prosecutor from Alex Acosta's perspective by giving him such a good deal when he's the person that all the ire should be aimed at? Well, it suggests the possibility that there was, in fact, a bigger fish involved who wanted to put the whole thing to bed as quickly as possible.

53:10Because if there were other people that Epstein could be pointing the finger at and looping in as part of turning state's evidence in order to get a better deal for himself, those people would have every interest in keeping Epstein on their good side. Right. And so, I mean, what's odd about this is that, you know, like many criminals, Donald Trump kept returning to the scene of this crime. So many of the key actors in this event were put into his administration. So many of the lawyers involved, like Alan Dershowitz, who outbrokered the sweetheart deal, later became a lawyer for Donald Trump. and then Trump campaigned on it.

53:58And we've seen how he loves to project onto other people his own anxieties and insecurities. So if he is nervous about what Epstein might say, then he would say, oh, well, the Democrats are really nervous about Epstein and we're going to blow the cover on this when we get in.

54:17Brian Tyler Cohen:Right. I got to ask this because I think we're starting to recognize that it's beyond clear Trump doesn't want these files released, that he's doing whatever he can to make sure that we're not looking at this stuff, offering up whatever decoys he can find, sending us, you know, over to the grand jury testimony while he secretes, you know, 95 % of the files that already do exist, that already are at Pam Bondi's disposal. Will we ever gain full access to the Epstein files or will it always be that Pam Bondi and and by association, by extension, Donald Trump, will be the final arbiters of exactly what information comes out.

54:56Brian Tyler Cohen:Like, those two people are really the only people that have the full range of all of the files that exist. And so even if the discharge petition come August or September, when it finally ripens and the House can vote on this thing and it passes, will Pam Bondi ultimately have the final say into what information exactly comes out? Or is there a way to circumvent her as as somebody who could kind of meddle in what comes out so that we can get the full range of the files? The wheel is still in spin, Brian. We don't know the answer to your question. But if you look at the Democratic resolution or rather the bipartisan support, the bipartisan resolution, which has been put in by Massey and by Kanna, there's a paragraph in there which says we want a complete accounting also of any of the destruction or altering or mutilation or effacement or impairment of different documents.

55:58In other words, we want to know, we want to see all the documents, and if any of the documents have been altered or changed or removed in any way, we want a record of that too.

56:08Brian Tyler Cohen:But on that point, I mean, the cop on that beat is Pam Bondi, and by extension, Donald Trump, who may very well be implicated in this. And so he has every interest in if there is some alteration, if there is some destruction of documents, he's not going to say anything because he's the person that that destruction would presumably benefit. And so who's there to be the like there is all of these people are in the pocket of Donald Trump. And so who's the cop on that beat? Well, if you look at the history of corruption scandals in the nation's capital, there are always people who are junior people, who are interns, who are staff associates, who are basically invisible and considered menial by the key actors.

56:55But they oftentimes come forward and tell what they know. But I'm with you. I mean, if there's a full-blown effort of cover-up and certainly mobilizing an army of a thousand FBI agents to go and find anything mentioning Donald Trump's name and then come and bring it to us, and at the same time we hear that Kash Patel is administering lie detector tests against people in order to determine who's trustworthy and who's not, we have every reason to be afraid that there will be a cover-up. But I just have to believe that there's so much information that has come from Florida, that's come from New York, that's come from other sources, that's come from journalists, that some people are going to be able to check them if their plan is just to obliterate the evidence.

57:37Brian Tyler Cohen:Right. And presumably, if they had intended on altering some information, doctoring some information, they would have already put it out there. So there's something that must be blocking them from doing this, because I think they probably rightly recognize that if they do try to mess with things and put it out there, then it becomes an even more obvious cover up. It becomes an even bigger scandal than what it likely already is. And so they're probably just trying to do that calculation now with like, can we get away with this? How much could we get away with? Is it going to be an even bigger scandal, shine an even hotter spotlight on us if we even try it?

58:11Yeah, because the cover up imports a whole new set of charges of obstruction of justice and conspiracy. And that takes it to a completely different level. There are just some things that are probably in there that are very hard to permanently erase, including emails, which are going to be very important. I believe in this case, correspondence and photographs. I mean, you know, you've got Michael Wolff, who's a Trump biographer who's written four books, I believe, about Donald Trump, who went on a podcast last week and said openly that Epstein had shown him lots of photographs of them together, Epstein and Trump, and that some of the photos included Trump with topless girls sitting on his lap and laughing and so on.

59:07Well, it's hard to make evidence like that go away. And if there are lots of people who've seen it or there might be other copies of it out there, it's hard to make it go away. So you start destroying evidence like that. You start destroying emails and texts and those things reappear. then it's become clear that not only were you involved in some way in the original events, but you're trying to cover it up. And you might be better off just making arguments about how, you know, well, yeah, the president may have been in compromising positions. It might not look good, but he didn't really do anything bad.

59:42Meantime, we don't want to lose sight of what's really going on here, which is this was a human trafficking child sex abuse ring. And the Trump administration as an administration has been doing everything in their power to dismantle the anti-human trafficking, anti-child abuse programs and funding that we've got at the Department of Justice, at the Department of State, at HHS, in agencies and departments throughout the government. They've been dismantling the funding to combat human trafficking. And the people who work on that have been screaming from the rooftops that this is going to be a nightmare if you take America off the field.

1:00:22Brian Tyler Cohen:Yeah, that's an excellent, often overlooked point in all of this. Let's finish off with this. Among your Republican colleagues in the GOP conference, what are these people saying behind the scenes? Because these are people who've staked their reputations and built their brands and and spoken openly and proudly about their efforts to take down, you know, this this this deep state pedophile ring that that encompassed the highest echelons of government. They Don Jr. spoke about it. J.D. Vance spoke about it. They've been talking about on podcast with with Tucker Carlson and all of their influencers.

1:00:57Brian Tyler Cohen:The president spoke about it from the highest levels of office. And now they find themselves taking vote after vote after vote, secreting this very information, preventing the release of the very information that they themselves put put themselves out there saying that they were going to deliver to their constituents. And so what are these people saying behind the scenes if you have the opportunity to speak to any of them? Well, a couple of them have taken the position with me that, look, this doesn't look good, but it was all conspiracy theory. and given that it was conspiracy theory all they can really do is to just let it all hang out and show that there's nothing there and if indeed it was all conspiracy theory and there are no names of the rich and powerful involved in this exploitative sex ring they would let it all hang out but i think others understand what a dangerous territory donald trump has entered here because he brought all of the attention on this and the spotlight is now on him and i don't think they know where it's going to go but they don't think that he's going to uh it's within his character to try to really release anything and disclose stuff he's just going to try to fight it till the end of his presidency and you know he's going to go from talking about you know russia russia russia or insurrection, insurrection, insurrection to just talking about Epstein, Epstein, Epstein.

1:02:27Brian Tyler Cohen:Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, I don't know how much. We're about to get a quick lesson in how potent the use of Biden's auto pen is as a distraction technique. So with that said, Congressman, I appreciate your time today. I appreciate you keeping this in the spotlight and we'll talk to you soon. Thank you, Brian. Hang tough, man. All best. Thanks again to John Ossoff, James Tallarico, and Jamie Raskin. That's it for this episode. Talk to you next week.

1:03:20Thank you.