Congress Grills Top Epstein Lawyer

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0:50Restrictions apply, including any token expiration and max wager amount. See full terms at FanDuel.com slash sportsbook. Gambling problem? Call 1-800-GAMBLER. Welcome to The Beat. I'm Ari Melba. We begin with Trump's war on Iran. It's threatening now to really metastasize into a global economic crisis. And the strategy has reached levels of incoherence and public contradiction. World markets very much rattled today. Here's some video from Iran. The largest natural gas field in the world is on fire. That's after some Israeli strikes. Iran has hit oil and gas infrastructures throughout the Middle East.

1:24We have footage there from Saudi Arabia cycle of escalating attacks on energy targets. Trump tried to tamp this down, and he's threatening to escalate his own attacks, though, on energy targets. He says the U.S. will massively blow up Iran's largest gas field if Iran strikes more oil fields. The Treasury Secretary also taking this kind of approach, saying the U.S. is considering rolling back sanctions on Iranian oil. We had a break-the-glass plan across the administration and at Treasury. We unsanctioned Russian oil. We knew that there were about 130 million barrels on the water, and we created supply that is beyond the Straits of Hermos.

2:06In the coming days, we may unsanction the Iranian oil that's on the water. It's about 140 million barrels. unsanctioned Iranian oil. That, of course, is a reversal of something that has been a long-standing way to have impact on Iran. Bloomberg reports doing that would be a reversal of policy, since the U.S. has used energy sanctions to bring Iran to the negotiating table over nukes. The price of crude jumping$100 to$119 a barrel. Then it kind of moved around and landed around 108. Experts say gas prices could reach four bucks a gallon. The Pentagon is preparing to ask Congress to pay this bill.

2:47And this is a rolling, rising tab,$200 billion. Those numbers only go up. They don't go down. There's also reported the Pentagon is eyeing a new phase, considering deploying thousands of U.S. troops to the Middle East. This would be to secure the Strait of Hormuz as well as a hub for oil experts. Reuters reporting on that. Trump has been sending mixed signals. people ask boots on the ground no boots on the ground four weeks two weeks six weeks go in go in president trump knows i know you don't tell the enemy the iranian regime is still sky news if you put boots on the ground in iran it will be another vietnam are you afraid of that no i'm not afraid of i'm really not afraid of anything one of the circumstances where you send in round troops how are you thinking about that you know i'm not going to answer could there be possible for very good reason.

3:38After me, very good reason. I'm not putting troops anywhere. If I were, I certainly wouldn't tell you, but I'm not putting troops. Wouldn't tell you, but a bit of a mix there. It's contradictory messages on the troops, on the timeline, and the endgame. What's the rationale and how do we know when we're done? Top intelligence official Tulsi Gabbard was grilled about Iran and whether it poses a threat. There is no imminent threat of nuclear breakout. Did you deliver that assessment to the president? I have delivered the intelligence community's assessments to the president. Were they weeks away of achieving a nuclear weapon?

4:18Yes or no? Congressman, this is a serious matter. Yes or no? Were they weeks away? Yes or no? It would be a disservice to you and the American people to answer this question with Amir. Reclaiming my time. Reclaiming my time. We're now joined by Jared Bernstein, chair of the Council on Economic Advisors under President Biden. Larry Pfeiffer, national security intelligence expert. He served in Bush 43 CIA and the Obama National Security Council. And we should note, has been a technical advisor on a House of Dynamite, Catherine Bigelow's Netflix film, which brings the threat of nuclear war to your home screen and is a harrowing, a harrowing way to look at all these issues.

4:55I want to start with you, Jared, on the on the economics. Why is the U.S. right now acting so desperate under the Trump administration, talking about unsanctioning? And is this something we can easily back out of? Can we go back to where we were before they started the war? Well, it's getting tougher and tougher to back out. I don't think easy would be a word that comes to mind, especially when you start seeing, as some of your clips just showed, the destruction of infrastructure. One of the things we know is that when these types of conflicts end, if oil production infrastructure has been destroyed, it, of course, takes much longer to resume production and refinement.

5:39But in terms of why this is so challenging, before this war started, the Trump administration had a really tough record when it comes to affordability, which, of course, is the number one concern of so many American households right now. The tariffs, of course, exacerbated that problem. Well, now we have it hitting the energy markets in ways that, again, you just described. The price of gas, the retail price of gas is up about 90 cents a gallon in just a few weeks. Diesel's up 142. And this doesn't just affect people filling their tanks. This affects the food market. This affects groceries. I even noticed today that the 30-year fixed rate mortgage rate has spiked up 40 basis points, four-tenths of a percent, on the basis of some of the financial dynamics around the war.

6:28So it's very costly to American households at a time when they're most concerned about affordability issues. Larry, same question, and we're seeing this kind of odd telegraphic from the White House, which seems like short-term planning. We'll unsanction, do a loophole for a little bit, then get back to normal. But your view of all this? Well, you hit the nail on the head there in terms of short-term planning. This appears, if I was a foreign intelligence service and I was looking at what's happening with America's management of this war with Iran, I would walk away saying there is no interagency process affording the president detailed and necessary expertise.

7:10You have services, the diplomatic corps, the intelligence corps, the defense department, other places, FBI, homeland security that have been gutted of expertise, either intentionally or unintentionally through these early retirements. You have apparently inadequate, maybe the most polite way to describe it, management of this small coalition we built with Israel. You have Tulsi Gabbard today up on the Hill telling Congress that we have differing objectives in this war, and she seemed to be okay with that. Yeah. We also had this official who's resigned with a bundle of sort of critiques, and the administration's been lashing out at him.

7:56He spoke to, it's Joe Kent, spoke to Tucker Carlson. Larry, take a listen. the argument that there was an imminent threat as in iran was planning to attack us immediately that just simply did not exist there was no intelligence that said hey on whatever day it was march 1st the iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack they're going to do some kind of a 9-11 pearl harbor etc they're going to attack one of our bases there was none of that intelligence. Larry? So not a big fan of Joe Kent. Didn't think he should have gotten the job even to begin with. But as they say, a broken clock can be correct twice a day.

8:37I think this is an instance where he's speaking truth to power. There does not appear to have been any change in intelligence since a year ago when Tulsi Gabbard went up on the Hill and said that Iran had not made a decision to recommence its nuclear weapons development program. We've subsequently had the 12-day war where the infrastructure to support such an effort was, quote-unquote, obliterated. And today, up on the Hill, you didn't have anybody willing to commit to the notion that there was intelligence indicating that there was an imminent threat. Instead, you have Tulsi Gabbard dodging behind this notion that only the president can decide what is an imminent threat.

9:21As a guy who worked 32 years in the intel community, the history of that intel community is such that, you know, it was founded on the fact that we didn't provide sufficient warning before Pearl Harbor. And the most significant reforms to that intel community happened after 9-11, another instance where we didn't provide enough specific warning for an administration to act. So the intel community takes that responsibility very seriously to provide that imminent warning. Jared, where do you see this going on the oil and economic front? Well, there's a phenomenon in this market. It's called rockets and feathers.

9:59Another way of saying that the gas price takes the elevator up and the stairs down. It's kind of a reflection on some of the things I was talking about earlier. Once this war ends, this is not a switch, a flip the switch moment to get things back to where they were. Oil prices, gas prices shoot up very quickly, but they come down quite slowly. I'm pretty confident we're going to be looking at gas above$4 a gallon pretty soon. We're almost at$3.90 right now, and it's been rising fast. And it's been very sensitive to some of the just degrading of the infrastructure and the the way the war has been prosecuted as per your last discussion with Larry.

10:42So I see this as being a real squeeze to American consumers. You know, one of the things the administration has been touting is that average tax refunds are supposed to go up this year because of the budget bill, maybe something like$600 or$700 per household that gets a refund. Well, we're looking at an increase in the gas price, according to our estimation, based on the dynamics I just described. that's in that same ballpark. So basically, this gas price increase is going to eat people's refunds pretty much fully through. And so, you know, that's, again, that's the kind of pinch that households are facing on the back of this war.

11:23And Jared, you've served in a White House. Everyone says they're doing the work, but politics suffuses everything. Trump's not shy about that. He just lost a big push to try to strong arm the Fed into taking on economic policies, juicing the economy, going into the midterms. He admits it, although he lost. How do you, if you have a negative or skeptical view of this president, how do you square that whole thing, which was trying to get the economy better, going into the midterms for his political reasons, and he might say because he He thinks it would be better for the country with a now open ended oil mess of a war that, as you just described, and anyone can look at the the pump or the markets and see the problem.

12:10How do you square that with him roiling the markets, which is the opposite of what he wanted to do to make things, quote unquote, better for the midterms? Well, it's unsquareable. In other words, what the president told a lot of people, even back to the campaign, is that I'm going to make your life more affordable. You'll see lower prices, lower interest rates. He comes into office and well before this war, he starts making your life less affordable by slapping tariffs on virtually all of our imports. Then he launches this war, which is having the effects we just described on the gas price. But what does unsquarable mean?

12:46You think he doesn't get it? He's incompetent? I think that he is a phony, quote, populist. I think his message, he tells the people what he wants them to hear, and then he goes out and acts in ways that are antithetical to that. He's going, and Larry's right, he's just going based on his instincts, which have proven to be really pretty bad. He has way too much self-confidence in his knowledge, which of this region is just remarkable, the mess they've gotten us into this quickly. Yeah. Jared Bernstein, Larry Pfeiffer kicking us off on two aspects of this. Thank you very much. I want to tell folks tonight Congress is putting the heat on the Trump DOJ, Epstein's lawyer under oath.

13:30But next, we just talked about Donald Trump's approach to the Fed. He's using the same failed playbook against James Comey, a brand new subpoena against the FBI director who stood up to him. I have a special legal breakdown on this and a guest, and we're back in 90 seconds.

13:51Breaking news today, DOJ subpoenaing former FBI director James Comey, another sign that Trump's DOJ continues to target his perceived enemies even after getting slapped down in court. Trump has long resented Comey as an independent official, an FBI director that he could not control or politicize in those early days of his first term. In fact, if you followed politics long enough, it was one of the big first clashes and then got wrapped up into the Mueller probe. But Trump publicly called for selective prosecution of Comey, which is illegal. Now, the last case fell apart in November because the DOJ's temporary prosecutor who went after Comey was found to be serving illegally the case thrown out.

14:31Now, those defeated allegations were thin. It was about Comey back when he was in office and then afterward when he was testifying about what he did in office, whether he misled Congress. These new subpoenas go back even farther. They try to allege that U.S. officials, including Comey, who handled intelligence about Russia and dealt with probes into Trump's campaign were somehow part of a criminal conspiracy, according to Axios report. Now, let's just be clear. When you have an honest DOJ and there's news of subpoenas or charges against someone, it usually tends to come with evidence and the prospect that a subject is in the wrong.

15:08In other words, we follow all the evidence, but you say, oh, probably something there, whether it amounts to a crime or not. Nowadays, with this DOJ under Trump and Bondi, it has become the opposite. Probes of most top government officials tend to add to the evidence against the DOJ and not those people. It adds to the evidence of a quite blatantly huge illegal enemies list. Because Trump has illicitly asked, often in public, to abuse DOJ powers, to go after the people you see on your screen, to probe and investigate, to indict or arrest, and even jail people who exercise their rights to disagree with them or their oath to the Constitution.

15:52If this list looks almost comically large, it is. Because a lot of these in green, for example, fell apart. But these are the many people that we know of that they're trying to go after. It includes the current federal officials like the Fed chair. These efforts have failed. Trump just lost another bid to subpoena Chairman Powell, which we discussed on tonight's program. That was just last week. The judge dealing Trump a loss, publicly showing he was powerless to misuse subpoenas as a form of, quote, quote, harassment. And that's the word the judge used. So tonight we have a serious report of the misuse, possibly, of more subpoenas to harass someone who's already been cleared several times, Mr.

16:35Comey, but you can't look at it alone. We're going to bring you the facts without fear or favor here, even though this enemies list, as you see in the upper middle, includes journalists now, Don Lemon indicted by the same DOJ. But taken together, this isn't just a story about James Comey and Donald Trump. It's a story about the wholesale abuse of the DOJ to go after these enemies. Now, if I had to update this with some fairness and say, on the other hand, some of these cases went to trial and landed in convictions, I would tell you if that happened. But a year in, they are zero when it comes to closing and winning any of these cases.

17:11I'm joined by Barbara McQuaid, former U.S. attorney and MSNOW legal analyst. I mention all that because Because we could go into the particulars of this Comey subpoena, and I'm curious to hear your view of it as described. But I don't think we can accurately at this point deal with the Trump DOJ without looking at the pattern. How do you see it tonight? I think that's absolutely right, Ari. I mean, I'm glad you included on the screen there not only Jerome Powell and Don Lemon, but how about the six members of Congress who merely restated the law accurately and had an effort at indicting all of them?

17:49And so, you know, I know sometimes this Justice Department is accused of being Donald Trump's personal law firm, but it's more than that. Law firms do zealously advocate on behalf of their client, but they usually do so within the parameters of the law and ethics. And what we're seeing by this Justice Department are these efforts to find charges against people where, at least in some instances, we know there are none. And so I am concerned, you know, about this case in particular, Ari, we know that there have already been three investigations into the origins of the Russia investigation. There was the Mueller report.

18:24There was an inspector general report. There was the John Durham investigation. And all of them found only some minor problems, and those have already been dealt with. We also know that the Mueller report was final in 2019. You know, my math's not that great, but I think it's beyond the five-year statute of limitations. And so it's very difficult to imagine that there is a real case here. But certainly there is the ability to make people's lives miserable. There is the ability to create at least an impression that there was something phony going on about this. And what's different here, Ari, from what we saw in the Powell Federal Reserve case of last week, is that it's not Chief Judge James Bosberg who is going to be overseeing these subpoenas and, in that case, quashed subpoenas because he found a mountain of evidence that the investigation was pretextual.

19:16But it appears that this investigation is being run out of Fort Pierce, Florida, under the watchful eye of none other than Judge Aileen Cannon. And so it may be that a little judge shopping is going on here as well. Yeah, you look at the judge shopping and you look at the wider pattern, should honest judges keep that in mind? We're always told that judges look only at the case before them. But at a certain point, this habitual abuse has led some judges, you mentioned the quashing of the subpoena, there's been a clash in New Jersey about the misuse of prosecutors under Trump. We're seeing some judges act more quickly to be more skeptical of the government, whereas, as I mentioned, in normal times, there's regular order and there's some deference to the DOJ.

20:00Yeah, there's ordinarily this phrase that's referred to as the presumption of regularity. That is, that government lawyers take an oath to support the Constitution, that they are acting in good faith. And when it comes to grand jury subpoenas, they are entitled to a very broad scope of deference. It isn't even that it has to be relevant to an investigation, just that it could be relevant to finding some discovery that might be relevant to an investigation. And yet what you say is so important, that is this administration, though, time and again has demonstrated that it has lost that presumption of regularity.

20:36So I do think that we are going to see many judges taking more skeptical eye, as has already been done, but I don't know that we're going to get that from Judge Aileen Cannon. I also worry, Ari, about what this does to the Justice Department going forward. While we do have what appear to be very politically motivated cases, there are also honorable assistant U.S. attorneys all over the country who are investigating real cases of kidnapping and human trafficking and bank robbery and other kinds of things. And if the Justice Department loses this presumption of regularity because of the abuse that we're seeing by the Justice Department, I worry that public safety and the American people will be poorly served in the future because of the way this Justice Department has kind of ruined it for everybody.

21:20Yeah, this is why we can't have nice justice departments, as the saying goes. Barbara McQuaid, we do appreciate your clarity, your sobriety on these kind of stories. And we're going to stay on these, even if it can seem exhausting to look at the list we showed you. So thank you. later tonight I have a fact check for Megyn Kelly and Secretary of State Rubio stick around for that the Epstein scandal continues to give Pam Bondi a different set of problems we're going to get into that and the evidence about an Epstein lawyer hiding material out of their safe that's next

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23:58There's been a lot going on with the Epstein probe in Congress and what Democrats say are evasions by the Trump DOJ. Democrats say the attorney general may be trying to evade a lawful subpoena forcing her to testify on this because she's been dodging. The House Oversight Chairman Comer appears to be backing Bondi, although he did be, he was a part of the committee pursuing the subpoena, but now we're talking about what it means to really comply. He does say yesterday's briefing would not replace, of course, the public process of testifying under oath. There's also testimony coming in from Epstein's longtime lawyer who told Congress he just didn't know about Epstein's wrongdoing.

24:36Now, people are entitled to a lawyer and a criminal defense lawyer, but there are larger questions here. There are documents suggesting the facilitation of payments to women, as well as directing witnesses to avoid law enforcement. And so while no one should be denied a lawyer, even if you face the most heinous allegations in the world under U.S. constitutional law, that does not mean that lawyers can just do anything. And so there are still questions, we've probed some of them, about the people around Epstein and whether they crossed the line into joining in his crimes. Congress is going through the unredacted files.

25:10Congressman Goldman yesterday said that one unredacted version of an email, which was heavily blacked out, raises questions that it contradicts some of Trump's defenses about why he ever broke ties with Epstein.

25:24This document here was redacted to the public. It was unredacted to Congress, and it completely disputes everything that Donald Trump has said about Jeffrey Epstein, about what he knew about the allegations, about his disgusting behavior. If the attorney general is covering up this information that she then reveals to Congress, what else is she covering up about Donald Trump's involvement? This is active. The pressure and the evidence is pouring out as we speak. That was, of course, just yesterday, middle of this week. The Daily Beast reports about that same email that it would suggest Epstein maybe was never even asked to leave Trump's club and that Trump may have been on Epstein's plane and at his home.