Former Prince Andrew Arrested After Epstein Files Revelations

18:58Paul Krugman:I never believed that America would be doing this.

19:01Ari Melber:A stain on this country, one that we said we would never repeat. Rachel Maddow presents Burn Order. All episodes available now. I'm so glad that this happened and there needs to be more of it. And frankly, it's happening in Europe, but it's not happening enough in the United States. Either the White House or the Republican Party, and maybe the two are the same thing right now. They are protecting people that they want to protect.

19:26Paul Krugman:We have to get real in this country. Are we going to take action like every other country in the world is? Calls for the accountability in the Epstein case as the UK makes actionable steps. I'm joined by Congress Robert Garcia, who's the top Democrat in the Oversight Committee. Welcome your response to this news out of the UK.

19:46Ari Melber:It's huge news. I mean, it's good to see actually accountability happening around the world. And look, this is incredibly serious. I think the fact that the UK is taking this so seriously that you see the public engage, you see the government actually engage is what we need to see here in the United States. But it's a reminder that we can actually do the right thing by the survivors. And what we've been saying, we've been wanting to talk to the former prince, by the way, for months. We've sent him letters. We've sent his lawyers letters. We know that the former prince has also critical information.

20:21Ari Melber:So I hope that he, of course, faces justice and he actually is accountable to the crimes that he may have committed. But at the same time, I'm hopeful that he thinks about the information that he can provide to our committee in the future and the information that we believe he has that can advance our investigation.

20:39Paul Krugman:Your committee has been pursuing leads that it appears the DOJ did not, at least fully. This was a big deposition this week. You spoke out afterward. You were there. Let's take a look at a moment with this former Epstein financial client.

20:55Ari Melber:Did you ever visit Zyland in the U.S. Virgin Islands? Yes. Jeffrey invited us to see it. and we were on a boat and we went to the island with our kids, walked around for a while, left probably an hour a visit. Okay, an hour. So on that trip, do you recall seeing any prominent figures on the island?

21:23Paul Krugman:No, it was a pretty crummy island. When you look at the information you got and what the files show, including Epstein repeatedly saying, that Wexner owed him a debt, that he couldn't have answered these questions without, quote, in a different context, violating a confidence with you, which he says he didn't do, referencing defending him against accusations, and then saying, don't pretend you don't have any idea what I mean. Do you believe, based on the evidence you have, that Epstein was trying to blackmail him?

22:01Ari Melber:I think it's very possible. I mean, look, first, two things stood out in that deposition. The first is that Wexner was obviously to us lying. I mean, look, he kept saying that he wasn't friendly with Epstein.

22:14Paul Krugman:You said he was lying to Congress.

22:15Ari Melber:I do. I personally do not believe he was being truthful in his answers. How do you describe your relationship as not friendly? He couldn't say that they were actually friends. Yet when presented with the birthday book note that he wrote him, he stood there in shock, which he signed your friend, Leslie. He gave Epstein power of attorney. No single person provided more financial wealth to Epstein than Wexner. Wexner gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Jeffrey Epstein. The reason there's a Jeffrey Epstein island and plane is in large part because of Les Wexner. And now Les Wexner is trying to somehow walk that back or say that he was unaware of what Epstein was doing.

22:56Ari Melber:I'm sorry, but you don't visit someone's island. You don't go around palling around with someone in Ghislaine Maxwell, going to all of these fashion shows, being intimate, going to different homes without at least being friendly. And so there's no question to me that Wexner still has a lot of questions to answer from us. And he's absolutely, in my opinion, part of some kind of broader cover up.

23:19Paul Krugman:And you're saying you as a lawmaker in that room think he was lying, as we all know, lying to Congress is a crime. The bill that you helped pass demands various documents about Epstein from the DOJ. Reading from one section, it requests documentation around Epstein's detention and death, incident reports, witness interviews, medical examiner files, autopsy reports, written records detailing the circumstances and cause of death. In your view, has the DOJ complied with that? Do you have all of the known requested such documents?

23:57Ari Melber:I mean, absolutely not. I mean, the DOJ right now, first, they've withheld 50 % of the documents at a minimum. I mean, the idea that half of the Epstein files they are keeping to themselves and not sharing with the Congress and the American public is outrageous. It's indefensible. They're breaking the law every single day. And it's on every single issue. It's not just issues related to Epstein's death. It's issues related around survivors, co-conspirators, the financial documents. And so the list goes on it.

24:28Paul Krugman:On the death, because that was a section that your law put, are there specific things you can name that they haven't provided? Or is it a general, just a general concern about their approach?

24:39Ari Melber:The general concern is that they're using, they're wordsmithing the law. They continue to say that interagency communication, for example, about the Epstein case could be held back. They continue to say that things that might be under investigation could be held back. I mean, that's just BS. And as it relates to the death, I'm not sure if there's any person in this country that isn't suspicious, at least somewhat, of the circumstances around Jeffrey Epstein's death. I mean, I certainly am. There's been reporting that I think raises a lot of questions. I think the broader question is, why has there been this massive government cover-up?

25:21Ari Melber:And look, it's not just the current DOJ and Donald Trump, but it's clear that for years, the DOJ and the FBI have not been aggressive in getting justice for the survivors and asking the wrong questions. And the fact that it didn't go after and ask Les Wexner questions is to me unconscionable.

25:39Paul Krugman:Right. And Wexner's position, you say you're concerned he could be lying. But his baseline position is that Epstein stole money from him, which is a crime. If you're following the money and you're trying to make a case, not investigating that financially provable or documented case is also suspicious for the DOJ. Congressman Garcia, appreciate you joining us on this very newsworthy night. Thank you. Nobel economist Paul Krugman will be here on The Billionaire Problem. That's coming up. And by the end of the hour, one of the top trial lawyers in the U.S. joins us from winning the Alec Baldwin case to clashing with ICE to representing the mayor of New York.

26:18Paul Krugman:Alex Spiro tonight.

26:23Ari Melber:I'm not here to talk politics. I was here to make sure that this case that should have never been brought ended.

26:36Ari Melber:There aren't a lot of functioning democracies around the world that work this way, where you can basically have millionaires and billionaires bankrolling whoever they want, however they want, in some cases undisclosed. And what it means is ordinary Americans are shut out of the process.

26:57Paul Krugman:That's what it means. The warnings about billionaires hijacking American elections, your voting power date back to President Obama there discussing the Supreme Court gutting what were legal limits on just how much billionaires could spend or hijack these elections. And the warnings were prescient. There's been a flood of corporate money going into these midterms. The richest 10 billionaires in the country mostly align with Trump and make it pretty clear this time around. Zuckerberg's empire is putting over$60 million just to back politicians who are allied with their plans to profit from AI, which may be unpopular if you held it to a vote given all of the risk and how it could cost people jobs.

27:40Paul Krugman:AOC also speaking out.

27:43Ari Melber:Extreme levels of income inequality lead to social instability and drives, in a sense, in authoritarianism, right-wing populism, and very dangerous domestic internal politics. And that is a direct outcome of not just income inequality, but the failure of democracies over decades to deliver.

28:08Paul Krugman:The arguments here are not about what to do within the system. Who should pay higher taxes? Why should so many billionaires pay lower tax rates than, say, you or their secretaries? That's within the system. The wider alert here is that the system itself may not function anymore if we call it a democracy, but it doesn't run like one. Economist and longtime author Paul Krugman says as we face an extreme threat from the tidal wave of billionaire influence. The Nobel-winning economist joins us now. Welcome. Explain your concern here. Okay.

28:44Ari Melber:So first of all, just look at what's happened in the last few years. We have, you know, X, formerly Twitter, was an important communications medium. Elon Musk bought it for$44 billion and has turned it into a cesspool of white supremacists, a lot of open Nazis, and that has really changed the discourse. We have Larry Ellison, who's only a little bit less incredibly rich than Musk, has, in effect, has bought CBS, which is being rapidly degraded. We've all been watching that story, and is trying to buy Warner Brothers, which would mean controlling CNN. So we have these individual, these are centibillionaires, people worth more than$100 billion, dollars, just buying critical institutions in the media space.

29:31Ari Melber:And then we have campaigns. Since Citizens United, which opened the floodgates in 2010, we've had just this incredible outpouring billionaires, mere billionaires. But that's a very small group. That's a few thousand people. It's not the 1%, it's the 0.002%, roughly speaking. Billionaires accounted for about 16 % of political spending in the last election. That's, you know, that's incredible. That's an incredibly tiny group of people completely out of touch with the concerns of ordinary Americans, and they have bought themselves enormous political power. And one of the things that's really critical here that's really disturbing is, you know, Citizens United didn't come out of thin air.

30:15Ari Melber:That was the result of a long campaign by billionaires. So what's happening is not only are billionaires buying influence within the system, they're also buying changes in the system that enlarge that influence. This is a catastrophic course. We're already well down the path to losing what America's supposed to be about.

30:35Paul Krugman:What does it tell you that they can't win in what we have been told is the, quote, free market of ideas, Professor? I know you like that one. Oh, yeah. No, I mean, it's... Go ahead.

30:48Ari Melber:No, I mean, this is, you know, if you're, if you do economics, you've known this for a long time. There's a lot of right wing. I mean, you know, there are people on the left, but right is, has where the world of money and power is. There are a lot of right wing economic concepts that just don't work. And the question is, why don't they go away? The belief that you get miraculous results from cutting taxes on rich people. Well, why does that stay in existence? The answer is, well, think about the rewards to anybody willing to espouse them. Think about how the system gets rigged. And then particularly, this is something new, what happened in 2024, there was a specific issue of crypto and the cryptocurrency.

31:26Ari Melber:They threw an enormous amount of money at not simply at boosting candidates they liked, but at torpedoing any politician who was mildly critical. That's going to happen again. The crypto guys are at it. And now it's going to happen with AI as well. So if you wanted to talk about pros and cons of AI, there's an interesting discussion to be had there. That's not what we're going to have. What we're going to have is a torrent, a tsunami of pro-AI money, pro-AI without any restraints, without any concerns about all of the various social threats it might pose. But they're just going to try and bury all opposition.

32:01Paul Krugman:And you mentioned conservative tech moguls trying to buy up media to change what people see and hear. There is news with Buffett taking a stake in the New York Times. How do you view those developments?

32:12Ari Melber:I mean, I don't know. I do worry. I mean, the Times, you know, I was there for many years and it's still it's a critically important institution, especially with so many newspapers dying. And look at what's happened to The Washington Post. I forgot to mention that. But look at what Jeff Bezos has done to the newspaper that brought down Richard Nixon and has now been gutted. And the Times has retained its status because it's kind of a, you know, there's the Salzberger family and the kind of noblesse oblige that the family has always had. To the extent that we start to get other people, even if it's Warren Buffett, you know, Warren Buffett does not appear to be a bad guy in the way that some of these other guys are.

32:49Ari Melber:He's not Elon Musk. But I think it's really disturbing that big money is starting to, you know, we don't have a whole lot of reasonably objective news sources left. And here we go.

33:01Paul Krugman:Yeah, and again, you have a legacy with the times, and you're saying that even though some might look at Buffett as different than those others, it still goes back to that tiny Uber 1 % control. And there were those who welcomed initially Bezos, and we saw how that's turned out. Professor Krugman, there's a lot going on tonight, but you wrote about this and it is a big deal, and I appreciate you giving us some of your views tonight. Thanks for having me on. Yes, sir. Thank you. So these days, you may have noticed our politics are full of legal clashes. Former New York Mayor Adams recently beat that case with the help of the super lawyer I told you about tonight, Alex Spiro.

33:38Paul Krugman:He's also fought against ICE for allegedly targeting individuals years back, taking those cases to court. When actor Alec Baldwin's freedom was on the line, he turned to the same trial lawyer. Spyro is known for mixing his Harvard-educated legal acumen with street smart skills and his brand of storytelling. I'm going to tell you, if you're interested in these issues and the law and politics, this is my special guest. He joins us right after the break.

34:05Ari Melber:I am intentionally painting a picture as I go forward that does not reveal everything at the start. I'm never going to say what ultimately the end of the movie is going to be. That wouldn't make for a very exciting movie.

34:23Paul Krugman:Welcome to the Summit Series with Ari Melber, where we go in-depth with leaders at the summit of their fields. Our guest is Alex Spiro, one of the most sought-after attorneys in the nation, representing billionaires, artists, actors, former New York City Mayor Adams, and other prominent figures. A former prosecutor with the Manhattan DA's office, Spiro leads high-stakes trials that make precedence and news. He won the dismissal of the case against actor Alec Baldwin over the Russ shooting. He's tried over 50 cases to verdict, with a winning record that has many legal experts viewing him as likely the top trial lawyer in America today.

34:58Ari Melber:The mayor's attorney, Alex Spiro. He's sort of part lawyer, part dealmaker, part fixer. The number one rule is that no one should ever know what I'm thinking. Jay-Z's attorney, Alex Spiro. The second thing is I am intentionally painting a picture as I go forward that does not reveal everything at the start. He claims to have never lost a case. I'm never going to say what ultimately the end of the movie is going to be. That wouldn't make for a very exciting movie.

35:26Paul Krugman:Spyro is a partner at Quinn Emanuel, known as a tough, untraditional firm where he co-chairs its investigations in white-collar defense practice. He's a JD from Harvard Law, where he also lectured. Alex Spyro joins us now. Welcome. Thanks. Great to have you. What do you like to do when you're making an argument in court?

35:46Ari Melber:I like to try to connect with the people I'm speaking to and make sure that they believe and understand that I believe what I'm saying.

35:55Paul Krugman:And you know you believe it because of the research you've done or the choices you've made and what cases to take? It's a little bit of both, but I wouldn't be standing there saying it and saying it the way that I am if I wasn't convinced. The New Yorker notes, you've never lost a jury case. Does that mean you're doing something different than all the other lawyers? I think there's a lot of things I'm doing differently.

36:17Ari Melber:I think I try cases differently. I think I put cases together differently. I think I look at people differently. I think I dissect people differently. And I think that combination of variables and some skill is the reason why my trials come out a certain way.

36:32Paul Krugman:Is there something where you're leaning less on the book smarts, even though you obviously checked that box? Well, I think I'm leaning way less on the book smarts.

36:41Ari Melber:Yeah. And so what does that mean? That's psychology? It's psychology, it's intuition, it's empathy, it's force of personality. It's being able to play chess when other people are playing checkers.

36:53Paul Krugman:Yeah. I want to turn to how you got to this chair or so many other chairs that are usually occupied by older people in the field. Sports is a younger person's game. Law is notoriously an older person's game. And so I already mentioned some of the accolades from others about who's choosing you and your level as a trial attorney. For a comparison that everyone can understand, if you go back to the so-called dream team, which has names that are recognizable to this day, Alan Dershowitz and others, the median age of the dream team was about 56. You're 43. Are you young to be such a sought-after trial lawyer?

37:37Paul Krugman:And how did that happen so fast?

37:39Ari Melber:I think I was younger to be a sought after trial lawyer at 35. I think I'm starting to get up there a little bit, but I guess I'm young.

37:48Paul Krugman:And when we go into these lawsuits and partnerships, the trial partners are 50s, 60s, sometimes 70s. Yes. So do you like that? Do you think about that? Is that not on your radar? I mean, you clearly are young for this feel.

38:05Ari Melber:It's on my radar so far as I'm glad I am where I am now because I can take a breath, look across the land and try to figure out what I want to do next. And so if I was still climbing the mountain to get to the top into my 50s and 60s, I wouldn't, I think, have the same view that I have now. And so I'm appreciative of that because it's going to give me, to me, it's given me a moment to pause and reflect. It's given me a moment to think about what do I want to do next?

38:33Paul Krugman:A lot of people in the country learn more about you during your representation of Alec Baldwin. I think it's fair to say that was a more known case of yours. Yeah. High profile. Certainly one of them. Yeah. And so this was a tragedy. You have someone who was killed on the set. And Alec Baldwin, ultimately, I'm simplifying on trial for involuntary manslaughter. And so let's look at what, of course, is a very difficult situation. Some of your trial advocacy.

39:02Ari Melber:this was an unspeakable tragedy but alec baldwin committed no crime he was an actor acting every other time you've been asked about this you've said it was an accident and now today at the trial of alec baldwin when you're talking to this jury you left that word out isn't that true not intentionally if you do not recall did the prosecutor ask you and you tell this jury that you were confirming that you searched and found every single live round. Why did you testify to that? I found what I believe to be all the live rounds at the warehouse. But that's not what you said. Actually, if you look at the boxes inside of that location, you didn't even search half of them.

39:48Ari Melber:There is zero evidence in this case that Alec Baldwin brought the live round onto set, correct? Correct. Your motion to dismiss with prejudice is granted.

40:04Ari Melber:How did you zero in on the key to getting that case dismissed? That case was always about how a live bullet got on the set. Prosecution thought it was about Alec Baldwin being reckless, Alec Baldwin having a big mouth, Alec Baldwin pointing a gun. But Alec Baldwin's done that. Actors have done that since the beginning of time. What was different here was really that there was a live bullet on the set. And so I made it my mission, the jury's mission, if they wanted to come with me, to try to figure out how that happened. And as that continued, that journey progressed, it turns out that the prosecutor was concerned about the same thing and hid evidence.

40:41Ari Melber:And that was uncovered in the middle of the trial and it disintegrated before the court's eyes.

40:47Paul Krugman:I want to go through our lightning round. this isn't a word or a sentence which i think you'll be good at because you're fast i knew i would be a lawyer when when i was going to go be a doctor and everybody said

41:01Ari Melber:you're no scientist you need to go be a lawyer before when i or when i saw a few good men well i and caffy you know that movie played a lot and and i think that subliminally i you know, I wanted to be Lieutenant Cavie.

41:16Paul Krugman:The last thing you should say in court is?

41:23I believe.

41:26Paul Krugman:The most important time to remain silent is? When somebody's self-destructing. A jury wants to hear? The unvarnished truth. Most overrated courtroom tactic?

41:42Ari Melber:the idea that on cross-examination or direct examination you should only ask methodical linear i know the answer to the question questions that i see pretty much everybody doing i think is a big mistake it's taught that way i think it makes it look staged uninteresting fake and does not lead to a compelling presentation or the search for truth.

42:09Paul Krugman:Opening statement or closing argument? He'll give me the close all day. Failure means? The necessary step to success. Success means? Take a beat, take it in, and find a new thing to be successful with. And finally, reaching the summit means?

42:34Ari Melber:You've got time to look at the trees and look at the horizon and figure out what you want to do next.

42:40Paul Krugman:Alex Spiro, thanks for being here.

42:42Ari Melber:Thanks.

42:44Paul Krugman:That's our interview with a lawyer at the center of it all. You can go see more at ms.now slash summit.

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