New Epstein Video Appears to Show "Hidden Cam" Footage

20:25Gary Shteyngart:Thank you. And we, of course, will stay very much in touch with everything we're hearing from law enforcement. Appreciate it. Turning back to our ongoing coverage, we intervened for that at Breaking News. On the Epstein story, Gretchen Carlson had mentioned. the blowback on the right. Let's take a look.

20:47Gary Shteyngart:We're going to play six. If we have it.

20:55Gary Shteyngart:I'll read it. Okay. I don't, I don't, I'm not hearing anything. So sometimes, you know, that happens, but you can be Joe Rogan. Joe Rogan says the FBI concluded that Epstein wasn't running a sex trafficking ring for powerful men, he says sarcastically. And then he says, this is gaslighting, blank, expletive. And that sort of frustration that you're seeing on the right. And he is someone who has a huge influence there. Yeah.

21:20Ari Melber:Look, I think that the photo yesterday of Pam Bondi not recognizing the Epstein survivors who were in that hearing, that is going to go down as the death knell for her. And now we're seeing it also from people on the right who've been very supportive of Trump, who I think that that hearing really was the tipping point. She thought she was going in there and that she was going to be able to blow away, you know, all the people who are asking questions with, you know, bad information about them or whatever her plan was. But her audience was simply Trump. The problem is, is that what ended up happening, I think, was that she got a whole group of people who maybe were not thinking poorly of her, now thinking poorly of her, and really starting to question whether or not this administration is telling the truth.

22:05Gary Shteyngart:Here's that sound.

22:10Ari Melber:I ain't cutting Trump any slack now that we know that they've covered up the co-conspirator documents. Oh, FBI concluded Jeffrey Epstein wasn't running a sex trafficking ring for powerful men file show. So there you go. That's the gaslightiest gaslighting I've ever heard in my life well what do they think is going on just a bunch of fun uh guys hanging out there's other stuff in there like that's already being brought up that i would say is shocking to the conscience that trump called it a hoax shocking and vanessa it's a whole different world uh you have trump

22:46Gary Shteyngart:lying to people about what he said he would do in office um keen eagle-eyed news viewers will find And that is not breaking news that has happened on many topics. But you can see an almost passionate kind of revelatory anger about it here, which does show us something different about the podcast space. We're not, for example, with all due respect, seeing that same awareness of the evidence on, say, many of the Fox News evening shows right now. But there's something different in the podcast space where, as they're mentioning, oh, these are the problems in the facts.

23:22Ari Melber:Yeah, I mean, podcasters are allowed to say what they really feel, right? They are alternative media becoming mainstream media. And whatever you think about Joe Rogan, he doesn't like hypocrisy. And what's so clear here is that Kash Patel did not tell us the truth. Now, right now, they're trying to give us a million documents because they're trying to take our eyes off of Trump and what happened with Trump and Epstein. And that is very much still an open question and one, I think, worth answering. So there is a degree to which, you know, the play here was like, well, just tell them about all the other powerful guys who were involved in this ring and will confuse the situation.

24:07Ari Melber:But by redacting some of those guys' names, you know, you then know, well, we can't really trust even that you've given us all the names of the powerful guys. And by the way, what exactly is going on with Trump? Like, what exactly was the nature of that relationship in Palm Beach in the years when, you know, when Epstein was doing his worst as far as we know, right, in this country? So there's still so many open questions. And I understand they're trying to close the book, but this is not the way to do it.

24:47Gary Shteyngart:Understood. Vanessa and Gretchen, thanks for coverage on this across two blocks, as well as the other breaking news we had to, of course, cover. Thank you both. I want to tell people this is the week that Donald Trump tried to indict six lawmakers, six different lawmakers at once. He completely failed. We'll see if they keep trying. But it is the Putin playbook. There are questions about what we can learn from the way people are fighting back in other countries. And we have a Putin critic turned Trump critic, Gary Steingart, here for that special conversation coming up. But our next story is one that you might have been surprised by a couple weeks ago.

25:21Gary Shteyngart:The protests, the court pressure, it's working. The Minnesota ice surge is ending. Trump has withdrawn federal troops from other places quietly because apparently he doesn't want this retreat covered. We're covering it next.

25:41Gary Shteyngart:You know, sometimes with this government, the biggest news are the things they're not telling you. But it doesn't mean that we as independent journalists won't tell you. So here's some things that the government are not really promoting, but we've been able to fact check. Donald Trump is in retreat on more than one front in his sort of militarization policing agenda. Tom Homan, who was put into Minnesota after all those controversies and the two killings, is now ending the ice surge. They had already started to draw down troops. Now they're basically ending it. The agents that were added there will be gone by next week, and we've been able to confirm some of that movement.

26:18Gary Shteyngart:It looks like a clear victory for what was a protest movement in Minnesota, even against the threat and use of lethal force. It also shows how pressure is working, even as the Trump administration wants to sometimes feed a hopeless idea that they don't notice or listen to anything or they're permanent dictators, which they are not. As for Mr. Homan, we've invited him on the program recently, along with other border officials I mentioned on air. Right now, the Trump administration, DHS, the White House, etc., are not joining us or taking us up on our invites. They remain open invites to have the respectful journalistic dialogue that we try to do around here.

26:57Gary Shteyngart:But we have previously had Mr. Holman, who's at the center of all this right now, on the program. We talked about some of this pressure. Here's what he said.

27:06Ari Melber:We're going to keep arresting them and taking them off the street. That's what I meant. I never said we're going to violate a court order. I said we're going to continue doing what we're doing and taking these people off the street. That is what I meant when I said that.

27:17Gary Shteyngart:That's what you meant. Consistent with court rulings.

27:23Ari Melber:President Trump has said he will obey the rulings of the Supreme Court.

27:29Gary Shteyngart:Now, that's a good thing. If in the vibe or pause, it seems almost hard to say, that is a change. That's not even something we have to ask government officials, sometimes in other administrations, because it's standard. But here's the thing. While there has been a lot of attacks on the rule of law, we can report that the Trump administration continues to not only pull back on ICE, where they have some wiggle room, but also to follow some of the rulings that have clipped their authorities to overuse or misuse the National Guard troops. Now this has been litigated extensively, but we are now learning that pursuant to several rulings that were trimming this power, and it's complicated, the Trump administration started pulling back in January these mobilizations.

28:15Gary Shteyngart:They didn't announce all of it publicly. One account saying it was a muted retreat by President Trump. To look at the political science of all this, we're joined by Christina Greer, political science professor at Fordham, author of How to Build a Democracy. see. Your view on the link between these two stories both involve excessive use of militarized policing. Some of it, I have to carefully say, lawful. Some of what the ICE agents were doing was part of the authority. Some of it clearly unlawful. And the president doesn't want everyone to know that he's doing a thing that's actually what you're supposed to do, which is follow the rulings or pull out when the courts tell you.

28:52Ari Melber:I think the optimistic takeaway from this is when the American people keep their foot on the gas and keep pressure on their own elected officials, whether Democrat or Republican. They keep pressure on the media to keep reporting these stories. They, quite honestly, are brave citizens in Minneapolis and refusing to turn away when you see not just innocent people being killed, but when you see children being deported. A five-year-old in a backpack does not pose a threat to society and not being gaslit by this administration about, we're taking these thugs and criminals off the street. That's not what you're doing.

29:29Ari Melber:You're harassing, whether they're documented or undocumented, you're terrorizing communities. This is a form of domestic terrorism that this administration has been injecting in communities.

29:38Gary Shteyngart:And given how you look at these issues, what do you think of the shift in civic culture? Because what everyone thinks of Al Gore, he made a point of saying, I'm upholding a ruling I really disagree with. That was a good thing. Here, I just showed when I did have the border, what they call the border czar, a border official on, people can draw their own conclusions. You can tell me what you saw there, but it wasn't quick to say they follow court orders. And the president is basically trying to obfuscate that he is actually bowing to the authority of the Supreme Court on the National Guard.

30:14Ari Melber:Well, what we've seen, though, with this administration is no one wants to go against the president, even if it means bending or leaning against the line of legality, quite honestly. And so this is where you saw that tension with Holman. I think what's fascinating, though, is that we've never, especially those of us who study the civil rights movement, we've never gotten any progress without insider and outsider tactics. So when I talk about how to build a democracy, I talk about Fannie Lou Hamer and Barbara Jordan. Both of them understood that sometimes we have to work within the confines of the United States Constitution and the legislative branches and our state houses and put pressure on our governors and our mayors to uphold the rule of law and especially the court systems and not just the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well.

30:57Ari Melber:and also protest politics that we've seen in Minneapolis and also in Los Angeles and cities across the country to make sure that we've seen this president retreat before. And he doesn't like to make grandiose pronouncements like he does with everything else when he's, quote unquote, winning. But he has retreated and he does. He follows optics and he recognizes these optics aren't great for him, not now or in November. Right.

31:21Gary Shteyngart:Which speaks to people keeping their eye on the ball and not just falling into the trap of, as you say, the PR that they're pushing. I want to show this polling of young men. You teach young people. And, you know, bros are people, too. And a lot of attacks on the young so-called bros. But the bros don't even like Trump anymore. What do you think of that huge gap, disapproval among young men alone?

31:44Ari Melber:Well, I think young people are seeing what's happening to this country and to even the bros. And I have lots of bros who have been in my classes over the years. They recognize the tariffs aren't working. They have questions about whether or not Social Security will be there when they're of age. They recognize that, you know, where are the jobs and a myriad of jobs at varying levels. They recognize that this president keeps throwing things at the American people. So we're in a tizzy. And they also recognize some of the tensions that are arising that don't need to be there. I think a lot of young people are just sort of like, you were thrusting us into a chaotic world that actually, based on this president, this administration, doesn't need to be as chaotic as it is.

32:26Ari Melber:Exactly. Domestically and abroad.

32:28Gary Shteyngart:And that even bros may look at this year now. We've had an actual record of lived experience. It's easy to forget. And if you're young, people forget. You're 22. You were 18 four years ago. You might not have been top of mind politics. I think even the bros in your class, some of them might say this. This is Cap. Well, I ask them.

32:47Ari Melber:Would they say this is Cap? They might say that. I prefer that they use full sentences that I can that I can probably understand is. You know what Cap is. I know what Cap is. But I do think that, you know, as I'm trying to help them figure out who they want to be. Right. I've got three and a half months to figure out what you like, what makes you tick and what path I can sort of help shepherd you on. And a lot of them are very scared about what is out there.

33:13Gary Shteyngart:I tried to break you for a light moment. And then you're just being a serious substantive person, which is fine.

33:17Ari Melber:I'm a serious professor.

33:19Gary Shteyngart:But you know what Rich the Kid said?

33:21Ari Melber:What did he say?

33:21Gary Shteyngart:No cap in my rap. Goodbye, Eric. Tell your students we said hello. Hello and goodbye. See, we got to a point Christina wants out of the segment or at least out of dealing with me, which I understand. I respect that choice. Professor Greer, thank you. Up ahead, we are looking at specifically how Trump is following the Putin playbook, not in the abstract, not as an insult, but literally trying to do it and failing. Gary Steingart, next. Why have I asked my electrician I found on Angie.com to bury my pet hamster? I was so moved by how carefully he buried my electrical wires, I knew I could trust him to bury my sweet nibbles after his untimely end.

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34:51Gary Shteyngart:Here's a story that would have been probably unthinkable 10 years ago or even in Trump's first term. A sitting president tries to indict six members of the opposition party for their free speech. The reason you might not have heard more about it is that Trump failed. And yet his possibly unconstitutional effort to indict six Democrats is a huge story. It underscores the brazen attempts to abuse government power against his enemies list, something that is so fraught, Pambandi vowed under oath to not have one. Well, here you're looking at it. They have one. And what we're tracking here is that in many ways it keeps failing.

35:30Gary Shteyngart:That's the green. And yet, that's not a defense. It just means they are so extreme that grand juries and sometimes judges are getting in the way of this enemies list. Indeed, the people you see on your screen all have one thing in common, not their party, not their geography, not their race, but just that they dared to cross Donald Trump. That includes even his own former cabinet member up top, John Bolton, indicted. And it comes amid a broader crackdown on free speech in the second term, which includes people who are also on that chart, these two journalists, Lemon and Fort, and the raid of a Georgia election office with a possibly pretext of relitigating the 2020 election, which we know Trump lost in his term of office there over.

36:15Gary Shteyngart:Joe Biden served those four years. Everybody knows that. And yet the question is, are these armed FBI agents trying to create a precedent so they can seize more ballots in the future as we see abroad? as well as the militarized policing of American streets. Trump says it's about deportation, but many people see abuse of power there as well, with Trump using the IRS and other powers and not going to the place where the most undocumented are. We haven't seen an ice surge in Florida or Texas. The tactics are not all made up. This isn't just some brainstorm coming out of Donald Trump. Many of them quite specifically follow the sinister precedents of other countries, like the leaders you see here.

36:54Gary Shteyngart:Russia's Putin or Turkey's Ordoğan. Democratic guardrails exist. Some are holding. But critics warn the fight is ahead. He thinks he should be allowed to do and give whatever order he wants because he's a wannabe dictator.

37:14Ari Melber:Are we a dictatorship yet? No, but we're getting there. They were trying to send a message that if you oppose them, if you step out of line, that they will crush their political enemies. I think Trump is a dictator. I think he's on the road to being a dictator. Yes.

37:31Gary Shteyngart:This is not rhetoric. This is a real problem in America. And to look at the lessons from abroad, we're joined by an acclaimed novelist, Gary Steingart, who's also written extensively about autocracy in his native Russia. His latest novel is Vera or Faith, also acclaimed like his past novels. And Mr. Steingard has noted that he he was a Putin critic and he's a Trump critic, often for the same reasons. Your thoughts right now?

37:57Ari Melber:Yes, it's interesting. I mean, there are the authoritarian playbook is only so big and has only so many moves. And these moves seem to be followed throughout history over and over. And I think Trump, either instinctively or I don't know how much he reads of history, but he's able to access or his cronies are able to access almost every level of this. Putin is a wonderful example. You know, there's so many similarities. The only thing I would say is that Trump is moving a lot faster than Putin did. It took him or at least a decade to achieve the kind of control he achieved over Russia, ultimately.

38:32And let me say, we hear a lot of comparisons.

38:35Gary Shteyngart:People love to compare to other random places. But when you say that, you're talking about something you lived with and then followed from abroad. And you're saying you literally think Trump is moving us faster than Putin declined Russia.

38:49Ari Melber:Absolutely. You look at several things that are happening. I just did a book tour across the country. One thing everyone is thinking about is ICE. ICE is on everyone's mind because it is a militarized paramilitary force in the middle of our cities. Putin had pioneered this quite a while ago, as had other authoritarians. In Russia, it's called Roskvarty, the Russian National Guard. It reports almost directly to Putin, and it basically acts as a Praetorian Guard. It has, I guess, its mandate is fighting terrorism or some such thing, the same way ISIS mandate is to round up supposedly so-called illegal citizens.

39:24Ari Melber:But both of them act as a kind of guard that can do anything because, you know, the Constitution isn't something, isn't a lodestar for either entity. They look toward their ultimate leader, which is Putin or Trump.

39:36Gary Shteyngart:When you look at the target lists, so much dystopian literature, which is, of course, still drawing on reality, looks at the unfairness and insanity of being in a show trial or not knowing what you're accused of or these fundamental rights. So we'll put back up these faces on the screen. We're talking about veterans. We're talking about people who have a lot of cred. We're talking about the Fed chair who's an elite. I think we have this. We're talking about, yeah, you know, Jerome Powell. What does he have to do? What does he have in common with Don Lemon and a House candidate most people haven't heard of?

40:10Gary Shteyngart:Right. Talk to us as we look at this list about what it echoes from other places, where even without convictions, this is designed to intimidate and chill.

40:22Ari Melber:Absolutely. Look, I was mentioning the ICE version, Roskvardia. One thing they did after the Ukraine invasion was that they were used specifically to break up anti-war protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And, you know, you ask what would happen to people who protest Putin. Well, they probably wouldn't be going through a judicial process. They'll be out of a window, thrown out of a window or encounter something called polonium. But I think the idea is very similar. You don't you self-censor. You know that if you get on Putin's problematic list that you're done for one way or another. The judicial process is already predetermined if that's what they want to do.

41:00Ari Melber:You can look at someone like Alexei Navalny, right, who was a politician who protested to Putin and ran for office and he was eventually killed in a jail, in a gulag type situation. So I'm not saying Putin, sorry, I mean Trump. I'm not saying Trump has reached all of these limits yet, but he's trying. He's clawing his way toward them very, very quickly. And I think he feels that if, you know, if things go against him, whether at the midterms or after he's out of office, if he leaves office, right, that things, the repercussions for him for after all of the lawlessness that has proceeded the last year will catch up with him.

41:36Ari Melber:So just like Putin is aware that this is an existential question.

41:39Gary Shteyngart:So I think it's Trump. You see rich and powerful people who have a life they want to protect often go along. And we've seen that in some of the countries you named. Do you think that's happening here in America? Of course. Of course.

41:52Ari Melber:Look, I teach at a certain university uptown, which has a deal with the Trump administration. You could look at that with, you name it, law firms. Every sector of society is worried. Nobody wants to lose their privileges. There's a great book called The Oppermans. It's a novel, and it was written in the early 1930s by a Jew living in Berlin. And it's about the same thing. It's about all the compromises that elites will make in order to stay on the dictator's good side just as he's rising through power. So, again, there's absolutely nothing new under the sun here. It's almost the same thing over and over.

42:26Ari Melber:Trump adds a little bit of clownishness to it because he's kind of, in some ways, a failed Borscht Belt comic. But there's other aspects to it, too. You know, Mussolini was also a clown. You know, he would strip his shirt off, which thankfully Trump will never do. But, you know, he would do these ridiculous things, say these ridiculous things just to keep people's attention.

42:45Gary Shteyngart:Yeah. And in conclusion, since you are a novelist, the key to a good story is.

42:54Ari Melber:Well, it's really funny because people keep asking me, like, what is the great Trump novel or the great Trump art? And I always say it's crazy. It's the Sopranos, you know, and that's the key to it is to have. to take somebody who is like Trump, a complete disaster, but to make a three-dimensional character of them. And nobody's done that to Trump yet, sadly.

43:14Gary Shteyngart:Well, and there are lessons about that in history because even in different places, history follows human psychology. And whether you call it bullying or threatening, intimidating, or in some cases, sadly, violence and killing, it does work in the short run. That's the tragedy. It often fails in the long run because you can't threaten everybody. We're out of time unless you have a sentence.

43:35Ari Melber:I just want to say thank you to the people of Minneapolis. They are a hero city and they are, they've changed the lives of so many people because we know that as a community, we can, we can stand up and fight.

43:48Gary Shteyngart:A fitting final note from Gary Steingart. We'll be right back.

43:58Gary Shteyngart:of all the stories we've covered today we haven't hit the economy and here's a comparison in biden's final year there were about one and a half million jobs added in trump's first year now under 200 000 you can see the big gap trump is spinning this as he's still proud of what's happening at what point are we in the trump economy oh i'd say we're there now i'm i'm very proud of it. Jobs are down, layoffs are up, and prices are high. That's what he's proud of, and we'll see how that plays. We'll be right back.

44:35Gary Shteyngart:We end tonight with a question for you, given everything we've covered. Are these protests and pushback working? You can tell me online at social media, at Ari Melber, across any platform you use. I'm still basically on most of them at Ari Melber. Connect with me on Instagram. Follow me. Message me. Are the protests working? You can always also connect with me at Ari Melber dot com. Why have I asked my electrician I found

44:57Ari Melber:on Angie dot com to bury my pet hamster Nibbles in our yard for me? Because I was so moved by

45:02Gary Shteyngart:how carefully he buried my electrical wires. I knew I could trust him to bury my sweet Nibbles after his untimely end. Huh.

45:09Ari Melber:Nibbles. Gone too soon. May he scurry in peace. Hey, sorry about your pet, but I just wire stuff. Nibbles would have loved you like a brother. Connecting homeowners with skilled pros for over 30 years. Angie, the one you trust to find the ones you trust. Find pros for all your home projects at Angie.com.