Top Trump Official Admits to Visiting Epstein Island

22:08Ari Melber:And so should they have looked deeper at what is described as a surveillance system, the clear efforts to create these videos? Do you think that they've released all the videos that they had? No.

22:21Andrew Weissmann:So I think there's no question they have not done enough, and I think Congress needs to pick up the slack. One of the reasons I say that is Todd Blanch, in defending his sort of softball questions for Ghislaine Maxwell said, well, just remember, we didn't have all of those emails. For instance, the emails between Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell where Jeffrey Epstein says, you know, we haven't heard from Donald Trump. He's the dog that didn't bark. And she responds essentially saying, you know, I was thinking the same thing. And he said, well, I didn't have that. We didn't get that. So to me, what Congress needs to do is find out what is the nature of the investigation, what was done, what was not done.

23:03Andrew Weissmann:That, by the way, may cross Republican and Democratic administrations. So be it that this is what it means to do an impartial, unbiased investigation. But they should call prosecutors. They should call agents. To your point, they could call the staff of Jeffrey Epstein and Glenn Maxwell to find out where they interviewed, what information they have. And they can immunize Ghislaine Maxwell because she has taken the fifth. And there's a way to force her to actually testify, which prosecutors know, Congress knows, they can immunize her. And that takes away her Fifth Amendment. And then she has to answer questions.

23:43Andrew Weissmann:So if Congress really wanted to know the answers to her questions, they have the tools.

23:49Ari Melber:Right. You're giving that roadmap. And that raises a question of what they're really trying to do. They have lawyers. Some of them are lawyers. I wanted to get into that with you, that roadmap of what would mean to put pressure on Maxwell. So, Andrew, let's do that. Stay with me and we'll get into that after the break.

24:11Ari Melber:We're back with Andrew Weissman. Andrew, there's been a lot of pressure on what we're going to learn out of these Epstein files. Is it more than, as I mentioned, the period interest of this or that photo? Some of that real work is happening, and that's a credit to some of the serious people involved. You write that Congress can do more than what the Republican-controlled committee did here with Maxwell. Congress can, quote, grant her a type of immunity, so she has to testify under oath. Her testimony cannot be used to prosecute her further, with an exception. She's already serving 20 years. Immunity will not reduce her current sentence.

24:45Ari Melber:This is because you argue there is more to the story than what Todd Blanch seemed to get in his unusual political meeting with her.

24:55Andrew Weissmann:Congress called her to testify. And so presumably Congress wanted the answers. And Ghislaine Maxwell asserted the Fifth Amendment. And to be clear, she has a valid Fifth Amendment. In other words, she has an absolute constitutional right to say that she refuses to answer a question that would tend to incriminate her. And I think I could understand why she would assert the Fifth. We can point out that she didn't do that when she met for two days with Todd Blanch, but she still has a right to assert the Fifth Amendment. So normally you wouldn't want to give somebody immunity because you don't want to just be, oh, I want to give immunity to someone who committed a murder or someone who committed sex trafficking.

25:39Andrew Weissmann:You want to prosecute them. You don't want to immunize them. But that's not the situation here because she has been convicted. She is doing her 20 years and nothing about affording her immunity is going to take that away. And so the way that you can force somebody who asserts the fifth to testify is to say that we will give you immunity, meaning that we will not use your answers to prosecute you further unless you lie to us. If she were to then lie, you can prosecute her for that. And that time would be actually consecutive to her current time. So if they're interested in getting the answers, and presumably that is why they called her, not to just have a performative display of her taking the fifth, which I think would be improper because it's a constitutional right you have and there's nothing wrong with asserting it.

26:34Andrew Weissmann:If they really want the answers, and I think they should, and I don't think Todd Blanch, in my view, did a very good job of asking tough questions. We also have millions of documents now to confront her with key ones to ask for questions about what happened. They should go ahead and do that. And so I really think this is one where they have yet another avenue to do justice for the victims.

27:04Ari Melber:Yeah, I think you lay that out well, and it also speaks to what has been a clear breakdown in the system. Even Republicans, many conservatives have spoken out about how DOJ failed victims and didn't pursue these leads. That's partly under Donald Trump's DOJ. So here, not unlike the Jan 6 example, you have Congress using its subpoena and lawful powers. it could do more. So it's interesting you say that. People out there can listen and make up their own mind. Thank you, Andrew. For weeks, America has been roiled by those killings in Minnesota. Now, we should tell you, the DHS under Trump has finally had an official under oath for the first time as Congress presses on that.

27:41Ari Melber:We're going to show you what happened. And later in the hour, we've been talking Bad Bunny, waiting to hear what Jon Stewart said by the end of the hour. It was a source of incredible pride.

27:54Andrew Weissmann:It's a sense of unity, of purpose, and of collective joy that we haven't felt in a long time.

28:08Ari Melber:Trump's DHS officials under oath in Congress. This is the first such hearing since those two killings in Minneapolis and all of the tumult and uproar across the nation around these issues. So this is the head of ICE, Border Patrol, and the citizens of Immigration Services testifying in the House. They face questions about these tactics, about how agents operating under Trump's aggressive policies killed these two American citizens. The acting ICE director, Todd Lyons, making claims that actually are contradicted with our observable reality. You won't see ICE agents rolling through the parking lots and just snatching someone up.

28:55Andrew Weissmann:An American citizen shouldn't carry or shouldn't feel the need to carry. Let me tell you what. You have a little database of Americans? No, sir, we don't. I can assure you there is no database that's tracking genocide citizens. Yeah, why are you taking my information down? Because we have a nice little database.

29:16Ari Melber:We couldn't show you these Trump officials just speaking, because to only do that would be to seem to reward, potentially, what they're saying under oath. Sometimes contradicting other officials, so somebody must be lying because they're saying the opposite of their own employees, and other times claiming under oath things that are flatly contradicted by the videos we've seen, sometimes taken at risk by citizens to make sure people understand what their government is doing. That's the reality of ICE. There are more details emerging as well from inside the facilities, which under Trump have expanded both in how they operate and who they force to wait in there.

29:52Ari Melber:Take an Irish man who's been held in ICE for months. He's lived in the U.S. for over 15 years. He says he had a valid work permit. He's also the spouse of an American citizen. Ask yourself if the resources, let alone the cruelty, make sense in holding someone like this for this long. We're learning more about this because despite some of the lies I just showed you, the truth is still getting out. He called into a radio show in Ireland to recount what he's living through.

30:24Andrew Weissmann:The best way I could describe it is probably like a modern day concentration camp. I've been locked in the same room now for four and a half months. I've had barely any outside time,

30:36Ari Melber:no fresh air, no sunshine. I mean, everybody's hungry, everybody's tired. The toilets, the showers, completely nasty. Very rarely cleaned. It's a nightmare down here. This is a different approach to dealing with those kind of violations. If somebody has been here and there's a dispute about their work permit, spending this much money to then put them in those kind of cruel conditions is not how immigration enforcement has been done in this country over the years. ProPublica reporting now that they've published the letters from hundreds of minors and children detained in a Texas ICE facility under Trump.

31:12Ari Melber:Here's one by Maria, described as a nine-year-old girl from Columbia, writing, I've been 113 days in detention. I miss my friends. I feel they're going to forget me. ICE used me to catch my mom, and now I'm in jail. When I arrived every night, I cried. There are hundreds more letters like that. Immigration experts say these are policy choices, many of them avoidable while still maintaining safety in the United States. We're joined by Semaphore's Margaret Carlson. Welcome.

31:51Andrew Weissmann:Thank you.

31:51Ari Melber:I mentioned what the experts say and we showed the videos. There are many ways into this story with you. I want to discuss the human side, which is what these people are being put through. children, obviously, but many other adults not accused of any violent crime or other crime, except for whether they have legal status here.

32:11Andrew Weissmann:Well, and they're not seeking to find out because these are sweeps that go on. And they know, like the little children are being used to get at the parents, and then the children get swept up in the detentions in horrible places. And even though the children are sometimes released, the trauma of it, I mean, imagine your child being just taken off. And it's like these hearings don't really tell us anything we don't know. Like, we know enough now. Those people listening at the hearing, the members of Congress, they already know this. But they're caught between two places here, which is they're still afraid of Trump, but they're beginning to be afraid of their own voters.

32:55Andrew Weissmann:and there's some peeling off. And when you see it, when you're confronted with it, they must be feeling it. And they must be. And even if they have no feelings left, they do read the polls.

33:08Ari Melber:They read the polls. They're facing an election in eight months that on the economy, on immigration, which now Trump is underwater because people are very opposed to this kind of force, at least against Americans, killing Americans, whether they're reading the children's letters or not. There doesn't seem to be anything that Trump has a plan for on this other than trying to change the topic.

33:34Andrew Weissmann:No, and replacing Kristi Noem with Tom Homan is such a tiny increment better. And in that press conference, he never apologized to the families. He never did. And the only thing he said was, well, we'll make some improvements, But then everything can be improved. So he didn't even really make that admission. There was nothing in that to give us a real idea that there was going to be dramatic change or any change. I think he just took 700 agents out of Minneapolis, but it still left a lot of agents there. So there isn't that wholesale change, which would have been an admission by Trump that it was wrong.

34:18Ari Melber:And I mentioned there's complexity in immigration enforcement, but this is so far outside of the mainstream. We're not in those debates. This isn't like a path to citizenship debate. I want to show this NPR poll. We're told we're a 50-50 country on some issues. Not on this. 65%, including a large number of people who statistically would have been pro-Trump, saying ICE has now gone too far.

34:43Andrew Weissmann:Yeah. And now those who are going to be up, Trump's not going to be up, but they are. They have to be seeing this. And so, as I said, even if they aren't feeling it, their conscience doesn't bother them. They will. And they're creatures of their own reelections. So they may do that. You know, there's one other thing about Tom Homan. Do you remember the$50 ,000 cash in the Kava bag? Kosh Patel and Todd Blanch said they did an investigation in quotations, nothing to see here. And he kind of walked away without anything. I mean, if he had to be confirmed, could he be confirmed with that? What's going on there?

35:24Ari Melber:Yeah, I think I think these are, again, points where you have to stay on. And it may be that some of these things are delayed because the Democrats are the ones who would be investigating this, if anyone in the Congress. And if they get subpoenas, then they can. And people are skeptical and cynical and say, what does it matter? Well, we just saw Epstein files and a bunch of other things come down because the laws matter and subpoenas in court still put pressure, even as Trump tries against it. So I think that you're reminding everyone that's an open issue that's got to be investigated, at least to get to the facts of it.

35:52Andrew Weissmann:Because now he's, I mean, he's totally in charge. He's more empowered. Exactly.

35:56Ari Melber:Margaret Carlson, always great to see you this time in person. Coming up, something a little bit lighter. You'll never guess what Jon Stewart had to say about MAGA tears over Bad Bunny. Next.

36:12Ari Melber:We turn now to a development, including new evidence, as authorities still search for Nancy Guthrie, the 84-year-old mother of today's show anchor Savannah Guthrie, who is a valued colleague for all of us. The FBI has released newly obtained video. This is from the morning of Guthrie's disappearance. And the videos, as you see here, are from the door perspective. So you're seeing what is an unidentified individual with a backpack and a ski mask and gloves. and the individual over time tries to tamper with and obscure what was Ms. Guthrie's doorbell camera. Another video also shows the person approaching the front door at this earlier interval with their heads sort of down.

36:58Ari Melber:You can see that there. Investigators releasing images. One shows the individual with appears to be a holstered gun in the waistband. Experts have noted it's an unusual way to holster that gun in the front. The Guthrie family says that based on the images provided by the Sheriff's Department of Law Enforcement, which include, of course, the body type and a little bit of the face that's not obscured by the mask. They say they do not believe they recognize this individual. MSNOW is reporting that officials are also back in the neighborhood of Annie Guthrie, where they are searching around the area as they continue to pursue any possible leads, information, anything, as we look into the case.

37:41Ari Melber:We're joined by Rob Damico, MSNL National Security and Law Enforcement Analyst, who also has hostage negotiation experience, I should say, and has joined us for tough stories like this. First of all, welcome. Thank you. This is the kind of video that would scare anyone. We are not repeatedly playing it for no reason. We're playing it because both the family and law enforcement in one voice have said they're seeking any tip, any information that someone might have based on what they see here. It could be the hint about the individual. It could be that matching up some of this information with other things people know might jog their memory out there.

38:19Ari Melber:People can call the FBI tip line on that material we've had up on the screen throughout our coverage across the day. People might recognize an item of clothing, et cetera. What does the video show you? What investigative value is it?

38:35Andrew Weissmann:There's a few things. One, I've thought that they weren't as professional as I thought maybe in the beginning. I don't think he was prepared to cover that camera, to deal with that camera, as I thought in the beginning. So I look at it as he didn't come up with a very purposeful thing to cover up the camera. So it tells me that maybe the reconnaissance that I thought they did wasn't as detailed as I initially suspected. It talks about like he was prepared. Let's slow down on that point.

39:08Ari Melber:I'll let you continue. But you're making a distinction between, For example, we've dealt with people in criminal scenarios who might have some other background, training, or expertise. And in those scenarios, we've seen this in bank robberies. They might come in much more organized than what we see here with the plants and trying to obscure surveillance that could out them or their details. Is that the contrast you're making?

39:31Andrew Weissmann:Yes, absolutely. I do assessments where I actually test people's securities and stuff. And I know exactly how to do these things that go up. and some of the guys I work with, some on the covert military side. But there's also things that you can learn online and other such. And he just didn't seem that prepared for what he was dealing with, especially trying to get some vegetation to cover the camera.

39:54Ari Melber:Does that give you any clue or law enforcement as to whether he is a kidnapper for monetary reasons or has some other potential motive? Obviously, they look at all potential motives.

40:06Andrew Weissmann:I think you had to go in there. We haven't heard about much being stolen. I think you have to go in there with the fact that they're looking to kidnap this person. I don't think it was an opportunity that you had a woman who's 84 that wasn't very mobile. They had to have a plan in order to get her away from that house. It wasn't, I think, a robbery that went wrong, so to speak. I think it was intentional on this. He took the easy, put a mask on, wear gloves type of thing. But he also does it. The video does provide some really good things on that. Now they can compare to one. They can go, as you saw, they're going around the neighborhood, probably showing this picture just to get, hey, have you seen this jacket before?

40:54Andrew Weissmann:Have you seen someone of this size? They will probably come out tomorrow with some better measurements, height, weight type of thing. I think the facial recognition, distance eyes, I think I saw a slight mustache. His lips were exposed in one of those. He could have covered that even more. But they're also going to compare it now to all the other videos, like convenience stores that were around the area, trying to figure out if he had gone to a store or got captured on a camera in that jacket where he wasn't wearing the mask. Obviously, he put the mask on to go there. They want to get something now on a video that shows in a similar jacket or backpack to compare where someone's not wearing a mask.

41:40Andrew Weissmann:So there's a number of that.

41:42Ari Melber:Matching that as using other surveillance as a triage, and you never know what they might get, especially in a case of such widespread concern and interest. I appreciate you joining us. We're obviously all following this. people can call 1-800-CALL-FBI with the tip line. Rob Domico, thank you so much. We'll be right back.

42:09Ari Melber:As the week goes on, many are still in the glow from Sunday's Bad Bunny heartfelt performance, and it's dominating all kinds of discussion. The performer lit up the stage with dancing, culture, and history. God bless America. Sea Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia.

42:32Andrew Weissmann:The power line workers. That part right there was so beautiful because he's reminding people.

42:37Ari Melber:Esa canción celebra el respeto mucho. Seguimos aquí.

42:43Andrew Weissmann:Ahora sí.

42:49Who couldn't enjoy that?

42:51Ari Melber:take a break from daily life and politics? Well, some of the MAGA leaders. And Jon Stewart responded.

43:02Andrew Weissmann:You know, the right has a lot of balls complaining that Bad Bunny didn't do enough to unify this country when you only found out a few days ago that Puerto Rico is a part of it. Why the f... Is it the Super Bowl halftime entertainer's job to unify the country? Oh, isn't there another person whose job description is much more along those lines?

43:37Ari Melber:And as it happens, Bad Bunny did literally unify the country. It is now on track to be the most watched halftime show of all time, bringing a lot of people together to share something while others just, I don't know, complained about it. I don't get to swear as much as Jon Stewart, so that's the best I can put it. Thanks for watching. Hey everyone, it's Chris Hayes. This week on my podcast, Why Is This Happening? How to Stop Dictators.

44:02Andrew Weissmann:You have to make it clear to people who are in positions of influence, not just in government, but also maybe even in your local community, that democracy is at stake and what we do plays a role in the outcome. That's the only way that you get people

44:13Ari Melber:to actually take action. That's this week on Why Is This Happening. Search for Why Is This Happening wherever you're listening right now and follow.