Trump Deflects as Epstein Scandal Raises New Questions

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0:38Is that water damage? Who do I even call? That's where Thumbtack comes in. Just upload a photo or voice note and it uses AI-powered search to match you with the right top-rated local pro. So instead of guessing, you get clarity and can hire with confidence. For your next home project, Try Thumbtack. Hire the right pro today. The top story is one Donald Trump can't escape as he caps the worst start to a month of his second term. From the Dem wins to the Epstein email explosion this week, he is having a tough November. These new Epstein emails have upended the White House. And they're only getting worse because it takes time, even in our rapid information environment, for journalists and politicos and any citizen who wants to look and go through these 20 ,000 emails.

1:27All of this started when Democrats used their power to push the envelope and release some of the emails, the ones they said showed why Trump is hiding as they demand a vote to release them all. Republicans got mad, remember, in the week and said, oh, well, we'll release more. And so what started with three emails turned to 20 ,000. Tonight I have more details on how it's all going, because this is a vast tranche of documents, of emails that many people clearly, from the way they were typing to Epstein, thought would stay secret forever. Epstein made the biggest news, perhaps, from the grave, so to speak, with his now unearthed statement to Maxwell, a sex trafficker, convicted and in prison right now, that, of course, Trump knew about the girls.

2:09Donald Trump has denied any wrongdoing and has very specifically tried to deny that he knew what Epstein was exactly up to, although the Trump story on that has changed and that is getting new scrutiny right now. There is also how the Trump DOJ has dealt with Maxwell and her controversial interview with a former Trump defense lawyer who now is paid by your tax dollars to do the people's business at the Trump DOJ. But it looks like Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche may not have been doing the people's business. We'll get to that. But in this exchange from 2011, Epstein wrote to Maxwell Trump was spending, quote, hours at his house with one of the victims.

2:49Maxwell said she's been thinking about that as they said that Trump was a dog that didn't bark. That matters for many reasons, but specifically whether Deputy Attorney General Blanche is worried about later professional sanctions or misconduct or even potentially being disbarred if this is part of a larger cover up. It obviously contradicts what Maxwell apparently falsely claimed with no repercussions yet when she had her cozy interview with Deputy Attorney General Blanche just months ago. I think they were friendly like people are in social settings. I don't think they were close friends. I certainly never witnessed the president in any of, I don't recall ever seeing him in his house, for instance.

3:40something she suddenly says she didn't recall when the emails say she did. If the Trump DOJ were on the level, and this is now public, at a minimum, they would go deal with this with her at a maximum. Remember, even when you're in prison, if you mislead the federal government, if you provide false statements to a federal officer, that could be a new crime. And yet they're not obviously doing anything like that. They're giving her special treatment and a puppy in prison, and we'll get to that. Blanche says that for some reason, quote, law enforcement didn't have those emails when he did the interview.

4:13As I've reported to you, he said, when I interviewed Maxwell, quote, law enforcement didn't have the materials. Epstein's estate, quote, hid for years and only provided to Congress. That statement is highly suspicious. And it is now getting debunked by the Epstein estate, which says we hadn't received any requests from DOJ in recent years. Emphasis on recent years. I'll come back to that. But they say, and these are the ones who have been lately more transparent, of course, working for the Epstein estate sounds controversial, but Epstein's dead. These are the people who manage the estate. These are lawyers who have their own obligations.

4:48They are the ones who provided these emails. So they might have more credibility than Mr. Blanche right now. And they say tonight it's inaccurate for Blanche and Trump DOJ to assert the estate has hidden anything. And let me tell you a bit more about that. You might say, okay, Ari, with everything going on, why are we diving into a debate between anonymous lawyers or random obscure lawyers at the Epstein estate and the deputy attorney general? Well, the deputy attorney general is responding because he's under pressure. The interview, many legal experts have said, looked suspicious at the time.

5:22Now it looks like outright coverup, potential misconduct. And so he says law enforcement didn't have the materials. He tries to go after the Epstein estate. Maybe he didn't realize they would come back at him. They're saying his whole defense that they hit anything is wrong, is inaccurate. Another word for that would be a lie if they think he knows that it's inaccurate. But more to the point, they didn't use the underlying original nonpartisan career prosecutors who led the Maxwell case. That was suspicious. I pointed that out at the time. Those prosecutors probably know everything that they requested, including the first step you take in this kind of probe, which is to try to get emails and texts and you go to the telecommunications providers.

6:01You don't even need to get them from Epstein. We would know more about that if the Trump DOJ was on the level. And then remember, on top of that, they then fired the person who actually won Maxwell's conviction, Maureen Comey. So there's a lot more smoke here and a lot more questions and a real investigation can get to the bottom of it. Now, you might say, are we going to get to the bottom of anything? Seems like a lot of secrecy and a lot of corruption these days. Well, you're right, if you think that. There are a lot of places where Congress doesn't do anything, and a lot of places where Republicans won't stand up to Donald Trump.

6:34That is a well-known pattern. And yet here we are ending this bruising week for Trump with an unusual headline. Republicans revolting. Congress, which is controlled by Republicans, will actually hold this vote next week on releasing more of the Epstein files. Epstein accusers imploring lawmakers to vote yes. That's part of the public pressure. They write, there's no hiding behind party affiliation. When you vote, we will remember your decision at the ballot box. And there has certainly been a nonpartisan or transpartisan movement with growing heat to get to the bottom of this. Trump is trying to deflect.

7:10He made an announcement today that itself is illicit and suspicious. He now says he wants the DOJ to investigate whether there were other crimes or Epstein's relationship with Bill Clinton and other figures. And he names the bank, J.P. Morgan, tech entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and others. Just think about that. I know we live in cynical times. but if this government from the president on down thinks there was sex trafficking with any of those people or jp morgan which of course was very controversial in how it handled epstein's banking just think about what trump just admitted that they haven't really pursued that this is his doj he was in charge in the first term they could have looked at all of that that's when the initial Epstein case came.

7:58He's been in charge now, as you know, for this year. And yet that announcement, if you take it at its word, admits they haven't done it and there may be crimes and now they want to do it. That implicates Donald Trump, if you take him at his word. If you don't take him at his word and you think this is a giant distraction, an effort to use the real crimes and victims and sex trafficking that did occur in a politicized way to go after other people and distract from himself, well, that's even more disgusting and cynical. And if you know this program, I don't use those words often or lightly, but it is indeed disgusting.

8:33If you have an oath to uphold the Constitution and enforce the laws, and here you are abusing and misusing that responsibility to play political games, and your pawns or chess pieces in that are the women and girls who actually were the victims of these crimes, we do need to maintain our capacity both for outrage when it's warranted and a vigorous search for the truth, which is what the justice system is supposed to do. This is how it goes when Trump talks to reporters about this. Mr. President, can you respond to these Epstein emails that were released today? President Trump walked past reporters yesterday, as you see here, as they were asking him questions about the newly released Epstein emails.

9:17Mr. President, any comment on these Epstein emails, sir? Now, not a lot of response from a normally voluble figure there. The conservative Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch, says, as is so often the case, Trump has been his own worst enemy here. He looks like he has something to hide, even if he doesn't. Now, let me tell you a word about that even if. Even if he doesn't have something to hide is charitable. But he does have something to hide. He's in the Epstein files. He's in Epstein's secret emails to a convicted sex trafficker, Maxwell, to Steve Bannon. People are getting more details on those as everyone pours through what is 20 ,000 documents.

9:59Some of them are quite interesting. Some of them are random. Some of them, the House release involves public information like pages from a book. So you go through all this in the reporting process, but he clearly has something to hide because he's been fighting even this disclosure, which shows he's in the files. And he's fighting the next possible disclosure, which suggests he's in the files again. As for Maxwell, she has the audacity or the sex trafficking chutzpah to use this period to prepare to ask Trump to let her out of prison. something that would seem unthinkable unless you think, again, he would rather take the hit for that to maintain her as some sort of non-credible source to defend him.

10:39Unlike other prisoners, Maxwell already reportedly gets unlimited supplies, special treatment, quote, customized meals, personally delivered to her cell, a private exercise area, access to this much maligned service puppy. She says it's safer and more comfortable. I feel like I've dropped through Alice in Wonderland looking glass. I'm much happier and safe, is her statement on the matter. Trump said he would not rule out freeing her. Think about that. He's on the run. He's in the files. And now, having campaigned on both transparency of releasing the files and justice and saying this whole pedophilia ring was a bad thing, he is now still leaving the door open to freeing from prison the only individual ever incarcerated for Epstein's related crimes.

11:28Now, we've heard so many lectures about how nothing changes, and Trump has loyalty, and he likes to tell people he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it. Well, that may not be true either. There are some problems, legal and otherwise, that Trump's base has excused. But right now, I showed you the Wall Street Journal, I showed you the Republicans in the House who overrode Trump's strategy here of secrecy, and other members of the MAGA base are upset. Newsweek reports on the threat to the Trump presidency now looks unlike anything we've seen before. And over across the whole country, his approval is cratering MAGA loyalists concerned.

12:08Across the Republican Party, there are calls for more disclosure. The government will not protect the predators. There is just nobody in the electorate who is buying this. Trump could one-up him and say, well, Johnson wants to have the vote Wednesday. I want to release the Epstein files Tuesday. And he could literally be a hero.

12:26Emily Bazelon:I think it's a huge miscalculation. He's alienated a lot of his base with this, with his statement that you're no longer my supporter and you never were if this is what you're for. This is, again, just the beginning. Epstein is one of those stories with many layers. If you've watched this program, we one time did a whole long special report just going back to the original Florida case and then the timeline and then his history with Trump. And if we did that report for you tonight, we'd have to add 20 ,000 emails worth of more details. So it's complicated and it's long. And yet this week, Americans learned more about what Epstein was secretly doing, including his discussions about Trump and with Trump aide Steve Bannon and a bunch of other people.

13:13We learn more this week than we've ever known before, and it's bad, and Trump's in free fall, and that's just a few days in. Imagine what's going to continue to happen when you learn even more damning information, Trump continues his spiral, his cynical announcements, which may not be playing very well, and then you actually might get a vote to release the files. Buckle up. The story is moving fast, and we have two special guests when I return in 90 seconds.

13:46We are covering the fallout from the release of these 20 ,000 Epstein emails. The Republican speaker admitting loss, admitting a defeat here, overrode by a majority of the House. That almost never happens. And admitting he could not hold the secrecy dam any longer. There will be a vote to release the Epstein files next week. And as I've emphasized in our reporting, we're going through the material as we get it. But it takes time to go through this many emails. The details mounting are hurting Trump. and the DOJ. There are many different avenues to this story. So after quite a week, we've set aside a good amount of time here with the New York Times Magazine's Emily Bazelon and Semaphore's Margaret Carlson.

14:24Emily, I mention all of the complexity because people have heard the name Epstein in this story a lot. People are upset with Donald Trump's response this week, and it's still just sinking in that there is new material and how much of it there is. What do you think is the import of the evidence here. It certainly has not helped Trump's mode of defense and denial.

14:49Emily Bazelon:Yeah, agree. Epstein clearly thought that he could do damage to Trump based on all of these criminal allegations. We don't know from the emails that have been released so far exactly what he thought was damaging, but you can tell that he kind of thought Trump knew the score, knew what was going on. And also Epstein remains really fixated on Donald Trump up until these emails end. So you just get the sense of these two people really mattering to each other, of Epstein seeming like he is really tracking Trump's every move, trying to think about whether there's some way to leverage his relationship with Trump into a benefit for himself, even as Obviously, his own situation is getting darker and darker, given the criminal conviction that he's facing.

15:42Marga? When best friends break up, it's always a dangerous period for both of them. And you know how this died down for a while. And Ari, I was on with Bill Kristol the day that Ghislaine got moved. And we discussed, well, what does this mean? Well, it means he bought her off and she went to this cushy prison. She gets meals and she works out. That was something pretty major to give to her without getting something in return. And I think it was that conversation with Todd Blanche, who may someday pay for this, but she exonerated Trump in that deposition. So now we've moved forward and now the Congress has begun to break a bit.

16:32And clear to me that the House is going to vote for more revelations. And I don't know about the Senate. It seems to me it should be the other way around because House members are up every two years and the Senate every six. So it's not as if they're going to be faced, all of them are going to be facing voters and you would get some defections. But I don't know if they're ever going to find their spine, but there's enough out there. And, you know, for Trump, he should have faced this a while back. He's at a pretty weak moment, as some of your stats showed, to be going through this. And if I can quote a former colleague of mine, he said about the whole matter that it's like a disease, and I won't name it since this is a family show, that goes dormant for a while.

17:18It always comes back. and that's what is happening here and that's what's going to be happening to Trump for the rest of his term if he doesn't somehow squirm out of it now. That makes sense. And the standard here is not just simply whether there is a smoking grunt major sex crime on the part of President Trump. There are many bad things short of that that could come out. The claim by Epstein and Maxwell in private that he knew about this already contradicts what Trump later said and her interview, as we've discussed. The other material that he apparently doesn't want to come out could refer to other things that for a leader or a politician are very bad, even if, as we've been careful to say, he hasn't been charged with anything related to the Epstein pedophilia ring.

18:10I use that word because that's part of what happened. Then you have some people who in the MAGA orbit seem to already be trying to either minimize or soften the ground. I want to play, Margaret, what Megan Kelly shared, and she has a pretty large MAGA audience these days. Take a listen. He was into the barely legal type. Like he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realize this is disgusting. I'm definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I'm just giving you facts that he wasn't into like eight-year-olds. You can say that's a distinction without a difference.

18:46Emily Bazelon:No, it's not. I think there is a difference. There's a difference between a 15-year-old and a 5-year-old. That's the worst offense I've ever heard. He wasn't into 8-year-olds. Well, thank you for that. But, oh, 15-year-olds, well, that's okay. And, you know, remember when Matt Gaetz was trying to get off the hook, he said, well, I didn't know how, you know, that they were underage. And that's no excuse. You don't get off. because you don't know they're underage. You know, on Fox News, I try to listen every once in a while. They just, you know, they're right there. They come up with these things that don't make any sense.

19:30Like, I'm surprised with Megyn Kelly. She's smarter than that. But, wow, this is going to be hard going forward when your defense is, well, they weren't into eight-year-olds. And it makes you wonder... why that conversation is politically being floated, Emily. Megan says, and I have the transcript quote, I'm just giving you facts. No, fact check. She, by her own depiction, is not giving us facts. She says that she was quoting or sourcing to an Epstein ally. So it's not even facts. Now, sometimes when we cover a murder trial, we cover a denial, Well, we don't call that giving you facts. We just say that the defendant has their defense and will report what their defense is.

20:21So Megyn Kelly, of course, as Margaret said, she said she's smarter than that. I don't have her IQ reports, but she's an attorney. She's a longtime journalist. Sourcing the Epstein universe, whatever that means, is different than the actual facts. And how do you view this? What sounds like a political softening of the ground or an attempt to move the lines, Emily?

20:42Emily Bazelon:Yeah, I mean, let's just take a step back. Why do we draw the line at 18? Why do we worry about teenagers under that age being exploited? It's because teenagers don't have fully developed brains. They're perfectly smart, but they are not adults. And we worry about their impulsivity, their executive function function. And we just want to protect them more than we protect adults. And so to try to say that, you know, there's a meaningful distinction here that makes it somehow it sounds like more OK if these girls are 15. That's just really at odds with the way we've come to think about adolescence and how important it is to make sure that people who aren't fully mature and are not adults are treated with with some protection here.

21:32Emily Bazelon:So it's dismaying to hear anyone kind of blur that line. all right i think next week we're going to hear more excuses where they're going to bring up biden's laptop and the russian hoax and all kinds of things to try to divert attention but it's it's past that it's it's way past that i don't think that's going to work and saying like a six-year-old well bill clinton did it too is not going to is not going to work either Well, that goes, you mentioned Bill Clinton, and I reported this, Emily, and I think it's one of the challenges of this period is what you even address versus dismiss. But the idea that Donald Trump is admitting today that the DOJ, under his leadership, has Epstein-related crimes against children that they didn't bother to get into or finish the job on investigating, that's the claim.

22:29That there are somehow some leftover crimes they didn't get to, and they only want to deal with it now. I'll let you respond. I just want to show folks, here's A.G. Bondi posting online today. the deep department will pursue this with urgency i guess there's some orwellian lack of self-awareness with that word as she says with urgency and then in her memo remember the head of the doj said we conducted an exhaustive review of holdings related to epstein we did not uncover evidence that could predicate investigation against any uncharged third parties So, Emily, this is one where it may obviously be a lie and a distraction technique, but I think Congress would have to investigate all of this because you can't predicate an investigation on a lie, which is what A.G.

23:18Bondi now says she's willing to do. And the fact check for her lie would be her own memo, your breakdown of this.

23:25Emily Bazelon:Well, you're right. I mean, I think there's a feeling that they're being caught in their own web here. If you're the attorney general and you say we've already checked, there's nothing more criminal that we don't already know about. And then you say a few months later, with urgency, we're investigating. Well, you were attorney general all along. You could have done something about this since you were confirmed in February. But also the idea that Trump is directing a selective investigation of certain people as opposed to we want to get to the bottom of this no matter who is involved. We're going to tell you in an even handed impartial way what was really going on here.

24:05Emily Bazelon:How are the American people supposed to trust that? It is just already a setup to limit the investigation to the targets that Donald Trump doesn't personally like, which, oh, by the way, of course, he's not including himself, even though what has emerged in the last week does involve him. Yeah. And that's, Margaret, why there's nothing funny about any of this, but sometimes the the biting satire makes a different point. The Onion, many people know as a funny news parody site, released a whole video. And I can't do it justice. But in dealing with the absurdity, they have these fake, you know, mock documentary interviews.

24:48and the subjects say, you know, if only there were some evidence like videos of Trump and Epstein back in the day or documents showing that Trump was aware or if some women had come forward and credibly accused Donald Trump of this kind of conduct or if he'd ever admitted that this was how he viewed women and young women. And they go on and on. So it's satire, but I mentioned it on the news because they refer to a bunch of true stuff and they're sort of, the onion's tone is banging its head against the wall of, without prejudging anything, which is part of our jobs as journalists, the obvious smoking guns in public about both Trump's unsavory ties, this individual, his administration joining the cover-up, including the examples I just showed, and him acting guilty in public saying, we don't want any more evidence.

25:38We're afraid of evidence and facts. It is all out here in the open now, isn't it, Margaret? Pretty much. I mean, the Onion's job is too easy now because some of the things are so preposterous you can't have satire about them. And, you know, the House is going to vote to have more out there. Pam Bondi says, well, now she feels this urgency and she's going to cave, possibly. Her version, however, will be highly redacted. But as you said early, Ari, there are a lot of other versions of that material that can be had that aren't redacted by a Justice Department that's completely under Trump's thumb.

26:19I mean, it's scary about the Justice Department. You know, when I see something in the paper quoting the Justice Department, I'm thinking of a real Justice Department and not one where everyone's been fired that's ever possibly shown any interest in nailing Trump for any of this. Everybody there is on the take. So you're going to have to go outside the usual channels to get this, even when the vote is to have the Justice Department turn it over, don't you think? I assume Pam Bondi has had that black marker you can't see through. All my black markers, you can see the type underneath it, but not the Justice Department's.