Senator Adam Schiff Rips Trump over Epstein Files

0:00Ben Meiselas:Donald Trump is panic posting on his social media platform the following. He goes, we had the greatest six months of any president in the history of our country. And all the fake news wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein hoax exclamation point. And he's still calling it a hoax, which is just a F you to the victims. It is such a despicable thing to call a very serious matter. Now, earlier in the day, Donald Trump was in the Oval Office with the president of the Philippines, and Donald Trump was asked about Epstein. A reminder, here's what he said. Let's play. No, that's no concern. He's a very talented person.

0:40He's very smart. I didn't know that they were going to do it. I don't really follow that too much. It's sort of a witch hunt, just a continuation of the witch hunt. But the witch hunt that you should be talking about is they caught President Obama absolutely cold. Tulsi Gabbard, what they did to this country in 2016, starting in 2016, but going up all the way going up to 2020 in the election. They tried to rig the election and they got caught.

1:09Ben Meiselas:And there should be very severe consequences for that. Let's bring in Democratic Senator Adam Schiff. Senator Schiff, you've got the House of Representatives going into recess because they don't want to talk about Epstein. You have Donald Trump saying that it is a hoax and that he's got bigger scandals that he wants the media to be focused on. What do you make of all of this? Well, it is incredible the way he is being consumed by his own mishandling of this whole Epstein business. And, you know, how they built this up among the MAGA base for years. And now Donald Trump's attitude seems to be nothing to see here, nothing to see here.

1:50Well, Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted child sex trafficker. Those crimes were real. There are detailed investigative files about it. And apparently Donald Trump ordered the Justice Department to deploy more than a thousand agents to go through those records and flag any mention of him. And apparently he's deeply worried about the release of those records now. So he's lashing out at the usual targets. I'm one of them. So is Barack Obama, to the point where former President Obama had to issue a statement today calling out this nonsense. But that's what Trump does when he's in trouble and he's in deep hot water over this whole Epstein fiasco.

2:30He tries to distract. So typical playbook. But this problem is not going away. Right.

2:36Ben Meiselas:So one of the things that Trump announced is that his Department of Justice, his former criminal defense attorney, who's now the number two at the DOJ, Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi, they're going to be speaking to Ghislaine Maxwell right now. This is what Todd Blanche said. And by the way, this comes right after the House of Representatives. Mind you, a Republican there, Congressmember Burchett, got a vote to pass in the Oversight Committee to get the deposition of Ghislaine Maxwell. So they get the depot of Ghislaine Maxwell in the House of Representatives. And then immediately Trump has Blanche and Bondi issue these statements.

3:16Ben Meiselas:And Blanche goes, justice demands courage. For the first time, the Department of Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask, what do you know? At Attorney General Pam Bondi's direction, I've contacted her counsel, meaning Ghislaine Maxwell's lawyer. I intend to meet with her soon. No one is above the law and no leads is off limits. You have Trump's former criminal defense attorney who we positioned at the number two now speaking to Ghislaine. That seems suspicious just a little bit. Oh, my God. So suspicious. And indeed, this was the problem from the very beginning of this Trump administration, Trump Justice Department.

3:53And that is when Bondi, who was one of his impeachment defense lawyers and Blanche, who was his criminal defense lawyer, when they were nominated to these high positions at justice, the questions we had for them are, who are you going to represent? Are you going to represent the public or are you going to represent the person of Donald Trump? Well, clearly this errand that the number two person in the Justice Department, Blanche, is going on right now is in Trump's, his capacity as Trump's criminal defense lawyer. He wants to know what this convicted child sex trafficker has to say about Donald Trump.

4:28and presumably she wants a pardon. And I guess Blanche wants to find out, you know, how damaging is what she has to say. Should they try to make it go away with a pardon? The whole thing just stinks to high heaven. And if they think this is going to make their problems go away, it's only going to make it worse.

4:48Ben Meiselas:You know, in that statement, in that post, this is the first time we've made contact with her. Nah, you prosecuted her. the United States attorney in the Southern District of New York successfully prosecuted. Trust me, they were in touch with Ghislaine's lawyer, right, in connection with the sex trafficking case. And by the way, you just fired the United States attorney who prosecuted Ghislaine Maxwell, the assistant U.S. attorney, Maureen Comey, James Comey's daughter, who you're now saying James Comey was one of the people responsible for this hoax. And so I'm like, you're kind of giving Ghislaine a golden ticket for a retron?

5:27Ben Meiselas:What are you going to argue? Oh, well, now the president of the United States is saying the dad of the prosecutor in my case created this whole case against me in order to help the deep state. You know, the judge may go, we can't believe what Donald Trump says anymore. But just think about it. That's where we are as a country. The judges, foreign country saying, yeah, we just we don't listen to his words anymore. That's exactly right. I mean, this is how perverse the situation is. They fired the prosecutor who prosecuted these traffickers, Epstein and Maxwell. And now they're making common cause, it would appear, with one of the traffickers, one of the co-conspirators, Maxwell.

6:08Well, that's how just crazy this is. But they're desperate. And there is obviously something Donald Trump is deeply worried about coming out in these Epstein files. There's no other possible or plausible explanation for this really erratic conduct. But I'm sure that Blanche is looking forward to this assignment of going to a prison to talk to this convicted trafficker. and how them appearing in cahoots now is going to help him with the MAGA base, I just don't understand the logic.

6:43Ben Meiselas:Because there's still a, I mean, you are a former federal prosecutor, so the grand jury testimony that they're talking about, that's a very small portion. There's Rule 6E under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure that's likely going to prevent grand jury testimony from being released, which they'll probably blame on the judge and go, it's a Democratic judge. But what people are asking for, right, is the file, the 300 gigabytes that and you as a federal prosecutor know this, right, that the FBI and the DOJ have because they executed search warrants on the island in the homes on Ghislaine's home.

7:18Ben Meiselas:There were wire intercepts of phone calls with Epstein and Ghislaine. So there's a file with video and phone calls that everybody's just saying redact the names of the victims and then just release the file. How easy would it be for them to release this if they wanted to, especially that they put a thousand lawyers on it at the FBI? If they put a thousand people on it, this would be very easy. And it would have been done by now if they wanted to release this. But you're absolutely right. This whole grand jury thing is a dodge. They know it will take a lot of time, and they're hoping that basically they can push this off.

7:49but they also realized the grand jury transcripts are going to go to essentially what they've charged Epstein with, some of the key witnesses, and what will be missing, what they're not going to show the public, are potentially hundreds and hundreds of what are called FBI 302s. These are the witness interviews with people maybe they didn't even bring before the grand jury because they went to maybe other clients of Jeffrey Epstein. So whether it's transcripts of wiretap recordings or whether it's witness interviews or documentary evidence, what they're saying is we're not going to show you any of that.

8:26We're just going to cherry pick some of the grand jury testimony. That's just not going to satisfy this pent up demand that they created among their base. So they might as well come clean. I certainly don't expect that to happen. But you can see how scared Republicans in Congress are over this. In the Senate, there was a unanimous voice vote to require preservation of the Epstein records and the Justice Department to compile a report. Republicans didn't want to vote against that. They actually didn't even want to vote on it. They let it go by voice vote. And in the House, they're canceling the rest of the session for July because they don't want to have to vote on this.

9:07But there's going to be no hiding from this issue. And, you know, notwithstanding Trump and all of these efforts at distraction, this is going to continue until they come clean.

9:19Ben Meiselas:Lastly, let's just talk about this administration six months in. Trump says we had the greatest six months of any president in the history of our country. The latest polling data shows that he's underwater in every single category. His disapproval has never been higher, including in his first term. The bottom has fallen in his support amongst young voters that 18 to 29 absolutely hate him as they're seeing, I guess, their future pulled away by the moves that he's making. So how do you contextualize where we are right now with everything he's done? Well, people in the White House think his numbers are bad now.

10:03Wait till they see his numbers after these health care cuts go into effect. And very soon, people are going to be getting notices from their insurers about how much their rates are going up. And in some cases, it could be by hundreds of percent because they're cutting these credits under the Affordable Care Act. So people are going to be getting those notices shortly. It's why Republicans are already starting to turn on their own bill. So those numbers are just going to continue to decline. And if he keeps with these reckless tariffs, the economy is going to take a body blow. And then his numbers are going to decline further on that.

10:40I would rather he not put the country through all of that harm. But he seems intent on it. And I'm not surprised. For our part, we need to be out there pushing positive change. I want the Democratic Party to be the party that is responsible for the next housing boom in America. much as after World War II, we built all these millions of houses for GIs so they could afford them. We need to do that again. So we need to push forward our own positive agenda. But the president's agenda, deeply unpopular, dragging him down and for good reason.

11:15Ben Meiselas:Finally, whenever I have a senator like you on here that may be seeing things that I don't see, are there any issues out there that you think are not being discussed enough or at all that weigh deeply on your mind or in the work that you're doing that, you know, in these interviews, you know, oftentimes the interviewer has a set of questions that they're going to ask, but that just that, that you say, I really wish that I was asked some of these questions because it's really important to the country right now. There are so many harms that are going on, but the ones that are most palpable to me, because we see them in my home state all the time, are the indiscriminate immigration enforcement actions, going into courtrooms where people are showing up for their legalization proceedings and then asking for those proceedings to be dismissed so they can be arrested and deported when they're doing exactly what they should do, now trying to get tax returns for immigrants, when we've encouraged people who are undocumented to pay taxes but now wanted to use those records against immigrants, The detention, arrest in detention and beating of the father of three U.S.

12:23Marines, a landscaper. The arrest recently of a man who worked in a car wash for 20 years, 10 hours a day. His daughter talking about her heartbreak. Our father is one of the hardest working people she's ever met. I mean, these stories of heartbreak are going on every day. And you talk about the president's numbers underwater in every category. They're underwater when it comes to immigration now. That was one of his strong suits. It is no more because all of us now are being touched by families that are being so painfully impacted by this heartless and indiscriminate action against people of no criminal record, except they're here undocumented.

13:04implemented. And that, you know, I know that has been a topic of conversation, but I bring it up because to me, it is among the biggest heartbreaks of what we've seen in the last six months.

13:16Ben Meiselas:Senator Adam Schiff, thanks for joining us as always. Thank you. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. The truth is more important than ever. Check out our new Truth Over Lies collection at store.midastouch.com. All 100 % USA union made.