How the Epstein files have turned MAGA against Trump

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1:02success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration. Who is Trump kidding? Everyone in his orbit wants to talk about Jeffrey Epstein. No one seems to understand why this promised file has miraculously disappeared. And having promised so much for so long, how are they going to get away with telling the MAGA base, the lovers of conspiracy theories that there is nothing whatsoever to see here. Welcome to the News Agents USA.

1:43It's John. It's Emily. And you wouldn't be a conspiracy theorist if you didn't think that it was really dodgy when your conspiracy theory disappeared overnight. But that is essentially what has happened for the millions of MAGA fans who believed Donald Trump when he said he was going to release not just files into JFK, not just files into MLK, their assassinations, but also into the client list held by one prolific paedophile, Jeffrey Epstein. And over the past weeks and months, Trump has been saying, oh, yeah, we'll get round to it. Pam Bondi, the attorney general's got the list on her desk. It's going to be released.

2:30Suddenly, an investigation has come back from the Department of Justice, from the FBI, and it says there's nothing to see here. There is no Epstein client list and the MAGA base is up in arms. So they've said two things. They've said there is no client list and Epstein's death was suicide. There's no doubt about it, even though there is a missing minute on the video, which I'm sure the conspiracy theorists who are unpersuaded will cling to. But Pam Bondi, the attorney general, she tried to set out where we are now and why there is no cover up. In February, I did an interview on Fox and it's been getting a lot of attention because I said I was asked a question about the client list.

3:17and my response was, it's sitting on my desk to be reviewed, meaning the file along with the JFK, MLK files as well. That's what I meant by that. Also, to the tens of thousands of video, they turned out to be child porn downloaded by that disgusting Jeffrey Epstein. Child porn is what they were. Never going to be released, never going to see the light of day. To him being an agent. I have no knowledge about that. We can get back to you on that. And the minute missing from the video, we released the video showing definitively the video was not conclusive, but the evidence prior to it was showing he committed suicide.

4:05And what was on that, there was a minute that was off the counter. And what we learned from Bureau of Prisons was every year every um night they redo that video it's old from like 1999 so every night the video is reset and every night should have the same minute missing so we're looking for that video to release that as well showing that a minute is missing every night and that's it on epstein so to understand why maga is so outraged i guess you have to think about two things one as explained they love a cover-up. They love a conspiracy. They really wanted to get to the bottom of this. They thought Donald Trump was their man.

4:43But B, they think it goes back to a pre-Trump time, specifically to a Clinton time, maybe a Clinton's time, to something that reminds them of the Pizzagate conspiracy. They think that there are many senior Democrats that were on Epstein's list, and they think that they need to get to the bottom of that too. Now, I should say, hands up, I have no idea if there ever was an Epstein list, if there wasn't an Epstein list, or if that list has been conveniently disappeared so as not to embarrass senior members of the Trump administration. But you just mentioned the Pizzagate conspiracy, which was that there were a whole bunch of children who had been kind of sex slaves in the basement of a pizza joint on Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC.

5:34And someone believed it and went there with an AR-15 assault rifle fired into the ground one round and said, I'm here to free the children from the basement. From Hillary Clinton's clutches. From Hillary Clinton's clutches and John Podesta, the chief of staff's clutches. The basement, there was no basement at this pizza restaurant. There were no children to release after all. And so you get these things that become so established, like they must be fact, like there must be a client list. Probably right that there was no client list. But But when you have been part of Trump land and you have been talking up endlessly, endlessly, endlessly that there probably is such a thing and there was all sorts of skullduggery going on.

6:12And these were bad people and they were all in on it. And the Washington swamp were part of this ring of deceit and paedophilia and all the rest of it. For Donald Trump then to come out and say, yeah, no, there's nothing here. It's a really hard sell when you've raised expectations over so many conspiracies that there is something deeply dark going on. Just listen to one big believer in the Epstein list. His name is Kash Patel, and this is him in 2023, speaking to the MAGA influencer, Benny Johnson. You say that the FBI has Epstein's list. They're sitting on it. That doesn't seem like something you should do.

6:51You're protecting the world's foremost predator. that seems like an evil thing to do, regardless of who may be embarrassed in the release of that list. Why is the FBI protecting the greatest pederast, the largest scale pederast in human history? Simple, because of who's on that list. And Kash Patel today is, roll of drums, the director of the FBI, the man who has said, there's nothing to see here, move along, there is no client list, There was no murder. It's all perfectly in order. Please, please don't detain yourself any longer with this. And so Benny Johnson, who we heard there asking the question to Kash Patel, has lost it, has lost it and is pretty damn unimpressed.

7:35It's a crisis. There's a crisis. And it's a tough crisis because something is horribly wrong here. For months, we heard that the Epstein list was sitting on the desk of officials like Pam Bondi. so we know that there are voluminous mountains of evidence that we haven't seen as the American people and yet the feds came out with a massive whitewash of all of this and released it to liberal media it almost as an insult to everybody who's been following this story and they just don't know the time that's my take they don't understand what time it is they thought that they could just like brush this under the rug and that people don't care people do care we care if our nation is run by a predator cult.

8:23That's important to know. And are those predators given free passes? Epstein certainly was. And so it's wild. It is blowing up. It is a nightmare, truly. And I'm a massive fan of the Trump administration. A lot of these people are my friends. This one was wrong. They got this wrong. And Laura Loomer, famous friend of the president. She is eating cats and dogs. Yeah. She says that Pam Bondi, the attorney general, ought to be sacked as a result of this. So you've got... Where do you stand? Do you think this has been hushed up or do you think there is no client list? Well, my view on life generally tends to be that things are cock up rather than conspiracy.

9:04And that probably would Epstein have kept a client list? I mean, it's a very murky story. But you kind of think, I mean, who do you believe? That's the beauty of this story, isn't it? The problem is when the people who are asking you to believe it's civil war are the people who have been the ones who have propagated every conspiracy theory before. You think they must be lying. And they've got a reason because something very dark is on that list. And remember, of course, Elon Musk saying that the reason this hasn't been revealed is that Donald Trump's name is on it. Well, joining us now is Anna Merlin.

9:38She's the senior reporter at Mother Jones. And she covers a lot of disinformation tech and is the author of Republic of Lies, a book about conspiracies and the way they have often held the American right in their sights. And I guess, Anna, the big question is, what were people expecting to see when we talk about this Epstein list? Just help us visualize what that was or what people were anticipating. Yeah, a lot of people, especially in the MAGA movement, believed that there was a discrete list of people who not just associated with Jeffrey Epstein, but took part in sex crimes against women and girls with him.

10:16And specifically believed that this list would contain the names of powerful Democrats and people on the left. And this became such an ingrained article of faith that it was mentioned, joked about for years and was a pretty key campaign promise for Donald Trump and for his proxies, you know, that when he returned to office, he would reveal the names on this list. Which makes it all the more difficult for him to turn around and say, this is a nothing burger. There is nothing here at all. Yeah, it's a pretty striking position for him to be in and for people in his administration like Dan Bongino and Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, you know, all of whom had been pretty encouraging about this idea that Epstein's associates were going to be brought to light and brought to justice.

11:05So, yeah, it is a very uncomfortable and unusual position for them all to be in right now. What difference does the list itself make? I mean, the rumors have circulated for many years in terms of who Epstein's clients, the rich and powerful, might have been. I mean, would this have been proof that wasn't found in his little black book? Or why would this have made a difference? Right. Well, I mean, the book obviously was an address book, right? And it named some of his very powerful friends and associates, but also people like his gardener, you know, his dry cleaner. Mother Jones, where I work a few years ago, an author and filmmaker called everyone in the book.

11:42And it, you know, contained a pretty diverse cross section of people. But, you know, in the US, as I imagine, in the UK, there is a huge across the board desire for anyone who participated in these crimes alongside Epstein to be brought to justice, to be prosecuted. And this is something specifically that the MAGA right has talked about for years as something that they think is incredibly important. They've accused the Biden administration of not doing enough. I mean, they really wanted to see prosecutions and really believed that it was about to happen. So this is very difficult for them to take in and metabolize that it's not going to happen.

12:19One of the things that has always struck me about the support that Donald Trump enjoys, that if he tells his supporters that black is white or white is black, they believe him. You know, they want to believe anything that Donald Trump has said. And he's always gone on and said, look, if you want to hear the truth, it comes from my lips. You don't listen to anyone else. Is there a kind of a dissonance now for his supporters where they think, well, yeah, that's what we want to do. But we can't because you've told us that there was something to see here. Yeah. Yes. This is the most extreme example I've ever seen of that happening.

12:56People are really having trouble making sense of this. And that includes very prominent conservative influencers and self-styled journalists who were part of a previous stunt in February where they were given these binders by Attorney General Pam Bondi that she claimed contained new Epstein information. And of course, none of it was new. But some of those people, Liz Wheeler, who's a right-wing influencer, Jessica Reed Krauss, who's another right-wing influencer, saying that they feel this sense of betrayal. that this has not happened. And yeah, as you say, Donald Trump has long styled himself as the only person telling the truth, the only person who's not hopelessly corrupted, the only person who will give them what they want.

13:40And so now it is, yeah, I think a very unusual position for them to say that they feel betrayed by the Trump administration. I've never really seen it happen before. So let's just knock one more conspiracy theory on the head, Anna, because there's the video doing the rounds saying that Steve Bannon went to see Epstein before he was in prison, before he died. And there are the questions, I guess, at the center of this of whether Trump was or wasn't on, you know, Epstein's books, the whole claim that Elon Musk made when they sort of broke up. I mean, do we think that Trump himself was a client of Epstein in any shape or form?

14:19Is that why this story has gone away? Or is that complete nonsense? So we do know that Trump and Epstein knew each other socially, right? And Trump gave a pretty infamous quote to New York Magazine in 2001, 2002, I would say, about Jeffrey Epstein being a great guy who enjoys his social life and likes younger women. You know, he gave this very jocular quote, but yeah, there's no evidence that Trump, for instance, participated in sex crimes. This is something that he has angrily denied that his son, Donald Trump Jr. has angrily denied. They've said, you know, don't you think if there was any evidence of this, that the Biden administration would have charged President Trump for it, which is probably right.

15:05But yeah, this was a claim advanced by Elon Musk after he left Doge when they were having their online tiff, you know, that the files had not been released because Donald Trump was in them. That was the allegation that Musk made. And so obviously, that's recirculating a little bit, but I'm honestly seeing much more kind of out there ideas circulating that don't involve having to implicate President Trump, which I think would be a bridge too far even, you know, for MAGA. Yeah, too complicated. Yeah. But Anna, I just wonder, I mean, you know, you've made your study of conspiracy theories of the right.

15:40I wonder whether the left are now thinking, hang on, hang on. If the Trump administration are burying this, I bet there's more to see here. And then it's self-serving that they're saying there is nothing of it. I bet you there is something dark. And then there is a list. I just wonder whether conspiracy theories, a hydra headed monster and you cut off one head and another head pops up. And I just wonder whether you're now going to get conspiracies from the left. Well, that was that was common for years. I've covered conspiracy theories in American society more generally for a long time. And I would say that conspiracy theories about Epstein are just as common on the left as on the right, because the most, let's call it charitable view of the situation is that a very wealthy billionaire pedophile was given a sweetheart prosecution deal in 2008.

16:30He served almost no time and then went back to socializing with some of the richest and most powerful people in the country and in the world. It is definitely an indictment of what the American justice system holds itself out to be. And it is certainly a very unflattering portrayal of some of our most rich and powerful members of society. So yeah, there have been conspiracy theories or suspicions on the left, on the right, and everywhere else in American society for years about who else knew about what Epstein was doing, participated in it alongside him. This is a very common belief in American society.

17:09But unlike the MAGA right, the left is not feeling a sense of betrayal because they didn't believe ever that Donald Trump was going to be the person to bring this to light. They don't have that kind of almost religious faith in him. Anna, thank you so much, Anna Merlin. Thanks for your time this afternoon. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. After the break, we're going to be looking at ICE, the immigration officials. Why are they looking more and more like Donald Trump's secret militia?

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18:42The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. Welcome back. We have breaking news here. This is in MacArthur Park. Scott Reif is in Air 7 HD. And Scott, we have a lot going on. We haven't seen much in the way of detentions at this point. This is MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, where the most astonishing scene unfolded in a park that was, broadly speaking, empty. There was a line of ICE officers on horseback. The Humvees came in. You remember those vehicles that were made famous during the Iraq War with ICE officers, immigration control agents, who have got their faces completely covered.

19:24They're wearing dark glasses. They look like a militia from some Latin American Timpot dictatorship. And they are looking for anyone whose skin might be a little bit brown. And there are huge numbers of them sweeping through this park, apparently in an attempt to round up illegal immigrants. Yeah. And this is a scene that is playing out more and more across America right now, because under the Trump White House, Immigration Customs Enforcement, the ICE agents are trying to deport a million immigrants a year. And that means they're aiming to make some 3000 arrests a day. And don't forget, this was the platform on which Donald Trump stood for election.

20:11I was in the hall when he was talking about mass deportation and everyone around me was waving signs, holding up their banner signs, their slogans saying mass deportation now. So there has been no secret about the fact that this was a Trump priority. And there has been no secret about the fact that the people who voted for him wanted to see this. But this is what it looks like in action now. Now, as you've said, there are people coming in to detain farmhands, to detain people working in the meat processing plants, garment industry, construction workers, graduate students. We've talked, for example, about Kilmar Albrego Garcia, the man picking up his child from work in Maryland, who suddenly found himself swept off his feet and sent to El Salvador.

21:01And then the government has now had to retract that and say it was a mistake. People who've turned out, in other words, to be innocent of whatever they were being arrested for. Even the mayor of Newark in New Jersey found himself arrested and detained when he was standing outside on these detention facilities to protest against it. He was, as it were, rounded up and pulled into custody. And the way this is being done now, as you said, is with complete anonymity. ICE agents are masked. Sometimes they're wearing ski masks. Sometimes they're wearing half masks. But they're basically wearing masks to stop being detected.

21:42They say, well, their bosses say, because they don't want to be doxxed. They don't want to be exposed. Names, addresses in the public and all the rest of it. But at the moment, they're looking kind of like a masked militia, like a secret police of the kind that you do not associate with America. You do not associate with Western democracies. Well, you know, if you see a policeman in the UK, they will have their name or if it was a military person, they'd have their number or whatever. Body cam. You know, there is a degree of accountability that goes with being an official. And it just seems that ICE stand outside the ordinary conventional policing methods, even in America where, you know, yes, there's always been policing by force in America.

22:27It always has been in the sense that they carry guns, they will produce their weapons very easily. whereas in the UK we talk about policing by consent. That's why the average Bobby on the beat does not have a gun with him. But what you've seen in the Trump presidency is what he promised to a large extent. But it was always said that the focus would be on those who've got a criminal history, that we want to get out rid of, first of all, of the illegal immigrants who are the rapists and the murderers and everything else. And not only Republicans signed up to that, Huge numbers of Democrats wanted that to happen as well.

23:02And there was a broad feeling that the Biden administration had been too weak. But the numbers of people who are legally in the US are also being picked up. And a lot of the people are just people who are, yes, they are there without documents, which is a civil infraction under US law. It's not a criminal offence. And what is interesting is the way that different bits of the administration, let's say broadly Democrat and Republican, are rubbing up against each other. And there is a chief of border police, Greg Bovino, in Los Angeles who had these words for the democratically elected mayor. The federal government is not leaving L.A.

23:43I don't work for Karen Bass. The federal government doesn't work for Karen Bass. We're going to be here till that mission's accomplished, as I said, and better get used to us now because this is going to be normal. In other words, you didn't vote for us to be here, but we don't care. Yeah. Karen Bass is the mayor of L.A. Karen Bass is the democratically elected mayor of L.A. And he's saying, I don't work for her. I work for Trump. I work for the federal government. And if you don't like us, tough because we're not going anywhere. And Karen Bass, for her part, has come out and said, screw you, they should not be on the ground in L.A.

24:17doing what they're doing. We don't know if a kidnapping is happening or what. And so our city attorney is leading the way. We're filing a lawsuit. We're calling for an injunction for this to stop. We need to remember who we are as a country. I'm very clear as to who we are as a city and I'm clear about my job, which is to make sure that this city is safe for all Angelenos, regardless of when you came here, what country you came from or why. And that is a very clear message from a Democrat there in office, in power. And I think it's important to understand that if Democrats were wary of getting involved in anything that looked like they were being soft on immigration at the beginning, that has to have changed now.

25:03You cannot actually watch masked agents, anonymous masked agents, as you say, in Humvees on horseback, going to people's place of work and just rounding people up without saying anything. Because if you don't mind that happening on the streets of America, what are you doing? What are you for? It's very clear what the law is. The law is that you have to have suspicion that someone has broken the law before you can arrest them. You can't just have snatch squads, you know, operating where a van full of ICE agents pulls into a Walmart car park where people may be looking for day work and snatching anyone who doesn't scarper.

25:48No, you don't even know if they're ICE agents. I mean, the point is, as soon as you're allowing people to be disguised or masked or incognito, that could just be a bunch of ordinary criminals, right? It could be anybody floating into a Walmart car park and pulling off the street. And what are you meant to do? Say, oh, yeah, you got me. And so what you've also had now are a number of cases where US citizens, people who have US passports and they have said, I've got a passport. And the ISA for sure has said, I don't believe you. You're put in the back of the wagon. You are taken to a detention centre.

26:21And I was reading a story of one guy who'd been held in detention for 10 days, even though he had a US passport and they thought it was a fake document. They wouldn't believe it. And you just think, you know, where is this going? Now, look, getting rid of the rapists and the murderers and the people who've entered the country illegally with dark criminal records or part of gangs. There is a broad consensus that you want these people gone. You want these people out of your land. But when you start to round up anyone who just happens to be a little bit brown and looks Latino, it is a very slippery slope that America is on right now.

26:55And I think Donald Trump is starting to realize the kickback he's going to get if he leaves large swathes of America without its workforce. This was him speaking a little bit earlier about how they have to think carefully about who they're taking away from American farms. There's no amnesty. What we're doing is we're getting rid of criminals, but we are doing a work program. Do you want to explain that, please? Yeah, this morning we talked about, of course this was a top of mind question, this morning we talked about protecting the farmers in the farmland, but obviously this President's vision of no amnesty, mass deportation continues, but in a strategic way, and then ensuring that our farmers have the labor that they need.

27:37Secretary Chavez de Rimmer has been a leader on this, obviously this comes out of the Labor Department, but moving toward automation, ensuring that our farmers have that workforce, and moving toward an American workforce. So all of the above. I want to give the farmers the people they need, but we're not talking amnesty. What is interesting, I guess, is to know where America is on this. And, you know, as we've said, this was a major plank of his election campaign. America that voted for Trump wanted to see mass deportations now, his slogan. But I don't think that the vast majority of voters are very comfortable with what they're seeing now.