Trump's $20 billion Epstein gamble

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast. Breaking news that we're following. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that President Donald Trump sent the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein a body letter for his birthday. Breaking news this morning, trying to relieve the pressure, a major sign that President Trump is feeling the heat of the controversy surrounding his administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case. Filing a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal and its parent companies and the former head of Fox News, the actual court document, has not yet been made available to us.

0:38But all of this is over that Wall Street Journal report that he denies. Trump is facing fresh scrutiny over his ties, his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein after the Wall Street Journal broke this story about a birthday card he apparently drew for the convicted paedophile. It is all leading to one of the most explosive court cases we've seen yet and it's not helping Trump at all. We've seen Donald Trump fall out with Elon Musk, the world's richest man. He's now falling out with the world's most powerful media mogul. But Rupert Murdoch looks like he doesn't want to blink. He's going to fight Trump all the way on this.

1:23And that could do Donald Trump a huge amount of damage. Welcome to The News Agents.

1:33The News Agents. It's John. It's Emily. And the Jeffrey Epstein saga rolls on and on and Donald Trump's efforts to shut it down are failing. But the Wall Street Journal, with this report of a card that Donald Trump is alleged to have sent Epstein to mark his 50th birthday about 20-odd years ago is really quite something and has led to this threat of legal action from Donald Trump over the card and the picture that apparently was drawn on it by Donald Trump and the reaction to it. Yeah, we should say we have not seen the card, we have not seen the letter and the president vehemently denies he has written or drawn it at all.

2:23In fact, it is becoming the basis for a$20 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal. But just in case you missed the details of what that story claims, here it is being spelled out for you. The letter bearing Trump's name, which was reviewed by the journal, is bawdy, like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman's breasts and the future president's signature is a squiggly Donald below her waist, mimicking pubic hair. The letter concludes, happy birthday and may every day be another wonderful secret.

3:04And that was Anderson Cooper, who was describing the letter, which comes in this leather-bound book, we are told, according to the Wall Street Journal's story. Now, as soon as the story was published, And we should say details are emerging now of how the Wall Street Journal was initially hoping to publish their story earlier in the week, Tuesday or Wednesday. And when Trump became aware of this, he is reported to have tried to contact both Rupert Murdoch and the Wall Street Journal editor, Emma Tucker, formerly of The Times here, and asked them not to run it. So Trump became aware of this story probably as early as Tuesday or Wednesday.

3:45It then appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Thursday. And within a day, Trump had called on Pam Bondi, his attorney general, to release what he's calling all pertinent grand jury testimony subject to court approval. In other words, all the stuff that Trump said didn't need to be released, didn't tell a story, wasn't relevant when he was telling the world that the Epstein story was sordid and boring and he didn't understand why people were interested in it. But let us just dig into that a little bit, because it really is important. The testimony given by the grand jury is about the prosecution of Epstein, who's dead, and the prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell, who is in prison.

4:33the public doesn't need to know the public's not that interested in that bit what the public wants to know are the thousands of other documents of other clients that Jeffrey Epstein had and that is what the public and Magalind is saying we need to see this and it looks like the reason that Donald Trump doesn't want this stuff to come out particularly is because he may be implicated as per the Wall Street Journal article. And that is why the story about this letter written by Donald Trump in the Wall Street Journal is so explosive for him, because it puts him in the centre of the story, which is not where you want to be when it concerns a paedophile who died in prison, having committed suicide, slash was murdered, depending on which conspiracy theory you believe.

5:24Yeah, we'll take you into the events leading up to the publication of the journal story in a moment. But it is worth saying that the Wall Street Journal is sticking to their side of the story. Presumably, they have had have got lawyers all over this. And there is also a world in which if Donald Trump wants to fight this in court, he has to, in some shape or form, give his side of the story, testimony. And as soon as he's doing that, he is not making this story go away. If anything, it is fanning the flames. So there is a world in which either the Wall Street Journal ends up paying a$20 billion bill, or else the story for them just gets better, because the president himself is brought into it.

6:11And we should say that for all Trump's legal activity in the past, this is unprecedented. This is the first time a sitting president has ever tried to sue the press. I think what Team Trump hoped was that they would threaten and Murdoch would say, OK, yeah, yeah, we'll sue for peace. We'll make a payment. We'll do this and get it over and done with, which is what ultimately Murdoch had to do over Fox's reporting about Dominion voting machines and kind of the delicious irony that maybe Trump should ring up Dominion voting machines to say, how do you best fight Rupert Murdoch? Because they got 780 million out of him, which, of course, they won't do.

6:53And so my enemy's enemy is my friend in that case. I think that, you know, Trump has taken on Murdoch and Murdoch for the moment doesn't seem to feel that he wants to fold. And he's got experience. I mean, he's a newspaper editor who's been around the block and knows Donald Trump well and they don't much like each other. But let's go back a bit, because if you're just coming to this story for the first time and you don't really realise how it all got so heated so quickly. We should take you back to the kind of things that Donald Trump was telling his supporters before he got back into office. Lots of questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein's life and indeed death, which were being whipped up by those around Trump.

7:35Trump told people there is a conspiracy here. Trump told people the Democrats had things to answer here. Trump told people that there was a lot of unanswered questions around what happened to Epstein. And sure enough, in February, in other words, six weeks after he'd been in power, Pam Bondi, who is his attorney general, said she told Fox News, there is a file on my desk about Epstein ready to go. What people understood by that remark at the time, I think it's fair to say, is she had revelations to make. And they now refer to Bondi's binders. In other words, a whole heap of stuff she put together which was meant to be about Epstein, which said absolutely nothing new.

8:22Now, she has tied herself to being the person that was going to deliver the answers that surrounded Jeffrey Epstein's prolific paedophilia, all those who hadn't yet been brought to justice around his crimes, and indeed what happened that fatal night in the jail when he is purported to have taken his own life, something that many people still don't believe. She was going to deliver those answers. Just last month, she came out and she said, there's nothing to see here. We got it wrong. There is no client list. There is nothing that leads to other people. There is no smoking gun, no trail. and essentially the MAGA influencers that bought into this idea they were going to hear everything about Epstein are up in arms.

9:12They're furious. They will not go away because they think that stuff is being concealed. And frankly, as the two of us sit here today, we don't know. Part of us thinks, well, there is conspiracy and there's conspiracy that's been whipped up by Trump. Like, you know, was Jeffrey Epstein a member of Mossad? Was he actually working as a spy? Was he working for the Israeli government? And there's a whole load of sort of, you know, you can find the anti-Semitic tropes on that one if you want to look for them. But also there are genuine questions surrounding what Epstein did. And there are probably other perpetrators or other people that worked alongside him whose names we do not yet know.

9:50And these are really valid, valuable questions to be asking. and Trump is trying to put a lid on something now, make it go away when he's fired the flames and people genuinely want to find out what they know. He wants the story to go away and sort of keeps talking about it and saying, why do you keep on about this? Well, if you keep saying things like that, that's going to keep it in the headlines. I thought there was an absolute classic of the genre yesterday of the throwing of shiny objects where Donald Trump... As in dead cats. Yeah, as in dead cats, hoping to get anything that will gather purchase that is a different story in a different direction.

10:32So there were stories about Obama and the Russia investigation and how Obama was implicated in spreading falsehood. Well, that didn't kind of get very far. He also put up about and this is kind of niche for a kind of follow American football. But the Washington commanders used to be known as the Washington Redskins for reasons of sensitivity. that name was changed in 2020. And Donald Trump is saying, I will block the funding of a new stadium to be built inside the District of Columbia, inside Washington, if Washington commanders don't change their name back to the Washington Redskins. Look, this is all really interesting because normally if Trump tells his supporters to look over there...

11:15They do. They look, right? If Trump directs you to what is happening on the border, you look at the border. If Trump directs you to what's happening in the stadium, you look at the stadium. This time, no one is budging from the story itself. And there's some really interesting reporting, actually, about what's going on in the White House now, according to The Atlantic, which is that Trump feels he has made these people. He has given MAGA influencers their bread and butter, you know, their podcasts or their columns or their ability to kind of go out and spread the MAGA word. And now they are essentially unleashed and they're not doing his bidding anymore.

11:54And he feels quite betrayed by this. You know, he told them there was something nefarious about everything around Epstein. And they're saying, yep. And now he's saying, oh, actually, I've got that wrong. There's nothing. And they're saying, well, hang on a second. And I guess this starts to open a really interesting door, which is. and obviously it's early days and Trump normally kind of gets the supporter base back. But can you imagine a world in which the MAGA base and Trump and the administration start to actually head off in different ways? And I suppose one of the sort of lower down theories during the rounds is that there are people now who will step in and take on the Epstein case and shout about the Epstein conspiracy and the scandal because they are envisaging a world where, you know, maybe the Tucker Carlsons, for example, of this world think, oh, there's an opening.

12:52Maybe I can get hold of the MAGA base. Maybe I can run in 2028. Maybe the path is clear for a leader who does take this on the nose. Now, the main thing we should say is that there are hundreds, possibly up to a thousand, victims of Epstein. And I think it is absolutely right that the people, the young women, the girls that were involved in his crimes want to get answers to this. So whatever you think about the kind of conspiracies surrounding what Trump has said about Epstein, there is a lot of stuff that just has never been explored and has never been understood and has never been properly answered.

13:37And look at Donald Trump's unique selling point when he came into politics for real, when he became a presidential candidate, which was I am going to drain the swamp. I'm going to deal with the deep state that all these people are self-serving, powerful individuals who always get their way and stay beyond the law. And as the MAGA leader, I am going to bring them all to justice. I'm going to bring them all to their knees. And now he is the one saying, no, there's nothing to see here. We'll move on. And the White House is trying to frame this as just a beltway story, i.e. only concerns. Washington reporters are the only people who are talking about this issue.

14:24Now, it's wider than that. And the MAGA movement is not happy with the answers that Donald Trump is giving. And I think this represents a really serious threat to his position as the leader of this movement that he gave birth to. Yeah, I mean, if you want to try and understand the context to the 50th birthday card, it didn't come out of nowhere. We know that Trump and Epstein were pals. We know that they party together. There are very friendly photos of the two of them together at Trump's Mor-a-Lago club. We know that Trump flew on Epstein's private jet seven times. And we know that Trump praised Epstein as a terrific guy, one who was a lot of fun to be with.

15:12And some of the creepy stuff in this card, if it is true, is about Trump and Epstein both talking about their love of secrets. Now, this does not mean, let's be categoric, this does not mean that Trump was a paedophile. This does not mean that Trump knew Epstein's victims. But it does mean that when he tries to distance himself from anything to do with Epstein, it doesn't ring true. Trump's defence about the card was that he doesn't ever draw. We know there is evidence of his doodles selling at auction of the Manhattan skyline for$29 ,000. In other words, why would you make up a simple lie that could be disproved so easily to get out of a much bigger one?

15:57and I think whatever the card does or doesn't tell us or whether it even exists will not stop the questions about Trump's relationship with Epstein and makes people want to know why he just wants to close the whole thing down if there is really nothing to see here at all. From draining the swamp to clearing up our sewers we'll be talking to the Environment Secretary Steve Reid next. That's coming up.

16:32This is The News Agents. I genuinely think at this point, the first year has been so utterly chaotic that I think the Secretary of State should actually now be considering his role in all of this over the last 12 months. Quite frankly, I think Steve Reid now needs to resign and hand the job over to somebody that could be more effective, more capable. Steve Reid, it's not every day that you wake up to a 1970s pop star calling for your head on a platter before 8am having spent a year working on these reforms. Well, you know, I respect Fergal for the campaigning he's done on cleaning up water, but I'm cleaning up the water.

17:09So really, I think Fergal should be happy with that. Well, let's pick up on what he's actually saying. He said that on day one, you should have replaced the board of the Environment Agency in Offwatt. And with the stroke of a pen, you could have amended the statutory guidance to get the law as it stands robustly enforced. In other words, he's saying you didn't need a year. You didn't need to sort of hail a big reshift in off-water. You just needed to change the people on the board and make sure it was actually doing its job. I'll tell you what, we've got a water system that is absolutely broken from top to bottom.

17:40Tinkering around the edges like that would not resolve the scale of the problem that we are facing. We've just had at the end of last year massive bill rises, 26 % on average, that people have had to pay because of a failure of regulation over previous years. And we've got, in the last year, we've got the data available. Last year, record levels of sewage pollution in our rivers and our lakes and our seas, poisoning wildlife that is living in there. I mean, why is just guessing the law as it stands for us to be enforced? Because the scale of what had happened is what contributed to that. This is a sector that needs change from top to bottom.

18:19And I'm afraid that isn't the work of one evening. That is the work of a lot of consideration. We need a revolution in this sector. And we've planned that. We've put the building blocks in place for change. Some of them already are operational now. Just explain that one. So when does OffWatt actually get replaced? Well, let me tell you, because it makes more sense if I contextualise it within the whole process of change that we're bringing about to revolutionise this sector, because that is what it needs in my judgment. first of all we had to reset the sector so we gave the regulator teeth they didn't previously have so we gave the regulator through legislation we passed earlier this year the power to ban unfair bonuses multi-million pound bonuses that the water bosses were taking and we introduced new offences with a potential jail sentence attached to them to focus the minds of the water bosses on cleaning up pollution and to put accountability back into a system where there was no accountability the second the second building block that's an important one this too um is we need to rebuild the entire water system so we secured and this took a lot of conversations and work with investors we've secured 104 billion pounds with a b investment in our water sector that's the single biggest investment in the water sector's history to start to upgrade those broken sewage pipes those leaking water pipes to dig out the reservoirs that we need that started to be spent in april so it's already happening that change is already happening that's why I was able to say within five years we will reduce sewage pollution from water companies by 50 that's the most ambitious sewage reduction target than any government has ever been able to announce but finally we need that revolution in the water sector to change the rules from top to bottom the biggest overhaul in a generation of our water system that's what Sir John Conliffe was talking to us about today How do you change the regulator?

20:10How do you change regulation, the rules, so they can prevent the kind of abuses that we've seen over recent years ever happening again? I've done all of that in one year. The previous Conservative government had 14 years and they didn't touch the sides of it. So let's dig into some of the detail in all of those things, because there are a few points that I want to pick up on. The 100 billion investment package you're touting was submitted by water businesses to Offwater in October 2023. So it's not new, is it? No, the draft determination came earlier in 2024. The final determination was settled in December last year.

20:48That took me and a colleague from the Treasury going and speaking to dozens of global investors to persuade them that the UK was a good place to come and invest in the water and the water sector. They were very spooked by the failure that they'd seen of regulation under the previous government. It was not an attractive investment proposition. And we had to talk them through the changes we were going to bring into the sector. So we secured that£104 billion of investment. And that is how we can replace the broken sewage pipes and the broken water pipes and put in place the new water infrastructure we need to make sure that we can still have clean drinking water whenever we turn on the taps.

21:26because as things stood, by the middle of the 2030s, this country was looking at water rationing because we were running out. These unfair bonuses being paid to water bosses. And I'm sure people will say, hurrah for that. Aren't the remuneration committees of those companies just going to say, OK, well, here's a bigger salary instead? Well, the way that the legislation applies may be able to have some input into that. You know, there's a Thames Water announced... You're not going to set people's pay, are you? I'm not going to set people's pay, But Thames Water announced they were going to make payments and call them something else.

21:58We managed to stop that. There's another case where somebody's receiving a big payment. Steve, you didn't, because the boss of Thames Water is getting£850 ,000 and£100 ,000 a year in pension contributions. No, they announced that they were going to rename bonuses something else. Wait, is that... We got them to stand it down. OK, is that... We got them to stand it down. I don't care about the bonuses. If their take-home pay is larger than ever, what does it matter what they're calling it? Well, I mean, I don't think, you know, they're a private sector company and they can set their own pay. So what's the point of even talking about capping bonuses then?

22:30Because the bonuses were the absolute outrage. What we were seeing was water companies... Don't you find£100 ,000 a year in pension contributions an absolute outrage? Companies need to act responsibly and they need to have a thought to what their customers might think about what they're doing. Is£850 ,000 a year responsible? When you've got companies that are putting up their water bills by in excess of 26 % in some cases, and then thinking it's acceptable to give their bosses a significant pay rise, that's out of order. We've passed the legislation to ban the bonuses. Yeah, but that's what people are saying to you, Steve.

23:00You're the minister in this. You know, people are saying to you it is unacceptable that water bosses are getting that much. People are saying to you it's unacceptable to have a£100 ,000 a year pension contribution. You can't just say it back to them. You've got to be the one acting on it. Yeah, but you get into a very difficult place if the government's going to start regulating on pay in private sector companies. Well, don't talk about their salaries then. You can't just say it's outrageous and not do anything about it. We did, we did. We banned the payment of the multi-million bonuses, which that was the aspect of it that the public found most offensive.

23:29Because in the public mind, and they're quite right, you get a bonus for doing well in your job. Yet here we had individuals getting paid multi-million pound bonuses for overseeing catastrophic levels of pollution. So what's the salary for then? £850 ,000 for dropping pollution in the rivers? What's that for? I'm not happy with that as well, but I'm also not happy that government should start regulating people's pay. I think if you go down that route, you end up in a very dangerous position. But bonuses for failure, I think people will see that that is unacceptable. You've talked about the failures of the privatised water industry.

24:01And yet it was ruled out of Sir John Cunliffe's report that you could consider renationalisation. And I'm sure a lot of people listening will say, well, why? we had a nationalized water industry for decades in this country and you know maybe it was better then well we have to start where we are so i can't magic away the past 35 years there's a privatized system if we wanted to nationalize it we would have to buy those companies back now the cost of buying those companies back is 100 billion pounds and that's not figures from the water companies that is figures that i asked officials in my department to come and work out for me so I could see exactly what the costs were.

24:42£100 billion, with a B, to buy back the water companies. That would be paid for by taxpayers' money that you'd have to take away from services like the National Health Service and Education in order to hand it to the people that own the water companies that are polluting our waterways. That makes no sense. But there's another reason, which is that you would have to go through years of intensely contested legal wrangling to unpick the current ownership models during that time these companies would not invest in upgrading the water system so water pollution would get worse instead of better the state of the pipes would get worse so that would result in the end in bigger bills for customers I don't want to see bigger bills I don't want to see pollution getting worse and I don't want to see the National Health Service stripped of funding to hand it to the owners of water bosses but but even after that we know that nationalization isn't the solution so we could do all that and it still wouldn't work because you just have to look north of the border where scotland has a nationalized water company and pollution there is worse than in england so you do all that for no benefit i'm focused on sorting this problem out i want less pollution isn't what we're going to see that people are going to have higher bills over the next few years and not really see much sign of any improvement at all and this is a small i understand the impetus to make a big announcement and this is very significant and the fact of the matter is that this is going to be one of those occasions where you make a big announcement and people are just going to the only thing they're really going to notice is their bills have gone up well your starting point is that is actually wrong on both counts by making these changes i can stop big bill increases and people will see a difference because over the next five years we will reduce sewage pollution but by 50 percent so every year you'll see a reduction well they've already seen the bill increase what happened was you know an analogy that explains this i think quite well is if you see a crack in the wall of your house and you leave it for 10 years the problem gets worse and it costs much more to fix that's exactly what happened with our sewage and water system because the previous government did not ensure that the water companies invested in upgrading the pipes because they let them siphon so much money out to pay in bonuses and dividends the pipes got into an even worse condition and then in order to fix them it necessitated that huge bill rise so people at the end of last year were left to pay the price for 14 years of conservative failure i will not let that happen again this government is intent on ensuring that bill rises will be modest and fair for years to come but at the same time as that we've secured that 104 billion pounds so that every year from now for the next five years while this process is is underway you will see a reduction in sewage going into our waterways that is the change this country voted to see so there will be visible change over this period there will be lower bill increases over this period and the abuses that the conservative party not just allowed to happen but actively colluded in will be prevented from happening again.

27:48And the reason I say colluded in is because the Conservatives instructed Offwatt, as the regulator, to go light touch on regulation, to ease up, to loosen their approach to what the water companies were doing, and they stripped out resources from the regulators. So they removed staff. 50 % of the environment agencies, staff monitoring the water companies were removed. And that, again, let the water companies get away with that. No more. We're changing the system from top to bottom. Do you think, Steve, that the public would consider a 36 % hike in water bills over the next five years modest and reasonable?

28:22They've already had the hike and it's not modest and it's not reasonable. It's outrageous and it's unacceptable. But it could be 36 % in the next five years. It won't be. We've already seen the big bill rise. Well, you've just capped it at 36%. It could be anywhere up to 36%. We've just seen the big bill rise. I'm changing the rules so what led to that cannot happen again. We are intent on keeping bill rises down to a fair and modest level. Just tell us what that is then. What is the fair and modest level if it's not up to 36 %? Well, I don't know what inflation is going to be for each of the next few years, but it will be a fair and modest level.

28:54The point of these reforms is you don't let, if you let the pipes crumble away, so you can no longer just upgrade them, you have to replace them. It costs a lot more. We're putting changes in so the water companies can't get away. I think over£80 billion they paid out in dividends to their shareholders. us that money a very large proportion of that money should have gone on upgrading the water pipes then there would have never been the need for this sudden increase in bills the new model of regulation we're bringing in it's why i call it a revolution will turn around the system entirely in future the water companies will be monitored to make sure they are investing appropriately in upgrading the pipes and the sewage system and the reservoirs that we need to keep ourselves safe, secure and reduce pollution, but it also keeps bills down.

29:41If the previous government had done this 14 years ago, we would not be in the state we're in today. Steve, very grateful to you. Thank you very much indeed. My pleasure. Thanks very much indeed. Thanks for coming in.