Trump's letter to Epstein is revealed

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0:47And it's ironic given that my father was the very guy that threw him out of the club because he thought he was a scumbag. My father's intuition was actually incredibly right. That's Eric Trump denying that his father, Donald, would ever have been so stupid as to send a drawing to the Jeffrey Epstein birthday book. He doesn't draw. Well, last night, that image so talked about was released after House Democrats subpoenaed it from Jeffrey Epstein's own estate. It is a sexually suggestive letter. It is a drawing of a nude woman, and it appears to bear the signature of Donald Trump. How much is this going to hurt the president?

1:28And does he regret those adamant denials now? Welcome to The News Agents.

1:37The News Agents. It's Emily. It's Lewis. And these latest documents which have come from the Democrats on this key congressional committee, which have been looking into Jeffrey Epstein and the relationship that he had with Donald Trump and others. I mean, explosive is the cliche. I think that's fair. In particular, a lot of focus is coming on a note and sexually suggestive drawing containing what appears to be Donald Trump's signature that was included in a book for Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday in 2003, a drawing that Trump is insisting he did not create. This drawing is a very weird figure of what appears to be a naked woman with Donald in Trump's signature written below her waist.

2:21And it says, among other things, there's a sort of weird kind of like what appears to be an imagined conversation between Trump and Epstein, which concludes with Donald saying, a pal is a wonderful thing. Happy birthday. And may every day be another wonderful secret. Yeah, just to take you back to how this story originated. It was first reported by the Wall Street Journal two months ago in July. And Trump denied it. He denied it fervently. He denied the existence of the picture, the existence of the book. He said he hadn't done the drawing. And he even went so far as to sue, essentially to take Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal to court because he said it couldn't possibly be true.

3:09And those around him called it a Democrat hoax. They said it was a crude invention. I don't do drawings. I'm not a drawing person. I don't do drawings. Sometimes people say, would you do a building? And I'll draw four lines and a little roof, you know, for a charity. But I'm not a drawing person. I don't do drawings of women, that I can tell you. They say there's a drawing of a woman. And I don't do drawings of women. And that is why the appearance of this book, we can see it. We can actually go through it page by page, has been the real bombshell. because it was turned over by the Jeffrey Epstein estate.

3:52In other words, this book existed within the Epstein estate and it was only given over to the House, Congress, to an oversight committee in response to a subpoena. In other words, a legal challenge which says we need to see the book. Now, the New York Times has done quite a long piece comparing the Donald Trump signature on that drawing to many of his signatures throughout the years. We can honestly even add one of our own because I received a signed photograph from Donald Trump after I'd interviewed him, I mean, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, and his signature is there for all to see in gold Sharpie.

4:36And it is pretty unmistakably the same one, I would say, that is on that drawing. But the point about this is, I guess, that when you've gone through the book and you've started to understand the tenor of some of those messages, you suddenly get what's at stake here. Because to put it mildly, the Donald Trump drawing is, I would say, actually one of the least offensive. I mean, we've combed through some of that book and it is dark and it is disgusting. There are pictures of drawings of Epstein lying on a beach, being massaged and giving balloons to children. The implication is pretty clear. There's another one which has the word children half redacted.

5:25So you can see some of the letters and not the other. There are pictures of like lions and zebras having sex. I mean, I don't know how that fits into his sexuality and I'm probably not going to go there. There are pictures of a scout hut talking about boy scouts. I'm just trying to give you a sense that in this book are messages from a lot of people who clearly knew the character of the man they were dealing with. I'm not saying that everybody who contributed to it knew, but there were clearly a lot of people who contributed to that book who understood what Epstein's proclivities were. There is even a message from our own ambassador in Washington, Peter Mandelson, calling Epstein a great pal.

6:11And I'm actually going to read you out a bit more of the message. He says, no sooner were you used to having him around, you'd suddenly be left alone again. He calls Epstein an intelligent, sharp-witted man, mysterious, who parachutes into your life. He left you with some interesting friends to entertain instead or just some dogs to keep you company. He wasn't always so keen on them. And then he'd parachute back in. You'd meet him in one of his glorious homes. He likes to share with his friends. Yum, yum. But wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal. Now, Lord Mandelson has been contacted for a response.

6:45And he says he said at the time he regretted ever being introduced to Epstein. He regretted the introduction of Epstein. You understand that as a voice of regret. But it doesn't really answer the question of why on the man's 50th birthday he's calling him his best pal. I think there are quite a lot of questions that this book raises, not least Bill Clinton. President Clinton is in the book as well, talking about the kind of entertainment that Epstein liked. There are lots of names. They're not redacted. You can go through the list and see for yourself just what people around Epstein were saying about him, drawing for him or thought about him.

7:26Yeah, and it is a trove of potential stories and potential deep, deep embarrassments and worse for those associated with it. The book spans to more than 200 pages. It's bound into three volumes, collection of letters, photographs, drawings from dozens of people that Epstein knew. But of course, the political he is going to be strongest and shine brightest on Trump himself, obviously, because he's the president. And, you know, we've talked so many times, Emily, and with John as well, you know, sort of day in, day out covering this sort of second Trump term, how different it has felt since the beginning, since the first one, not least because Trump feels so much more hegemonic, so much more powerful.

8:06He feels there are virtually no checks on his power anymore. Congress has basically gone to sleep. The Supreme Court is doing whatever he wants. He has been king of all he surveyed. The one thing, the one thing which has been a cloud on that political horizon and a dark one at that is this Epstein scandal and these documents. It is the one thing where Trump and his administration, this new administration, this imperial kind of government now, have seemed genuinely rattled and genuinely scared. And in the reaction, since these documents appeared, they have again had that same sense of brittleness.

8:39You know, his spokesperson from the White House podium, again, denying that this is him trying to convince everybody that it's a complete fake. But it rings hollow. And it rings hollow, not least because, yes, there have been furious reactions again from Democrats. You've seen Patty Murray, for example, the Democratic senator, saying, this is revolting. Clearly some truly sick stuff was going on between Trump and Epstein. There is no more pretending. so you're searing that. But the point as well is, this is one of the rare, rare moments of at least some kind of sense of bipartisanship in Washington, when you've had Republicans, because Trump has, as we've discussed before, Trump himself and his team, those in the MAGA movement, have been some of those in the past who have been talking about these files.

9:22And, you know, that sense of conspiracy, which is at the center of MAGA racism and Trump, he is being basically, he's lived by sword and now he is dying by the swords. There are Republicans and MAGA people who want to know, wanted to see these documents and it is deeply unfortunate for them that it happens to cohere around their leader, Trump himself. I think Trump was politically stupid about this whole issue and I'll tell you what I mean by that. I think his denial was so instant and so forthright that he couldn't possibly have done the drawing, that he actually set a trap for himself. As an example, if I was accused of something, let's say I was accused of like treading on a kid's toe, right?

10:06I could either come out and go, there is no way on earth I've ever trodden on a kid's toe. That would be appalling and abusive and absolutely shocking. I did not do that. Or I could just say, oh, I hope I didn't do that. Oh, it might've been me. But, you know, if so, I apologize. Yeah, I apologise and I hope it wasn't. And by denying it so outrightly, he's basically set himself up as having to acknowledge that the thing itself was really bad. And the person who's been incredibly politically astute, I think is J.D. Vance. Now, at the time, we started wondering where the leak had come from, where this story had come from.

10:46And we are no closer, it has to be said to knowing that. But one person who comes out of this quite well is potentially J.D. Vance. Because if I take you back to what he wrote on X at the time, he says the Wall Street Journal should be ashamed for publishing it. Where is this letter? Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it? Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump? Now, those three questions he asks have all now been proved wrong. Where is the letter? Well, it's here. They never showed it to us before publishing it. Well, now we're all seeing it.

11:25Does it honestly sound like Donald Trump? Well, yes, actually, it does. There is a bit of your brain that might be thinking in extraordinary ways that the vice president has set the president up for a fall here. He's not saying, oh, stop concentrating on nonsense. We've got big work to do. He's not saying, oh, everyone might have contributed to a friend's birthday book or done a silly drawing. He's saying it couldn't possibly exist. It doesn't sound like Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal is making up the entire story. And there are those, I think, around the president and possibly in the Democrat Party, too, who just are starting to wonder whether this is a trap that J.D.

12:10Vance has laid rather perfectly for his own boss. One historian once said that American politics is conducted in the paranoid style, right? And there has always been that strain of paranoia, anti-elite, populist politics in the United States from the very beginning. It's one of the things that makes its political culture distinctive. That has been at the centre of Margarism and Trump, right? The whole critique, the whole thesis is, is that there are a group of elites who are hiding things from you. And that is at the center of Trump's politics. He has cultivated that. He has incubated it. He has amplified it.

12:45He's made that paranoid style, that strain. It was always there in the background. He's brought it right to the foreground. It's the center of his politics. He is now suffering by that very act. He has basically taken that sword and put it off on himself, precisely for that reason you say, Emily, which is that it would have been smarter to acknowledge the fact that the truth which is what everyone knows which is they had a relationship and they had a friendship it fizzled out in the mid-2000s he could credibly claim he could credibly say that he didn't know about epstein's worst excesses which is convenient enough what all of these people who knew this man terribly terribly well all claim that actually oh i did had no idea he was doing all of that but that would at least have been something to cling to instead he is clinging clearly to fiction which is basically that he had almost no relationship with us all, and that therefore any of these documents must be and are bound to be fake.

13:35Trump's problem is that he has basically lobbed grenades from the outside for a very, very long time. He is the establishment now. He is the state now. He is the deep state that he has railed against for so long, for year after year after year. So he finds himself basically in a position of his own making. And that is why on this one issue, why it's so politically noxious for him. But it's also why on this one issue, that he finds even his foot soldiers in the Republican Party in the House of Representatives himself, having actually some space between them and the president. Because, you know, it's that thing about conspiracy theories, right?

14:11If you're a conspiracy theorist, ultimately, the thing that you want most in the world is to find actually that even the people on your side are part of it. That is basically the kind of place in which Trump now finds himself. In a moment, we're going to be talking to the father of the internet, the inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee is a name that many people across the pond haven't even heard of because he didn't become a tech billionaire. His aim was to make the web fully available and fully free for everyone. In fact, his book is called This Is For Everyone. It was the sign held up during that 2012 Olympic ceremony as a way of recognising the importance of that one invention, that gift that he essentially gave the world.

14:55But now he's looking at what he's created and is very honest about the difficulties that we now face, the addiction that we now face, the way it's polarised politics and discourse and division. And he talks about what has to happen next.

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16:00The News Agents. Well, I'm joined now by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who's just written a book called This Is For Everyone. And indeed, in the acknowledgements, you sweetly thank everyone for using the World Wide Web, which you invented, Tim. Well, that's what it's for. That's what it's for. I want to start with a moment in your childhood that seems to have informed so much of your thinking. You show us the diagram that your mum created of the calendar that shows us a year in clock face form. and you say it was an entirely different way of looking at something. And that does seem to have been key, just approaching angles from a totally oblique angle.

16:47Yes, that calendar. So we had this on the wall. We had a line around the clock face for each calendar day and it was superior in lots of ways. And so, yes, in a way, that was mum's ability. Both my parents were very creative. and they met building the first computer so that the idea of what a computer was was just being sort of forged around them in their community. And so those days were amazing days and also they were amazing people. Do you think you can teach a society to think about normal things differently, to use that sense of an oblique approach to an everyday issue? I don't know. Maybe if we change the way we sort of examine people, maybe instead of examining them for what they know examine them for tackling problems in different ways maybe i hadn't thought about it you went to work at cern it's a nuclear research center in in switzerland um it's a great place you go there if you can it was there that you had the opportunity to think about your own project and you knew that you wanted to be able to connect the world in infinite ways with infinite data.

18:03And it was built around the hypertext and the hyperlink. Can you just give us, dare I say, the idiot's version as to why that is so key? What was it? What was that seed? I think you say I had a seed that sprouted to a tool that shook up the world. Universality would later be key to the web. how were you thinking at this point so universality is that the web it had to be a lot of systems which are out there already you had to use a particular computer for example if you weren't using an ibm computer it wouldn't work or if you weren't using a particular device or a particular operating system or a lot of systems were designed just for academic papers and so part of the frustration which led to the web was all of these different systems from managing information were different they were incompatible but also each one forced you into some narrow slot you had to use it had to be a particular sort of document so the universality of the web the design was you should be able to put anything on it that was what drove the design the universality and so because we could put anything on it then now everything's on it more or less.

19:22And did people understand that when you first I guess went to your bosses or your colleagues and said I want a system where everything's on it I mean what was the response? In general people yes people didn't understand it at all. My boss or my boss's boss Mike Sendall in fact he did get it he was pretty much the only person you know the famous thing is that when after he'd passed away unfortunately of cancer his wife Peggy and my boss found in his things a copy of my memo and he'd written on the corner in handwriting vague but exciting I guess the inciting part triumphed and he let me work on it because you understood what you wanted you write what I discovered was that information was meaningless in isolation what truly mattered was the relationship between between one piece of information and the next.

20:19And you call it mesh. Is that a really hard concept? I mean, we now cannot go back to a time where we didn't know what the web did. But I just want to try and understand, you're saying, you're trying to explain this to people. Yes. And mostly you're just getting, what, blank looks? They think you're a bit mad or what? Yeah, they understand. On all of the systems they'd ever seen before, you click on a link and it'll take you somewhere else in the little localized system, like a CD-ROM. Information would come on CD-ROMs, you'd plug your CD-ROM into your computer and you'd surf around the CD-ROM and you'd get pictures and hypertext was really, it was about links, but the links always were just local.

20:58They'd never go somewhere else and people just could not imagine. If you clicked on a link, it could go anywhere in the world. They couldn't imagine it. And how long do you think you spent trying to explain this? Or was it useless to explain? Did you just have to show? I explained it to a few people. I'd give a talk to a few hundred people and three people would come to me at the end of the talk and say, you know, this is really cool. You'd see the twinkle in the eyes of just three people from the whole talk. But that was all you needed because those three people would then go and help with the project.

21:30And by October of 1990, you had become the world's first web developer. I'm curious to understand the plan because you called your book This Is For Everyone. You chose not to become a billionaire. You're not a name like Zuckerberg or Bezos or Musk. What was the plan? What was it about in your eyes? The plan was I was asking everybody. I wanted to be able to link to anything. So that means anybody who had any form of information sitting on a computer, they should put it on the web. They should connect their computer to the internet. That's a really big ask. You can't also ask, and you have to pay me two cents a click.

22:16For a lot of people who adopted the web early on, the fact that it was free was really, really important. In 1991, you had two million people regularly using the internet. Did the growth take you by surprise? I mean, did the speed of the growth take you by surprise? Or was that what you'd always imagined? Well, the load on the original server went up by a factor of 10 the first year. And then it went up by a factor of 10 the second year. And then it went up by a factor of 10 the third year. So just looking at the load on our server, the number of people looking at the first ever web server, you could see something was up.

22:51You could see that something exponential was going on. You describe an interview you did with the BBC with Alan Yentol. Oh, yeah. You're basically describing to him what's going to happen to the BBC, what's going to happen to mainstream television and how it's all going to be on streaming, right? It will be on the web. And this was in 2000. And I'm curious to know what, I mean, you are sort of the Cassandra in this situation. You are foreseeing things that most people can't even imagine. Did you get pushback? Did people listen? Did people try and work towards what you saw was going to happen? Mostly what I did was I didn't try and predict what was going to happen.

23:28I just told people what I want to happen. If you predict people, what's going to happen, you can be wrong. If you say what you want, you're always going to be right. And so that's been my attitude. I've always told people what we want. What I want is for everything to be on the web. What I want is for the web to be completely accessible to people with disabilities, to work for anybody in any country. And has what has happened now to the web become what you wanted? Not exactly. Some of it's great. In fact, in the book there's a diagram where I have all the wonderful things of the web on one side.

24:03And there's a very large number of wonderful things on the internet, including pre-web things like email and so on. If you have an internet connection, you can use it for all kinds of different things, positive things. Then there's the negative things. And the negative things, the Facebook, Instagram, what's negative about those? What's negative about those is just the extent to which they're addictive. Yeah, I mean, about two thirds of the way in, you start asking, I guess, the biggest question of the day, which is about how intertwined democracy and technology are. It's a massive question, Tim, and you sort of go towards it, but then you pull back.

24:44I mean, do you think technology is damaging democracy? It depends on how you use it. So we found with the web and the same with AI. With the web, you can build systems like the Fediverse. You can build systems like Matrix and email and WhatsApp chat. But my question was slightly different. My question is, is it, not could it or can it or will it, but is it? Is it damaging democracy? I think when my conclusion was for the first Trump election, which coincided more or less with Brexit, so Brexit and Trump, and when people said it's possible that those elections were seriously swayed by Facebook, by people using Facebook as a manipulative platform, then that was a shock.

25:35Do you think they're right? yes i think i think that the social media has a huge effect on elections it's very interesting because you write i didn't want to usher in a new age of unrest but i did want to make sure the web had the ability to reach and uplift everyone on the planet we were speaking to nick clegg last week formerly at facebook who says he doesn't believe there is the data to prove beyond doubt a causal link between political unrest and technology. You disagree? I know Nick takes that point of view, but I think there's a lot of science out there since the animatronics. I think that there is a link between, for example, polarization is greater because of...

26:21It's very hard to prove causality when you're looking back at the world, but I think most people who have looked at it in detail conclude, yes, social media are important and social media tend to polarise people. It would be great to do some experiments, I suppose, but you have to have a world with no social media and a world with social media and set them off. But in your mind, I guess, there is little doubt. In my mind, there's little doubt, yes. It's fair to say that you're trying in the book to offer solutions or trying to offer a sort of different path, envisaging a world in which people would take choices that are less addictive or less provocative in their social media feeds for example you praise mastodon over twitter x i don't know anyone on i mean it's got a million users to x's 600 million isn't that the problem well i'm on mastodon when i post on Mastodon.

27:20I get more posts on Twitter. Yes, I have more followers on X. But the response I get on Mastodon is greater because I'm in a small community there of people who are interested in these things. I guess what I'm asking is is it a slightly benign view of the world? It's like asking why kids don't drink milk instead of energy fissy drinks you know we know why you don't always do the things that are better for you that are healthier for you that we go towards addictive provocative material because it is but on a good day you give them school they used to give us milk not fissy drinks and so potentially one of the things we've wondered about is suppose the phone manufacturers made phones which are specifically for children suppose there was an iphone for adults there was iPhone for kids and you could buy these iPhone for kids and you could give your kids and those iPhone for kids you pay money for them in the shop and specifically not having the doesn't you don't get TikTok at that age under the control of the parents so you can you can use technology you can build systems with which are closed systems with limited ability to install things but which still allow kids to contribute to wikipedia and to use wikipedia and to contribute to open street map and use open maps and things and whatsapp chat when they want to come home i mean you've still got adults doing crazy things with their adult size phones i mean in your world that's true would you say i don't want that kind of phone at all for me i have a smartphone but i don't use TikTok at all.

29:01So not TikTok. I mean, I'm interested just to try and understand how you feel about the sort of tech giants now, because you described being very warm, friendly with Mark Zuckerberg when you first met him. And then you write, I began to grow disillusioned with Facebook. A handful of providers grew into dominant, unregulated monopolies. Mark monetized this platform by bundling Facebook users' data and targeting them with ads. I guess the same with X, I guess the same with TikTok. Do you think they're fundamentally bad actors? You'd have to have them sitting in their seat to ask them about their...