Is the Epstein Scandal Trump’s Kryptonite?

0:04Welcome to The Political Scene from The New Yorker, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Jane Mayer, and I'm joined by my colleagues, Evan Osnos and Susan Glasser. Hi, Evan. Good morning, guys. Hi, Susan. Hey there. Great to be with you. Well, all right. This week, some of the Jeffrey Epstein emails have been released, and a vote on the release of the full Epstein files is expected in the House next week. Unlike Trump's previous scandals, the Epstein story lands differently, revealing cracks in Trump's otherwise loyal MAGA base and creating fractures in the GOP.

0:47Could this finally be the scandal that breaks through? This question got us digging into the bigger picture. How have political scandals evolved in America? What scandals have caused real political consequences and what can past political scandals tell us about today? So to help us unpack this, we are lucky enough to be joined by a guest today, Michael Isikoff, an investigative reporter who has broken some of the biggest stories in American politics, including the Clinton-Lewinsky affair and Russian interference in the 2016 election. Michael also happens to have been a colleague of mine going all the way back to the now defunct late great Washington Star in 1981.

1:37So I can attest personally to the fact that he is an amazing reporter, I would say, with an unparalleled nose for scandal. Welcome, Michael, and thanks for joining us. Good to be with you, and you've just informed the world how old we are. Hey, we're into transparency. Yeah. This is why we don't have video on our podcast. All right. To kick things off, I just want to run through some of the big takeaways from the Epstein email drop this week. All right. In a 2019 email from Epstein to reporter Michael Wolff, Epstein said of Trump, of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.

2:22In another 2011 email, Epstein alleged to Ghislaine Maxwell that Trump had spent hours with one of his victims. In a 2017 email, Epstein wrote, I have met some very bad people, none as bad as Trump, not one decent cell in his body. All right. It takes one to know one, I guess. With friends like these. Right. Let's stipulate here that the true grotesqueness of Jeffrey Epstein and the fact that this is an incredibly unpleasant story that now seems to be a permanent fact of our politics. So I just I have to say that. Thank you. This is not just any narrator sending these emails. It's a convicted sex offender and child sex trafficker.

3:12In response to the email drop, Trump has waged a pressure campaign on congressional Republicans to stop the release of the Epstein files. This week, in what appeared to be an attempt to get one Republican congresswoman, Lauren Boebert, to back off, he and Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel called her into a meeting in the Situation Room at the White House. Pretty heavy-handed move, which she nonetheless resisted. It puts Republicans in an interesting spot. They have to navigate their loyalty to Trump while also fulfilling calls for transparency from their constituents. Michael, what has been your reaction to the emails this week?

3:58So I'm of two minds on this one. On the one hand, it's obviously entertaining to watch MAGA world hoisted on their own petard. I mean, people like Kash Patel and Diane Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, and Pam Bondi herself, pushed the Epstein scandal quite a bit and insisted that the files should be released. And the reason they did it is, I mean, this was it got MAGA world all whipped up. It was kind of QAnon adjacent. The idea of a pedophile ring that powerful people were using and exploiting fit into some of the fever dreams that people have about this. So to watch them all now agonizing with all the documents come out relating to Trump is kind of rich.

4:52But on the other hand, can I just point out that the idea that you're going to release raw Justice Department files filled with all sorts of uncorroborated allegations against all sorts of people is like really bad public policy. There's a Justice Department manual that explicitly says you don't release information about uncharged third parties. And there's a good reason for that. I mean, you remember like J. Edgar Hoover's personal file? He had dirt on everybody. Allegations. Somebody was a communist. Somebody was gay. Somebody was whatever. And this was considered a really bad thing. The idea that it would get released and you would smear the reputations of people who weren't charged with crimes is kind of offensive to civil libertarians.

5:45And I don't get people like Jamie Raskin, you know, civil libertarian, constitutional law professor. Release the files. Release the files. And here's the danger in this. Like, let's just take the email you just read. The Democrats pulled a fast one there because they deleted the name of the victim, Virginia Jeffrey. Right. That's the way it came to the committee. The Democrats didn't want that out there. They say they're protecting the victim. Look, she's the most public victim of all. She's written a memoir. She's testified under oath. And she's no longer alive. And she's no longer alive. So you're not really protecting any victim there.

6:22And the other part of it, the reason they didn't want that name out there is because she's testified under oath that Trump didn't do anything improper. She never saw him do anything improper. She put that in her memoir. So the Democrats didn't want that out there when you see the email first. They wanted the explosive oomph of releasing that email. The dog that hasn't barked. Well, and you're, you know, Michael, I think it's a really important point about the releases. The other thing, though, that I thought was really notable is that it was Republicans then who responded to the Democrats kind of initial targeted disclosure with 20 ,000 additional pages of documents and unverified stuff.

7:03Right. Right. Raking Trump through the calls. This is Trump's own party. Yes. chose to release 20 ,000 pages of documents already. So this is even before the entire cause celeb Justice Department filed. So that's one issue. But we wanted to sort of step up to this question Jane asked at the beginning of the conversation as well, which is, what does it even mean to have a scandal in Washington anymore if there's no accountability? OK, so this is a president who survived two impeachments. The main sort of long term takeaway of which is that impeachment is functionally speaking, no longer an actual check on a president's actions, because, in fact, in our extremely polarized world, it's almost inconceivable that any act, no matter how heinous, is going to get a sufficient vote in the Senate to have a conviction.

7:58And, you know, Donald Trump, you think he's scared of impeachment? He's had it twice before. Well, look, if he loses the midterms, he'll be impeached again February of 27. But, you know, it's you need 66 votes, I think, in the Senate. It's not even 60. I think you need the full two thirds. So what kind of a check is that? Where is the accountability? It's no check at all. Look, I mean, political scandals, I got to say, you know, which I have spent many, many years writing about are almost passe now because like how do you define? I mean, Trump has broken all the rules of American politics. He's broken all the rules of norms of behavior.

8:42You remember the like the U.S. attorney scandal in the Bush, George W. Bush, the idea that the president would replace his U.S. attorneys with more loyal U.S. attorneys was considered a scandal because it might lead to the president being able to indict people that. And yet it's almost impossible to find anything that would shame Donald Trump or the Republican Party. So this is true. But I think what maybe is so tantalizing about this, and I want to get your gut check on, is why then is Trump fighting so hard to keep this information from reaching the public? I mean, I think everybody's sort of wondering, you know, he's done so many things.

9:29What could possibly be worth hiding? Yeah. Well, that's a good question. And, you know, look, clearly there was a close relationship there between Trump and Epstein for many years and they had a falling out. Right. Right. And, you know, the one thing that leaps through when you read these emails is how obsessed Epstein was with Trump. He's constantly talking about Trump. He's trying to get people to write about Trump, looking for ways to embarrass him. So they had a falling out. Who knows what it was really about? You know, there's reports of a real estate deal where Trump supposedly bought property that Epstein was interested in.

10:13Maybe it was that Trump has his own version that Epstein was trying to steal women from the Mar-a-Lago club. I mean, you know, it could have been anything, some sort of personal slight between two very rich people with very large egos. We don't know. It would be nice to know, but I'm not sure that releasing these files is going to get us there. I think the history of scandal can be informative here, too. And I wonder when you look at where this process is now, scandals don't always evolve in a kind of orderly, efficient way. They can die down for a while and then they come roaring back. And I think the question that is sort of lurking right at the heart of this is what would it actually take for it to do fundamental damage to a Trump presidency?

11:05Is it the context in which it happens? Is it the fact that his poll numbers are now so low? The fact that he's dealing with this kind of persistent inflation? the fact that it's happening in a moment when other presidents would feel weak? Or is it in fact that it depends on the details that are ultimately contained in this mysterious black box? Yeah, I mean, all of the above. I mean, look, clearly he is not happy about having, you know, the relationship with Epstein, you know, continually on the front pages of the papers. You know, that's probably the easiest explanation for why he's fighting so hard, because it is embarrassing, even though, you know, it's not necessarily criminally incriminating.

11:50We haven't seen anything along those lines. But also he knows what this is doing within his base. I mean, look at Marjorie Taylor Greene. I mean, there are hardcore MAGA people who are really committed to the Epstein scandal and believe it's important and believe... So they're not going away and they're dug in. So this could be, of all the... Of all the things that would get Donald Trump, you know, it's kind of ironic that it might be this. But, you know, between this and the economy, I think the guy's got serious problems. So, Michael, I'd love for you to put your reporter, investigative reporter hat on for just a second here.

12:33Because for my money, you know, one of the most interesting things to have emerged in these emails, Politico found a fascinating correspondence between Jeffrey Epstein and former prime minister of Norway right before the Helsinki summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, in which Epstein was trying to get a message to Russia's foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, saying, I want to give him insight into Donald Trump right before the Helsinki thing. And fascinatingly to me, he referred in that email exchange to conversations plural with the late Vitaly Chirkin, who was, as you know, Russia's ambassador to the United Nations.

13:17And he said after Trump was elected president the first time that he, Epstein, had repeatedly spoken with Chirkin about Donald Trump. What as a reporter do you make of this? And do you think we'll ever find out more about it? I saw those and was intrigued as you were. Now, you know, I mentioned before that, you know, one theory of the falling out that Trump had was over a real estate deal, which is the property that Trump buys, which he then sells to a Russian oligarch for a substantial markup. So one conceivable explanation here is Epstein knows that he's obsessed with trying to get Trump. So he's going to anybody he can, including the Russians.

14:02But I saw those. And, you know, my first reaction is also is like, how does Epstein have access to all these people? Like, what does the guy do for a job? I don't quite understand that, that he has all these like connections to powerful people in the United States, Lawrence Summers, Bill Gates, you know, and then also all these foreigners. Like what what is it that the guy does that, you know, he presents this illusion of being a financial genius, I guess. But do you have a theory on that, Michael? I mean, this is a more than incidental question. I think that usually people say, oh, it's, you know, he's got huge amounts of money.

14:43So people respond to his emails. But there has always been a sense that, well, is it in fact something more than that? Was he, you know, was he related to a government entity of some kind? Yeah, yeah. Well, there's, you know, there's certainly theories along those lines as well. And which governments are we talking about? Well, I mean, you know, the Dropside News did publish a pretty interesting series of emails about between Epstein and Barack, the former Israeli prime minister and a former security aide to Barack that suggests that there was a relationship there. That doesn't necessarily mean he was a – Epstein was a Mossad agent.

15:18But, you know, certainly Barack was one of the many foreigners, important government officials who seemed to have a relationship with Epstein. Look, the best theory I could give is like the guy is a expert networker. worker. He gets some people and that allows him to get other people. He's flying Bill Clinton on his plane to Africa. That seems like a totally legitimate thing to do. It's AIDS, whatever. You know, people see that and then they think Epstein is an important person. I thought one of the more enlightening pieces of reporting on him was the New York Times piece just about his financial life that was really about his relationship with the big banks in New York, what you realize again is he was a consummate networker and finagler and trading on inside gossip.

16:09And the bank loved him because he was bringing in important and big accounts to the bank and in exchange getting all kinds of deals. I just want to just drill down on one little tidbit, which is this weird real estate deal that Epstein knew that Trump had transacted that has to do with Trump buys a mansion in Palm Beach. It's one that Epstein had wanted to buy himself. Trump buys it instead and then flips it not very long after to a Russian oligarch. Yeah. And he sold the house for an ungodly amount of money,$95 million. And then I believe the Russian oligarch tore the mansion down. So it's not as if he actually really wanted that place.

17:00I'm just wondering, what do you make of that? It seems suspicious on its face. A seasoned pro. Exactly. Not his first game. Look, my thoughts are first, when I sell my house, I want to sell it to a Russian oligarch. But a lot of people have looked at this for a long time and it's been on the radar screen. It's been out there. I think Epstein, as I mentioned before, probably knew about this and was trying to, you know, this was one of the ways he was trying to get leverage over Trump. And, you know, the one thing that isn't mentioned is why was Epstein so obsessed with Trump? And one interpretation of one of those emails is the dog that hasn't barked is Epstein thinks.

17:54And Vicki Ward said this on television yesterday that Epstein thought that Trump had gone to the cops when they had their falling out. That Trump was the informant on Epstein. That Trump was the informant on Epstein. Right. And by the way, one corroboration of that is Brad Edwards, who is the lawyer for many of the victims, including Virginia Jeffrey, said that Trump cooperated with him when he was preparing his suit against Epstein. So it is possible that in their TIF feud whatever, and we don't really know the cause, you know, that that was what was behind Epstein's obsession with Trump and why he wanted to get back at Trump because he thought Trump had contributed to his downfall.

18:39Amazing. Unbelievable. Scorpions in the bottom of the little jar. All right. Well, we are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll look back at one of America's biggest political scandals, one that Michael knows quite well, the Clinton Lewinsky scandal. The political scene from The New Yorker will be back in just a moment.

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19:45So, listen, we've been talking about Epstein. And as you mentioned, it seems like political scandals are passé now. Is it possible anymore to actually have some kind of accountability for terrible behavior, corruption or sexual exploitation or anything else? I guess it depends on who the scandal is about, right? I mean, it would be easy to say at this point, sex scandals are out the window, right? We had, you know, Trump go on trial. He was convicted of, you know, covering up his relationship with Stormy Daniels, paying her off. Hardly the first president to cover up a sexual activity. So Trump escapes completely.

20:37And then you had Fonnie Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, who gets thrown off a case, her case against Donald Trump because she was dating her deputy. I mean, two professionals, adult professionals having a consensual relationship. And then and that became a cause. So, I mean, look, we're a totally divided country. Right. And we're so polarized that convincing, you know, the other half that something is legitimately a scandal about the people they support or backing is almost impossible. Like, can you get a jury to convict a MAGA person in a red state? Can you get a jury to acquit somebody like Trump in a blue state?

21:28I doubt it at this point. I just think that we're so dug in that it's almost impossible to imagine something that can bring somebody down. I think to that important point, Michael, I am curious about which audience is the operative audience right now for publicizing and understanding scandal. What I mean is, you know, traditionally, if we thought about impeachment, the line has always been that impeachment is a political process. It's not a simple legal threshold. It all depends on how the public feels about the person who is being impeached. And so if that person is profoundly unpopular, then the effects of that impeachment are very different than if they're a popular figure.

22:11I mean, if you go back for a second, put your Clinton Lewinsky hat on for a moment and help us understand what is there about that scandal, about that experience that is useful, if anything, in understanding the context for how this scandal can reverberate through the culture in a way that has political consequences. Right. Because every scandal has a context, right? Now, with Clinton, it was, you know, his womanizing was baggage from the beginning of his political campaign. In 87, Clinton was thinking of running and had to get out because Betsy Wright confronted him with all the women he had had, he was supposed to have had affairs with.

22:52So and then, of course, Jennifer Flowers, you know, the cloud over his political campaign. He denies it and he escapes. So that was the context. And, you know, I think a lot of people assume that, well, Clinton, OK, you know, he's been a womanizer for years. But surely when he becomes president, he will behave himself. And then to learn that he, in fact, was not and was getting having oral sex in the Oval Office from a White House intern was a pretty shocking thing. Right. So it was the context that that made that such a big scandal. And of course, you add on top of that, that, you know, he lied before a federal judge in a lawsuit.

23:33So I think you have to look at the context. Now, whether that still applies when you're talking about Trump, I have no idea. I suppose if there was really a smoking gun in these Epstein emails that, you know, did show that which he has denied, that would be a serious problem for him. But just on, can I just take you back? We were talking about Clint Lewinsky about how Sandals have become passe. Let's go back to Watergate. What was the smoking gun in Watergate? It was the tape in which Nixon tells his aides to go to the CIA and tell them to get the FBI to back off. Right? Guess what? It was an official action.

24:18He's communicating with federal agencies under the Supreme Court immunity rule. It's off the table. You couldn't even ask questions about that which brought down Richard Nixon. So I think that's another clear example of how scandals of the past don't really have the traction that they should today. Michael, I think to your point about also essentially our laws or institutions or structures create outcomes, the Clinton scandal is another great example of that Washington phenomenon of sort of scandal metastasization. You know, if you investigate somebody for long enough, and I think, you know, that people may not remember that it was actually an outgrowth of the Whitewater investigation that essentially hung over the entirety of Bill Clinton's presidency.

25:09We all lived this, at least I guess Jane and you and I lived in this sort of covering Washington in the 1990s. And there was always something, Whitewater and Travelgate and, you know, all the subsidiary affairs before they got to the Starr investigation at the very end of Clinton's presidency in 1998. And I'm struck by that in Trump's case because, first of all, who's going to investigate? What has he done in the nine months that he's been president so far? He has worked to dismantle the structures of accountability combined with the Supreme Court giving him immunity anyway. So the Justice Department isn't going to investigate.

25:50The FBI isn't going to investigate. The Republican Congress literally went out of session from mid-September on. I think this is a bigger scandal, by the way, in its own right than people have focused on. As far as we can tell, the Speaker of the House took the House of Representatives out of work rather than swear in a new member who would have been the 218th and final vote to force this vote to the floor on releasing the House. This has never happened that anyone is aware of in American history. The Speaker acted as essentially the president's representative and shut down one of our branches of government from mid-September to mid-November.

26:29Yeah. I mean, something else, I think what you're saying is, you know, these are really important points. But I also think what's going on is in some ways even worse, because not only are the real investigations not likely to happen, but fake investigations are now happening where the mechanics of the Justice Department, which are as powerful as they get, are being turned on Trump's enemies to create investigative scandals that don't exist. Where even, you know, as you said, you couldn't investigate anyone and find anything. Actually, they did look and look and look and look at some of these subjects before.

27:08James Comey, for instance, and find nothing. You had the John Durham investigation for two years. A special counsel appointed by Bill Barr to look for criminal evidence of wrongdoing relating to the intelligence agencies and FBI in 2016. And he didn't, you know, find anything. But they're trying again. Can I just add, though, to what Susan was saying? You know, one other indicia is they fired all the inspectors general. So the internal people who were supposed to investigate and look at the things like, OK, I did a piece in spy talk the other day about Kash Patel's flying all around using FBI aircraft to see his girlfriend.

27:52to go on a golfing trip in Scotland, to see a hockey game in New York, and pointed out that there was an FBI director, William Sessions, who was fired for misuse of the FBI aircraft. He used it to go see his daughter in San Francisco and to take his wife to see the ballet in Atlantic City. Those were the criteria that led, and it was an internal Justice Department investigation. Is there an internal Justice Department investigation or FBI investigation at the Kash Patel's use of the plane and whether it violates standard policies? What happened to the$50 ,000 that Tom Homan got in a paper bag in an FBI sting?

28:37Where is it? Where did it go? It's like every day there is something that should be or would be in the past a scandal on the front pages of the paper. But because there's no follow-up, because there's no investigative tie that we're going to get to the bottom of this, there's nobody able to do that at the moment in American politics. Okay. I have a final question, at least from me, that goes exactly to this, Michael. So if you were assigning Michael Isikoff, star investigative reporter, to, you know, cover the scandals that matter in this Trump administration, what would you assign Michael Isikoff to be working on right now?

29:22Because there's so many things. Yeah, well, first of all, I need to hire about 10 of me, if not more, because, you know, whether it's what we've been talking about with the FBI or the twisting of the Justice Department is just so off the charts of what the norms that we've expected. The intelligence community, the distortions of the intelligence community. I mean, the National Intelligence Council writes a report that contradicts what Trump was saying about Tren de Aragua and Venezuela, that it was not an invasion ordered by Maduro. And Kelsey Gabbard fires the head of the National Intelligence Council.