162. The Missing Epstein Files: Who Do They Protect?

15:31Anthony Scaramucci:But I think accountability or rejection of accountability, backlash accountability, I think I said this the other day, is part of the kind of anti-woke thing. But I am going to push back a bit because, look, you have and this is not a Democrat or Republican thing, but you've had people in very powerful positions. You now have Larry Summers, who's basically on gardening leave until the end of the year, is not coming back to teach at Harvard anymore. One of the most powerful economists in the United States of our generation. You have Bill Gates having to give an embarrassing apology that was videoed to his staff.

16:05Anthony Scaramucci:You have the heads of law firms. You have the Clintons being deposed. As we speak this week, they're going to be deposed. So I think you do have some people being pushed out of high positions. I mean, I think shamefulness still exists in some places in the United States. It is still possible for shame to dictate the way that people's careers develop, especially around this Epstein issue. The trouble with that, as we've said, is that once people go, yeah, they step down. It sucks for them, maybe. I don't really care. They should have everything that comes to them, but if they're liable in any way.

16:43Anthony Scaramucci:But they don't. They're not investigated. they don't have to be deposed in court we don't hear who else they knew about i mean the lawyers for the epstein victims have always said that other people should be prosecuted not just people who facilitated jeffrey epstein but other men who participated in the abuse as well so that's the lawyer's story uh three or four of the top lawyers defending this have been absolutely consistent on this, that other people were involved. And I guess if you're saying that if we don't have trials, if we don't have prosecutions, then that means that people aren't being held accountable, that it has to be through the legal system.

17:21Katty Kay:I sort of feel like the accountability is only really happening in countries where Epstein's connections don't include the people that are actually controlling the investigation. So Trump's in there. And, you know,

17:34Anthony Scaramucci:and Pam Bondi is going to go to the wall to defend Donald Trump.

17:37Katty Kay:Yeah. The Democrats are saying he's in there a million times. They showed him 38 ,000 times. So they redacted 96 % of his nonsense. But there's something else going on, Caddy, that I think is very important for people to understand. And this goes way back to 2007. So the FBI opened this investigation on Epstein in July of 2006, but in May of 2007, the agents were expecting an indictment. And the prosecutors down in Florida drafted one, and multiple underage girls went to the FBI and told them what was going on with Jeff Epstein. But Alex Acosta made a decision and then he and again, when he was talking openly about it, he's now denying it.

18:19Katty Kay:He made a decision to sign a non-prosecution agreement for a group of people that came in to talk about this. And then he lightly tapped Jeff Epstein. He gave him 18 months. Most of it was on work release, Caddy. OK. And he was in a private wing of the jail.

18:37Anthony Scaramucci:So they only had to spend the nights in the jail in the daytime. He could be out.

18:41Katty Kay:Exactly. That's work release. And he was in a private part of the jail. And so when this guy came back to New York, he was telling people he got lightly tapped on the wrist. And Alan Dershowitz was saying, you know, it was one underage prostitute that was only two months younger than the age of 18 and all this silly nonsense. And I'm saying that's 15 or so years ago. And it's coming back to haunt us. It's a little more than that. 17, 18 years ago. But you get my point. So you have a couple of things going on at the same time. The thing is exploding now, but these non-prosecutorial agreements that were signed 15 years ago have prevented a lot of prosecutions and have prevented, frankly, a lot of indictments.

19:24Katty Kay:And so there's a frustrating aspect of this. But I want to ask you this question about the 302s, because people in Congress, Massey and Kana, we saw them together at the State of the Union, and they're openly committed to outing the men that trafficked these young girls, this horrifying situation. But they want these 302s completely out there. Do you think that that's something that could happen? Or do you think the Republicans like Johnson and the Republicans like Thune will block that from happening?

19:53Anthony Scaramucci:Well, I mean, I think it's going to be interesting to see how much more pressure grows from inside the party. I mean, you've got Marjorie Taylor Greene, you've got the Nancy Macy's, you've got the Thomas Massey's, and there are clearly senators, I know of senators, who are uncomfortable with this situation and would like to have more information out there. You've got the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanch, who has acknowledged that there were more than a thousand victims. And this was basically the biggest sex trafficking ring in American history. So how much longer if this story of these missing 302s and this woman who not that long ago came forward and said that Donald Trump abused her after 2019 and is still around.

20:38Anthony Scaramucci:If her story carries on and we get more and more credible news stories now investigating it, because every journalist who's on the Epstein files is going to want to try and investigate this story. How much longer can Republicans like John Cornyn or John Thune? there are a bunch of centrist senators who are looking at Donald Trump's poll numbers and looking at the fact that the Senate is closer in the midterms than it should be and who may be thinking to themselves, actually, I don't need to stick with this guy as kind of lockstep as I have been doing. Or do you think that's naive? Do you think it's possible that there could now be pressure for the release?

21:17Anthony Scaramucci:I think it depends partly what these documents show, because I really don't see Pam Bondi wanting to release anything that is detrimental to Donald Trump. That's the problem.

21:26Katty Kay:Well, listen, you know, we're going to go to the State of the Union in a second. But one of the most vivid images for me of the State of the Union was Thune, Emmer and Johnson walking hand in hand, literally arm in arm with Donald Trump as he was announced into the chamber. And I don't think these guys are breaking. I think these guys have made a decision that he's a decaying political asset and a few years he'll be gone and they'll pick up, you know, wherever the fire has left them. They'll try to rebuild the party or whatever elements of it.

21:57Anthony Scaramucci:So even if this blows up and good investigative reporters really dig into this story, like Julie Brown down in the Miami Herald did initially and broke the story, you think this doesn't go anywhere? You think there's no way we get to see these missing precees of these FBI interviews from this woman?

22:15Katty Kay:Okay. So there's two things I want to say, what I want to have happen and what I think is going to happen. So I just want to make it clear to everybody what I would like to have happen is that smoking guns are found and these people are taking the justice. That's what I would like to have. Whoever's culpable. Whoever is culpable, a bipartisan, the whole thing.

22:34Anthony Scaramucci:And we don't know who that is yet.

22:35Katty Kay:And we don't know who that is. But what I think is going to happen is Donald Trump is going to survive this. And I think he's already survived E. Jean Carroll, who he's lost the rape case against or a civil rape case. I'll point out it wasn't a criminal rape case, but he lost that case. owes her money. They're fighting it out in the appeals court. He survived that. He survived accusations one after the other over two to three decades. He survived that. And I think he is going to survive this. I think he's very lucky that he got reelected because there were a lot of different things that were happening.

23:11Katty Kay:Jack Smith, the insurrection, a lot of things that were happening that he may not have survived had he not been able to take control of the Department of Justice. And I think this is important for people to understand. And this is probably something that needs reform, Caddy. The constitutional architecture in the United States is such that the Department of Justice reports to the President of the United States in the executive branch. And he is not Richard Nixon. Okay. And I'm saying that jokingly, Richard Nixon was trying to cover things up, but he also respected the constitutional process, which is why he resigned.

23:52Katty Kay:I mean, there's enough smoke around Trump. You know, any normal person that understood shame or understood anything other than his egocentric narcissism would have resigned by now. But he's going to stay in there. He's going to bring that party down with him. OK, and unless you're telling me that congressional Democrats are going to find a mechanism, the 302s or something else that provides the smoking gun, he survives this. And I think this is a bigger, bigger problem for the United States to be candid.

24:25Anthony Scaramucci:Can I ask you another legal question? Because not only do you play a very good journalist on this podcast, you are also a very impressive lawyer on this podcast. So the transparent that was said with all seriousness, the transit. I know you see, I could see you looking like you didn't believe me, but I actually mean that you're, this is why I like having you, you know.

24:42Katty Kay:Okay, I'm bracing myself now for the question. Go ahead, Kat.

24:47Anthony Scaramucci:Okay, so the Transparency Act expressly prohibits federal officials from withholding or redacting materials, quote, on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity to public figures. So my understanding is that under the law, the Justice Department can redact material that could be used to identify Epstein's victims. They didn't do a terribly good job of redacting that material, but they can't redact material or withhold material to save a public figure from embarrassment. So if the Justice Department doesn't release these 302s pertaining to this woman who has accused Donald Trump of abusing her, is Pam Bondi then breaking the law?

25:34Anthony Scaramucci:Because Donald Trump signed that law, right? The Transparency Act was signed by Donald Trump. So what's her legal position here?

25:41Katty Kay:So this is the most fascinating thing about Donald Trump. And I always say this to you that there's two sides to Donald Trump, right? He's going to be out there saying, I am for transparency. I'm for transparency. I signed the Transparency Act. But then the other side of the coin, this is that sort of Gemini in him. The other side of that twin is, hey, you better do everything you possibly can to make this the least transparent, transparent thing. And so this is the irony. And this is why he still gets these faithful followers. I did a deep dive on Twitter and I asked my team at Skybridge, my research team, it's not a scientific poll or anything like that, but just tell me what you see out there in MAGA world.

26:29Katty Kay:In MAGA world, they have outrage fatigue. In MAGA world, they have investigation fatigue. Accountability fatigue. Accountability fatigue. They want this over with, Katty. So the Transparency Act has this fatal architectural flaw that nobody talked about when it passed.

26:49Anthony Scaramucci:It's really interesting. Epstein has switched from being a MAGA issue to a Democrat issue. Super interesting. Yeah. Right?

26:56Katty Kay:And those MAGA guys go on Fox News and say, this is a Democratic issue and it's nothing to do with Trump. It's a hoax. It's a hoax. 85 % of the people in the thing are Democrats. So Congress did something here that they're going to really regret, Caddy. They outsource the most sensitive declassification decision in modern American history to the one person with the greatest institutional incentive to get it wrong. Okay, and that's the irony of the Transparency Act. Congress should have said, hey, give me that goddamn act, and we're going to have a bipartisan commission, and we're going to make this thing transparent.

27:33Katty Kay:But again, Caddy, this is about the power elite protecting itself because there are Democrats on that list. There is a reason why Joe Biden didn't open up these files. Yeah. You see? Yeah. This is one of the crazy things in our contemporary history.

27:49Anthony Scaramucci:It's become a Democratic talking point, not a MAGA talking point anymore. It's so interesting how it's flipped.

27:57Katty Kay:I predict that this is going to go nowhere. As much as I would like it to go somewhere, I'm going to maintain what I've said that it's not going to go anywhere. Okay, let's take a break there, Caddy. But when we come back, I want to talk about the State of the Union because it's such classic Trump behavior.

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29:32Anthony Scaramucci:What did you think of the State of the Union? You know, I'm going to be totally candid. I hate States of the Unions. For years and years and years as a BBC anchor, I was having to stay up and do the special coverage. I hated that night. It ran way too late. I have rarely seen a State to the union, apart from the one with Joe Biden in 2024, that actually moved the needle on a presidential or a midterm election. And I don't think this one did either. Am I wrong? Well, no.

30:01Katty Kay:I mean, it was mumbo jumbo. I didn't get a lot out. I mean, there were some feel good moments, as I pointed out earlier in the podcast, but there was more mumbo jumbo, one hour, 48 minutes long.

30:14Anthony Scaramucci:Could you talk for that long? Could you stand up and talk for one hour?

30:17Katty Kay:caddy i mean come on i'm italian america come on you knew the answer to that question before you

30:22Anthony Scaramucci:asked it i was wondering if even anthony scaramucci could talk for one hour and 48 minutes i'm fidel castro i need a microphone i'd be sitting there thinking oh my god these poor people they need to go to bed they've got to get up early i shouldn't go on too long i should let them go

30:39Katty Kay:at one hour caddy you know the most dangerous place in the world you know this after working with me. It's between me and a camera and a microphone. Get out of the way. Okay, no, of course I could talk for six hours like Fidel Castro. But in all seriousness, one of the best lines from a president, and I always say this to younger people about public speaking, is from Franklin Roosevelt. When he was asked, you're a great public orator, sir, what is your best advice? He said, you know what my advice is? Stand up, speak briefly, sit down.

31:11Anthony Scaramucci:There.

31:12Katty Kay:Love that. Right. That's Franklin Roosevelt. That's the best advice about public speaking.

31:16Anthony Scaramucci:Why the Gettysburg Address is such a brilliant address. There you go. There you go. If you can't say in two or three minutes, don't say it.

31:23Katty Kay:And Everett was scheduled to speak for two and a half hours. He was getting his speech ready. He expected Lincoln to speak for at least one hour, three minutes and 10 seconds later. Lincoln is off the podium and Everett is flummoxed up there trying to get his speech together. and then he goes on for two hours or whatever the hell it was and he told he told the press i had to shorten the speech after the president i was scheduled to speak for three hours yeah anyway the supreme court to me there's a couple things that went on that i want you to address number one we have a partial government shutdown going on never gets addressed uh number two only four of the Supreme Court justices, there are nine of them, actually show up at the speech.

32:12Katty Kay:Some of them voted against Trump and some of them voted with Trump. But I want you to address that. And then the third thing is that Donald Trump actually is going to defy, he's going to defy this Supreme Court decision. And do you think he's going to get away with that? So number one, And what happened to those other five justices, Katty?

32:36Anthony Scaramucci:It's not totally unusual. Sometimes they haven't all turned up. But I think it was good that the president shook their hands. I think it was good that the president didn't stand there and berate them and say that they were an embarrassment and they're an embarrassment to their family. So on that side, I think it was better than it could have been. I imagine that Susie Wiles was sort of, you know, heaving a little bit of a sigh of relief that Donald Trump didn't go off piece there and start laying into them. I don't think he's going to defy them by invoking AIPA, though, and saying I'm imposing these tariffs under the national security rulings.

33:18Anthony Scaramucci:He's going to find other ways to impose the tariffs. Which are illegal.

33:22Katty Kay:He's going to find other illegal ways that are going to get stopped. And that will get stopped in the courts.

33:25Anthony Scaramucci:Yeah. I don't think that is quite a defiance of that. That's why I said initially when this ruling came down that actually it was my understanding was that that ruling pertained to that particular issue of whether he could impose tariffs under the basis of national security or under an emergency provision. So if he finds other ways and they get blocked in the courts, they'll get blocked in the courts. But if he were to actually defy that particular Supreme Court ruling from last week, then, yeah, that would be a huge deal. But I don't think I actually don't think he's going to do it that way.

33:56Katty Kay:Yeah, and I agree. He'll find another way that'll get challenged in the courts and struck down. But I want to go to the$18 trillion investment pledge. He said that in 12 months, he secured$18 trillion pouring in from all over the globe. I mean, there isn't a bigger fiction than that, right? That's half of the U.S. economy is coming in, which, of course, it isn't.

34:23Anthony Scaramucci:And the price of beef is down, by the way. And rents are down.

34:27Katty Kay:He lied about the gas and the whole thing. So he's sitting there. Yeah, I mean, fact checkers are having sort of like heart palpitations. Yeah, so we have an affordability issue. I'm going to lie about it. I'm telling you that I'm bringing investments into the country, which are not happening. But look at me, Caddy. Look at me. All the cabinet members are jumping up and they're clapping and barking like seals. So you live in Washington. Obviously, I get kicked out of Washington after 11 days. So explain to me how that goes. that a jackass in the cabinet that knows the guy is lying is jumping up and down, barking like a seal.

35:06Katty Kay:Go ahead. And slapping their fins.

35:08Anthony Scaramucci:I mean, it gets back to where we started this podcast, that the qualification for being in Donald Trump's cabinet is absolute loyalty to Donald Trump. And Speaker Johnson was sitting right behind him. The moment Donald Trump said anything, you know, anything, there was Johnson like grinning like a Cheshire cat, like it was the funniest thing he had ever heard. And I think the cabinet members have tied their, you know, their fortunes are so tied to Donald Trump. They buy into it. It's not like he has people when you were there who say, which is why you were thrown out, because you were prepared to say no to Donald Trump.

35:45Anthony Scaramucci:None of these people are. I mean, that's like, you can't, there isn't room in this. I mean, this is actually, you know, if we were to give a public service announcement to the Trump White House, President Trump, do yourself a favor and get somebody near you who will say no to you, because otherwise you're going to start making mistakes and you're not going to read the room and you're not going to realize that making fun of this word affordability like it's a Democratic joke actually then starts to sound like you're making fun of the people who think that they have a problem with affordability, which is a great many Americans who you want to vote for you.

36:20Anthony Scaramucci:I mean, I think all those. What are there? there are 30 odd vulnerable Republican members of Congress who were sitting in that audience and they may have been clapping because there is this weird hold that Donald Trump has over them, but they know this is not good for them. They know this doesn't help them when they have to try and get reelected in November.

36:39Katty Kay:So, you know, listen, it's fascinating that this is happening, but it is apropos to who Trump is. And you and I have just completed this bonus thing for our founding members on Donald Trump, but this speech was classic Donald Trump. And hear me out for a second. He is actually governing from a position of greater fragility than the speech itself acknowledged. The other thing that's happening is it was a maximalist triumphalism. He's literally telling you stuff that isn't true about himself and about the economy and about his administration and the golden age and all this stuff. And then he's relentlessly blasting the Democrats.

37:23Katty Kay:And so why is this classic Trump, in my opinion? Because this is him trying to will the narrative caddy to his direction. He's been doing that his whole life. And will he be successful this time? I don't know the answer to that, but I feel he won't be. That's just my guess. But this is classic Trump behavior. And I think it's important for people to know, and we talked about it this week on the first episode of our Trump series, what he is like. And so take a listen here to a clip from the series.

37:59Anthony Scaramucci:Let's talk about his playboy image, because it was something that he cultivated very deliberately, right? I mean, yes, he had reasonable looks. I think his older brother was widely determined to be better looking than he was. But he went hard after creating this image of himself as a man about town. And yet you've got people who were close to him, people like Rudy Giuliani, who were even close to him at the time, saying it was all a bit of a sham. I mean, he goes to these parties, but he turns up, make sure he's photographed, make sure that the right reporters see him. He leaves early and he doesn't drink anything.

38:35Anthony Scaramucci:In his early 20s, he even says, I don't plan to marry anybody. So it's a kind of, again, it's this sort of fakeness about Donald Trump that comes out in this playboy image. He has said in his early 20s that he never wants to get married. But then he meets Ivana Marie Zelinkova at a restaurant in Manhattan. She says of that meeting that he immediately was trying to be the dominant one, imposing his will on her, in telling the waiter what she wanted, controlling the tone of the evening. And then he started being kind of infatuated with her and putting around stories about her that, again, not quite accurate.

39:18Anthony Scaramucci:She says she was a member of the Czech Olympic ski team, that she had been a top model in Canada. This is not strictly two. She had been a competitive skier, but she was not on the ski team. She had been a child actress, but she was not a top model in Canada. But again, he meets a woman, he latches onto her, he inflates her reputation and her personality. Again, I think almost to make himself look better, right?

39:44Katty Kay:I think the big tell there, Caddy, is that he didn't want to get married. People should remember that when they think of him. Because it's about, you know, enough about me talking about me, Caddy. What do you think of me? That's Donald Trump. Okay, that's how he lives. That's how he thinks, right? And so you have to understand that the Eastern European angle of this, because he's married two Eastern European women and one Southern woman, but the Eastern European women who have talked about him and have dated him because he dated other Eastern European women. Why is he dating Eastern European women?

40:23Anthony Scaramucci:Also outsiders, right? Also not part of the system.

40:26Katty Kay:It's a cultural thing. he likes the fact that they're going to allow him to be the alpha male dog uh they're not necessarily feminists in the case of the ivana trump she has a great career he divorces her because she has too big of a career he didn't like the attention grabbing that she represented to him because the spotlight always has to be on him if you watched him at the kennedy center during the Melania interview while he's standing there dawdling. I mean, he looked like, when is she going to shut up? It was almost like every young kid, every young boy in the supermarket when their mother meets a friend in one of the shopping aisles.

41:09Katty Kay:They're like, well, when are we getting on with this, right? So that's Trump. He's always been that way. And he's in his late 20s. And he's in the business world now, and he's going to take some big bets with his father's money. And he's got a big discrimination case going on.

41:27Anthony Scaramucci:In 1973, Trump Management Inc. are served a notice by the housing section of the federal justice government because they'd sent undercover agents in trying to rent properties from the Trump organization. And they found out that black applicants to rent properties, their application was marked with a C for the word colored. And if they were offered a place at all, they would be put into a separate, less nice place than the white applicants. and the government said this was discrimination and it was against the law. It was against the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which was part of the whole civil rights movement.

42:07Anthony Scaramucci:And they were going to sue the Trump organization for this. So he's in the middle of this suit and Roy Cohn comes along and says, even if you're guilty, we're going to find a way to go after the Justice Department. We're going to turn this attack against us into our benefit.

42:23Katty Kay:I was on Trump's campaign, as people will remember, and Trump would always turn to you and say, you know, Roy Cohn, he was the best. I love Roy Cohn. And his thing was feed the reporters constantly. You can feed them bullshit. You can feed them non-bullshit. It doesn't matter, but feed them. create a spectacle get the eyes on you make yourself unavoidable these are things that Roy Cohn would say to him and control the narrative through volume and aggression okay so my story may not be true but you are going to hear it repetitively from me until you say well maybe it is true. He said it to Leslie Stahl on 60 Minutes.

43:09Katty Kay:He said it on the campaign. He said it for 40 years. I'm going to keep saying something until at least a good portion of the people end up believing it.

43:23Anthony Scaramucci:If you'd like to listen to the full episode or for new episodes every week, of course, you can sign up and become a founding member at the rest is politics us.com. We hope you enjoy that um thanks guys thanks for listening another busy week in american politics enjoy the

43:38Katty Kay:skiing caddy enjoy the skiing okay i promise you it's my last week of skiing that's it i'm done oh come on come on it's okay to be bougie on this program okay to be bougie all right guys see you

43:50Anthony Scaramucci:soon