The Epstein Rabbit Hole

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With me, as always, Executive Editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe. Hi, John. You're one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. But, you know, you forbear. You don't have to say you're not because – No, I think I'm up there. Okay, you're up there. Okay. Also, one of the greater Americans who ever lived, Senior Editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth. hi john and of course two great americans seriatim we have uh washington free beacon editor eliana johnson hi eliana hi john and social commentary columnist christine rosen hi christine hi john i'm still still still zarina too zarina the fan of fugazi we were because christine said she wanted a halftime show with fugazi we've been getting emails all week of people going i can't believe christine loves fugazia like a death metal band of the early death metal band out of dc not death metal it's a founding punk rock you know foundational punk rock of the of the of the 80s you know the washington i heard them i heard them when you were like nine years old i heard fugazi at the 930 club and don't tell me what they are because they okay okay they did a great concert their last concert was at fort reno park here in dc in like 2002 i think which i happened to end up seeing the last part of because i was with a friend who wanted to go um and i obviously knew fugazi and it was great it was great i mean maybe it's the 930 club that you dislike i i actually i do uh but anyway okay i'm being cranky and we're talking about something that 99 of the people that we're that we're speaking to here have no idea what on earth but those who know but you do need to know that christine and seth are big fans of a terrible group called fugazi anyway my choices which was interesting the one interesting thing about them was that they insisted on charging i believe i remember right five bucks a show they did not want they wanted their young fans who didn't have money to be able to come see their shows which i think is very nice even though they were corrupting the minds of the youth and turning them towards satanic rituals and things like that they weren't. I'm just joking. What I'm not going to joke about here right now is, okay, we have various topics. We've got the possible government shutdown. We've got Epstein and the scene in Congress with Attorney General Pan Bondi and the Democrats screaming at each other. We have the trans shooter in Canada. And what else do we have? We have a couple of other things. I can't even remember. There's so much going on. And at the same time, oh, we have the partial shutdown. We have the 10-day shutdown of the airspace right at El Paso that was lifted. Yeah, Phoebe's visit to Washington and the potential move of a second carrier into the waters off Iran. And we have the Carrie Prejean story. Carrie Prejean, a bowler, being removed from the Religious Liberty Commission. And apparently, according to her, the head of the commission is not allowed to remove her from the commission because she answers only to Christ the king, which is great. I think it's a new way of going about this. Although she didn't say it was Christ the king that was keeping her in the job. It was Trump. And only Trump had the power to remove her from the commission. It was the same thing. Okay. I don't know where we're going with this. But let us, let us, let us, but okay, maybe we'll go to Epstein. We haven't talked much about Epstein. Yeah, I have like a very, probably a counterintuitive thought about this and feeling very upset about the release of all these files. That's my thing too. So we should go to that. Why don't you start, John? Very simply, Congress passed a law saying that six million pages of material collected by the Department of Justice should be released so that everybody should see it. And I, like everybody else, am fascinated by all the things that are coming out from these documents. Revelations about what it's like to be super rich in the person of Leon Black, the former head of Apollo, and his bank accounts, which are in the files. Communications about Bill Gates' marriage. Stuff like that. Who can resist it? You can't resist it. It's like getting a window into the private lives of people who are – Yeah, we all like being peeping Toms, okay? Right. It's all of our worst instincts and all of our most based human instincts. Yes. So it has been an axiom of the process of law enforcement and information collection to look into crimes. That the material that is collected by law enforcement agencies is confidential in the extreme. It's one of the reasons that grand jury hearings, where the prosecutor is allowed to present evidence to a grand jury without the presence of a defense attorney, why they are secret and why there are no transcripts and why we don't know what goes on in grand jury hearings except for the decision that they make and this material which is collated six million pages of information from various places also includes hundreds of thousands i believe of tips things called into phone lines things like that much about most of which from what i know from people in law enforcement are often supplied by psychotics and schizophrenics and shut-ins and things like that who call these lines and make things up and you can't accept them as gospel. So now all of this stuff unmediated except for the supposed redactions of some names and the redactions of photographs of people who are said to be victims of Epstein, which was apparently not done very efficiently since some of the photographs were not redacted is out there this is terrible this is a horrible precedent people don't understand what this means if it's a precedent it means that no one is safe ever you know the whole thing about how trump you know was you know if they can go after trump they can go after you right and obviously that was what Trump said about the unjust prosecutor what he believed to be the unjust prosecutions of him okay so that that's obviously ridiculous because no one is Trump right like his circumstance is very unique and also no one is Jeffrey Epstein circumstances are very unique but tens of thousands of people every year are investigated by law enforcement And if we are breaching through congressional vote and the decision of the president to sign the congressional vote into law because of a runaway effort to make political hay, first on the right and now on the left, out of the Epstein files, none of us is safe. We believe that we are innocent until proven guilty. There are now people who are losing jobs, who are being fired by their clients, who are going through the torments of hell, who maybe they wrote a disgusting email. Maybe they were friends with Jeffrey Epstein. They shouldn't have been friends with Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe they had dinner with Jeffrey Epstein. I don't care. They didn't do anything criminal or actionable. they are bystanders in a gigantic political ideological game that is going on and if you want to talk about the worst president that i've ever seen this is the worst president i've ever seen congress's behavior in demanding and the voting to release these files first by people who thought that it was a way of nailing democrats because of the presence and participation of people like Bill Clinton in the life of Jeffrey Epstein. And then the decision by Democrats to jump on the bandwagon last year, because the behavior of the Trump Department of Justice suggested deep uneasiness with the release of the files that the people there had previously demanded their release of, thus leading Democrats to think that there must be smoke there. And they wanted the files out too in case there was some there would be like the needle in the haystack that would reveal that trump was a sexual predator or something like that so this conspiracy of political interests come together they vote to release these files trump signs the bill to release the files and now we're living through this circumstance in which people's lives are being ruined for having some ancillary relationship to the files. Just one case, there is a playwright, I'm not going to give her name, but there's a playwright whose name is in the Epstein files, whose play was canceled by the theater company that was producing it, because her name is in the Epstein files. It's likely that, well, all of our names are in the, I mean, I'm not, apparently, if that index thing is real. But it's, you know, anything. Anything could be in there. It's six million pages. Someone could have forwarded something Abe wrote on the commentary blog 15 years ago to Epstein. Or something that Seth wrote for the New York Post 10 years ago. Or any of us. Anybody. We're all in someone's files. Right. And that's the point. Everybody is everywhere. And we have no business reading this stuff. It is an outrage and a scandal that this is the decision of our political system of one of the rare bipartisan things that happened in 2025 was the decision to release the Epstein files. And it's an act of cosmic injustice and will is the sort of thing that pursued further could destroy our society. And I say that without sort of like without qualification. If you cannot trust that law enforcement can't go asking questions of people, every single person confronted with somebody who comes and says something to them, now we'll take the Fifth Amendment or say, I will lawyer up in order to talk to a cop or something like that. Like, what are you going to do? It's the only way to secure your safety against this kind of depredation. Eliana, you have your own take on this. my own take on this and yes congress did pass a law that they shouldn't have passed but that was the second step i in my mind it sort of began with um members some members of the trump administration the attorney general and the director of the fbi suggesting before they came into office that things existed in these files, client lists and evidence of child trafficking rings that in fact do not exist in these files, and then handing over binders to influencers and making a show of transparency that was not actually transparency and creating a huge furor around this that resulted in Congress then doing what it did, which it shouldn't have done. But this is not transparency around this is not justice. And it is resulting in grave injustices and a mad witch hunt comparable to the excesses of Me Too. And I think worse because many people here are guilty of nothing. Absolutely nothing. Some people are guilty of bad judgment, of associating with people they knew who were bad because the guy was rich and they believe he had status. I too am guilty of exhibiting bad judgment on occasion of associating with people who are probably bad you know all of us are guilty way to talk about us on this podcast of bad judgment you know I was gonna say present company excluded right Eliana right um but Eliana would never be a member of a club that would have you know are guilty of exhibiting bad judgment but there's a huge. OK, there's Kathy Rumler of Goldman Sachs, who did obviously, you know, very bad things and was guiding the guy on media strategy and Steve Bannon, who I'd put on one end of the spectrum. And then there are people who did totally innocuous things who are losing their jobs. That none of this stuff, this is not the way that this stuff, this stuff should have never seen the light of day. If it sees the light of day, this is not the way that that it should have become private. People are talking about transparency, like transparency for transparency's sake is like a great good. Transparency is not justice. And now there's talk, you hear Democrats on the campaign trail, most recently John Ossoff, but the Epstein class is becoming a term that will, we are going to hear that term on the campaign trail. And even though what we are seeing in these files is that 95% of the people who associated with Epstein are liberals and Democrats. This is going to be used against Republicans on campaign trails because people aren't following this that closely. They're not tracking like what member of the party, you know, like, was it a Democrat or was it a Republican? People just perceive that these are the people in power who were doing this. There's some kind of nefarious corruption going on around Epstein. And Democrats are going to campaign on this against Republicans and call Republicans the Epstein class. And I think it will actually be effective. Let's talk about aura frames, aura frames, the solution to hundreds of photos that never make it past your camera roll. I can tell you this because right now in my living room, aura frames are rolling photo after photo after photo after photo from my iPhone. 25 years, actually, of photos. Six of them before the iPhone, but downloaded into my photo app nonetheless. And you get them. You use the app that AuraFrame supplies to move them from your photo app into the AuraFrame's app, and then they appear right there in your home. 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Everything is built to hold up to daily wear and still look good season after season. So look, refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash commentary for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash commentary. Free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince dot com slash commentary. I don't think the Epstein class just applies to Republicans. It's going to be used against Jews. We're already getting emails here saying, why aren't you talking about how everybody around Epstein was a Jew? Which, of course, is not true. I mean, I'm unaware that Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, the two most important people in the Epstein files are Jewish, that would be news to me. But I mentioned this in my post yesterday on Carrie Prejean Bowler, which is that she was putting out these Instagram memes of saying that the Epstein people and the Gaza genocide people are the same That one of the talking points that is catching on that people who people who love to do bad things to children, to innocent children. And it's, you know, what do they have in common? But the other thing is that also just real quickly, I saw a headline the other day that crystallized what bothered me about all this along the lines of what you guys are saying. And the headline was, you know, Epstein reportedly was working with the Mossad, according to FBI document. That's that kind of headline is what really bothers me about this, because the documents are all FBI documents. But the document at hand, as we know now, you know, was Charles Johnson, an apparent Holocaust denier or whatever troll, you know, made up something and somebody emailed to somebody else that, hey, this guy thinks that Epstein might be working for the Mossad, blah, blah, blah, this and that. But the headline gets to be, you know, federal document. Right. Okay. So let's unpack this a little bit because the Epstein class isn't a dismissible soundbite. Because what we've seen in these files, and once they're out, they can't be put back in. It's the genie is out of the bottle. We are seeing in this information that we are gathering, aside from the individual destruction of people's lives and privacy and all this, a world before our eyes. And the world before our eyes is a world in which this guy who served 13 months in prison on a, I guess, a knockdown charge of prostitution solicitation of a minor, but that led him to have to be registered as a sex offender. that in the world in which he traveled, that was not disqualifying. That was not something where everybody on earth said, I will not have anything to do with you. If he was a ordinary, you know, if it was like a working class, lower middle class guy who moved into your neighborhood and was on the sex offender registry, everybody in the neighborhood would say, everybody avoid that house like the plague. I'm not inviting him over to the neighborhood pool party. He has people coming to the mansion, according to this Michael Wolfe, unpublished Michael Wolfe article, and basically kind of coming to him and being around him and being with him. And whatever reason that they had for discounting what they had every reason to know he was, which was this, you know, sex offender didn't mean that they weren't going to continue to socialize with him, travel with him, have dinner with him, and all of that. Now, maybe the reason they came to his house is they didn't want to invite him to their house. I was going to say that this is the key point, though. And it harks back to what Eliana was saying, that transparency isn't justice. the thing that gets people completely hooked on this story is the question of complicity, not the legal question of complicity. It's a judgment call for people to continue to hang out with someone like Epstein, even before his conviction, because they could see there were young women around, his house had all kinds of obviously in-your-face erotic themes. He was kind of a sleazy guy. And just like with Harvey Weinstein, there were a lot of people who knew that he was a sleazy guy and they overlooked it for their own purposes. And that's the kind of complicity. That is a moral judgment. It's about character and personal judgment. And I think we're absolutely within our rights to assess people like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates and others who might not have broken any law, but have extremely poor judgment, poor character, and have shown no moral, upstanding morals in the way that they interacted with this guy. But the problem is there were a lot of people who just quietly went about their work and supported. And so they are complicit just around Weinstein. And a lot of those people were probably women too, unfortunately. We know from Weinstein, he had assistants who would set up these actresses to send them up to his rooms and people knew and couldn't act. And there are a lot of arguments about power dynamics and why people might've been fearful. But that's why this theater that we saw play out yesterday in the house with Pam Bondi, where, you know, Jayapal, Representative Jayapal says, stand up and look at these accusers and the accusers are all lined up. It is theater because the really tough questions are the ones of complicity and the people who just let it all happen and wouldn't speak up. And the question is, why do we live in a system where that exists? It existed with Weinstein. It did exist with a lot of these powerful Me Too guys. And it obviously existed with Epstein. So Elian is absolutely right that the excess, the sort of legal excesses of Me Too, the legal excesses of some of these Epstein claims. That's a separate issue. I'm really interested in who was complicit in a moral sense in allowing this behavior to continue. And I would definitely put a lot of the lists on that and those Epstein files. A lot of the men on those lists are complicit, even if they didn't break the law. And they should be shunned. I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that's, you know, I don't think this person should be, you know, held up as a figure whose opinion we listen to if he actually, you know, was hanging out and going to the island? I mean, no. There are plenty of people who didn't go, is my point. Look, we have these questions, and they're going to linger forever, and they're probably never going to be answered. Because it's not just that he had these parties and there were these files, right? We have the fact that somebody that law enforcement did not trust, who unfortunately took her life by suicide last year, was kind of the author of the idea that there were these lists and ledgers and things like that, and that there was this giant sex trafficking ring and that she had been trafficking, and all these girls had been trafficked to different prominent men, and that that was kind of like at the heart of the Epstein nexus was that people were coming to him to attain sexual favors and that he was then getting from them this massive wealth and social position. The thing is that no one was ever charged or has ever been charged because they got one source, different areas of people in law enforcement who had no particular reason to disbelieve this tragic woman's story, found in the end that she was a fabulist and that there were things that were very wrong with her and they could not trust her and they could not get others to verify the things that she was claiming. As a result, no one but Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell has been charged in Epstein-related criminal sexual behavior. And it's not for lack of trying, is my point. You think that an ambitious prosecutor in New York or in Florida or whatever wouldn't want to nail a famous person and get them? That's their life's blood. They want to do that. They want to prosecute the prominent. That's the best way to make yourself famous and to maybe move on to a different political order. They couldn't substantiate it. That's number one. Number two, of course, is the circumstances surrounding his wealth and the circumstances surrounding his death. So the circumstances around his wealth is nobody can really understand how he amassed half a trillion, half a billion dollars in cash when he was dead. Where did that money come from? What did he do to get it? And then you hear these details about how this one gave him a house. That one paid him $150 million for tax advice. And you say that doesn't pass the smell test. Something untoward must have been going on. But to be fair, efforts to investigate those things have come up with nothing. Criminal. There is no evidence of criminality. It's not like, again, prosecutors and people like that wouldn't have wanted to bust Leslie Wexner. or Leon Black. Sure they would. Like I say, if you bust Martha Stewart for something Martha Stewart should not have been busted for, you get a lot of headlines and you get a lot of perp walks and you get a lot of stuff like that. And then there are the circumstances surrounding his death in prison, which also don't add up or don't seem to make sense. So you have these enduring mysteries. Where's the money from? How did he die? How would it be that he could commit suicide when he was on suicide watch? All of that stuff. And so we're left with this mystery that we can't bear being a mystery. And so if the answer is there is no mystery, he wasn't a sex trafficker. He wasn't running a prostitution ring that was supplying underage girls to rich people, but rather that these rich people and famous people wanted to hang out with him despite the fact that he was a sex criminal. That's where this morphs into is what is wrong with the American elite? What is the disease within this American elite that made up billionaires, major industrialists, major hedge fund people, former president of the United States, former prime minister of Israel, you know, former president of Harvard, all of these people who seem to have no problem being anywhere near him. Whereas I think most of us, based on what we read, I mean, I don't know him, I've never met him, I don't know, but like, he must have given off the odor of, or the scent of corruption and filth, just being in his presence. So that's where the Epstein class thing, something going on in America that helps explain Trump is that he basically said in 2016, though he said it in a different way, I'm from the Epstein class. I'm the guy who invited Bill and Hillary to my wedding. Why? Because that's what you do if you want to be a player. And now I'd like to throw her in jail. And then I might have wanted to throw her in jail too, but I'm still going to have her at my wedding. I'm the only one who can clean up the Aegean stables because I'm the only one who was living in the Aegean stables. And that was a very powerful message in 2016. And it's going to remain a powerful message as long as the Epstein matter remains in the public eye. um i don't actually think it's hard to figure out why people would have wanted to why people spent time with him um i do look i don't know i'm speculating however i have read um i i have read leon's black's interviews, which I recommend to people. They're really interesting. And Puck, his long interviews about his relationship with Epstein, which he says in there that Epstein saved him a tremendous amount of money in taxes that his lawyers at these high-priced firms had not figured out how to do, which led me to believe that for the people Epstein was working for, he was providing an actual service, which is something I had wondered about. Look, he could not be telling the truth, but I believed it when I read it. Why were people hanging around him? He had a lot of money. He had the largest townhouse in Manhattan. He was handsome. Sorry, but it's true. He appears to have been very charming. By all appearances, he was incredibly cultured and probably a great conversationalist. And there were incredibly beautiful women around him all the time. I think most people situated in this class of very wealthy men are not super handsome. Probably don't have tons of beautiful young women. I mean, it wasn't George Clooney. I mean, he was kind of short. I'm probably a better judge. He was no Gavin Newsom. I'm just saying, I agree, but I mean, he wasn't like a Greek god or anything. No, but like I just think it was probably fun to be around him and the guy had an island he was inviting people to and offering to send a jet here and a car there and like i think he's probably was probably a lot more fun and interesting than the average person bill gates had the opportunity to hang around with i i i agree entirely uh with heliana's assessment and i also want to say i think when you get to a certain stratum of whatever your field, if it's entertainment, if it's finance, politics, academia, whatever, and this is a trap. This is a danger. It's a bad compulsion. You begin to let you overlook all kinds of indiscretions of the others who are up at the top with you. I mean, you talk about Weinstein. Why did people hang around with Harvey Weinstein, do business with Harvey Weinstein, knowing what he was up to? Why did people hang around with Sean Combs? What there's a certain like clubbish, you know, hey, we're all we're all above worrying about this kind of thing. You know, who gets to be us? Let's just enjoy it. You know, this is this is this is what it means to to to live the good life. And it's a sick thing. I agree. But I mean, it's it's why the nature of excess and celebrity and super wealth is very sick. But everything both of you said is true. And obviously he provided pleasure. So if it wasn't that it was that you were, you know, having sex with an underage girl, it was that you've got to go to this island and you've got to have these dinner parties and maybe your own life was more boring and his life was more interesting. and he was a reprobate so you have the kind of like frisson of hanging out with this guy who was kind of demimonde he's like a little this little is kind of uh exciting because he isn't just like another boring type he's like this you know never married sybarate you know you can and and so he's your he's your um character in uh bright lights big city tad allagash which is why men like He's hanging out with him. by people like that, is by definition then corrupted by the fact that this is the world that they travel in and the moral frame in which they are willing to make all of these excuses for, that that is not a potent social and political issue at a time of upheaval change and great anxiety about what people with great wealth are doing with their great wealth on all sides, right? We have it because we think all these people are supporting horrible universities that are doing terrible things and they're, you know, futzing around with climate change stuff that is very bad for the world economy. That's how we feel. They think that all these people are restructuring American and global life to their own practical financial benefit in every way, shape or form, the left things, and wants these people quashed in some fashion or other. And now we have this, whatever they are, they seem amoral at best, immoral at worst, and criminal and monstrous at worst. And there's nothing positive to say about it. Like, what's the positive here? that he was having meetings to talk about science and then he was funding Harvard and Yale science programs. Harvard and Yale science programs were DEI, you know, infected and just like the universe, and, you know, university money is fungible. So if you're giving it to them, you're providing more money to these corrupted institutions that we want to see not necessarily burned to the ground, but at least like overhauled because they're doing bad. They're talking America down. They're ruining our civic culture and all of that. So we have beef. The left has beef. Who's there to defend it? What defense is there? And that's what was so weird about the Bondi scene. She made this issue. She and Kash Patel and people like that and Don Pungino, Like made hay out of the Epstein files until they got into office as Eliana laid out. They were like trying to make it as though this was a cabal of evil liberal Democrats who were having sex with children. Then they come into office and taking them at their word, they get a hold of the files. They look at them and they're like, oh, it's sort of like David Albright and the – was that his name? uh the you know the guy came back from iraq and said i can't find any chemical weapons can't find them thought we all thought they were here i went around i can't find them now we're all gonna have to live in a world in which that was not the case was it heraldo was it heraldo who did the the the capone the the vault yeah the vault yeah so they went in and said, uh-oh, we just spent two years ginning up crazy people all over America with the idea that this evil cabal was doing the most monstrous things on earth. Oops, sorry, I guess we got that wrong. Oh, well, you know, better luck next time. But you open that, you know, you open that door, you open that Pandora's box, and you no longer have control of it. So they started it, and now Pramila Jayapal and Jamie Raskin and other people whose acceptance of disgusting ideas about Jews and Israel and the moral framing of all kinds of things you know strike me as being despicable now get to get on a high horse and scream at pam bondy right what did pam bondy the weird part is pam bondy yes as i say like deserves discredit because she was like fomenting stuff she came in she looked at the files she said there's nothing here but now they want their things to be there they want things to be there but okay so can we talk What? There's a I just there's a parallel here with with the with the Trump dossier regarding Russia and all that stuff that was at some point BuzzFeed just said, we're going to dump it here. here's the whole dossier and it was left for people to go through and fish stuff out um and it was you know it was i think most people consider it probably unhelpful um some considered irresponsible there's a few defenders but for the most part it was just can talk about so but but there was for the most part it was a contextless dump of like all this information and rumor and people were able to make of it what they wanted. And there's something similar with the Epstein files where it's just like, instead of walking you through an investigation or something or, you know, releasing the things we've proved or something like that, it's just, here's literally everything we have. And here's the search bar and you go into it. And it's interesting because both of these happened because of fights that Trump started, things Trump did and things people were trying to do to Trump. Like it's such a classic sign of the Trump era of American politics. I'm not blaming him solely for it, obviously, certainly not the dossier, but it was just, this is like, it kind of feels like this is how we live now for 10 years. We should blame him for it. We've been dumping documents. But we should blame him for it because he is the person who surfaced the idea in politics. I just mean not entirely for the dossier. No, no, no, no, but I'm saying this. He's the person who came in in 2015 and said, everything is corrupt. The Republicans are corrupt. The Democrats are corrupt. Everything is a scam. Everything, you are being ripped off. All of your life is being controlled by this cabal that, you know, isn't interested in you and is only interested in itself. I alone can fix. I'm going to come in and do this. And he mainstreamed in a way that no one else ever had before the conspiracist view of how the world works. You know, it's like, don't be ridiculous. You know how it works? You pay bribes or you do this. If you really had a serious conversation with him about what on earth he and his family are doing in the Middle East with crypto and with Bitcoin and with investments and things like that, he would say, oh, you think, as he said to Bill O'Reilly about Putin, oh, you think we're so pure? You think other people didn't do this before I did it? Everybody does it. I'm just, you know what? I'm just more honest about it. And so having created, maybe he's right, in which case all that I'm saying here is just a validation of his incredible cynicism about how the world really works. But he's the one who made the world safe for the scene at the House yesterday, which we should talk about a little bit. if you didn't see it, Pam Bondi and Democrats in Congress screamed at each other for four hours. I mean, I've never, I didn't watch the whole thing. I only saw bits and pieces of it. Never seen anything like it. I don't think there's ever been anything like it. There are contentious moments in House hearings and things like that. And people, mostly what's interesting about it is that mostly what happens is the congressmen yell at the witnesses and the witnesses sit there and go, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, or I can't really answer that or something like that. And in this case, the Bondi decision was to scream back at them. So Jamie Raskin says, how dare you do whatever it is you do? And then she says, you're a loser. You're a loser. You're a loser lawyer. You're not even a lawyer. You loser. Right. And then she has a confrontation with Rebecca Balint, a first-term congressman from Vermont, and out of nowhere, she says, Rebecca Bailett asked her question, she's like, well, I think it's really interesting that you should be talking this way, given the fact that you didn't condemn the phrase from the river to the sea, you know, Palestine should be free. So I'm not going to take any moral instruction from you, says Pan Bondi to Rebecca Bailin, who then says, oh, you're going to go there? My grandfather died in the Holocaust. Now we're off to the races. What on earth does this have to do with Epstein? What does this have to do with anything? It serves both sides purposes right now, which is to be antic, frantic, performative, useless people. And I'm saying that for Pan Bondi. I'm saying that for every single member of that hearing. They are, none of them actually had to ask the questions that should be addressed to Pam Bondi, and she never had to answer them. And the main question right now is how much power and oversight is the president trying to exert on the Department of Justice, and does that compromise her job and her role as attorney general? She didn't get to talk about any of the wins that her Department of Justice has had in the last few months in terms of what they're going after, the people they're investigating, what the results of those investigations are, you know, normal oversight. Both of them benefit. She's trying to curry favor with Trump. So she spent most of her time yelling and screaming and defending the president in this very, you know, fake outrage sort of tone, which he must have loved. She's been kind of on the outs with him from what we understand. So that serves her personal purposes. But it was a clown show. It's embarrassing. I personally was embarrassed watching all of them, Every last one of them. I mean, in some ways it's worse than a clown. I mean, it's like if historians of the future want to mark a moment at which our republic began, you know, showed signs of its crumbling, that hearing would have been one of those moments. And it followed a week in which – It's the same as the last one. I mean, I was a guest on this podcast, I think, when Bondi appeared before Congress. I think it was the last time. And when I came on, I said, this is the end of congressional oversight. Because there's no. Yes, you did. It's the Senate hearing. Yes. Yeah, there's no active sense on her part that Congress can and should conduct oversight of the executive branch. This was a giant middle finger. The response to every question is an insult to the lawmakers. And that's the way this is going to go from now on. And that's the way yesterday's went. So I view yesterday steering through that lens as more as a continuation of what we've seen from her. And it's not just her, but she's definitely the tip of the spear on this as like, you're not going to conduct oversight of the Justice Department. I mean, so now it's left, if they're not going to do it, to grand juries. And the other day, this preposterous and disgusting effort to criminalize the six members of Congress who put out the ad saying that no member of the military needed – veterans, right, who said no member of the military needed to obey unlawful orders. and then basically in service to Trump, the Justice Department tries, I guess in the person of Jeanine Pirro, goes to a grand jury to try to get an indictment on the grounds of, I don't even know what, sedition? I'm not quite sure what they were going for. A criminal indictment of sitting members of Congress for saying that no one should obey an unlawful order if you are in the military. A reminder, which is true, which is the law, and they have full free speech rights as ordinary Americans, and they have special free speech rights as members of Congress under the speech and debate clause, although I guess they didn't say it on the floor of the House or the Senate. But it is understood that members of Congress speaking about political issues have almost unlimited speech rights, you know, because that's how our system works and that's in the Constitution. And because the people around Trump do not care about the fact that they took an oath to defend and uphold the Constitution of the United States of America, they violate that oath every single minute that they start thinking about how to help Trump when he wants them to do unconstitutional things. and so in this case a grand jury in washington said we're not indicting and it's the second time that a grand jury jury in the last couple of weeks has has refused to rubber stamp a trump an absolute overreach nauseating overreach by the trump justice department which let's remember the whole point and the reason i brought this up at the beginning about the documents is that the Justice Department has the power to detain. It has the power to arrest. It has the power to subpoena and put you in jail if you don't obey their subpoenas. And it has the power to ask you any question it wants unless you want to take the Fifth Amendment. It has the power to coerce you to do this. In government, in the federal government, there are no other departments that have this power over ordinary civilians. And that power has to be husbanded carefully, overseen carefully, and managed carefully because it's too much power. And if it's left unmanaged and untrammeled and you have somebody who doesn't care about the rules, then the Justice Department is going to turn into an arm of illegitimate power. And that's, again, collapsing our – that's one of the ways in which our republic can collapse. if he does it and then a democrat comes in and a democrat does it and a democrat does it to you know us or you know to somebody else or whatever you know like that's the justification for what bondi and the justice department are doing now it's that under biden under previous democratic administrations that is what they do particularly under biden that was you know all going after Trump is seen as open. It's now open season on anyone who comes in and gets power. So it's complete power play then, which is bad for our system because it means that, and it speaks to what you were saying earlier about Trump, the nihilism that's at the core of the MAGA movement. And it's different from populism, but when it's combined with the populist wave, it's extremely damaging to institutions that actually we should want to preserve, regardless of the fact that I think there was a lot of abuse at the Justice Department under the Biden administration. Absolutely. Does that mean we should blow it all up and that it doesn't matter? Well, actually, the rule of law still should matter. And so rebuilding trust in that, even if you don't like the people who are at the FBI or at the Department of Justice, is still important or should be. And there is a huge vacuum right now in political leadership of anyone willing to say that on either side. So instead, we get our performances at fake oversight hearings. I think there's another danger to the administration, which is that, sure, there are 53 Republican senators, 47 essentially Democrats, you know, some independents who caucus with the Democrats like Bernie Sanders. But it's also a club of 100. And we saw that when Marco Rubio is nominated for Secretary of State, and he's confirmed overwhelmingly because senators are loyal to each other. And I think a move like this is something that raises concerns among senators, including those who are not targeted. The senators, Republican senators, I think, have to be opposed to a move like this, concerned about a move like this, particularly as we head into a midterm election fight. And it came around the same time as we saw six Republicans in Congress defect and vote against the administration on a tariff vote. And the- Toward Canada, right. Yeah. Toward Canada. But didn't a vote precede that, allowing the vote, allowing Congress to disapprove of the president's tariff policies. And then came the Canada vote, I believe. And I think that showed the president, well, Mike Johnson's, but also the president's ability to hold his caucus together, slipping ahead of the midterms. And I think that should raise some real concerns for this White House. Well, and he and it showed also, which we've repeatedly seen Trump's contempt for Congress and his own and the GOP in Congress, because he immediately tweeted out all he had to do was say nothing. He they do not have a filibuster proof. He can he can just, you know, veto whatever comes out of on the tariffs, whatever comes out of there. They do not have a veto proof majority. So he'll he'll you know, he vetoes. It's fine. But he had to go on Truth Social and threaten primary challenges to the GOP folks who voted for the bill. So he can't resist. He needs 100 percent loyalty. And that is a real weakness when it comes to Congress, because what he should understand is that he needs to let some of those people in vulnerable districts, GOP reps in vulnerable districts, occasionally vote against him so that they can go at the midterms and say, you know, I'm not completely a Trump's dude. You can trust me and I'm in my purple district. And the other people, it didn't matter anyway. They're either retiring or they're Thomas Massey. So it was just, it just was really about, that struck me, his true social post is being bad for Johnson, who's trying to, you know, doing the best he can, keeping this thing together with his very narrow majority and worried about the midterms and Trump's ego. And, you know, Trump's mad because people said no to him. And I think that's just, it's just not strategic long term thinking as we come into a very tendentious midterm election for the GOP. And Republicans should also, you know, they if they want to be you can't you can't wait till you give him permission to dissent from Trump also like Trump demands loyalty, but Republicans should be able to show that that's just not what they're going to give him. And they, you know, they don't test that enough. I mean, we, you know, we see this with like, you know, some of his nominees, Republicans in the Senate having second thoughts about, you know, RFK Jr. heading the Health and Human Services Department or something like that. You didn't have to vote for him. You didn't have to give him what he wanted in that sense. And you also, you, you set a precedent, Right. Which is like you've nobody. I don't think Trump was really threatening people. Maybe I'm wrong. I just don't remember. But I don't think he was threatening people with primary challenges over some of these nominees. It was just kind of assumed that he gets what he wants. He's president. And most presidents get the nominees, you know, mostly get the nominees that they want. There's a sort of norm around it also, obviously. But there are situations in which there didn't seem to be a lot of danger for some Republicans in crossing him at that moment. And then when the danger was stated later, surely they were not going to because they wouldn't test it even when he wasn't threatened. Okay, the problem with that theory is that you've got to trust that people understand the nature of, you know, that people's own animal cunning tells them what is dangerous to them and what is not. And so the decision of, you know, Senator Cassidy in Louisiana to vote for RFK Jr. was a decision that he made after considerable thought and and and deciding that it was too dangerous for him to do what he clearly wanted to do, which was vote against and maybe even lead a charge so that Kennedy's nomination would be withdrawn. You can say he shouldn't. Trump is supporting his primary opponent anyway. But I don't – I'm telling you, he sees – he sees what he sees. He did what he did. Maybe he's right. Maybe he's wrong. But you can't sort of question the security protocol that he followed except to say that Republicans en masse may be making a huge mistake. I mean, here is the detail this week, the salient detail. There was a special election in Louisiana in a state House seat because the governor appointed the incumbent in the seat to a state job. And so the seat was open and it's a seat that gets 10,000, like the electorate is 10,000 people because it's a Saturday night on a Monday night in February. And it was held by a Democrat who got this appointment. So it was a democratically held seat, but it's a seat that Trump won or that's district. Trump won by 27. Republicans outspent the Democrats three to one. And in the end, the Democrat won the seat by 24 percentage points in a district that Trump won by 13. So that is a 37% shift since 2024. According to the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, since 2024, Democrats have flipped 26 state legislative seats and Republicans have flipped none. And this is a midterm election in 2014. You may remember Barack Obama, terrible midterm election for the Democrats. Terrible. They lost nine Senate seats. House majority increased for the Republicans. Terrible election. But it was preceded by a wipeout at the state and local level. And by the time Obama was out of office, a thousand seats at the state and local levels had flipped from Democrat to Republican across the country. It wasn't just that Hillary lost to Trump. It wasn't just that Trump got the House and the Senate or whatever. It was also that over the course of eight years, Obama had decimated the Democratic Party at the local level. There are signs that Trump is on the way to doing this with the Republican Party. What does the Republican Party do to forestall that danger? I don't know. I have no idea what technically they can do to distance themselves from Trump. There may be nothing, and they're just going to have to reap the whirlwind. But this is the political reality of the moment. Everything is going badly for Republicans when people are asked to judge how they feel about Republican versus Democrat somewhere. because remember in this race in Louisiana, Republicans outspent Democrats three to one and the Democrat won by, you know, won by whatever, whatever whatever numbers I just with this 37 percent shift from Trump to persoint shift And that when you watch Pam Bondi you watch these fights and you watch these scenes and you watch what Trump wants and you watch what Trump is going for. It's just another data. It's just another moment on this road that Republicans seem to be walking down into like a buzzsaw or a wood chipper. There's another data point for you. And part of the problem for Republicans is when they do try to, not compromise, when they try to make the Trump side really happy. And there's an example, which is a very popular issue, which is requiring people to show ID to vote. to the House has passed this bill, which I think something like 85% of Americans are like, sure, I mean, I've got to show ID for lots of things. So showing ID to prove who I am to vote is fine. We have real ID kind of in many, many states. So that means that when you get your ID, you know, you often have to prove citizenship, other stuff. But the Republicans take this bill that is a wildly popular measure. They could have just passed that. Like you have to show a valid ID in order to cast your ballot. Everybody's on board with that. That would be an epic win. Very good. They have to add the like Trump spin on and the Trump spin is the citizenship issue. So they're not just requiring that people have to get a real ID which shows citizenship status of some sort that you have to prove your citizen to vote, which is already the law. They're now saying to cast your vote in any federal election, you have to show up with proof of citizenship. Now, half of the people in this country who are American citizens don't have a passport, don't have an obvious easy thing to bring, don't necessarily have their birth certificate get easily handy to bring every time they vote. So that's just taking to excess a very good and very popular idea that most Americans think is a no brainer and making it difficult. So they get this thing through, it's not going to pass. But it satisfies the kind of Stephen Miller wing of the White House that, you know, thinks there's a ton of voter fraud and that the problem is all these illegal immigrants, which we know not to be true. It adds all this stuff that is actually not super popular among Americans. And so you snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And I think there are a number of legislative efforts where it's too late for the Republicans in the lead up to the midterms, but they should be thinking to 2028 and how in Congress in particular needs to reassert its role over the executive branch regard because if a Democrat is in the White House in 2028 and Republicans control either chamber, they're going to want to have that back up and running in a healthy, functional way that it isn't right now. John, I think this goes, Christine's point goes to the point you make in your editor's letter this month about enough available at commentary.org enough and more than enough um and and that the more than enough is is what christine is calling the trump spin right which which i quote in this in this editor's letter i quote a sentence from william blake's the marriage of heaven and hell which is you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough and in trump's case uh he always and minnesota is the is the is the argument that i use uh most pressingly here that having had this incredible success with at the border and shutting down illegal crossings and all of that which should have been enough as we say at passover um he can't help himself but press his luck and turn a victory into a defeat uh and deploy ice and border patrol to a blue state on unwilling or uninterested in having this enforcement take place as a form of political gamesmanship to fight against the Somali fraud. And the net result is that in the poll this week, the first major poll in February this week, Trump's negative on immigration, he was up 10 six months ago, he is now down 20. 60% of Americans disapprove of his immigration policy. It was 55-45 or something like that in July. He did that to himself. Nobody did that to him. There's literally nothing changed except the more aggressive policy that they have put in place. I don't know who he's listening to. I don't know whether it's his own impulses, whatever. Is it self-destructive? Is it foolish? Is it that his sense of where the American people are. He's losing over time because he lives in a bubble the way all presidents do. There's no way of knowing. And all of this can be temporary and maybe the economy will be great and all of that. But all the data points that we are assembling suggest that things that he thought were going to be benefits or liabilities, they thought that the Epstein files was going to be a benefit to them in 2024, and it is now a huge liability to them in 2026 immigration was a benefit now it's a liability and all of that and so i don't know what the republicans can can do because he's still pretty scary and you know they're willing to like i don't know sick the justice department on you if you do the wrong thing uh we've gone we've gone a long time but we really should talk a little bit about carrie prejean bowler um the appointee to the Religious Liberty Commission, which met on Monday, and where she very deliberately seemed to have caused a scene and started ranting about Zionists and Zionism and how Catholics aren't Zionists and why is this a religious liberty question, and she was removed from the panel the following day. I should say that we should add that there was an epic and excellent response to her remarks in the moment by Sully who said obviously thoughtfully and rationally when she claimed to be speaking for all Catholics she converted like a minute ago and he said, you know, look I think the point of this commission isn't to assume that each of us speaks for an entire faith, we're a very big country with lots of opinions, I mean he was so perfect, I just wanted to give a shout out to his always wise remarks in that particularly heated moment. Yes. But I mean, the reason we need to talk about it is that this is yet another step on the right into this question of whether or not the right is going to use the tools and means, or the woke right is going to use the tools and means that it has at its disposal to push this window of open antisemitism. I mean, that is to say, or Jew hatred. I mean, I don't know how else to put it. She issued a statement in response to her removal by the chairman of the commission that features the following sentences. You did not appoint me to the commission and you lack authority to remove me from it. This is a gross overstepping of your role. This is Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, and leads me to believe you are acting in alignment with a Zionist political framework that hijacked the hearing rather than in defense of religious liberty. Remember, she's the one who hijacked the hearing and started ranting about Zionism. We serve as equals on this commission just as I cannot remove you, you cannot remove me. You are speaking without authority and it is clear your actions reflect a Zionist political agenda, not the president's, not the U.S. Constitution's, and not the purpose of this commission. I know POTUS cares deeply about religious freedom, which is why he appointed me. I'm here to protect religious liberty, including that of devout Catholics like myself who reject Zionism. I refuse to bend the knee to Israel. I am no slave to a foreign nation, but to Christ our King, respectfully, Cary Prejean Bowler. This is rhetoric that I frankly have not heard in the course of my almost 65 years on this earth. This is a predecessor form of rhetoric dating back to the 1930s and Father Coughlin and mainstream Catholic anti-Semitism and Jew hatred. She's using the word Zionism instead of the word Judaism. But there is no difference. And she herself says, I'm not a slave to a foreign nation, but to Christ the king. She's the one who analogizes the two. What do we – so on the one hand, this is a little bitty thing that doesn't matter. And on the other hand, it could matter an enormous amount. I'd like to think that the that this particular brand of performative and outrageous Jew hatred is hitting a kind of absurd stride where it's sort of revealing itself as imbecilic. I'd like to think this between her between you know now Candace Owens going connected to her Jew hatred going directly at Erica Kirk various things like this and then I think I'm not so sure that that the people that Carrie Prejean and the others want to reach will read this as imbecilic. I think they might find this stirring. So I think it's a big thing. I think every such moment is a big moment. The question you're asking is how many imbeciles are there out there, right? I mean, the people who don't hear this as imbecilic don't hear it as imbecilic for that specific reason, right? And the question is, what is the market for this kind of thing. I don't think this kind of classic Catholic anti-Semitism is imbecilic. It's not whether it's an imbecilic at all. But it's a question of whether what she's doing is representative of classic Catholic anti-Semitism. That is a much bigger question. What she's doing is reading lines and performing for, you know, this sort of social media age, you know, this sort of Instagram age. And the question is whether that's representative of what she claims it's representative of the Catholics on the commission pushed back most, but you know, she's obviously not a student of Richard John Newhouse. I mean, like this is, you know, it's not we're not really, we're not necessarily confronting a sort of intellectual movement. The question is whether that matters, that it's not an intellectual movement, whether it can, you know, pull in the same sort of feelings from the public. But I think that, you know, she, she, whether she really represents what she claims to represent is, is a question that people are pushing back on, not, not just Jews, but Catholics. And I, and I think that they have a point. But she wants to be, Eliana nailed it in our pre-tape conversation. When she pointed out, she wants to be an influencer. She wants to be a podcast. She wants to be an anti-Zio something, either a podcaster or an influencer. She wants that kind of attention. And this is exactly the career path to making it. Make a stink in a big way, get a lot of social media. She gained, you know, I'm sure many, many followers after this stunt that she pulled. And it doesn't even matter anymore if you are recently, she's a very recent Catholic. So she's not even a cradle Catholic who might know who Richard John Newhouse is. She just wants to make an impact. I've got to jump after this, but, you know, recall that I think she was Miss California and she had to step down because she opposed gay marriage and she made a name for herself because of that. And this struck me as a, you know, performative stunt to make headlines. And then the governor, who's Dan Patrick, who's the chairman of the Religious Liberty Commission, removed her. And now she's come back with another performative stunt because she wants a public showdown to get her name out there, get her picture out there and make headlines and turn it into a reality influencer career. We'd never heard of this person for a decade since before this. Right. And I'd add to that one thing, which is that the one detail, which is that The first idea of her and Samira Munshi, who Samira Munshi is an advisor to the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission, and she has been sort of prepping Prejean Bowler for these appearances. And Munshi has addressed the council before and made it about Israel. So what their first idea was not to have Prejean Bowler be the person to make these arguments at the hearing. They attempted beforehand to get Norman Finkelstein and Mikko Pellet and others like them to make the arguments for them. So the initial thing was not Catholic. Let's let's throw some Catholic anti-Semitism at them. the initial thing was, let's make this about Israel. Let's make this about Jews. Let's, let's pull some antisemitism. Doesn't matter where it comes from, but it'd be great if it were as a Jew antisemitism, it would be great if it were, you know, whatever, like antisemitism is the point. And then the commission smartly rejected all these nonsense people that they wanted to go because they had seen them go on Candace Owens show. And so they were left with a plan B and the audible was okay. So just make the arguments yourself. So pray Jean, uh, I recently you know i'm a new catholic i'm a catholic convert so i'm going to say it from the catholic's perspective but the people she's speaking for are not necessarily seeing it through any sort of ideological or theological lens they're just like a group of anti-semites we just have to start vetting the pageant circuit for extremism this is my theory these passion of terrors Candace Owens is also a convert to Catholicism. And so, and by the way, if we're talking about, you know, she just wants to be an influencer. What do you think Father Charles Coughlin, the most influential anti-Semite in America in the 1930s, after the sort of fading of Henry Ford? What do you think he was? He was a radio priest. He was a priest in Detroit. No, I mean, I'm not saying it's just an influencer. That's who people listen. That's who the younger generation in particular listens to. They don't listen to the smart Catholics who are writing Scarlett. But the analogy is exact because radio was a new medium. It was 1926 when he went on the radio in Detroit. That was when, you know, it was like he went on the radio because they needed programming because like the radio station was coming out of a record store or something like that. He starts doing it. He builds up by – he's a left winger, a supporter of Roosevelt, supporter of the New Deal, but hates Jews. And he starts in with this Jewish cabal is running, dominating the world stuff. And every high-minded person in America thought he was disgusting and disgraceful. but he had his own way to go over their heads to the American people on a 50,000 watt radio station out of Detroit. This is where the analysis isn't exact, where the analogy isn't exact, is scary, because where this radio, especially primitive radio, you would have to start locally. and it would take you longer to for us to hear about it for other that that that's not now podcasting is global uh everything is uh all all media is um there's no such thing as failing in a small market first uh or or succeeding in a small market first so you can get a much larger following much faster. Well, that's true. But I mean, if you take Tucker and Candace as examples, like Tucker was 30 years ago, was, you know, working for me at the Weekly Standard and not, and wasn't, you know, you know, becoming basically Gallider Julius Stryker. And Candace Owens, 10, you know, 10 years ago, was working as a kind of, you know, conservative voice of young black female culture and then has taken this trip down a road that has led to this point but that's all the evolutionary over time it's just in her case because the road has now been laid the path has been laid for her by tucker and nick fuentes and candace owens and andrew tate and whoever else is in this weird world of Groyper podcasting, she can do it much faster because the launch pad, the foundation has been set and the infrastructure has been built and she can join the Candace Owens podcast network or something like that, which is also frightening. But I mean, I don't have a diagnosis. I don't have a cure. I don't have a solution. I have no idea what to do about any of this. We're just having to talk about it because we're here to depress you. So, well, also, you know, that that and that is part of Tucker's influence also is not just I mean, one of the reasons Tucker is is a problem is because he is undeniably influential. He waltzes through the Oval Office. You know, I mean, he's obviously there. He's in center power. But the other thing he does is that, you know, there was this I caught this interesting thing. There's a you know, there's this Red Scare podcast. Right. Which is, you know, from the left. And they had on somebody from a they had they had on one of these like right like Nick Fuentes or something. And then they they they started, you know, losing sponsors and all this other stuff. Dasha, one of the hosts who has a career outside of podcasting, I saw her interviewed on this and she said, I texted Tucker Carlson right away. And I said, what should I do? You know, there is this like, okay. Yeah, there is a group, there is a movement of sorts of these people. And there is a kind of guru at the top, which is Tucker Carlson, which people who don't have any sort of otherwise political or ideological connection or anything in common with him. he's the first person they go to because they are part of this now. Yeah, because what all connects them is hatred of Jews. That's what's interesting is when you get down to it, it's this kind of, that's a through line. They're left, they're right, they're this, they're that. They're nationalists, they're socialists, they're communists, but they all come together in their hatred of Jews, and that is a very frightening fact. The Tom Lehrer song. Yeah, that's right. National Brotherhood Week. Yeah, the Protestants hate the Catholics, the Catholics hate the Protestants, and the Hindus hate the Muslims. and everybody hates the Jews. We'll be back tomorrow for Christine, Seth, Eliana, and Abe. I'm John Podhoretz. Keep the candle burning.