← The Beat with Ari Melber
The Beat with Ari Melber
New Epstein Video Appears to Show "Hidden Cam" Footage
00:41:39
MS NOW's Ari Melber reports on new evidence from the Epstein files, including what appears to be a hidden camera from inside his Palm Beach office.
Loading summary
Transcript90 lines
- [00:00]
LifeLock Announcer
It's tax season, and at Lifelock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points Lifelock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it. Guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com specialoffer for the threats you can't control. Terms apply.
- [00:30]
Rakuten Announcer
Shop with Rakuten and you'll get it. What's it? It's the real deal. Cash back and savings on almost everything you buy. Join Rakuten and start getting cash back at cvs, Instacart, YSL Beauty and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start shopping with Rakuten to save money and get that cash back feeling. Join for free@rakuten.com or get the free Rakuten app. That's R A K U t e.
- [00:57]
Ari Melber
N rakuten.com welcome to the beat. We begin, as we have so many nights, with new evidence. And the reason we have this new evidence is because a public pressure campaign, along with survivors, forced Donald Trump to do that which he had fought all last year. Release the Epstein files. And even as debates continue about the propriety and the redactions and AG Bondi's unusual presentation before Congress yesterday, we continue to learn new things. There's video from what appears to be a hidden camera inside an office he had in his Palm beach residence. And it could shed light on what some witnesses and survivors have said was an effort at blackmail. And that matters not just for telling the story or looking back on this. It matters if these cameras were used, abused, misused for potential crimes. That extend out to the ongoing questions which survivors and advocates for survivors and lawyers have expressed. Was there an ongoing conspiracy that has prevented a full accountability up until this day? And these files, these videos, they are changing things around the world, including in other countries. The questions about what the DOJ has failed to do or what some allege might it have been pressured not to do? Now, some of the footage is admittedly grainy. There's about nine minutes of it that shows at least one woman and one man at one point. We, upon this review of the DOJ material, have not been able to identify further what was on the video, who those individuals were, why someone would want to have ongoing office video like this, or the Secretive, tiny video cameras that we only learned from the files he had an aide placing in Kleenex boxes. At one point, a woman sits on the desk. A man propping his feet up, can also see a man in the chair as a woman appears to kneel on the floor next to him. At another point, there's a man that looks towards what we believe to be a hidden camera, meaning it wasn't out for everyone to understand. Britain's Channel 4 confirms the footage is from Epstein's Palm beach home office. So how do we know what this is and where it comes from? Epstein's Palm beach property was raided by law enforcement in 2005, where police filmed this footage. Pause it. Here you can see his office in the corner of the ground floor living area. This is the exact same office captured in the spy cam footage. So where is this spy cam in the office? Well, we believe it's here. And in the footage of the 2005 police raid, we can see that there is what looks like a wide clock positioned on a low side table facing the desk. That's the channel for investigation, including their review and video forensics. Now, if this were just a random person or random government files from an old case, and you say, oh, someone has videos or someone keeps a diary, or some people keep voluminous notes and other people don't take any notes at all, you might say, who cares? And why is this on the news? But of course, you see where I'm going. We are way past innocuous notes or videos. We are talking about a sprawling conspiracy that wet years that has many unanswered questions. And according to a lot of experts and victims, as I mentioned, who've spoken out a scandal that involves other people allegedly a part of this criminal ring, who haven't been pursued, who haven't faced full accountability. And the question is whether the videos and the notations and the other materials have been used over time in ways potentially illicit or illegal.
- [04:31]
Rakuten Announcer
To.
- [04:31]
Ari Melber
To answer part of that question, I'm speaking slowly and carefully because we are talking about elements. If you talk to prosecutors, they talk about elements of a crime. You'd have to check off all of the elements and prove them in court to have the crime. And here, video surveillance is suspicious, but it's only an element. Now, I'll remind you there are Epstein victims who have said that they believed Epstein had this extensive network of hidden cameras across several homes, according to the New York Times, and that there was concern that he might be trying to deliberately compile, quote, damaging info about Rich and powerful men with whom he associated. Translation, the allegation or question is, was he not only a sex trafficker and a kind of a pimp for the adults, a sex trafficker and criminal for the minors, but was he also a blackmailer? There's a member of Donald Trump's cabinet who still says that and hasn't faced any sanction for lying about going to the island, a story we're also following now. There's footage that matches the police raid of the Palm beach home in 2005, where they noted a camera hidden inside a clock in Epstein's office. They found another near his garage. We also have photographs that emerge of the surveillance system, at times publishing the image of a camera perched near a suite of bathrooms. Other photos revealing an apparent monitoring station which was labeled. We don't know if it was accurate, but they labeled it 24 hour surveillance. We also have only from the new files a little bit of how this worked. Epstein, who had a lot of money, paid a lot of people telling an aide to set up these hidden cameras. The aide replying by email, I'm installing them into Kleenex boxes now. And then there is the current Trump Cabinet. You might think it wouldn't be that hard, of all the people available to take these powerful jobs, that if one had been caught lying about Epstein, you might say, thank you for your service. We're going to find someone else who's not directly tied to this scandal and lied about it for whatever those reasons are. But that's not President Trump's position as of tonight. He continues to stand by Howard Lutnick, who clearly lied about this when the files came out in the last couple weeks, he then was forced to admit under oath he visited the island. And he, for whatever his reasons are, because before we had all these public disclosures about Kompromat and video and potential materials used for whatever they'd be used for. He was previously talking in public, accusing Epstein of running one of the greatest blackmail operations ever. That's what his M.O. was. You know, get a massage, get a massage. And what happened in that massage room, I assume was on video. This guy was the greatest blackmailer ever. Blackmailed people.
- [07:04]
Alex Tabitt
That's how he had money.
- [07:07]
Ari Melber
Blackmailed people to a degree that he would make money. And Epstein had a lot more money than most people. So if Ludnick, who deals with your money as Commerce Secretary, thinks this was a significant amount of money, that is a lead. In the case. Yesterday, Pam Bondi basically dodged and then implied that the DOJ hasn't checked with their own colleague, a fellow cabinet official, about what he was saying about blackmail. And let's remember I'm showing you what we know in public. Doesn't mean he's credible. He was just caught lying. Maybe he was lying and exaggerating about the blackmail video for whatever his reasons were. But if you care about this, you'd want to get to the bottom of that. There are people who care about this, there are people who've been harmed by this, and then there's the Trump administration acting the way it is. This video is the latest revelation emerging from what has been a voluminous chock full of information series of evidence in the new Epstein files.
- [08:01]
Christina Greer
According to the newly released documents, Lutnick.
- [08:04]
Rakuten Announcer
Arranged and carried out a private lunch with Epstein and his family on Epstein's private island.
- [08:11]
Ari Melber
There's also a nearly two hour long, largely sympathetic interview filmed around 2019 where that Bannon conducted with Epstein. Do you think you're the devil himself? No, but I do have a good mirror.
- [08:25]
Gretchen Carlson
Musk is also Epstein files. Emails show that he tried coordinating multiple visits to Jeffrey Epstein's private island.
- [08:32]
Ari Melber
Donald Trump's name is in the Epstein files over a million times according to Congressman Jamie Raskin who has seen the so called unredacted version of the files. Now the files that we have versus redacted have a big gap. Some of the million mentions could be duplicates, but the lawmakers who got this thing passed are concerned that the gap is so wide there could be ongoing false or illegal redactions. This is law now. Violating the rules on the redactions is violating federal law. And so that's where we begin tonight with the new evidence and the videos and a lot of open questions facing this administration. Joined by Gretchen Carlson, of course, the veteran journalist, co founder of Lift Our Voices, and Vanessa Grigorialis, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair and host of the infamous podcast. She also wrote for Vanity Fair about Epstein, the piece Dating the Monster. Welcome to both of you. Vanessa, as I mentioned, this is a story that's pulled in interest for all sorts of reasons. But there have been people and journalists and advocates interested for a long time for the substance. With that in mind, what do you feel we are learning from following this for so long from this giant cachet of documents? And do the redactions concern you?
- [09:52]
Vanessa Grigorialis
The redactions are definitely concerning. I mean, in the case of Les Wexner, for years people have tried to put together what was the relationship between these two men and what about the fact that Les Wexner owned Victoria's Secret, and Epstein was going around saying that he was somehow an agent of Victoria's Secret. We see that in the emails, a woman saying, aren't you going this kind of introduction to somebody who casts for Victoria's Secret? So I think, you know, upcoming we're going to hear a lot more about that. In terms of the videos, you know, we have known for years that he had some sort of surveillance system. I'm not quite as convinced by what we've seen in the office so far. You know, I'd like to see, okay, is there something in more private quarters, or was he indeed trying to, you know, catch somebody that was doing something in his office? Or was there true surveillance that he was, you know, worried about thieves? Which I know sounds sort of preposterous, but people do put cameras in more public spots. I think we know at this point that there was a vast network of men that he was recommending women to. And they are overage, as far as we know right now. But the heart of the matter is, were they also underage? And that is the thing we have to answer.
- [11:22]
Ari Melber
Well, and the point you're making, again, depending on where you are jurisdictionally, what the crimes are, you're referring to the evidence that Epstein may have had one set of sex crimes going for him or a very small group of people involving minors and then other activities which legally might have been legal in some places and still illegal in other places. Prostitutions of adults is illegal in a lot of places. And that what you're saying was a wider network?
- [11:50]
Vanessa Grigorialis
Absolutely. I mean, I think what happened in the mid-2000s in Palm beach unquestionably involved many minor children. To date, we don't have evidence that he didn't act on his own. And, you know, with Maxwell right in that arena. But once he was released from jail, came back to New York City, many men seem to have been fine with associating with this convicted sex offender. And even beyond that, getting involved with him on a level of getting women recommended to them by him to have romantic or sexual interludes with, and then going back to him and saying, oh, my God, did she like me? You know, the most accomplished men in the world were doing this, and the women we can see from the emails were only interested in a transactional fashion. You know, can this person. Can Steve Tisch, can he do something for me, please? And, you know, it was so heartbreaking for me to see in one of the emails that one of the women said, you know, I don't want to get associated with this man because he'll just take my youth and give me nothing in return. And that was the transaction that was being made.
- [13:24]
Ari Melber
Yeah. Gretchen, your thoughts tonight?
- [13:26]
Gretchen Carlson
My thoughts first from a political point of view is that it appears now that to get inside of the Trump White House and be a member of his cabinet, you have to be in the Epstein files. I mean, now we have Dr. Oz who was having some sort of discussion with Epstein. And so, you know, I think that this will go down and it was said yesterday at the hearing as bigger than Watergate as far as the COVID up. And I think more and more you are having members of MAGA who are starting to question things, especially after the performance of Pam Bondi yesterday. And more and more people are looking to support Thomas Massie for what he's doing and they're calling him heroic on on the Republican side for standing with Ro Khanna and trying get to the bottom of this for the survivors. So with regard to the videos, all I can say as somebody who, you know, was allegedly sexually harassed by Roger Ailes, there were tremendous amounts of allegations that he had a very high level network of video cameras. So I think that this is something that's commonplace for people who are alleged predators. They want to have evidence not only for their despicable actions so that they can go back and watch that apparently, but also because they want to be able to have the power over the people that they have on camera.
- [14:45]
Ari Melber
Well, and I think you speaking about someone again who was in some of these circles and how this material is collected and whether that then helps people interested in accountability or the government say okay, well you have to deal with that I think is really important. You also mentioned, Gretchen, the pushback on the right. What we're going to show next are the people including Joe Rogan who much to Trump's sadness is a bigger ratings get than Trump has a big audience. What he's saying in agreement with you about these files. So we're gonna show that Rogan and these so called broadcasters when we're back with the same guests here in 90 seconds. Try angel stuff for your tushy. It's made by angels soft and strong. Budget friendly. The choice is simple. Pick up a pack today.
- [15:36]
Christina Greer
Angel soft.
- [15:37]
Ari Melber
Soft and strong. Simple lifelock.
- [15:41]
Alex Tabitt
How can I help?
- [15:42]
Vanessa Grigorialis
The IRS said I filed my return, but I haven't.
- [15:44]
LifeLock Announcer
One in four taxpaying Americans has paid the price of identity fraud.
- [15:48]
Vanessa Grigorialis
What do I do?
- [15:49]
Gary Steingard
My refund though.
- [15:50]
Alex Tabitt
I'm freaking out. Don't worry, I can Fix this.
- [15:52]
LifeLock Announcer
Lifelock fixes identity theft guaranteed and gets your money back with up to $3 million in coverage.
- [15:57]
Rakuten Announcer
I'm so relieved. No problem.
- [15:59]
Alex Tabitt
I'll be with you every step of the way.
- [16:01]
LifeLock Announcer
One in four was a fraud paying American. Not anymore. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com Specialoffer terms apply Shop with.
- [16:10]
Rakuten Announcer
Rakuten and you'll get it. What's it? It's the real deal. Cash back and savings on almost everything you buy. Join Rakuten and start getting cash back at cvs, Instacart, YSL Beauty and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start shopping with Rakuten to save money and get that cash back feeling. Join for free@rakuten.com or get the free Rakuten app that's R a K u t e n rakuten.com.
- [16:41]
Ari Melber
Recovering fallout to the Epstein files I have our guests standing by but we turn now first to breaking news. We have this update from the FBI crossing the wire right now in the case of Nancy Guthrie. The FBI posting They are increasing the reward to $100,000 for information leading to her location and the arrest or conviction of anyone involved in the disappearance. We also and this goes to the threat assessment from those videos. The FBI has released its details now on a breakdown of what they have regarding this suspect who of course they believe is a person of interest. From the footage, the photo they have posted now states that they believe this suspect is me, male, approximately 59 to 510 tall with an average build. In the video, individual is wearing a black 25 liter Ozark Trail hiker backpack. The FBI conf the FBI confident that this is the backpack. These are the kind of individual pieces of information or leads that they hope someone might be able to connect to the recent history or the outstanding investigation. And we have Alex Tabitt in Tucson, Arizona. Tell us what you are learning as we get this update from the FBI.
- [17:53]
Alex Tabitt
Well Ari, it's a lot of what you just said, the backpack, the increase of this reward. Remember the reward started off at about a couple thousand dollars, then $50,000, now $100,000 with regard to this backpack. It is sold in many places including Walmart. Retails for about $11 at Walmart. So we can expect the FBI is combing through surveillance footage of the Walma the Tucson area. And what's also interesting about this is how many tips the FBI has collected. They say They've collected about 13,000 tips since the day that Nancy Guthrie was first discovered as missing. And that's not even to mention the number of tips that the Pima County Sheriff's department has also received. That's about 14,000 tips. So basically, the investigators are hoping that all of these tips, all this new identifiable information, might catalyze this investigation as they tried to bring home Nancy Guthrie. Ari?
- [18:57]
Ari Melber
Yeah, and that volume of tips is very high. There's high interest. Their hope is for an increase in quality. I mean, they say They've got a 24 hour center combing through these, these many tips.
- [19:10]
Alex Tabitt
That's absolutely right. I mean, we are just down the street from Nancy Guthrie's home, and we're seeing investigators come to the home today. They set up a white tent to collect more evidence from that front porch where this doorbel video, these three new videos, these six pictures that the FBI released earlier this week to collect evidence. We're also seeing members of both the FBI, the Pima County Sheriff's office and border patrol combing through this neighborhood, the Catalina Foothills, which is an affluent neighborhood here in the northeast of Tucson. The properties here are quite large, but in between each property there's something called like washes, which is like a canal which helps provide flooding here in Arizona. And it provides a lot of space for a potential kidnapper, a potential susp, to hide in between these homes. So we saw a very, very thorough combing of those washes, of those areas in between property just yesterday. We also heard from the Pima County Sheriff's Department earlier today, and they did confirm that they did find gloves that they are currently sending to a lab for DNA analysis. So it does seem that ever since these new images were released by the FBI earlier this week, this investigation is starting to heat up.
- [20:23]
Ari Melber
Ari, thank you. And we, of course, will stay very much in touch with everything we're hearing from law enforcement. Appreciate it. Turning back to our ongoing coverage, we. We intervened for that. At breaking news on the Epstein story. Gretchen Carlson had mentioned the blowback on the. Right, let's take a look. We're going to play six if we have it. I'll read it.
- [20:54]
Vanessa Grigorialis
Okay.
- [20:54]
Ari Melber
We don't.
- [20:55]
Gary Steingard
I don't.
- [20:55]
Ari Melber
I don't. I'm not hearing anything. So sometimes, you know, that happens.
- [20:58]
Gretchen Carlson
But you can be Joe Rogan.
- [21:00]
Ari Melber
Joe Rogan says the FBI concluded that Epstein wasn't running a sex trafficking ring for powerful men. He says sarcastically, and then he says this is gaslighting blank expletive and that sort of frustration that you're seeing on the right. And he is someone who has a huge influence there.
- [21:18]
Gretchen Carlson
Yeah, look, I think that the photo yesterday of Pam Bondi not recognizing the Epstein survivors who were in that hearing, that is going to go down as the death knell for her. And now we're seeing it also from people on the right who've been very supportive of Trump, who I think that that hearing really was the tipping point. I mean, she thought she was going in there and that she was going to be able to blow away, you know, all the people who are asking questions with, you know, bad information about them or whatever her plan was. But her audience was simply Trump. The problem is, is that what ended up happening, I think was that she got a whole group of people who maybe were not thinking poorly of her now thinking poorly of her and really starting to question whether or not this administration is telling the truth.
- [22:04]
Ari Melber
Here's that sound. I ain't cutting Trump any slack now that we know that they've covered up the co conspirator. Conspirator documents. Oh, FBI concluded Jeffrey Epstein wasn' running a sex trafficking ring for powerful men file show. So there you go. That's the gaslightiest gaslighting I've ever heard in my life. Well, what do they think is going on? Just a bunch of fun guys hanging out.
- [22:30]
Alex Tabitt
There's other stuff in there like that's already being brought up that I would say is shocking to the conscience that.
- [22:38]
Ari Melber
Trump called it a hoax. Shocking. And Vanessa, it's a whole different world. You have Trump lying to people about what he said he would do in office. Keen eagle eyed news viewers will find that is not breaking news. That has happened on many topics. But you can see an almost passionate kind of revelatory anger about it here, which does show us something different about the podcast space. We're not, for example, with all due respect, seeing that same awareness of the evidence on, say, many of the Fox News evening shows right now. But there's something different in the podcast space where as they're mentioning, oh, these are the problems in the facts.
- [23:21]
Vanessa Grigorialis
Yeah. I mean, podcasters are allowed to say what they really feel. Right. I mean they are alternative media becoming mainstream media. And whatever you think about Joe Rogan, he doesn't like hypocrisy. And what's so clear here is that Kash Patel did not tell us the truth. Now right now they're trying to give us a million documents because they're trying to take our eyes off of Trump and what happened with Trump and Epstein. And that is very much still an open question and one I think worth answering. So There is a degree to which, you know, the play here was like, well, just tell them about all the other powerful guys who were involved in this ring and will confuse the situation. But by redacting some of those guys names, you know, you then know, well, we can't really trust even that you've given us all the names of the powerful guys. And by the way, what exactly is going on with Trump? Like, what exactly was the nature of the, that relationship in Palm beach in the years when, you know, when Epstein was doing his worst, as far as we know, right in this country. So there's still so many open questions. And I understand they're trying to close the book, but this, this is not the way to do it.
- [24:45]
Ari Melber
Understood. Vanessa and Gretchen, thanks for coverage on this across two blocks, as well as the other breaking news we had to, of course, cover. Thank you both. I want to tell people this is the week that Donald Trump tried to indict six lawmakers, six different lawmakers at once. He completely failed. We'll see if they keep trying. But it is the Putin playbook. There are questions about what we can learn from the way people are fighting back in other countries. And we have a Putin critic turned Trump critic Gary Steingard here for that special conversation coming up. But our next story is one that you might have been surprised by a couple weeks ago. The protests, the court pressure. It's working. The Minnesota ice surge is ending. Trump has withdrawn federal troops from other places quietly because apparently he doesn't want this retreat covered. We're covering it next. You know, sometimes with this government, the biggest news are the things they're not not telling you, which doesn't mean that we as independent journalists won't tell you. So here's some things that the government are not really promoting, but we've been able to fact check. Donald Trump is in retreat on more than one front in his sort of militarization policing agenda. Tom Homan, who was put into Minnesota after all those controversies and the two killings, is now ending the ice surge. They had already started to draw down troops. Now they're basically ending it. The agents that were added there will be gone by next week. And we've been able to confirm some of that movement. It looks like a clear victory for what was a protest movement in Minnesota, even against the threat and use of lethal force. It also shows how pressure is working, even as the Trump administration wants to sometimes feed a hopeless idea that they don't notice or listen to anything, or they're permanent dictators, which they are not as for Mr. Homan, we've invited him on the program recently, along with other border officials I mentioned on air right now, the Trump administration, dhs, the White House, et cetera, are not joining us or taking us up on our invites. They remain open invites to have the respectful journalistic dialogue that we try to do around here. But we have previously had Mr. Homan, who's at the center of all this right now on the program. We talked about some of this pressure. Here's what he said. We're going to keep arresting them and taking them off the street. That's what I meant. I never said we're going to violate a court order. I said we're going to continue doing what we're doing and taking these people off the street. That is what I meant when I said that. That's what you meant. Consistent with court rulings, President Trump has said he'll obey the rulings of the Supreme Court. Now, that's a good thing. If in the vibe or pause, it seems almost hard to say, that is a change. That's not even something we have to ask government officials sometimes in other administrations because it's standard. But here's the thing. While there has been a lot of attacks on the rule of law, we can report that the Trump administration continues to not only pull back on ice, where they have some wiggle room, but also to follow some of the rulings that have clipped their authorities to overuse or misused the National Guard troops. Now, this has been litigated extensively, but we are now learning that pursuant to several rulings that we're trimming this power. And it's complicated. The Trump administration started pulling back in January. These mobilizations, they didn't announce all of it publicly. One account saying it was a muted retreat by President Trump. To look at the political science of all this, we're joined by Christina Greer, political science professor at Fordham, author of how to Build a Democracy. Your view on the link between these two stories, both involve excessive use of militarized policing. Some of it, I have to carefully say, lawful. Some of what the ICE agents were doing was part of the authority, some of it clearly unlawful. And the president doesn't want everyone to know that he's doing a thing that's actually what you're supposed to do, which is follow the rulings or pull out when the courts tell you.
- [28:51]
Christina Greer
I think the optimistic takeaway from this is when the American people keep their foot on the gas and keep pressure on their own elected officials, whether Democrat or Republican, they keep pressure on the media to keep reporting these stories. They quite honestly are brave citizens in Minneapolis and refusing to turn away when you see not just innocent people being killed, but when you see children being deported. A five year old in a backpack does not pose a threat to society. And not being gaslit by this administration about, you know, we're taking these thugs and criminals off the street. That's not what you're doing. You're harassing, whether they're documented or undocumented. You're terrorizing communities. This is a form of domestic terrorism that this administration has been injecting in communities.
- [29:36]
Ari Melber
And given how you look at these issues, what do you think of the shift in civic culture? Because what everyone thinks of Al Gore, he made a point of saying, I'm upholding a ruling I really disagree with. That was a good thing here. I just showed when I did have the border, what they call the border czar, a border official on people can draw their own conclusions. You can tell me what you saw there. But it wasn't quick to say they follow court orders. And the president is basically trying to obfuscate that he is actually bowing to the authority of the Supreme Court on the National Guard.
- [30:13]
Christina Greer
Well, what we've seen, though, with this administration is no one wants to go against the president, even if it means bending or leaning against the line of legality, quite honestly. And so this is where you saw that tension with Holman. I think what's fascinating, though, is that we've never, especially those of us who studied the civil rights movement, we've never gotten any progress without insider and outsider tactics. So when I talk about how to build a democracy, I talk about Fannie Lou Hamer and Barbara Jordan. Both of them understood that sometimes we have to work within the confines of the United States Constitution and the legislative branches and our state houses and put pressure on our government governors and our mayors to uphold the rule of law and especially the court systems and not just the Supreme Court, but the lower courts as well, and also protest politics that we've seen in Minneapolis and also in Los Angeles and cities across the. Across the country to make sure that we've seen this president retreat before. And he doesn't like to make grandiose pronouncements like he does with everything else when he's, quote, unquote, winning. But he has retreated. And he does.
- [31:14]
Gary Steingard
He.
- [31:15]
Christina Greer
He follows optics and he recognizes these optics aren't great for him. Not now or in November.
- [31:19]
Ari Melber
Right. Which speaks to people keeping their eye on the ball and not just falling into the trap of as you say, the PR that they're pushing. I want to show this polling of young men. You teach young people and, you know, bros are people too, and a lot of attacks on the young so called bros, but the bros don't even like Trump anymore. What do you think of that huge gap disapproval among young men alone?
- [31:43]
Christina Greer
Well, I think young people are seeing what's happening to this country. And so even the bros, and I have lots of bros who have been in my classes over the years, they recognize the tariffs aren't working. They have questions about whether or not Social Security will be there when they're of age. They recognize that, you know, where are the jobs and a myriad of jobs at varying levels. They recognize that this president keeps throwing things at the American people. So we're in a tizzy. And they also recognize some of the tensions that are arising that don't need to be there. I think a lot of young people are just sort of like you are thrusting us into a chaotic world that actually based on this president, this administration doesn't need to be as chaotic as it is exactly. Domestically and abroad.
- [32:27]
Ari Melber
And that even bros may look at this year now, we've had an actual record of lived experience. It's easy to forget. And if you're young people, forget you're 22, you were 18 four years ago. You might not have been top of mind politics. I think even the bros in your class, some of them might say, this is cap.
- [32:44]
Christina Greer
Well, I asked them, would they say this is cap? They might say that I prefer that they use full sentences that I can probably understand as someone a little longer.
- [32:54]
Ari Melber
You know what CAP is.
- [32:55]
Christina Greer
I know what CAP is. But I do think that, you know, as I'm trying to help them figure out who they want to be. Right. I've got three and a half months to figure out what you like, what makes you tick, and what path I can sort of help shepherd you on. And a lot of them are very scared about things out there.
- [33:12]
Ari Melber
I tried to break you for a light moment at the end of the second, and then you're just being a serious, substantive person, which is fine.
- [33:16]
Christina Greer
I'm a serious professor.
- [33:17]
Ari Melber
But you know what Rich, the kid said?
- [33:19]
Christina Greer
What did he say?
- [33:20]
Ari Melber
No Cap in my rap. Goodbye, Eric. Tell your students we said hello. Hello and goodbye. See, we got to a point. Christina wants out of the segment, or at least out of dealing with me, which I understand. I respect that choice. Professor Greer.
- [33:33]
Gary Steingard
Thank you.
- [33:33]
Ari Melber
Up ahead, we are looking at specifically how Trump is following the Putin playbook, not in the abstract, not as an insult, but literally trying to do it and failing. Gary Steingart Next.
- [33:46]
LifeLock Announcer
It'S tax season, and at LifeLock, we know you're tired of numbers, but here's a big one you need to hear. Billions. That's the amount of money and refunds the IRS has flagged for possible identity fraud. Now here's another big number. 100 million. That's how many data points LifeLock monitors every second. If your identity is stolen, we'll fix it. Guaranteed. One last big number. Save up to 40% your first year. Visit lifelock.com specialoffer for the threats you can't control. Terms apply.
- [34:16]
Rakuten Announcer
Shop with Rakuten and you'll get it. What's it it's the real deal. Cash back and savings on almost everything you buy. Join Rakuten and start getting cash back at cvs, Instacart, YSL Beauty and other stores you love. You can even stack sales on top of cash back. Just start shopping with Rakuten to save money and get that cash back feeling. Join for free@rakuten.com or get the free Rakuten app that's R A K u t e n rakuten.com why have I.
- [34:46]
Ari Melber
Asked my electrician I found on angie.com to bury my pet hamster? I was so moved by how carefully.
- [34:50]
Alex Tabitt
He buried my electrical wires, I knew I could trust him to bury my.
- [34:53]
Ari Melber
Sweet nibbles after his untimely end.
- [34:54]
Alex Tabitt
This is very strange, Angie, the one.
- [34:56]
Ari Melber
You trust to find the ones you trust. Find pros for all your home projects@angie.com Here's a story that would have been probably unthinkable 10 years ago, or even in Trump's first term. A sitting president tries to indict six members of the opposition party for their free speech. The reason you might not have heard more about it is that Trump failed. And yet his possibly unconstitutional effort to indict six Democrats is a huge story. It underscores the brazen attempts to abuse government power against his enemies list, something that is so fraught, Pam Bondi vowed under oath to not have one. Well, here you're looking at it. They have one. And what we're tracking here is that in many ways it keeps failing. That's the green. And yet that's not a defense. It just means they are so extreme that grand juries and sometimes judges are getting in the way of this enemy's list. Indeed, the people you see on your screen all have one thing in common. Not their party, not their geography, not their race. But just that they dared to cross Donald Trump. That includes even his own former cabinet member up top, John Bolton, indicted. And it comes amid a broader crackdown on free speech in the second term, which includes people who are also on that chart, these two journalists, Lemon and Fort. And the rate of a Georgia election office with a possibly pretext of relitigating the 2020 election, which we know Trump lost, and his term of office there over. Joe Biden served those four years. Everybody knows that. And yet the question is, are these armed FBI agents trying to create a precedent so they can seize more ballots in the future, as we see abroad, as well as the militarized policing of American streets? Trump says it's about deportation, but many people see abuse of power there as well, with Trump using the IRS and other powers and not going to the place where the most undocumented are. We haven't seen an ice surge in Florida or Texas. The tactics are not all made up. This isn't just some brainstorm coming out of Donald Trump. Many of them quite specifically follow the sinister precedents of other countries, like the leaders you see here, Russia's Putin or Turkey's Erdogan. Democratic guardrails exist. Some are holding, but critics warn the fight is ahead. He thinks he should be allowed to do and give whatever order he wants because he's a wannabe dictator.
- [37:26]
Gary Steingard
Are we a dictatorship yet?
- [37:28]
Ari Melber
No, but we're getting there. They were trying to send a message that if you oppose them, if you step out of line, that they will crush their political enemies. Guys think Trump is a dictator. I think he's on the road to being a dictator.
- [37:42]
Christina Greer
Yes.
- [37:43]
Ari Melber
This is not rhetoric. This is a real problem in America. And to look at the lessons from abroad, we're joined by an acclaimed novelist, Gary Steingard, who's also written extensively about autocracy in his native Russia. His latest novel is Vera or Faith, also acclaimed like his past novels. And Mr. Steingard has noted that he was a Putin critic, and he's a Trump critic, often for the same reasons. Your thoughts right now?
- [38:10]
Gary Steingard
Yes, it's interesting. I mean, there are. The authoritarian playbook is only so big and has only so many moves. And these moves seem to be followed throughout history over and over. And I think Trump either instinctively or I don't know how much he reads of history, but he's able to access, or his cronies are able to access almost every level of this. Putin is a wonderful example. There's so many similarities. The only thing I would say is that Trump is moving a Lot faster than Putin. Putin did. It took him or at least a decade to achieve the kind of control he achieved over Russia ultimately.
- [38:44]
Ari Melber
And let me say we hear a lot of comparisons. People love to compare to other random places. But when you say that, you're talking about something you lived with and then followed from abroad. And you're saying you literally think Trump is moving us faster than Putin declined Russia.
- [39:02]
Gary Steingard
Absolutely. You look at several things that are happening. I just did a book tour across the country. One thing everyone is thinking about is ice. ICE is on everyone's mind because it is a militarized paramilitary force in the middle of our cities. Putin had pioneered this quite a while ago, as had other authoritarians in Russia. It's called the Russian National Guard. It reports almost directly to Putin and it basically acts as a praetorian guard. It has, I guess, its mandate is fighting terrorism or some such thing. The same way ISIS mandate is to round up supposedly so called illegal citizens. But both of them act as a kind of guard that can do anything because you know, the Constitution isn't something, isn't a lodestar for either entity. They look toward their ultimate leader, which is Putin or Trump.
- [39:49]
Ari Melber
When you look at the target lists, so much dystopian literature, which is of course still drawing on reality, looks at the unfairness and insanity of being in a show trial or not knowing what you're accused of, or these fundamental rights. So we'll put back up these faces on the screen. We're talking about veterans, we're talking about people who have a lot of cred. We're talking about, about the Fed chair who's an elite. I think we have this. We're talking about. Yeah, you know, Jerome Powell. What does he have to do? What does he have in common with Don Lemon and a House candidate most people haven't heard of. Right. Talk to us as we look at this list about what it echoes from other places where even without convictions, this is designed to intimidate and chill.
- [40:35]
Gary Steingard
Absolutely. Look, I was talking, I was mentioning the ICE version. Rosgvardia. One thing they did after the Ukrainian invasion was that they were used specifically to break up anti war protests in Moscow and St. Petersburg. And you ask what would happen to people who protest Putin? Well, they probably wouldn't be going through a judicial process. They'll be out of a window, thrown out of a window, or encounter something called polonium. But I think the idea is very similar. You self censor, you know that if you get on Putin's problematic list that you're done for one way or another. The judicial process is already predetermined, if that's what they want to do. You could look at someone like Alexei Navalny, right, who was a politician who protested to Putin and ran for office, and he was eventually killed in a jail in a Gulag type situation. So I'm not saying Putin. Sorry, I mean Trump. I'm not saying Trump has reached all of these limits yet, but he's trying. He's clawing his way toward them very, very quickly. And I think he feels that if things go against him, whether at the midterms or after he's out of office, if he leaves office. Right. That the repercussions for him, after all of the lawlessness that has preceded the last, will catch up with him. So just like Putin is aware that this is an existential question, so I think is Trump.
- [41:54]
Ari Melber
You see, rich and powerful people who have a life they want to protect often go along. And we've seen that in some of the countries you name. Do you think that's happening here in America?
- [42:04]
Gary Steingard
Of course, of course. Look, I teach at a certain university uptown which has a deal with the Trump administration. You could look at that with, you name it, law firms. Every sector of society is worried. Nobody wants to lose their privileges. There's a great book called the Oppermans. It's a novel, and it's said, and it was written in the early 1930s by a Jew living in Berlin. And it's about the same thing. It's about all the compromises that elites will make in order to stay on the dictator's good side just as he's rising through power. So, again, there's absolutely nothing new under the sun here. It's almost the same thing over and over. Trump adds a little bit of clownishness to it because he's kind of, in some ways, a failed borsch belt comic. But there's other aspects to it, too. You know, Mussolini was also a clown. You know, he would strip his shirt off, which, thankfully, Trump will never do. But, you know, he would do these ridiculous things, say these ridiculous things just to keep people's attention.
- [42:58]
Ari Melber
Yeah. And in conclusion, since you are a novelist, the key to a good story is.
- [43:06]
Gary Steingard
Well, it's really funny because people keep asking me, like, what is the great Trump novel or the great Trump art? And I always say it's very easy. It's the Sopranos, you know, and that's the key to it, is to have to take somebody who is, like Trump, a complete disaster. But to make a three dimensional character of that, of them. And nobody's done that to Trump yet, sadly.
- [43:26]
Ari Melber
Well, and those, there are lessons about that in history because even in different places, history follows human psychology. And whether you call it bullying or threatening, intimidating or in some cases, sadly, violence and killing. Right. It does work in the short run. That's the tragedy. It often fails in the long run because you can't threaten everybody. We are out of time unless you have a sentence.
- [43:48]
Gary Steingard
I just want to say thank you to the people of Minneapolis. They are a hero city and they are, they've changed the lives of so many people because we know that as a community, we can, we can stand up and fight.
- [44:01]
Ari Melber
A fitting final note from Gary Steingard. We'll be right back. Of all the stories we've covered today, we haven't hit the economy. And here's a comparison. In Biden's final year, there were about one and a half million jobs added in Trump's first year. Now under 200,000, you can see the big gap. Trump is spinning this as he's still proud of what's happening. At what point are we in the Trump economy? Oh, I'd say we're there now. I'm, I'm very proud of it. Jobs are down, layoffs are up and prices are high. That's what he's proud of. And we'll see how that plays. We'll be right back. We end tonight with a question for you. Given everything we've covered, are these protests and pushback working? You can tell me online at social media at R Melber across any platform you use. I'm still basically on most of the them at Ari Melber. Connect with me on Instagram. Follow me, message me. Are the protests working? You can always also connect with me@armelber.com try angel stuff for your tushy. It's made by Angels Soft and strong, budget friendly. The choice is simple. Pick up a pack today.
- [45:19]
Christina Greer
Angel soft, Soft and strong.