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- [00:00]
Tim Miller
Foreign. Welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday, July 21st, and I'm here with Bill Kristol, as is our habit. How you doing, Bill?
- [00:22]
Bill Kristol
I'm doing fine. How are you?
- [00:24]
Tim Miller
I'm doing pretty good. I binged the Epstein documentary over the weekend, so we'll get to that in a minute. But that's where. That's where. That's where I am. You thought you were obsessed with the Epstein case. I was staying up after the husband and child were in bed, you know, binging the documentary.
- [00:40]
Bill Kristol
I actually had a Fairly Epstein free 48 hours at a wedding, a family wedding, and then seeing kids and so forth. But though I did take it 45 minutes off to do the podcast with Sarah yesterday where we obsessed about Epstein and lamented the fact that more people weren't obsessed about it. But we can, we can discuss that.
- [00:58]
Tim Miller
We can.
- [00:59]
Bill Kristol
That's good that you're in the obsessed camp. In the internal, subtle, internal bulwark. It's you and me and Sarah, you know.
- [01:06]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And obsessed is maybe an understatement for me. So we will discuss. I want to do though first start with the news that came out late Friday. So after we did the podcast of this, what they're calling a prisoner swap, but was really a hostage exchange between the United States and Venezuela, the 250 some odd Venezuelans that we had kidnapped and disappeared to El Salvador got sent back to Venezuela, the country they had fled, in exchange for some Americans that were being held hostage in Venezuela. The government was trying to claim that this was just a prisoner deal between El Salvador and Venezuela, which doesn't even pass the laugh test. Obviously the United States that had claimed that they had no ability to effectuate return for any of these men obviously were the key factor in this swap on the good news. And we did, if people want to see it, on Friday night, kind of an emotional live stream with Andre Hernandez Romero, the makeup artist. We've been covering a lot. His lawyer, and she's a lawyer for about seven or eight of the other folks that were detained, as well as some other immigration experts. And Sam got on with me. If you want to catch that live stream that we did on Friday night, you can get the audio on the Bulwark Takes feed. If you haven't been checking that out, that's where we're kind of putting our rapid response video audio products. So go check out Bulwark Takes on your podcast player of choice. You know, at the top level, it's kind of like I wrote on the newsletter about this this morning, there's like a relief and thank God that he and these other men are alive. At the same time. It's combined with just this, a feeling of rage that we're even in this situation. But wondering what you, what you think about the developments.
- [02:52]
Bill Kristol
A couple of people at the wedding we were at Saturday had seen your the live stream Friday night. I think we'd probably been driving and very much liked it and thought you were properly emotional about what had happened and properly. Both joyful but also angry that it had to happen and angry that it's not clear it's not still happening or won't happen again. Right. I think that's, you know, you make that point this morning in the newsletter too.
- [03:16]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And I think that the good news here from a policy standpoint is that the El Salvador secot policy seems to be a failure. I mean, they might send more people there in the future, who knows. But they had a plan to send a lot of folks there. They'd initially sent the three plane foals. They were going to send more. And that plan totally unraveled because in large part because of their incompetence. You know, they tried to, you know, they did so in spite of legal rulings against them. And even Bukele, you know, reportedly, according to the New York Times, said that he was like, wait a minute, who are these? You told me you're sending me the worst people. And I was like, I've seen some of these guys. And I don't think that's true. Right. So if even the fucking dictator of El Salvador is like, you got, you went a little overboard, I think it shows that that attempt was a failure. So that's good. And it's good these guys are free. I should just say this morning we'll continue to follow this. They haven't actually been released. They're still being processed in Venezuela according to the lawyers that we've spoken to. Andre and some of the other detainees have talked to their families, had a chance to, you know, be on the phone with them and said that they're going to come home today or tomorrow, but. But they're still in this process, so that part is good. The thing is though, is that we're here now in a place where, okay, well, they just got 45 more billion from Congress to do a domestic fucking detention archipelago. And they still have the other policies. The policy of being able to send migrants to a third country, not to their home country, is a policy they're still enacting. So, again, it's nice that the El Salvador policy was, I think, disrupted in large part by the legal and political reaction to it, but they got a lot more to come.
- [05:03]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, I feel like one could almost generalize that statement. There's been a pretty decent legal and political reaction against, I would say, Trump's super aggressive deportation policies, the detentions. We haven't seen the effects of the tripling of the size of ICE and the tripling of the detention capability yet, but obviously that'll have real effect. But also just the way ICE is behaving, the masks, the seizure of all these people who were doing nothing but tried to get a job or doing their jobs or selling things from street vendors in la, the whole thing. So I think on the one hand the reaction's been probably will constrain them a little. On the other hand, they seem determined to just plunge ahead. I mean, I'm very struck by that. Did a conversation with our friend Aaron Raichlen Melnick, I guess, last week, and he's really also, I mean, we would have six months ago said maybe they would be more politically sensitive. Trump would respond to the AG and hotel people calling him and he did for like 24 hours saying, oh, maybe we're going too far. But that is not the order that Miller and Homan received, apparently, and it's certainly not the ones they're transmitting. The degree to which, I mean, the fanaticism of this is really amazing and it seems to be getting carried out. There's apparently reports of dissatisfaction within ICE and grumbling and so forth, but basically they have tens of thousands of people and they've got other law enforcement people roped in and some of them are unhappy, the police forces, but they're kind of a lot of pressure to go along, a lot of financial incentives to go along.
- [06:26]
Tim Miller
Actually, I was just going to say now they've got this slush fund, they're going to be able to pay people to go along.
- [06:30]
Bill Kristol
So that's part is very, you know, I mean, it's great that these people are back and it's great that that particularly grotesque, you might say, you know, leading edge of the deportation agenda has been curbed for now, but it's bad and it's going to get worse. I mean, I don't know what it's going to look like in six months, honestly, in terms of if they keep doing this.
- [06:50]
Tim Miller
Yeah, just to sit on that a second about the leading edge, it was a category difference. The immigration regime overall is Horrible. But what we did in El Salvador, where they kidnapped these people, disappeared them, they're gone for 125 days in the hole. The reports that we've heard from at least a couple of the folks have gotten out is that they were beaten. One guy said we were beaten for breakfast, beaten for lunch, beaten for dinner. And it's like they had no access to lawyer, no access to their family. There was a story just that came out just before this deal that there was a couple dozen of them that weren't even confirmed to be there. Like, they literally disappeared them. They were not on the list that the government had put out, and it was only revealed via hacking. So, I mean, like, this treatment is, you know, I hate to kind of do the superhero movie reductive, good guy, bad guy thing, but it's like, it's the way that the villains in the world have treated people. And it's really more similar to how put dealt with people in the Brittney Griner situation, for example. It's like we're gonna. We're gonna hold somebody hostage that committed a minor violation of some crime, and we're gonna use it to get something out of the west, right? Like, that's us that was doing that. We're to use these men as pawns to get something out of Venezuela. Just on the Rubio geopolitical thing, it's almost literary how much of a bad actor he is, just on specifically the topic that had been animating to his right. I mean, it's like these men are fleeing a communist country in Latin America. Like the Rubio family had. They come to America, they are kidnapped without any due process. They're treated as if they're in a communist regime and. And jailed as political enemies, essentially, despite not having, you know, done any political activism against the United States. And. And then they're traded to back to the communists leader who Rubio is now handing a political. This is a huge political win for Maduro where Maduro can now domestically say, oh, he was the white knight that saved these Venezuelans from the evil capitalist gringos and be accurate in that assessment, essentially. Imagine just how fucking evil you have to be to give a win to Maduro and to make Maduro seem like the good guy. And to me, it's just for Rubio, it's like that whole confluence of his backstory and doing this to people fleeing communism and then giving a geopolitical wind to Maduro, and it's a total, just utter failure on his part. And I feel like that does get lost a little bit in all this.
- [09:26]
Bill Kristol
I mean, those of us who knew him once upon a time said for a while, I think after he became Secretary of State, well, he must really be dissatisfied with this or unhappy or he doesn't really want to be doing this. He has, he feels he has to suck up to Trump. That's unfortunate, that's foolish. But I don't know, maybe he's just crossed some Rubicon in his own mind, honestly, in his own psyche and this is where he is and he's sort of put his, his past out of his mind. And everything he said from as a senator and as a candidate and as a human being, honestly, until 2015 or 16 has just been memory hold. I don't know. Let me ask you one question. You would have a better feel for this than I, I feel like there's a bit of a religious but particularly Catholic backlash against this. There have been the Archbishop, various bishops who have sort of denounced this in California, but I think Elsewhere as well, 25 Knights of Columbus showed up at the Florida detention center to pray the rosary for those who were incarcerated there. I don't know, I just maybe, I don't know how much effect it has. But do you sense that a little bit.
- [10:29]
Tim Miller
I mean, I remember thinking about this. I did Christmas mass with my family at a church that has a lot of immigrants in Colorado because we were, we were in the mountains over the holidays. I can remember thinking that like looking around the church being like God, like bad stuff is coming for this community. I don't exactly know who is documented, who is not in this church, but it's hard to imagine that in the Spanish speaking Catholic Church, a lot of working class folks, that there's nobody that has, you know, mixed immigration status or you know, who is not here, who's not documented. And that is like a built in community. Right. So there is, I think both like kind of the backlash within the Hispanic community. Folks that like that this is more draconian than they expected. And there have been some examples of this at churches and then at the elite level, I mean the Catholic Church, like anything is anymore, is split. Like it's polarized, right? There is whatever Francis Leo wing and like a maga wing, but for the ones that are more in the Francis Leo mold, the immigration is kind of a safe place to advocate on politics. Right. Like it is a tradition. It's part of the traditional, you know, kind of Catholic social justice outreach and teaching. And so, you know, I, you know, it's the kind of Thing that you can talk about in the context of church, you know, that's different from Epstein Epstein or you know what I mean? Like if you're anti Trump or whatever, like it's not, you're not going to go up there and do a homily about whatever the latest random Trump scandals, the immigration stuff. You can though, and there's action you can do, right? Like going down and providing service to migrants in these communities. We saw that in the first Trump term. So I think there's potentially something to that. I have to tell you about this game changing product I use before a night out with drinks. It's called pre alcohol. Let's face it, after a night out with drinks, I don't bounce back the next day like I used to. I have to make a choice. I can either have a great night or a great next day. That is until I found pre alcohol. ZBiotics Pre alcohol Probiotic drink is the world's first genetically engineered probiotic. It was invented by PhD scientists to tackle rough mornings after drinking. Here's how it works. When you drink, alcohol gets converted into a toxic byproduct in the gut. It's a buildup of that byproduct, not dehydration that's to blame for rough next days after drinking. Pre alcohol produces an enzyme to break this byproduct down. Just remember to make pre alcohol your first drink of the night. Drink responsibly and you'll feel your best tomorrow. I told some of you who are there for the live stream when Andre and the other Venezuelans had been released that I was, I was jamming it in before I went to my friend's birthday party and we did that. And I have to tell you, I just did this. We talked to the great Lindsay Teslowski. The lawyer at Immigrant Defenders who was advocating for Andre was tireless in that. Who continues to be tireless and closed that up, closed down the computer here, the camera was, went downstairs, had my pre alcohol boom, went out to the French Quarter and I was rollicking on Saturday. No problems here. Go to zebiotics.com thebullwork to learn more and get 15% off your first order. When you use the Bulwark at checkout, Zebiotics is backed with a 100% money back guarantee. So if you're unsatisfied for any reason, they'll refund your money, no questions asked. Remember to head to zbiotics.com thebullwork and use the code thebullwerk at checkout for 15% off. I just want to run through a couple other immigration things when we get to Epstein. George Reddes, I mentioned him on Friday, was a security guard in California. He was arriving to work when federal agents surrounded his car, broke his window, pepper sprayed him, dragged him out. He was a US citizen and a veteran. He ended up being held in detention for three days and he was released. But that's a US citizen that was just racially targeted and targeted because of where he worked. There's a story from Human Rights Watch this morning. Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates like dogs, according to a report published by the Human Rights Watch on the overcrowded South Florida facilities. Then there's this strange story about Luis Leon. So I don't want to just caveat this that sometimes it's so strange, maybe, I guess there's at least an outside chance that this is a hoax, but. 82 year old man was granted political asylum in the US in 1987. He lost his wallet containing his green card, went to get it replaced and they arrested him. The family was later told he died in ICE custody. Then they later found out he was in a hospital in Guatemala. He was not Guatemalan, he was I think Chilean. Guatemala's Migration Institute says they have no records of him being in Guatemala. So we still don't exactly know what's happening.
- [15:18]
Bill Kristol
And that part of it, I mean, it's terrible to seize these people in the first place. And the way it's being done, it's awful. But also, okay, they seize this US citizen and veteran. They presumably discovered he's a US citizen and veteran in two hours, four hours. I mean, what are we talking about here? It's not hard these days. Right. They do have computers. I said at the Immigration center, there's big backlog. Yeah. And they want. But you want to get. Well, it gets, I mean apart from, in addition to the obvious humiliation of the feeding of these other people in overcrowded facilities and stuff, they want to, I guess, humiliate people. They want to send a message to other people. Aaron really stressed this in our conversation. The self deportation agenda. They need that to get anywhere close to their goals. And also it's what they believe in. They really do want all these people gone. So, you know, they know they can't literally probably seize them all. They need them to leave. What causes them to leave? Well, part of it is just the how badly one is treated in these centers. And there's apparently evidence from the past that if you're in one of these places, the place in the Everglades for X number of weeks or maybe a month or two or something, much more likely to say, you know what? This isn't worth it. Maybe you have been in touch with a lawyer. Maybe there's some appeal pending. It's going to take another three months. They can hold you. This is not like being a US citizen where they release you after 70, where they could, but they don't release you after 48 hours and, you know, on your own recognizance or with some bail or something, and someone's custody and someone's vouchers for you and you get to live as a free person while your appeal is pending. No, you're in this horrible place and you say, you know what? Okay, I'll go back. I'll go back. This is all part of the plan. This is not like, oh, that's a weird kind of fluke that they detained the guy much longer than they needed to.
- [16:55]
Tim Miller
No, no, that's exactly right. They don't. They don't mind these, right? Like, unless it rises to the level of Trump. And Trump feels like he's embarrassed. Right? They're not like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and Tom Homan. Like, again, that's part of what their agenda is, is to, you know, treat the migrants like sub humans and be capricious and, and hope that some of them just check out. I mean, they say it. It's explicitly. It's not a secret.
- [17:22]
Bill Kristol
Yeah.
- [17:25]
Tim Miller
All right. Hey, y'. All. Just got a new package this weekend from one of our favorite sponsors at Quints. So I'm excited to talk to you about why I keep going back to their lightweight layers and high quality staples that are becoming everyday essentials for me and for Toulouse. To be honest, Quince has the kind of stuff you'll actually wear on repeat, like breathable flowknit polos. I'm not a polo man. But you might be. Crisp cotton shirts and comfortable lightweight pants that somehow work for both weekend hangs and dressed up dinners. The best part, everything Quince has is half the cost of similar brands. By working with top artisans and cutting out the metal men, Quince gives you luxury pieces without the markups. I got a new, what I call podcast shirt coming. You know, something that looks nice from kind of the chest up here for you guys. So I'm working on one of those. I think it's arriving today. The Kiddo got a new kind of breathable summer shirt and new swimwear because we're gonna do a little quick family vacation here in a couple weeks and a little weekend trip. So she needs some updated swimwear and she's gonna be looking good in quints. You should join us. Stick to the staples at last, with elevated essentials from quince. Go to quince.com the bulwark for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q U-I-N-C E.com the bulwark to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.com thebullwerk all right, let's do Epstein. As I said, I watched the documentary. It's like a five parter. So a lot of time when I'm doing my podcast research now, I listen to everything on 2x speed and they haven't done that yet on Netflix documentaries. I kind of wanted it to be on 2x speed so I could make it through as quickly as possible.
- [19:05]
Bill Kristol
So does this date from before the max? What period is this?
- [19:08]
Tim Miller
Yeah, so the original documentary was done in 2020 and it was focused on Epstein and then there was a supplemental on on Maxwell in 2022. So this is all during the Biden administration. I hadn't watched it. I'd read Julie Brown's archive on all this. It's like decently so. A lot of it was not unfamiliar to me, but some of it refreshed my memory. One of the interesting things about it, I guess I want to start here. There are all these new little wrinkles. Trump, really, just from a PR standpoint, botched this so badly by putting out this document and creating this feeding frenzy. There's some new material that came up which we're going to get into, related to Trump, but it also sort of unearthed re gives people an excuse to bring back up stuff that had been known but not really discussed or not really given as much attention to anyway. One of the things that really jumped out to me as something that creates a huge vulnerability for Trump now is one of the main characters in his documentary. Maria Farmer went to the FBI in 1996 and said that Epstein was abusing her and her sister. And they didn't get into this in the documentary, but now it's related to it in a New York Times story that was out over the weekend was apparently during that report she named Trump also, and Trump hadn't done anything to her, but she'd said that she was with Epstein and like Trump came by the office or something. And she's standing there and she thought he was kind of hovering over her. And she said that Epstein said to Trump, no, she's not for you. She kind of has some implications for what maybe there are others that are for him. I don't know. So she gives its word to FBI 96. It's relevant because Epstein doesn't get arrested for a decade after that till 2006. And during 2006, it was the local, Florida local Palm beach cops that were after him. And when they were trying to make it to take it to the FBI, they needed it to go across jurisdictions. Right. And it was this woman's report from 96 that made it. That rose it to an FBI type case. Right. Because I think it had happened in New Mexico or Ohio.
- [21:15]
Bill Kristol
I forget.
- [21:16]
Tim Miller
So anyway, the fact that the Trump connection goes back to that, the original FBI report on Epstein is obviously noteworthy and speaks to this. Now, question of, okay, well, how much is he in the vials? Seems like quite a bit.
- [21:32]
Bill Kristol
I mean, yes, I assume he's probably in quite a bit. I mean, there's so much public information. That's the thing. Right. Leaving aside that they had access to Epstein's own records, someone said Trump is. I'm a little fuzzy on the black book. Maybe you know more about this than I do. And then some names are circled. I think this is legitimate reporting, though. I think it's. Julie Brown actually either reported it or confirmed it. 35 names are circled. They're the kind of, I don't know, special friends of Epstein or it's unclear if they're all clients or quote, clients or friends or. And Trump is one of them. So again, the closeness to Epstein, very clear way back. And of course, the video, that video of them yucking it up is early 90s maybe. And then the story about the two of them, 20 or something, young women being invited to something at Mar a Lago, sort of like it's going to be a party.
- [22:20]
Tim Miller
Yeah. This was also another thing that came out this weekend is a time story that there was a Calendar Girl party or something at Mar a Lago.
- [22:26]
Bill Kristol
It's only Trump and Epstein. Right. It's not a party.
- [22:28]
Tim Miller
I mean, Trump only invited Epstein as among the men to be there. And there's one, I guess one of.
- [22:32]
Bill Kristol
The sickness of it all. You know, I do feel like I was trying to think of a way to summarize where we are. I mean, I think one thing is, I'd say before all this came out, this was sort of Access Hollywood level, plus the MAGA interest in Epstein and related to QAnon and stuff, which just made it slightly different. But still it was sort of reports of things or in the case of Access Hollywood, an actual tape of Trump. But there didn't prove that he did anything exactly. It just proved him boasting to Billy Bush, I guess. Right. You could say. And it's pretty bad. And it did do a lot of people forget once it oh well, that's only exes Hollywood. It almost derailed his campaign in October of 2016. That was not nothing but whatever. We're in a new era now and I'm sure that's so I thought pre the last two weeks it was the Epstein issue was a kind of an Access Hollywood type thing. Now we're way beyond that. We've got, you know, we're now dealing with there. There was no crime in Access Hollywood and what they what may have been crimes that Trump did.
- [23:25]
Tim Miller
You talked about what would have been a crime had he done it.
- [23:27]
Bill Kristol
What would have been a crime. But we don't have not the concrete. I mean when you read the indictment, I mean Epstein was of course convicted of crimes, Maxwell was convicted of crimes. And Trump's, you know, I'm going to say adjacent to that criminal enterprise, either almost certainly knowing about it sort of, but maybe not really, or maybe knowing about it really or maybe being, you know, tangentially connected, just connected to it. So there's that. And then the second thing that people haven't focused on enough. I don't want to jump ahead, but is he's the President of the United States and they're covering it up. I mean, so you have both the crime and the COVID up. I don't think people, you know, it's not like when Trump tried to cover up things as a private Citizen. Stormy Daniels, $150,000. They got him on something in New York. But again, that's different from using the government of the United States to cover up paper files that exist about a crime, a criminal conspiracy, which the President of the United States when he was a private citizen was connected to or mentioned in. Let's just say in this respect, people who keep saying none of this stuff ever gets to Trump. We don't have a case. I don't think I was trying to think. We don't really have a case study of this combination the criminal conspiracy and the government cover up under Trump.
- [24:38]
Tim Miller
Right. Because he was out of government when he was trying to get out of the other various criminal conspiracies whether the classified documents case, for example, or some of this, I guess was there an attempt to cover up some of the Ukraine phone call stuff? I guess. But that's not. Again, that was not really a crime.
- [24:58]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. And that was him pressuring a government to do something. It wasn't exactly a criminal. Was sort of. But it wasn't exactly a criminal conspiracy. Now when you think about the first term in 2019, they arrested Epstein. So in a way they were being more aggressive than the Obama Justice Department, you could argue. And then, you know, he dies. And so that became a conspiracy topic. But couldn't really prove Trump had anything to do with that. So yeah, I do think it's new. People are being too blase. A lot of our friends and a lot of the journalists, I think and oh, he always avoids these things. And this is gonna be just like the others.
- [25:31]
Tim Miller
Just one more thing on again, not a new piece of information, but information that people were re reminded of because of the nature of how the story goes. Stacey Williams, who was not underage time, I think she was in her early 20s, so she was a young woman. But she is dating Epstein and Epstein brings her by Trump's office and Trump gropes her. And she was one of the initial accusers. When you go back to like that first, you know, in the 2016 campaign, like after the Access Hollywood and there are all these different women that are making credible accusations of sexual harassment or assault against Trump. Again, one of them was Epstein's like quasi girlfriend at the time that he brings by Trump Tower. There are a couple interviews about with.
- [26:15]
Bill Kristol
Her over the weekend and Epstein takes it for granted, like Epstein's offended by this. Right. I believe if one brought one's girlfriend over and some of your friends started to grope her, that might be hard on the relationship, you know, but not in this case.
- [26:27]
Tim Miller
I got a buddy who just dropped one of a mutual friend over. Not a groping over a consensual. Consensual relationship with a girlfriend. So yeah, you could see him being upset.
- [26:38]
Bill Kristol
So they are. That's what it's. Their behavior is more that of co conspirators.
- [26:43]
Tim Miller
Yes.
- [26:44]
Bill Kristol
Than buddies who like to have a good time.
- [26:46]
Tim Miller
Yes, good point. All right, so on the COVID up, the Dick Durbin letter over the weekend, he writes this. According to information my office received, the FBI was pressured to put approximately 1,000 personnel in its information management division on 24 hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein related records. This effort, which reportedly took place from March 14th through the end of March was haphazardly supplemented by hundreds of FBI New York field office personnel. My office was told that these personnel were instructed to flag any records in which President Trump was mentioned. So talking about the COVID up part of this, and again, the decision to not release this now does not come after. It would be bad, but it would be one thing if it was like, oh, the doj, they'd been lying this whole time about Epstein and they didn't really even look at it that deeply and they're just like, sorry, guys, it turns out we're not going to investigate this after all. That still would have been a huge controversy in MAGA world. But okay, but that is not what it seems like happened. It seems like they spent huge amounts of government resources to go through everything and then once they saw what was in there, decided not to release it, possibly because of the extent of how many records that mentioned Donald Trump and which now we presume they have like a file catalog of the times Trump was mentioned. And if he was flagged right then at some level somebody was collecting all of those flags.
- [28:18]
Bill Kristol
That's really important. Such an important point. I was thinking about it yesterday evening. I assumed, incorrectly, I think that two, three weeks ago, when the whole thing, you know, when the memo came out from Bondi and Patel that they hadn't done a real search, that it was all kind of fake, you know, they had done a fake review, me too, and decided, hey, nothing there. And which is not only if you were going to just determine to cover it up in the beginning, that's presumably what you would do. I mean, why would you, you know, you don't want a thousand agents to have seen different things and have the possible ability of having a chat with a Wall Street Journal reporter and so forth. So. So it seems like, I don't know if that was a Trump, if that was Bondi sort of acting maybe a little bit without talking to Trump because she really believed that they wanted to have an account.
- [28:58]
Tim Miller
Or Patel.
- [28:59]
Bill Kristol
Or Patel.
- [28:59]
Tim Miller
Or Patel and Bongino. Right. Again, it's important to remember that Patel and Bongino not only were active participants in the conspiracy and making claims, you know, that there was this big conspiracy that, that included a lot of deep state officials and a lot of Democrat prominent Democrats. So I don't think it's crazy. I think they believe their own bs. Right, right. And then they got in there and they thought this was part of their remit, that they'd promised their listeners on the podcast that they were going to nab the Epstein co conspirators. And so then they, you know, ordered a bunch of their underlings to do it. I, and I assume they'd have to talk to Bondi about that, but definitely Patel and Bungino too, I would think.
- [29:36]
Bill Kristol
I talked a couple of legal types who've been at DOJ and FBI who knows their experiences in the past and nothing to do with Epstein. So who knows if their sense of how things work is how things now work. Obviously it's a very different world, but now they think Bondi and DOJ would be central to it. FBI is not really set up to do this kind of thing at the degree to which they're now doing it. I mean, some of the reporting suggests pretty intensive DOJ involvement, so Bondi at least has to agree and then put some resources behind it and so forth. And they didn't check with Trump. Maybe they did check and Trump was just kind of, yeah, go ahead. But he assumed they would arrange it all, so there was no problem. Bondi knows a little bit about Epstein. She was Florida Attorney General and totally failed to investigate anything from 2011 maybe to 18. I can't remember something like that. Two terms. I think she's a bit of a villain, I think in Julie Brown's account of the total failure to take any of the evidence seriously, any of the victims, many of whom were in Florida, obviously a lot of this happened in Florida. Some of it happened in Florida. So anyway, I am, I'm a little bewildered, but they seem to have done a very extensive search and as you say, they, they, they, they. I mean they would have, when they do these searches, they would have had lists of other. Everyone in a sense. I mean, it's not like the FBI doesn't do like we do word searchers and put them into a different document, you know, so they would have had Trump, you know, 37 times, whatever, but someone, they would be interesting to find out about more about this, what moment it was in mid late March when Bondi and or Patel and or Bongino or some deputy to them discovered, oh my God, we have to reverse course in effect on this. It does feel like they wanted to put out something, which I guess your point's right about that. If you've been screaming and yelling about it for years, you think, okay, I'm going to put out something and also keep people happy in Nagaworld and also get credit for investigating something that Obama and Biden didn't or something. Right.
- [31:22]
Tim Miller
I mean it's very hubristic and I Guess you go in there, and the fact that these people are such amateurs probably contributes to this. But you go in there and you're thinking, all right, we're gonna tell people to flag the Trump stuff. I'll just pocket veto that or whatever. We'll put it over here in a secret file to be dealt with later. And in the meantime, we'll go out and put out evidence against Bill Clinton and whoever else, Bill Gates or whoever, you know, Prince Andrew, whoever they think are the villains in this situation, I guess. And then they just sort of felt like, well, we're running everything. We're in charge. Like, we'll be able to. That. I don't know, though. That's so stupid in retrospect. Like the risk. There's so many risk points, like, of different people that could leak a converse between hubris and being true believer. Like not believing that. Like kind of believing the story that Trump had dumped him actually before the bad stuff happened. And that was for people in Mega World who are. Who are deep in the sauce on this. They already had had to come up with a rationale for why Trump was not a bad guy, even though. Because they knew that he hung out with them. Right. And it was that, oh, in 2004, whatever it was, he banned him from Mar A Lago. And so Trump is with the good guy here. I guess maybe they've convinced themselves of that. I don't know.
- [32:34]
Bill Kristol
Yeah. I don't know the hubris side of it, or just the. Or maybe that they're doing the search. They're pretty confident it's all going great from their point. Not great, but it's going fine. They're going to have some report, and then they discover something in mid March, and suddenly it's, oh, my God. Or they talk to Trump. I mean, this is also possible, right? Hey, we're doing this good search of the Epsom interesting documents, just like you got you wanted, Mr. President. He's like, you know, I want to know what's in that before you guys do anything. And suddenly it's like, oh, didn't the flagging Trump come a little late, maybe? I think in the search. I think, as I recall from one of the Tiktoks, it's. That's not the first thing they say. First they say, just do a search and they reverse that. Mid March moment would be interesting, I hope. I trust reporters are looking in that. At that in some depth, what might have happened to cause this. But then they also, you know, you said something. Well, didn't they realize this would go wrong. But to be fair, there weren't many leaks that we know of at the time. If they hadn't put out that statement two weeks ago, that was also unbelievably stupid. I mean that is to say, I think from their point of view. Don't you just sit on it forever. This search is very complicated. We're very, very careful about not being sure that when we. And if we release something that no one who's innocent or certainly none of the victims would have any personal identification, blah, blah, blah. And so you just put it off at least for a while. Then you find sometimes it's at least.
- [33:48]
Tim Miller
It where it's just a total rake step.
- [33:50]
Bill Kristol
Yeah.
- [33:50]
Tim Miller
And it was a total cell phone. They absolutely did not need to put out that statement. Nobody would have been talking about it. I know there'd be a handful of MAGA obsessives.
- [33:58]
Bill Kristol
Right.
- [33:59]
Tim Miller
It would have been. That would have been hassling them about it. But yeah, you probably could have found some other chum again having now being a fake expert, having watched five hours of documentary on it late night over the weekend. I like there certainly are other co conspirators who have not been indicted really Depstein who are not Trump. And so you know, you could do that. Like there are a million potential things that they could have done besides just put out a press release saying nothing to see here.
- [34:25]
Bill Kristol
And you don't think. I don't recall. At least MAGA World was intensifying pressure on Bondi and Patel. Where's the report? Maybe there was. I wouldn't know.
- [34:34]
Tim Miller
There was some chatter because she had given out those. And the original sin was she gave out those ridiculous binders and it made some of their own people look dumb. Right. So there were some people that were mad at them in MAGA World and this kind of stuff where it comes by in my feed and it all sort of blurs together. So I kind of don't really remember who was the point person on being mad. But I do remember seeing people that are like you're making us look dumb. Right. Like you handed this out like this is a serious thing. We've got to go after these people. Like we need whatever the next step is from the binders. There was a little bit of that pressure, but like nothing unmanageable.
- [35:11]
Bill Kristol
Here's a question. You and I have been in a different lives slightly involved in trying to, you know, deal with the press when there are adverse news coming. Is it conceivable they got a call from the Journal two weeks ago. I mean, I don't know. We don't know what I don't think when the Journal got the information it got and it's also the Journal, I think understandably has been slightly murky about. I mean they clearly 100% believe in and I assume therefore fully checked out the provenance and the authenticity of the information. But then it's unclear exactly what they.
- [35:40]
Tim Miller
Got, when they got and we still haven't seen it. Like we like, you know, they haven't shown.
- [35:43]
Bill Kristol
Is it possible that it's a.2 and a half weeks ago the Journal begins to call us and says, hey, we need to talk to you about the Epstein files. We have some information here. Obviously we're not going to report it until we blah, blah, blah, give you a chance to explain. And they're like in total panic mode and decide to put out that statement as a kind of preemptive. It has a vague feel to me of clever campaign people. We're going to preempt the story that's coming. Right. I believe such things once or twice.
- [36:09]
Tim Miller
Not related to sex crimes with minors though. But you know, the concept of the move.
- [36:14]
Bill Kristol
Thank God. Thank God. But I mean, yeah, no, it wouldn't be. But we wouldn't do that. I don't believe it. The but this is another reason why these cover ups are hard. The Journal is a player in this. We're going to learn more about what they have, what they got, when they got it, what the reaction of the administration was. And so Sarah and I discussed this some yesterday. I mean, these scandals have a certain dynamic of their own once they get going. Often the one thing this one doesn't have. I cautioned Sarah, who's very, you know, I mean she was great and gung ho and the media should investigate, which it should. But in past scandals, one reason they keep going is that there's a special counsel or sometimes the Department of Justice itself or such as the State House Oversight. Yeah, House Oversight somewhat is investigating. So on the one hand there's the stonewall side of things, which is always the White House and whatever they control. And on the other hand, there's the investigative side of things and they clash. But there is someone, this case, they've got justice, FBI, the Congress totally sewn up, so far as one can tell, at least the majority in the Congress and therefore the official committee proceedings. So it's really a little. I'm a little worried. I mean, if you ask me, why can they suppress this? My instinct is to say no, it doesn't usually work. The COVID up doesn't usually work. But they have an awful lot of assets on the COVID up side. Many more than Nixon had, many more than Reagan had and Iran Contra, many more than Clinton had in 98. Right. I mean, they don't have the especially they don't have a special counsel with the authority of the Justice Department to subpoena, indict, put people under oath. So I guess maybe certainly they'll move heaven and earth to cover it, to support the COVID up.
- [37:50]
Tim Miller
I agree that, though. And this gets us into the political with the Democrats. Lauren Egan wrote a great newsletter last night, just kind of about how the Democrats are thinking about how this could be useful and tied into sort of a broader message about how Trump ran as a populist who cares about regular folks, but his administration has been all about protecting elites and tax cuts for the rich and now protecting prominent child predators. And I think there's something to that. And I think that the Democrats then, assuming they take back the House, then do have an opportunity to call Ghislaine Maxwell from prison if they choose, call whoever. And I think that now this FBI, this is where the Durbin letter is, I think so important. Right, because that gives them a tangible thing like the House Democrats, a tangible thing to investigate. That's not like Donald Trump's behavior in the year 2003. It's cash Patel and Pam Bondi's behavior in the year 2025. Did they receive incriminating evidence about Trump and stifle it and did they report.
- [38:54]
Bill Kristol
That to Trump and did Trump order them to stifle? No, you get that's your classic, literally your classic kind of Watergate, Iran Contra question of what did the president know, when did he know it? And I, I very much agree. They should focus a lot and they should focus on the crimes as this kind of out of justice to the victims, for one thing. And also because Trump want the journal to get the birthday card is pretty, in my view, reasonably incriminating. But the COVID up is the issue that you're right, that the Democrats can really focus, that is the Trump administration and who knew what when, who made the order in March to reverse course and if there was one who looked at the files, can we have testimony that's not just from Bondi and Patel, but from some of the people who went through the deputies. I mean, there's a ton they can do there. They can do it. If they take the House, they can run on doing it to some degree. We need an investigative body here. This is not being investigated by special counsel, it's not being investigated by justice, it's not being investigated by the Republican Congress. We need to bring to light this cover up. It's not a totally and nothing issue, I don't think in an actual 26 congressional campaign.
- [39:57]
Tim Miller
I don't want to spend more than one minute on this, but it is just worth noting. And the flailing Trump, Trump reaction to this, his social media over the weekend was even more unhinged than usual. He is, you know, he's posting about arresting Barack Hussein Obama over some fake scandal that's too arcane to even justify explaining to the listeners. But also as part of that, he wants to investigate all the other Russia hoax people that accused him falsely of coordinating with Russia. And he put out a list of nine or AI pictures like nine Democrats in orange jumpsuits. It's deport. Rosie o' Donnell has been on his list recently. He brought out this old saw. He wants the Washington football team to change their name back to the Redskins. I mean, this is the sign of somebody who's like desperate for at least the right wing media to talk about anything other than Epstein.
- [40:53]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, the football thing is kind of just classic distraction and desperation. The initial thing I just saw quickly was I was getting a bit little tied up. But that's crazy actually because he's now legitimizing the notion that there's been massive cover ups of a billion. I mean, if you took it all seriously, it's obviously nonsense. But there have been massive cover ups of crimes throughout the federal government and those should be investigated. Okay, well, you know what, investigate if you want. I mean, we can't stop Trump's Justice Department from looking at Obama and Clinton. And for all we know, they are incidentally they've talked about it at times, Bonte and Patel and Trump himself. But if you're going to investigate them, investigate Epstein and Trump. Right. I mean, I think the right position to be in if you're going to be justifying a cover up is, you know what? We have to govern this country. We're very concerned about rising prices, we're concerned about bringing peace to the Middle east, blah, blah, blah. And we don't need to have you attracted by all this past stuff. Let bygones be bygones. That would be a little crazy for them to be saying this at this point given MAGA propaganda for the last few years. But it wouldn't be. Some people might say, okay, fine, let's move on. They should be in the move on camp, not in the let's investigate everything camp. And so in that respect, they're opening a door for the Democrats. Right?
- [42:01]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And I think if you're an average MAGA person, right. And there's some of these folks, whatever, you've been going along with these conspiracies for 10 years, and you'll believe whatever Trump says, and Mr. Trump is the best, and you're kind of in a cult, and so you'll go along with it. But you've already seen this. But people who are more in the Joe Rogan camp that are into conspiracies, qua conspiracies, they're not so much maga. Right. And so they got aligned with Trump as part of the kind of quack alignment that we had. They're like, eventually people start to feel like, wait a minute, you've been president now twice. Like, you're talking about how there this huge criminal conspiracy against you, you know, dating back to the Obama administration, and they tapped your wires and, you know, and James Clapper and Comey, and they're all involved. It's like, you haven't indicted any of them. Where's the evidence? You are in charge now. You have the doj. When you're sitting in Mar a Lago, you know, Norma Desmond bleeding about how they should be arrested, it's like, okay, well that's silly and, and ridiculous. But, like, now you're in charge, so do it. Okay. So show. Put your money in your mouth is eventually people start to. And I think that there's an interplay between that and Epstein, which is like, you've breached the trust with the conspiracists. Like, even conspiracy theorists, like, want to believe that there's at least some level of, like, trust, but, you know, that they're not being made for fools right now it seems like they're being made for fools. And I think some of them are going to figure it out.
- [43:28]
Bill Kristol
No, I think that's a good point. That's well said. But I'd also say which way does. I'm curious what you think about which way does that cut? Does that cut to them actually intensify? Actually going after a bunch of Democrats and sort of trying to find people to indict because as a kind of. To prove your point. Right. I mean, I think it's.
- [43:46]
Tim Miller
The problem is you need to have grand juries from the start, start dating back to January. What were our worries? Like, I always was worried that, like, you know, they're going to create major Hassle for people like they're going to come after them and yeah, I don't, I don't want to even put anybody's name into the ether right now because I don't want to manifest that. But like Right. That they're going to hassle people and create all this trouble. You know but even still it's like okay, like you need to have crimes like you still have to go to a grand jury. Donald Trump just can't call people up for military tribunals at least at this point. So maybe they do that. Who is going to do it? They've demonstrated a ton of competence across. Well obviously with some misses within the immigration space that spending OMB vote we haven't exactly seen it across these other areas. And so I don't know. I don't know. I don't wanna, I don't wanna jinx.
- [44:42]
Bill Kristol
It but don't jinx it. No, no. I mean just one more point. That's interesting question like grand jury. D.C. grand jury. But I guess they could convene one down in Eileen Cannons district in Florida which makes me. Which is I believe is where they're suing the Journal. Interestingly that also is desperation. I mean that is to say they could have taken the position on the birthday card that look we're not gonna comment on it. God knows what cards are in that book and we don't know if he wrote or you know he doesn't remember Right. Writing it. But you know it was whatever meaningless. I mean it would be a little hard to. That's a little. Makes it tries to make it Access Hollywood ish locker room talk. They felt that was damaging enough. Or and or they felt that what was going still to come is going to be damaging enough that they had to take the position it's a hoax literally that this, this thing was invented that it's not done by Trump. I just can't believe the Journal does not have extremely good proof. I'm almost going to say that this is a legitimate 2003 birthday card. The doodle is by Trump and presumably it's a doodle on a script that he had dictated or whatever and been typed by someone at his direction. And I then one can interpret the script as the sort of ridiculous dialogue as much as one wants. I interpreted it pretty dark and sick but they felt they couldn't sustain that. I think that's interesting. I mean that is Trump's first instance has always been lots of people in the Nixon first instance is denied. It's not true. Not True. You know, didn't Trump say that about Access Hollywood for like 12 hours?
- [46:11]
Tim Miller
Yeah, it doesn't sound like me, doesn't sound like voice.
- [46:13]
Bill Kristol
But then within like that became ridiculous of course. And then he just went to the kind of locker room talk. They can't go to locker room talk on this one I think either because the card itself is so damning or because they know there's more stuff to come and so they have to make it all a giant, I guess, conspiracy to get him. I mean what's there? What is their actual, they can say, okay, it's fake, I'm swing the Wall Street. What's their actual account? Someone made up this card. I mean some human in 2024 of 2025 knew about this book of Epstein and was able to slip this card into it. I mean, you think about it for a minute, it's a pretty far fetched argument they're now making. And I think it shows a kind of desperation, but it also shows, I think knowledge maybe on Trump's part of.
- [46:54]
Tim Miller
What is there really quick on the Hill. One other thing. Brendan Boyle, the Democratic ranking member on the Budget Committee has an op ed in the Bulwark over the weekend about this upcoming government funding fight. We're about months out from it, so there's a little bit of time. It's interesting take again about where the Democrats are now. We had this rescission bill where essentially there's this bipartisan budget that gets passed which was an extension a lot of the Biden budget really a couple months ago. And the Republicans then last week take out 9 billion from it via party line vote 50 50, including some really like insanely harsh removals of pretty modest budget line items. Boyle's point is, okay, well so now here we are. Democrats can't be expected to do any deals with the Republicans going forward. They can't. How can you do that if you're going to come to a bipartisan deal and then the Republicans are going to go the next week and be like, oh, we're just going to take out everything that's the Democrats priorities. To me it just, it signals a posture that has changed from what a lot of us were complaining about at the beginning of the year, which was can we work with them in certain areas? Look at good faith. There was another example of this, I think Mark Warner said at a town hall recently that he regretted voting for the Lake and Riley Act. Now in retrospect it does seem like that there's been a change in posture from the Democrats.
- [48:21]
Bill Kristol
Right. I mean, remember, it takes the rescission legislation takes only 50 votes, 51 votes. To sustain the President's attempted revoking of these funds like Reconciliation only takes 51 votes. The budget takes 60 votes. That's why the Democrats had the ability to stop it. That's why Schumer's decision to go ahead and in effect, okay, the continuing resolution, I think it was, but that was a budget in March, whatever, was controversial because they did need Democratic votes. That's why the September issue becomes very interesting. If it's not reconciliation, it's obviously not a rescission. They'll need Democratic votes. And the Democrats attitude, there's a reason there's been no rescission legislation since the late 90s. The decision was kind of complicated. I don't remember it exactly, but the legislative line on the veto was struck down or this was kind of an alternative to it. Anyway. There's a reason it hasn't been done for almost 30 years, because you can't have a situation where the Democrats go along with some bipartisan ish compromise on spending for HHS or anything else, DOD or whatever. And with 60 votes, that's, that's how they get some say in the situation. And then the Republicans get to get 51 votes to rescind it, which is what just happened. Right. I mean, that's why the Democrats genuinely feel aggrieved. It's not just they don't like the policies. This is like a double cross. In effect. There's a reason this didn't happen under Bush, under Obama, under Biden, under Trump, one even. It was so obviously a way to stack the deck and interesting. So I agree that combined with the general exasperate, correct exasperation of the Democrats or sense that they don't, they get no reward for being a little bit bipartisan or a little bit accommodating. It will be interesting to see what happens in September.
- [49:57]
Tim Miller
All right, Bill, Crystal, they're giving us plenty to talk about, I guess. So we've got that going for us.
- [50:02]
Bill Kristol
You can't complain about that. Yeah.
- [50:04]
Tim Miller
Enjoy the trip back to D.C. everybody else, we got a good one coming tomorrow, so we'll be back here. Make sure to check us out out and we'll be talking to you then. Peace.
- [50:15]
Katie Cooper
It's time to tear this place down I've got the last game on my mind not seen friends in ages Have I been left behind it's time to figure out why I find myself in custody with each and every question what's come so easily FL Salvador I don't know what and I don't know what for I've seen the picture for myself where did that label go I tried it out but it didn't work so I'll choose the picture for for myself it's time to start over Take only one thing sped away Head for the check in lights and get up into the air it's time to take new measures Someone will put us up tonight fa1 a place of of rest ass almost got deep inside FL to El Salvador I don't know why and I don't know what for I've seen the picture for myself where did that label go I tried it out but it didn't work so I'll choose the did you for myself first class big hotels can't crop up my finger on it Videos global sales can't crop up my finger on it Free drinks that you pay yourself I can't crop up my finger on it.
- [52:28]
Tim Miller
The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.