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- [00:01]
John Podhoretz
This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Between two factor authentication, strong passwords and a VPN, you try to be in.
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Seth Mandel
Control of how your info is protected. But many other places also have it.
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John Podhoretz
And they might not be as careful. That's why Lifelock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats. If your identity is stolen, they'll fix it, guaranteed, or your money back.
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Seth Mandel
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John Podhoretz
Make visit lifelock.com podcast for 40% off terms. Apply some diapers. No way of knowing which way it's going.
- [00:49]
Seth Mandel
Hope for the mistakes. Make the worst, hope for the best. Welcome to the Commentary Magazine daily podcast. Today is Monday, July 14, 2025. I am Jon Bodhoritz, the editor of Commentary magazine. With me, as always, executive editor Abe Greenwald. Hi, Abe.
- [01:09]
Christine Rosen
Hi, John.
- [01:10]
Seth Mandel
Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth.
- [01:13]
John Podhoretz
Hi, John.
- [01:13]
Seth Mandel
And social Commentary columnist Christine Rosen. Hi, Christine.
- [01:17]
Abe Greenwald
Hi, John.
- [01:18]
Seth Mandel
So much to talk about today. We got to talk about Trump and Ukraine. We got to talk about Jeffrey Epstein. We got to talk about some other stuff, but maybe we will just briefly begin with the fact that there has been yet another week of or two weeks of ceasefire negotiations between Israel and Hamas, or Hamas's intermediaries in Doha, and maybe the Egyptians, and maybe not. And Israel has agreed to the ceasefire, and it is pretty clear that Hamas is not agreeing to the ceasefire, so there will be no ceasefire. So this reminds me, of course, of Sartre's play no Exit, where six people are sitting in a room and they realize that they're in hell just doing the same thing over and over and over again. So the. The thing is that Israel is responding not only to international pressure to Trump and Witkoff wanting to be able to announce a ceasefire, but also internal Israeli political pressure, which is very interesting because, like, as in all matters, what matters when you gauge public opinion in a national atmosphere, like the atmosphere in Israel, it all depends on how you ask the question. So if you ask Israelis the question, would you like there to be a ceasefire and all the hostages returned home at once, more than 70% of the country says yes. And if you say, would you like to stop the war with Hamas still in power, 65% say no. And clearly the ceasefire deal to be had would be a deal in which Israel would say, give us the hostages, and Hamas says, let us stay in power, and Israel says, okay, that Hamas would agree to. Nothing else will Hamas agree to. So you're going to hear a lot of talk over the course of the next couple of days that once Again, Bibi Netanyahu is keeping, refusing to make a ceasefire deal to, because he wants to retain his power or whatever. And it's all nonsense because Hamas. The only deal that Hamas will make is a deal that Israel actually cannot accept that will tank Bibi Netanyahu's government and that the public does not want. When it is asked the question plainly, which is under the terms of a deal that Hamas would agree to, Hamas would not be forced out of Gaza or destroyed or whatever. Seth, does that comport with your understanding?
- [04:03]
Christine Rosen
Yes.
- [04:03]
John Podhoretz
And also, I think people are underestimating the disruptive nature of a government falling right now. I mean, people are wish casting, especially outside of Israel, people are wish casting that there was just somebody else in power. They think Bibi is, is, you know, trying to variously get to, you know, run out the clock on, on, on various things. First, he's, he's got the legislative recess coming up in less than two weeks. So he's going to run the clock out on that. Then he wants to run the clock on whatever comes after, you know, whatever. But imagine a government in Israeli government falling now with 85% of the ceasefire agreement essentially agreed to and details about, you know, troop withdrawals not agreed to.
- [04:53]
Abe Greenwald
That.
- [04:53]
John Podhoretz
That's sort of the last thing. A government falling would mean that Bibi remains prime minister until there's a new government and a new government would come in after elections. You would have to schedule elections months away. You can't schedule elections for tomorrow if the schedule elections for months away. In that interim period, you have exactly what you have now, except you have complete and total domestic turmoil. So I think that the whole, the whole conceit of Bibi trying to stay in power as a bad thing is really messing with people's ability to look at this rationally. He's the elected prime minister. He's doing what he thinks, you know, the country needs to do in this war. And people who want everything to, you know, every. They want the government to capsize are not under, are not anticipating the chaos that would ensue and what that would mean from their perspective for the hostages. They say Bibi delays and look what happens to the hostages. And if you bring down Bibi, you get those delays built in plus chaos, and it would affect the hostages similarly. And so I just think people have to let go of the obsession, honestly, with Bibi and what are his intentions.
- [06:13]
Seth Mandel
In any case, the threat to the government today right now, though obviously it would accelerate in different ways. Should be agreed to a ceasefire deal of a sort of that would please the people who like the New York Times. Slanderous and disgusting story that says that he wants to, he has wanted to perpetuate the war for his own political gain. The deal that he, that he could strike, that could be agreed to is one that they would like. And he would obviously, as I say, based on the polling, be crosswise of Israel's public opinion on these matters, but it's all domestic. The threat to his government right now has to do with complications involving the drafting of ultra Orthodox Jews. So there are a couple of very little orthodox parties. One of them is likely to pull out of the government today because they haven't yet received a draft of the new version of the law about how the Haredi Jews are going to be drafted. And they were hoping this tiny little party that a much bigger party called Shasp would come in with them. But Shas has either betrayed them or decided that it's too much to play that game and they're not willing to say that they want out. And so it's not what people here might think. It's about that Bibi's government is slightly at risk and only slightly at risk because as Seth says, not only would there not be an election for four months, Netanyahu ran the country for four years or maybe longer and five elections without attaining a majority. Like we just went through a period from like 2017 to 2022 where he was Prime Minister without actually winning an absolute majority for his coalition because he couldn't get one. And then nobody else could form a government either. And therefore the government that existed, that was the one that he had before he foolishly called snap elections seven, eight years ago, whenever that was, stayed in power until somebody could form a government. And then finally there, and finally they're cobbled together a government under the weird joint tutelage of Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett. And that lasted for 13 months, I can't even remember how long it lasted. And then it collapsed and then there was an election in 2022 and Bibi won outright for the first time since 2015 or something like that. He actually won an outright majority and is therefore the duly elected Prime Minister with a four year term with a functioning government. So just to get the politics right here, because they're crazy. And then there's a whole other crazy thing going on with the Attorney General who, whom Bibi wants to fire. And complicated political rules don't allow him to directly fire the Attorney General, which you would think he should be able to do as the elected prime minister, but he can't. And the attorney general is desperately trying to hold on to power by threatening to indict two or three people in his government. Like, is like using as almost like bargaining chips for her own future, her power to indict people. So there is, like, gross political machinations going on here. And you may think Bibi is, as I do, like, a very oily, slippery, difficulty politician to pin down and all of that, but compared to the knaves and morons and thieves and crooks and bad actors who also populate Israel's political system, including this attorney general, you know, he's. He's in the middle of the pack. He's, you know, he's not like, blazing a new trail of, you know, you know, defiant criminality.
- [10:42]
John Podhoretz
We should just say, by the way, that the great innovation that the attorney general has done, and this is like something out of a satirical political novel or something, it's so ridiculous. But essentially, she'll open an investigation into Bibi on something, let's say, you know, connections to Cutter or something from one of his aides or something like that, and then she'll use this law or not. It's not a law, but she'll use this power. She has to declare that Bibi has a conflict of interest in anything that has to do with that. So there she's saying he can't. He couldn't fire the head of Internal Security, the Shin Bet, which is the, you know, the domestic security apparatus. He couldn't fire the head of the security apparatus because he had a conflict. Now, presidents, prime ministers, who run their government, there's no way to get around the idea of a con like, you have a vested interest in the people who are running your government alongside you, who the people you hire and fire. And so they open investigation, and that disqualifies him from firing and hiring people, and it seizes this sort of state in place.
- [11:56]
Seth Mandel
This is very important because she's been doing this or not. She. But her predecessor, and she had been doing this from the beginning of Netanyahu's term. And the big controversy over Netanyahu's term that began the term, which was the judicial reform package, remember that? This is like going back to the Stone Age, the way things have gone in Israel, he was deemed to have a conflict interest in the judicial reform matter, which meant that he could play no political role in determining how the issue that was tearing the country apart and had 250,000 people in the streets every Saturday night, how that was playing out because she said he had a conflict of interest and therefore had to recuse himself on the most important political matter in the country. This is why Israel needs a constitution. It needs to lay out and enumerate the powers and the separations of powers and all of that, because these workarounds that have been created to make sure that the prime minister's power is somewhat limited, obviously, in prime parliamentary systems have this problem, which is that since basically they're almost like dictatorships, like your party wins and your party is the executive branch and the legislative branch, and you can sort of do what you want to do at will with the only threat to your governor governs, you know, that the government will collapse from within if you go too far. It's the weakness of the parliamentary system. And so Israel has come up with, as I say, some workarounds to limit the prime minister's power. But now it's. Now they're being used in, I think, absolutely preposterous ways that are defended by liberals who are worried about democracy. Sound familiar? In. In, you know, they, they like them fine. And they would be screaming about them if they were being used against a liberal prime minister. Not that there will ever again be a liberal prime minister the way things are going in Israel. So maybe we should. Hey, go ahead. No, you were. Okay, so let's move on. I want to talk about this Biden pardon controversy, but maybe we should talk about Jeffrey Epstein for a minute, because clearly the internal Trump coalition is facing its first genuine crisis. Right. There was a crisis in the Republican Party between never Trumpers and Trumpers or people who love Trump and people who didn't really. But it acceded to Trump. And then the party basically fell in line behind Trump. And now everybody, every Republican, loves Trump. So now it's in the Trump vanguard, the people who created the. You must love Trump and, you know, he should be, you know, dictator for life and all of that. They're the ones who are rearing in horror at the fact that the Trump's attorney general, his FBI director, and the deputy FBI director have all said there's no there there to the. Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in jail because of the list that apparently doesn't really exist.
- [15:30]
Christine Rosen
And this comes, you know, right after the bombing of the Iranian facilities, which they're all still angry about Trump's turn on Ukraine, which they're.
- [15:42]
Seth Mandel
Which they're all angry about, but they're not saying they're. That's what's interesting. Think that they're saying, if I'm following them as, not as closely as I should. Well, there hasn't been an internal revolt about the issues. Right. Like they're kind of quiet on Ukraine and they're kind of quiet on, on, on the bombing of Iran. They were, they were beforehand hysterical.
- [16:08]
Christine Rosen
Not the influencers. The influencers haven't been quiet.
- [16:10]
Seth Mandel
I mean, you know, Candace Owens hasn't been quiet, but.
- [16:13]
Christine Rosen
And Tucker and yeah, yeah, but, but.
- [16:15]
Abe Greenwald
This is an, this is an example of I think a mistake that Trump made in some of his staffing and hiring choices. Because what a lot of us who followed MAGA from the very early years knew is that conspiracy theories are kind of a glue. And when you give some of the top voices and top conspiracy theorists advocates a position of power and they come into conflict with what their role and duties are, that acts and should as a solvent. But the base is still very much committed to this as a, as a mechanism for, for comity among the MAGA types. And I think that's where, you know the fact that Patel and the others are saying, well, there isn't. We've given you everything there is. We've looked. There's no list. There's only one or one or two choices here. One is a cover up and who is the COVID up meant to protect? Or they're just lying, they're traitors. And I think that's where MAGA world becomes because it's so Manichean in its worldview and conspiracy theory has long been its glue. That should not, that should have been something that Trump should have known about staffing. That if you take these conspiracy theorist promoters and you put them in a position of power, they really only have one of two choices. Acknowledge that the conspiracy was untrue or they are seen to be part of the COVID up.
- [17:32]
Seth Mandel
But I think Abe, Abe's point is important and maybe my mandation was too vulgar, but that what they're mad about, they're not admitting they're mad, they're not fully admitting they're mad about. What they're upset about is that he is going another way on foreign policy from where they thought he was going to go. And Epstein came up at exactly this moment to become something that the entire MAGA right, could rally around.
- [18:05]
Abe Greenwald
But I know I actually they don't.
- [18:07]
Seth Mandel
Want to attack Trump directly on actions that Trump himself took because then he'll come after them to say how dare you.
- [18:17]
Abe Greenwald
But Epstein is its own thing because it's a pillar of the idea that the system has been covering up important things for decades. So I actually think it's. I mean, they might be using as an excuse for that, but I think it's also quite, quite central to the MAGA worldview, which is that powerful people have long tried to cover up bad behavior of others. And then there's. But there's this wildcard of whether or not Trump himself might appear on some list of Epstein's clients or whatnot.
- [18:41]
Seth Mandel
So, okay, so there's a great moment in the play the Crucible, which I ordinarily would not cite because Arthur Miller was a communist, and I. It makes me sick. And he wasn't nice to Marilyn. Bad. But it's a really good play. And there is this moment as the. The girls in the Crucible are, you know, naming and saying that so. And so was in league with the devil in Salem, and so else somebody else was in league with the devil. And the judge who was running the case, who was dealing with them, basically is interrogating them. And then one of the girls says, well, you know, I think I maybe saw you in the woods with Goody Proctor or whoever. And he goes, mind your tongue, young woman. Mind your tongue. In other words, like, okay, we'll go with you as far as you go here, but when you start coming for the senior officials of Salem, this could flip on a dime. And what you just said, Christine, is.
- [19:49]
Abe Greenwald
Don'T tell me about my duck. I'm kidding.
- [19:52]
Seth Mandel
I'm mansplaining to you now.
- [19:55]
Abe Greenwald
Please do.
- [19:56]
Seth Mandel
No, but that. The only place for this conversation to go, if MAGA wants to get hysterical about it, is Pam Bondi and Kash Patel. They're shutting it down to protect Trump. MAGA can't say that. Weirdly enough, not that many people on the liberal left are saying it. So I don't know where this goes from here. It just becomes like the. Why didn't Pat. Why did Pam Bondi do this? And why did Cash Patel. Why did Don Bongino do this? Why. Why are Don Bongino and Cash Patel mad at Pam Bondi? None of that is the issue. The issue is they think somebody shut this down to protect people in power. But the only person that Bondi, Bongino, and Patel have any interest in protecting in this story is Trump in theory.
- [20:59]
Abe Greenwald
Well, and Bondi made that terrible error early on of releasing those weird binders and having all the influencers hold their binders, which were full of information that was already publicly available. So that. And that stunt, I think she was trying to quiet them. And the fact that it's come back shows that that was a, that was a misfire on her part.
- [21:18]
Seth Mandel
Hey everybody, it's John here to talk to you about Shopify. You know, Commentary is an old line American product produced physically mailed as mostly the way we do business with some newsstand sales, subscriptions, checks, cash, all of that. Only in the last 15 years have we had to become a digital product. And I got to tell you, if I were starting out today as a digital entrepreneur, what I would want on my side is Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names to brands. Just getting started. It will help you just take off into the stratosphere. You get started with your own design studio providing you hundreds of ready to use templates. Shopify will help you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. It will help accelerate your content creation. Packed with helpful AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines and even enhance your product's photography, it will help you get your word out. Like you have a marketing team behind you. You can easily create email and social media campaigns whenever you're and wherever your customers are, are scrolling or strolling. And best yet, Shopify is your commerce expert with world class expertise in everything from managing inventory to international shipping to processing returns and beyond. If you're ready to sell, you're ready for Shopify. Turn your business idea into cash, into an income, into a life. With Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com commentary. Go to shopify.com commentary shopify.com/complymented. Hey everybody. It is summer. It is thrilling to be summer. And it is time for me to talk to you about quints. I am the last person to chase trends. Conservative Jewish magazine editor, not a trendsetter, not a trend follower. But I am all about stuff that fits right, feels good and actually lasts. And I keep coming back to quints. Their lightweight layers and high quality staples have become my everyday essentials. You know this, I've talked about the sweaters. I just bought a whole bunch of lightweight shirts for summer. The kind of stuff you I'll wear on repeat. Like breathable flow knit polos. Those are the ones I bought. Crisp cotton shirts, comfortable lightweight pants that's somehow work for both weekend hangs and dressed up dinners. And the best part, everything with Quint is half the cost of similar brands. By working with top artisans, cutting out the middlemen, Quint gives you luxury pieces without the markups. And Quint only works with factories that use safe, ethical and responsible manufacturing practices and premium fabrics and finishes. So stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials. From quintessential Go to quint.com commentary for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-Y-N C E.com commentary to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com commentary well, you cannot satisfy a conspiracy theory. Right? You can never satisfy a conspiracy theory. You know, it's like that joke where somebody goes to God, dies, you know, like a, like a JFK conspiracy theorist dies and goes to God and God says, you can, you've been a wonderful person. You can ask me one question. And he says, who killed jfk? And God says, Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. And the guy says, wow, this goes way higher than I thought. Right. I mean, that's the, that's the problem with this is that there's no way to still it once you, once you accept the notion that there is this story behind the story or this, you know, there's this gigantic conspiracy which of course in the end turns out to be an omni conspiracy because it's not. Because it then ties to Comet Pizza and Hillary Clinton doing this and Bill Clinton going to sex slave island and why did Bill Clinton do it? And, and that this world of the.
- [25:48]
Abe Greenwald
Vaccines, because Bill Gates is involved and he was the guy who wants to put the chip in the vaccine.
- [25:52]
Seth Mandel
That chip in the vaccines goes on.
- [25:54]
Abe Greenwald
And on and on.
- [25:55]
Seth Mandel
Yeah.
- [25:56]
John Podhoretz
There is a foreign policy angle to this, John, that you were mentioning earlier, which is that I think that some people now really want there to be some kind of Israeli conspiracy connection here because certain, these, certain people have been arguing that Israel is determining American foreign policy and Israel is bossing Trump around, even totally aside from the Epstein thing, because of Iran. Right. They were making this argument like, oh, now Trump is just, you know, he takes his orders from Netanyahu. These were people who were saying that. And so for them, there's something super convenient in the idea that there's this other conspiracy theory that Trump himself played into and helped, you know, and helped inflate that can connect all these things together.
- [26:48]
Christine Rosen
Well, their conspiracy theory there is explicit. I mean, there are people who say that Epstein is a Mossad agent and that he, the Israel used him to blackmail Trump into being their puppet. I mean, that's the, that's the line.
- [27:05]
Seth Mandel
So over the weekend, there was this big MAGA convention, the Turning Point USA convention, run by Charlie Kirk, who is Arguably the person in America who has benefited the most from the creation and the power and the strength of the Trump movement because he was like a college student who then aligned himself with Trump. His organization raises $130 million a year or something crazy like that. He, he, Trump. The Trump campaign outsourced a lot of the get out the vote efforts in 2024 to Turning Point USA. He's a very powerful figure and Kirk has been very Zionist over the past year, has been sort of like basically threw in his cards with, with Israel when other MAGA figures like Tucker and Candace Owens obviously were not. And. But Tucker Carlson was invited to give a speech at the Turning Point usa and he said Israel has been committing crimes inside the United States. He said, no, anyone who serves in.
- [28:16]
Abe Greenwald
The IDF who's an American is a.
- [28:18]
Seth Mandel
Traitor and should and should and should have their citizenship revoked. Okay, so this is personal to me because I have four nieces and nephews who are joint American Israeli citizens and, you know, serve in the idf. And so Tucker and his brother Buckley and his son Buckley and his wife Buckley and all of them, why don't they lose their citizenship for being traitors to the United States for their anti Semit. I'm, I'm for that. So let's all talk about how everybody we don't like should lose their citizenship. Trump started it last week by saying Rosie o', Donnell, born on Long island, should lose her citizenship. I'm perfectly happy to have a big argument about who gets Elmo has to.
- [29:07]
Abe Greenwald
Be stripped of his citizenship after this weekend. It's just a horror show.
- [29:10]
Seth Mandel
But I bring this up not just to insult and speak ill of Tucker Carlson, who, as people who've listened to this podcast know, I hired for his first major job in journalism. And I will be paying for this in, In Olam Haba, as we say in the world to come, if, if one is forced in the world to come to reckon with one's sins on earth. But as he gave this speech, according to the videos that I have seen, there were mass walkouts as he began to make this, you know, completely psychotic, anti Semitic slime fest. That is a room of people Republicans overwhelmingly supportive of the strike on Iran and, and of course, if their evangelicals in the United States remain overwhelmingly supportive of Israel and they are not liking what they are hearing, the vanguard of the Tucker audience may be this weird amalgam of his old audience and Alex Jones and Nick Fuentes and the old anti Semitic John Birchers and the people who emerged in 2015. You know, with these horrible anti Semitic messages on social media that I received and that Seth's wife Bethany received and that Ben Shapiro received and you know, the hundreds of thousands of, you know, vile, you know, you should go in an oven and pictures of Auschwitz and, you know, all of that stuff. That is not what this movement is. That is a, that is a small coterie of people inside. And by raising this, by going directly at it, by saying Israel is a traitor, it's an enemy of the United States, people who are supporters of Israel or who are dual Israeli American citizens or traitors to the United States, Tucker Carlson and others are playing with fire, with their own future popularity or, you know, mainstream, mainstream ishness inside the MAGA movement, like they are going out there over their skis. This is not where Trump's supporters want them to be. Based on everything that I'm seeing in terms of the numbers. Yeah, that's very heartening, by the way, because I wouldn't necessarily have thought that would be the case.
- [31:49]
Christine Rosen
Yeah, that's the impression I get too, that the self identified MAGA people are very pro Israel, very pro close ties with the US And Israel. That's what the polls indicate. But I have to admit that I'm cautiously heartened because it's so fluid and whatever goes on among MAGA is so slippery and gets out of control so fast that you never quite know. But that is the sense I get. And they're also making a mistake in going at Trump in various ways, directly and indirectly. And he's pushing back. He pushed back on truth, social about Epstein, he's pushed back about the Iran strikes and he will win those showdowns. Of that I am certain.
- [32:50]
Seth Mandel
The Epstein story also has this weird quality which is everybody knows that it stinks to high heaven and I'm not even talking about the last 12 hours of his life because that may be the one thing that doesn't stink to high heaven. He was in a jail cell. He somehow managed because the guards were asleep or they didn't care or maybe he even paid them to help him kill himself. That makes perfect rational sense. He was in jail for the rest of his life. He was probably going to be in solitary for much of the rest of his life. He was there, had no hope of anything and there was nothing left for him to live for. You know, he evil. He's an evil person with no real friends or social connections or children or anything or any hope. And you know, his nihilistic, disgusting personal behavior. What else was there for him to do? That makes perfect sense.
- [33:53]
Christine Rosen
And he knew better, he knew better than any of us what he did. So what was going to come out. So.
- [33:59]
Seth Mandel
Right. It's how he ended up with a will, with a, with a, with an estate worth $560 million when he had eight employees working for him and no evident gigantic investment portfolio that he was running for anybody. That's the part that stinks to high heaven and that's the part that we don't really understand and that we are likely never to understand. And it will, you know, haunt everybody who is, finds these kinds of real life mysteries, you know.
- [34:31]
Abe Greenwald
And the reason we don't know a lot of it is that it's not just that powerful people like Bill Clinton who wrote on the private jet and others, it's not just that we, we know that they had this close connection to him or utilized his, his wealth and power for their own ends. It's that there are tons of totally non famous people just a tier below G's. Lane. I can't pronounce her name. Maxwell.
- [34:54]
Seth Mandel
Ghislaine.
- [34:55]
Abe Greenwald
Ghislaine. Ghislaine. Maxwell became a public figure because she was his lieutenant. But there are a whole lot of Ghislaine's out there who covered up the assistance to the former presidents, the assistance to the CEOs. Those people know a lot and they are keeping their mouths shut. It reminds me quite a bit actually of the Harvey Weinstein situation where a lot of those things were set up and enabled by people who knew exactly what was going on but didn't say a word.
- [35:19]
Seth Mandel
Right. That was 20 years Harvey Weinstein, basically, or more that he, you know, behaved like an animal. And I mean remember Epstein did plead guilty and went to jail. Like he didn't. It was that this whole thing started because he seemed to have gotten a sweetheart deal in Florida when he pled guilty and went to jail. And so that doesn't seem right, doesn't seem fair, doesn't seem right. And it doesn't seem fair, right, that nobody else was brought to justice. But you know, and also the time.
- [35:56]
John Podhoretz
It took to bring him to justice is a big part of the frustration also, right. With the people. Which is, which is, in other words. Well, there were people, there were these investigations and there were people writing about him and his name was bandied about and it didn't, when he was finally arrested and charged, it didn't feel like we suddenly knew all this more about Epstein than before. He seemed, his name was kind of a stand in for this. You know, this you know, this kind of perverted character. And so people felt like, well, we've all sort of, you know, we've all been saying it, you know, for years. Just sort of known. All of a sudden he was.
- [36:35]
Seth Mandel
So he went to jail twice, right? I mean, he went to jail once in 2008 in Florida, and then, of course, he was convicted, you know, 10 years later when he was in the Metropolitan Correctional Facility in New York City.
- [36:52]
Abe Greenwald
And in that decade when people knew he'd already been convicted for really nefarious activities, plenty of people hung out with him, took his money, did. I mean, people who then. Like the guy mit.
- [37:02]
Seth Mandel
The Gates. Yeah, yeah, Melinda Gates, Bill Gates.
- [37:04]
John Podhoretz
Don't you believe in second chances, Christine?
- [37:07]
Seth Mandel
Huh? Oh, that's. That's very moving. Well, Melinda Gates says, basically said last week that she divorced Bill Gates because he was spending time with Jeffrey Epstein. She hasn't said why spending time with Jeffrey Epstein would be enough to make her divorce him, or why she thought he was spending time with Jeffrey Epstein or whatever. But she has plenty of time to say more. She's young. He's young. You know, I mean, he's not young, but, you know, he's young enough.
- [37:39]
Abe Greenwald
Yeah, but she was careful because in her divorce agreement, no doubt, she had to sign a lot of papers outlining what she could and could not say about her.
- [37:46]
Seth Mandel
Yeah, let's see. Let's see. Yeah, let's see him sue her. She's already. She's already independently worth $25 billion. So I'm sure that would be a really, you know, she's really got to worry about her legal exposure.
- [38:00]
Christine Rosen
But, you know, the thing is that to a certain contingent of maga, who's very into this, to them, the Epstein list is of utmost importance, because in the way they view it, that list unlocks the whole system that's unfair, that has been cheating, that has been deceiving, that has been conning them. And they've. Their attitude is if Trump is not. If the Trump administration is not going to turn that key, unlock that and show us everything, and therefore sort of, you know, dismantle the old regime in that way, then what was the whole point of the.
- [38:44]
Abe Greenwald
This is the thing about modern populism is that with. With. Because of the Internet, in a lot of ways, it demands a radical transparency that previous populist movements were happy to just kind of nurture their own conspiracy theories in vague terms, but now they're literally like, show me the documents, show me the list. And they can demand that because the culture has made that something that's. That's possible to do.
- [39:07]
John Podhoretz
Yeah, that's a very good point. I think, in that just one. What we're all used to seeing, it's like people. You know, Christine, you always say people are going to run for office, and everybody in the future who runs for office is going to have terrible Facebook photos and stuff like that. We're just sort of used to certain information, just like almost an entitlement. We're entitled to know what people are doing behind closed doors, because that's. Every TV show we watch is a reality show, and the Internet is a reality show and whatever. But one thing I also think Perverted.
- [39:35]
Abe Greenwald
Love island.
- [39:39]
John Podhoretz
One of the things that, you know, that I was thinking about, about the point that Abe just raised about this is supposed to be the key to everything, and if even Trump won't undo it, think about what that says about Trump as a political phenomenon, because it is in a lot of ways, a kind of knocking down of the very idea that he rose on. Right. Which is not just the Epstein stuff, but the fact that everything's a conspiracy. Right. I mean, that Trump was the candidate for people who really believe that behind every closed door there was, you know, a secret passageway, like in the Clue Mansion, you know, and that there were all these things to uncover, not just in the things they spoke about, but that the world just works a certain way. And the way the world works is, you know, those 12 guys sitting around a table in a bunker, and we're, you know, and we got to get to them. And it's not just Epstein. It's everything. It's every policy, it's every this. It's every.
- [40:43]
Seth Mandel
It's.
- [40:43]
John Podhoretz
The World bank is sitting at that table, too. Maybe the World bank isn't in with Epstein, but, like, it's the Knights of the Round Table, but like a demented version of it, you know, and they see all the heads of all these international organizations and power players as part of that roundtable. And what this suggests now to them is that there's no roundtable at all. It's not that there's no Epstein specific conspiracy. The whole way you look at the world is wrong. That the roundtable doesn't exist.
- [41:15]
Seth Mandel
Well, that is a very. I mean, you are talking about the shattering of a. Of a worldview that has the advantage of providing a sense of order and organization to the terrifying fact that we mostly live in chaos. So just. Just as the positive element of humankind, if you want. If you're sort of coming at this like as an atheist or a cultural historian or an atheist, cultural historian. Like, the positive value of religion is that it provides an explanation for the universe. So does a conspiracy theory. So, so you have one, you have, ah, the wheel. There is a. There's a first mover and it's the Elders of Zion. There's a first mover and it's Bilderberg or it's Davos or it's Bohemian Grove or it's Skull and Bones or it's some collection, small collection of people. And by the way, Balzac, one of the greatest of all novelists, literally his Human Comedy, which is 30, posits this as the worldview of the. Of this great series of amazingly deep social novels, which is that there is this group called the 13 that basically run France. You know, so it's not as though you only crackpots believed this sort of.
- [42:54]
Abe Greenwald
Thing, but there's a. There's a particular, There's a particular strain in MAGA that I think makes it feel like more damning to them. In the case of Epstein or these other conspiracy theories, I think Seth is absolutely right. But it's also justice for them. And so when Trump said things like, I am your retribution. Retribution, there's this sense that not just that people are controlling things, but there's injustice being performed. Look, remember Comet Pizza was about a guy who thought children were being trafficked and held hostage and he was going to save them. So there's this sense of, in a world where you feel you have no control, you can actually be part of a. An effort to stop injustice. And Trump was the spokesman for that, for a lot of these people who believe in conspiracy theories. So it's not just that it helps them understand how the world works. It gives them a sense of identity, meaning and purpose that, absent anything else, makes it. Nihilism is the least of our problems if they don't have anywhere to go with this pursuit of a sense of justice and.
- [43:49]
Seth Mandel
Right, okay, so let's move on to something where you have things going on that, that contribute to the sense that the people who are running the world are deeply corrupt and playing games and doing things that are untoward, that are hidden from view, and that is the last year of the Biden administration. This astonishing story that came out last night from the New York Times, that was an effort by Biden that began in an effort by Joe Biden and his people to quiet down, to tamp down, or to answer the charge that he had not been doing, had not been governing the country. And that the official expressions of Biden administration policy through the signed documents that the President must execute if they are to become law or be executive orders or be pardons or grants of clemency or whatever, literally, physical documents that the, that the president must sign or that in prior times a king would have to use a seal, right, to show that it was the seal that only he had, that would show that it was legitimately a document produced by the king so that nobody could say it was a fraud, that he wasn't signing them and that, and that the signatures were being done by the auto pen, the machine that is used and has been used for, you know, decades. So that when a million letters go out from the President to people who wish him a happy birthday, there's a signature at the bottom and it's the auto pan or not a million people, thousands of people.
- [45:42]
Abe Greenwald
But okay, but just, just a historical point on the auto pen. It has also been bedeviled by controversy in its use by officials for decades.
- [45:51]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [45:52]
Abe Greenwald
Donald Rumsfeld got into trouble for, for using it to sign condolence letters to the, to the families of soldiers who died.
- [45:57]
Seth Mandel
Right.
- [45:58]
Abe Greenwald
You get in trouble for its use when it's, when it's deemed by the public politically to be in poor taste, that the human being didn't sign the document.
- [46:06]
John Podhoretz
How do you think, how do you think we all wrote all those bar mitzvah thank you cards?
- [46:11]
Seth Mandel
Oh, if only. Yes, if my children only had had an autopad. But the problem is someone's got to write the text. Anyway. Important point. Thank you for that one. The story in the New York Times, which was, as I say, incepted by the Bidens, it appears, and Biden gave a 10 minute interview to the Times, which the Times heralds as a world exclusive, because apparently Joe Biden speaking to anybody for 10 minutes is now a groundbreaking fact.
- [46:46]
Abe Greenwald
It was the first interview he ever gave to the New York Times. He never gave them an interview as president. It's the first one.
- [46:52]
Seth Mandel
And here's why this is important, because the piece begins with a. Trump is saying that we can see that Biden wasn't really president because he had cognitive lapses. And we all now sort of accept that there were cognitive issues with, with Biden toward the end of his term. But, you know, they're on a spectrum. And, you know, cognitive could be just forgetting a name or it could be like that you're totally non compos mentis and it's a spectrum. And then. So the piece essentially backs the notion if you sort of follow it, that he was mostly okay and that he made the decision, he says he made the decisions on whom to pardon and whom to grant clemency. But at the same time they get 10 minutes with him. So their own experience with Biden suggests he is being carefully managed and that he can only be compass, he can only be trusted to be compos mentis. In an interview with the New York Times for 10 minutes.
- [48:00]
Abe Greenwald
Can, can I, can I add a little something to this? Because I think there's, there is an actual healthy Democratic silver lining to these stories, whatever happens with regard to the investigations in Congress. And that's that these two things, the extremely powerful vague pardon power, which I think a lot of Americans like me think should be revised and in some cases rescinded, that's getting discussed. And so we already have Buddy Carter, Republican from Georgia, introducing legislation that says you cannot pardon, you cannot use the auto pen to pardon. And the auto pen, which as we've just been discussing, has wide use not just by the president but in all the executive agencies. And I think that these two discussions are very helpful because for a long time, this speaks to the conspiracy point you made for this segment, John. A lot. For a long time we assumed the system worked with integrity. And I think what the, this Biden investigation of pardons will show, particularly this vast preemptive pardoning he did and the use of the auto pen and the questions it raised will all be for the good if we follow it through. There was one pardon on his very last day that he signed by hand and that was the one for Hunter Biden.
- [49:07]
Seth Mandel
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- [49:09]
Abe Greenwald
With the price of just about everything going up, we thought we'd bring our prices down.
- [49:14]
John Podhoretz
So to help us, we brought in.
- [49:15]
Seth Mandel
A reverse auctioneer, which is apparently a.
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John Podhoretz
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- [49:26]
Seth Mandel
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Abe Greenwald
Give it a try at, @mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment of $45 for three month plan equivalent to 15 per month. Required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes of network's busy. Taxes and fees extra.
- [49:37]
John Podhoretz
See mint mobile.com.
- [49:38]
Abe Greenwald
You know that one friend who somehow knows everything about money? Yeah.
- [49:43]
Seth Mandel
Now imagine they live in your phone. Say hey to Experian, your big financial friend.
- [49:48]
Abe Greenwald
It's the app that helps you check your FICO score, find ways to save and basically feel like a financial genius. And guess what?
- [49:55]
Seth Mandel
It's totally free.
- [49:57]
Abe Greenwald
So go on, download the Experian app. Trust me, having a BFF like this.
- [50:01]
Seth Mandel
Is a total game changer. People can go read the story of the New York Times. There's so many people I know.
- [50:10]
John Podhoretz
Can we, can we tease out one detail, though? It seems from the story that he didn't approve every individual party.
- [50:18]
Seth Mandel
That's that point, by the way. Yes. So I'm going to.
- [50:20]
John Podhoretz
So they had a system where he would say I approve, and then Zions or whoever would email everybody and say at 10pm we've got the approval and the auto pen. But that I think is, is, is where people need to hear. How is that something that has, Is that something that. Is it normal for a president to, to approve a category of these sorts of things? Because that part to me feels like no clear crossing of a line.
- [50:51]
Seth Mandel
No, it doesn't just feel like it to you. It is unquestionably. If he were still president and this came out, he would be impeached and convicted and removed from office. The claim here is that he verbally agreed to large quantities of clemencies and pardons in a specific category and then after that, those criteria.
- [51:21]
Christine Rosen
Criteria.
- [51:23]
Seth Mandel
Criteria for pardon.
- [51:24]
Christine Rosen
Yes.
- [51:26]
Abe Greenwald
Which were then edited along the way too. Remember, there was back and forth with.
- [51:30]
Christine Rosen
Not taken back to him each time.
- [51:32]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [51:32]
Seth Mandel
Anyway, the point is that he has the pardon power. It is invested in him personally. I don't think anybody has ever imagined in the history of the pardoning power, which goes back to sort of like the Magna Carta or something, that the pardon wouldn't be issued by the leader personally. That's why the pardon power exists. It is an un. It is an unappealable executive act intended to prevent in an extreme circumstance, profound injustices from taking place or acts that are necessary for the maintenance of the society's core or something like that. The idea that you could say, he says everybody who was convicted of a drug offense or a nonviolent drug offense who has served more than three years should get clemency or whose last name is Biden. Right. Or is that right? Well, that, remember he signed that one. As, as, as Christine said, that is a violation of every understanding of what pardoning means. Well, from the history of pardoning. Well, we have to say this person put his partner.
- [53:00]
Abe Greenwald
Well, we have, we have had blanket pardons that the public has accepted as necessary. Jimmy Carter doing a blanket pardon of draft dodgers. But they very.
- [53:10]
Seth Mandel
Those were not pardons.
- [53:12]
Abe Greenwald
Right.
- [53:12]
Seth Mandel
But amnesty.
- [53:14]
Abe Greenwald
But there were. Even in that situation, there was a very Methodical effort to go through and not include the names of individuals who had committed violent acts during protests, who had done other. You know, there were all. They were actual. They had gone name by name and just made sure that the people that were receiving the amnesty.
- [53:31]
Seth Mandel
I think Carter signed every. I, I don't even know if there was an auto pen in 1990. Right. I don't know if he auto.
- [53:38]
Abe Greenwald
But the idea being like training can be, can be well, and even preemptive pardoning, like what was done for Nixon. I mean these things can be acceptable, but they are very rare. They should. And it's always explained with very thorough regard for.
- [53:53]
Seth Mandel
I'm not talking about the policy.
- [53:54]
John Podhoretz
The main difference I see is that like what I can't get over is that it's an, it's accurate to say Joe Biden doesn't know who he pardoned. Right?
- [54:04]
Seth Mandel
Yes. And by the way, this is what's important you're talking about. Should there be preemptive pardons? Can there be blanket pardons? Can there be amnesties? Can there be whatever. Okay, that's one thing. The execution of the pardon has to be done by the President himself on a piece of paper with his physical signature. I don't think that there would be any question that that would be a requirement of the justice of the pardon. You slip the piece of paper under him, you say, Mr. President, this is the pardon for Joe Schlebotnik. He was a nonviolent drug offender. We've, you know, you remember we talked about it, you said that that was fine, cuz he had no other offenses. And then Biden takes his hand and he writes his name and the paper is slipped on and then another piece of paper is put under it. The President's signature. Like this is why I mentioned the Royal seal is the only legal manifestation of this process. Otherwise the process is illegitimate. If he is not known to have chosen to pardon that specific person who has already been convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to jail by a judge. So we have the entire western system of justice that allowed that person innocence until proven guilty, a fair trial, speedy trial with a lawyer, you know, taking his case, loses the case, goes to jail, is sentenced by someone in the judiciary following the laws as faithfully passed by Congress. He cannot wipe that out by a category of people. So I, that is a crime. A crime has been committed here by using the auto pen.
- [56:03]
Abe Greenwald
I think though this is actually where the vague lack of clarity in the law about the use of the auto pen is Important because there have been these arguments about whether it can be used to sign important legislation. George Bush, George W. Bush got into trouble in, like, 2011, 11 or 12, I think, when FISA was being needed to be signed. And there was this argument among legal scholars, look, he's not physically present to sign it. Can he use the auto pen? Can he tell someone else to sign it? So those debates are ongoing. But I will say that the broader context of why this story came out when it did, why Biden is. Is sitting for 10, even 10 minutes with the New York Times, is that they are trying to distract the public from the broader scandal of his, the entire administration and the investigation. Patients, his, you know, his personal physician pleading the Fifth, the fact that others are now being brought in before Congress to testify, as a few already have done, about who was making the decisions. This makes him look sympathetic because it's about pardon, it's about clemency. It's about, you know, they think it.
- [57:02]
Seth Mandel
Makes him look sympathetic. I know.
- [57:03]
Abe Greenwald
Well, that's the point. He's got a new personal lawyer, too. So he, he is being advised legally now in a new way.
- [57:10]
Seth Mandel
They live in a pocket universe of their own devising in which every time they get up to defend him, they make the story worse. So let me just, since we've been talking around it here, here is a passage from the New York Times. Quote, Mr. Biden did not individually approve each name for the categorical pardons that applied to large numbers of people, he and aides confirmed. Rather, after extensive discussion of different possible criteria, he signed off on the standards he wanted to be used to determine which convicts would qualify for a reduction in sentence. So there are different forms of reductions in sentences, right? There's commutations, there's clemency, and there are pardons, outright pardons. And a pardon wipes out your criminality, right? That's what a pardon does. It says you are no longer to be considered a criminal. You did not. You did not commit a crime. According to this, okay? Even after Mr. Biden made that decision, one former aide said the Bureau of Prisons kept providing additional information about specific inmates, resulting in small changes to the list. Rather than ask Mr. Biden to. To keep signing revised diversions, his staff waited and then ran the final version through the auto pen, which they saw as a routine procedure. The aide said, now, let's see.
- [58:41]
Christine Rosen
That's amazing to me. That's amazing to me.
- [58:44]
Seth Mandel
Go ahead.
- [58:45]
Christine Rosen
Because this brings up a new opportunity to do something wrong. Once you, if you are on the team and, and the president says, I'm not going to go through every name. Here's what I want. You can then go, he's not going through every name. We can we. I want this guy. He's not. He's not going to know about him. You want that guy? He's not going to know about him.
- [59:10]
Seth Mandel
That's the danger. That's right. Now, what does this mean?
- [59:13]
John Podhoretz
There were, there were some scandalous names on that that were not Hunter Biden. Right. You know, there were people, you know, I, I think wasn't the judge who was sending kids to, like, a prison for kickbacks, like a local official, completely bankrupt, things like that. People, terrible people went like that. Doesn't make any sense. Why would Biden pardon this guy? And you saw, you know, liberals arguing with each other about this. You know, it's like, well, this case, clearly he wasn't paying attention. Or this. That it turned out that, you know, the most likely case. I mean, the almost. Almost surely what happened is that these individual cases were never considered by Joe Biden at all. Not that he forgot who he was or didn't recognize. You know, it's just this was never put in front of his face at any time.
- [60:00]
Seth Mandel
Okay, so this thing that I just read about the Bureau of Presence, what if we unpack this quote, Bureau of Prisons kept providing additional information about specific inmates, resulting in small changes to the list. What does that mean? That means that the Bureau of Prisons is informed that so and so is about to get clemency or is about to get pardoned or is about to get whatever. And somebody at the Bureau of Prison says, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. That guy just shiv'd somebody in the cafeteria. You better not pardon him. And then they're like, okay, we won't pardon him. Otherwise he would have been pardoned. Rather than ask Mr. Biden to keep signing revised versions. The revised versions are the clemency. It's not that what he want, he wants to pardon categories of people. That is not how the United States works. Every criminal is convicted individually of a criminal offense, as I said, through this process that is established by law and tradition going back to Blackstone, Juries, unanimous evidence, innocent until proven guilty, judge, sentence in jail. Some of the Bureau of Prison says that guy is not good people based on his behavior in prison. And they're like, okay, we'll take him off the list.
- [61:27]
Abe Greenwald
There's also. There was also another little detail in the piece that, that struck me as being worth pursuing, which is that the chain of command from what Biden and his close, close aides would discuss about various pardons. And then those aides would, would leave the room and, and like Zients and others would say to an assistant or a secretary, he has, they would summarize the meeting that would then go to a secretary who would type it up and then that would be used as the draft language. And so, so you have Biden further and further removed from the process. So the person, they use this as evidence that, oh, he was in charge the whole time. But there's this moment where his aides could very easily, he could have been sitting there watching cartoons and they could come up with a list, turn to the, come out of that office and say he wants these five people very important.
- [62:17]
Seth Mandel
You make a very important point. And this is where there are going to be subpoenas and where some people are going to be in trouble. I mean, they'll plead the fifth, but they're going to be in trouble because I'm going to read specifically from what you were talking about on January 19th at a meeting which took place in the yellow oval room of the White House residence. Did you know there was a yellow oval room in the White House residence? That's, I worked in the White House. I didn't know that. There must be like a little cutesy little semi Oval Office. Mr. Biden kept his aides until nearly 10pm What a, what a generous thing to do because usually he's in bed by eight to talk through such decisions. According to people familiar with the matter, the emails show that an aide to Mr. Mr. Siskel I won't go through. He is sent a draft summary of Mr. Biden's decisions at that meeting to an assistant to Mr. Zients, who is the White House Chief of Staff. Jeff Zients copying Mr. Siskel at 1003pm the assistant forwarded it to Mr. Reed and Mr. Zients, asking for their approval, and then sent a final version to Ms. Feldman. That's the person who prepared the letter, right? Typed up the letter that was the pardon or the commutation or whatever. Copying many meeting participants and aids at 10:28pm Three minutes later, Mr. Zients hit reply all and wrote, quote, I, I, Jeff Zients, I approve the use of the auto pen for the execution of, of all of the following pardons. Jeff Zients is not the President of the United States. If that, if that email had come from Joe Biden and it said I approve the use of the auto pen.
- [64:04]
John Podhoretz
The use of That, I mean, is that not. Sorry to interpret. Is that maybe what was the. It was the. Was Jeff Zients forget to send it from the president's email. That's what. That's what I saw when I read that. That. What else is coming from the president's email that was written by Jeff Zients that says I approve or I order this.
- [64:26]
Seth Mandel
Maybe the president doesn't have email anymore. One of the things that you do when you are trying to forestall problems with people who are cognitively disabled is that you remove their access to the Internet so they can't fall prey to $100,000 Nigerian prince scams or send out emails to people as president United States that might involve matters of policy. Let me finish the other point here, which is even weirder. So Jeff Zients approves the use of the auto pen. I'm not saying he's going to go to jail. I am saying that he is going to end up before a white. He's going to end up before a congressional committee and he is going to plead the fifth because he doesn't have the right to order the use of the auto pen. Biden. That's Biden's name on a piece of paper. It's bad enough that he, Biden, isn't signing it himself. He's not even providing the final approval for the use of the auto pen. Zients is not Biden. Common law dating back eight centuries in the west does not give the chief of staff the power to speak as the president. Now, here is the final detail I want us to parse because the story is not well written. Mr. Biden said in the interview that he had his staff use an auto pen for the warrants because he had granted clemency to so many people. The auto pen was used in all on 25 pardon and clemency warrants from last December to January. Some of the individual warrants included large batches of names. Okay, he can't sign 25 pieces of paper. It's reading the story. You think, oh my God. Well, of course he used the auto pen. There were 4,000 grants of clemency. The auto pen was used 25 times. He could not reliably be trusted to sign 25 pieces of paper. On January 19, 2021, 2025. He could not sign 25 pieces of paper or he would. They would have put the piece of paper in front of him and he might have said, what the hell is this? What am I signing? Well, we Talked about this, Mr. President. It's the clemency, which clemency. So, reading between the lines, this story gets worse and worse and worse. He must have been so impaired that he couldn't sign 25 pieces of paper or that his signature had become so impaired that they could not allow anyone to see it any longer.
- [67:26]
Christine Rosen
So, you know, there's another element here that's interesting to me. When Trump first raised this issue in, like, a Midnight Truth, where he declared on truth social, every Biden pardon illegitimate or whatever because of the auto pen, first of all, in the way and place in which he did it, it was kind of comic. And I. And I had no idea that there was anything like this much smoke there. Trump did. How and why that, that, that. That's what I'm interested in.
- [68:02]
Abe Greenwald
Well, he knew from the first term in his own. How the pardon process works, I assume, and he probably thought this, this doesn't. Something stinks to high heaven here. Not just that it was 4,000 people and very, you know, literal midnight pardons and preemptive pardons for people, but that he knew that there was a process in play. However crazy and chaotic Trump, Trump's first term was, he knew how it worked.
- [68:24]
Seth Mandel
One thing that could easily have been done that showed this to him is the thing that happened when we discovered that the documents alleging the documents that proved that George W. Bush had faked his National Guard service were forgeries. If you remember, in 2004, this letter came out, was used by 60 Minutes, or to show that Trump had. That Bush had behaved in an untoward manner, and Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs typed the letter in Times New Roman, a typeface that did not exist in 1972, and discovered that it was a perfect match for the document that had been released. Meaning that it was a forgery, because there was no. There was no such typeface in the year that it was alleged to have been issued. So those documents exist, and somebody may have taken them and photographed them and laid them all on, like, top of one another or, you know, in some computer file and discovered that the signatures on these pardons were identical. Now, we sign things all the time. Would any of our signatures be identical? Obviously, I once.
- [70:00]
John Podhoretz
I once had to resign for a. I remember when we used to pay your. Your down payment in rent. Right. You used to have to get, like, a banker's. Yeah, whatever was called a banker's note from. You have to go to your bank and get one of those notes.
- [70:15]
Seth Mandel
Yeah.
- [70:15]
John Podhoretz
The cashier's check. Thank you. I once. I once failed the cashier's check because I was told I failed my signature. I didn't remember how the last time I had, you know, originally when I opened the account. Yeah, I had. How many times do I sign my name and official documents for them? Never. Right. So when I opened the account five years, 10 years earlier, I had signed my name a certain way, and now I couldn't get a cashier's check.
- [70:37]
Seth Mandel
So I'm just saying somebody may have just, like, done a Hail Mary and said, why don't we take a look at those pardons and just look at them and see what was, you know, if there's anything there, and spotted this. And then said to Trump, you know, he did it with the auto pen. He did them with the auto pen. And this is really bad. I mean, like, that. I just. This is really bad. Like, this is like an unprecedented. I mean, it does 17 different things. It can deals with the narrative of how could Biden even have been serving his prey? He should have been forced down by the 25th Amendment in Whenever, including in January. Like, what if there'd been a nuclear war in January and he'd been the president? You know, would have been better for Kamala Harris to be president at that moment, even if she was only president for 10 days. Because he's out. Because he can't sign 25 pieces of paper, because he is executing pardons without knowing what he's doing. Because he now, seven months later, can't give an interview to the New York Times for more than 10 minutes on the subject of how he executed the pardons because either they cut it off or he was done, or they knew he could only last 10 minutes, or they. Or he could not be allowed to answer any more questions because the horror of what he did here. And as I say, it sounds like a technical thing. Well, does it matter that he signed it or that the auto pen signed it? Of course it matters. Like, you know, you start screwing around with the auto pen, people will, you know, will. Will. Somebody will type a document up. They'll be like, we begin bombing in five minutes. And they'll. They'll hilariously get drunk one night, sneak into wherever the auto pin is and sign it in Trump's name and then put it out on the Internet as an executive order. I mean, this is no joke. If the auto pen signature is deemed an acceptable substitute for the President's signing, which the president always does in the presence of witnesses.
- [72:45]
Abe Greenwald
The presence. The presence is important. This is. Look, Congress has two big jobs to do that are far more important long term for this country than big beautiful bills, reform the president's pardon power and actually legislate in detail when auto pen signatures are considered legitimate. Those two things would really help with a lot of these challenges, particularly the pardon power reform.
- [73:07]
Seth Mandel
And it's really, and by the way, this is one of these things that can be totally bipartisan because this is where, if this is where there is no, this could be abused by both parties at any time. Obviously, Trump has been very cavalier, to put it mildly, with the pardon power and all of that. So if you suddenly heard that, you know, Trump had issued a pardon for so and so, you would think, yeah, he might have done that because he talks every day. You probably would know if it happened or it didn't happen. But again, you know, he's, he's, you know, he's pushing 80. What if he has a stroke in 2027 and he's sitting there, we don't really know he's had a stroke. And then suddenly, you know, like everybody that he ever knew was getting pardoned. I mean, that's why we have, this has to be nipped in the bud before.
- [74:03]
John Podhoretz
John, just to your earlier point, by the way, about the handwriting, there is the Associated Press has a photo from one of the hearings from a hearing on this. And the photo shows Ted Cruz speaking. Behind Ted Cruz is a big board that says on the top, Biden's auto pen signatures. Auto pen A, auto pen B, auto pen C. And it shows what the signature looked like. And underneath the sign, each signature is the dates that that signature were used on documents. So I do think that your, your point about the handwriting is probably, probably dead on because I can see here, you know, there's one there, there's two. I can only see two of the three in the picture because Cruz's head is blocking it. And there's nothing in the story about it, but one that right when he writes his name, full name Joseph R. Biden. Right. Is used at the end of his term, and the one used at the beginning of his term is just J Dot R. Biden, stuff like that. So I do think they, you know, from this picture, I can't find anything in the story, but it does seem to me that, that the, those investigating it in Congress have zeroed in on the handwriting as one element of it.
- [75:16]
Seth Mandel
Well, I mean, this is not anything. I mean, this came out last night. This is not anything I expected us to be talking about. And, you know, it really is like one of those moments where a presidency ends it ends in failure. He wins one term, you know, he loses his second term. He's senile. Let him march off into the sunset. Leave him alone. We can't leave this alone. I mean, the. The good working order of our constitutional system is challenged by the idea that a. That a organization like the White House, which can be opaque and sealed off from people, believes could conceivably have been overruling, as I said, like, eight centuries of comm. Law with the flick of a wrist or a finger, and that cannot be allowed to continue. And I think the reform that Christine is talking about is relatively simple. I mean, obviously, removal of the pardon power would take a constitutional amendment, but issuing something that says that the pardon power, this is how the pardon power has to be executed. Executed that then maybe the White House or the administration would take to a. To court, maybe. Or they would say that's fine, but they might take it to court to say it's an impingement on executive authority or executive privilege. And I can't imagine that a court would. Would say that that was the case, because Congress does have the right and power to defend against the. What would you call it? The deliberate effort to ignore or bypass the laws that it has established for criminal procedure in the, you know, in. In the federal courts. And these are all, of course, federal cases. So there we are. Okay. Well, we've gone really long, so no recommendation today, though. I like Superman. That's all I'm going to say. I liked it, and I saw Jurassic World, Rebirth, and it's the worst movie I've ever seen. So if you have to. If those are the only two movies that you're Cineplex and go see Superman. We'll be back tomorrow. For Seth, Christine, and Abe, I'm John Potter's Keep the Candle Burning.