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The Breakdown | Caught in a Cover-up
00:17:14
Jay Clayton, the nominee for Director of National Intelligence, was part of Blanche’s plot to manipulate the courts in order to protect Trump from the Epstein fallout. Allison breaks down explosive reports detailing how top Trump allies, including Todd Blanche and J.D. Vance, manipulated the courts to shield Donald Trump from fallout over the Epstein files.
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Hi, I'm Frances Collier. And I'm Angela V. Shelton. And we're Frangela. You know what you mean in your life. The Final Word podcast. Yes, you do. That's right. It is the final word on all things political and pop cultural, where we make real news, real funny, where we inspire you so you can resist. Subscribe and get a new episode of the Final Word podcast each week. It's the news we think you need to hear. That's right. We think you need to hear it. Okay. Yeah. It's what we say.
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So.
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That's right. And because all we do is give. Every Thursday, you can listen to our hysterical podcast, Idiot of the Week. We round up the stupid. Because you know what? Somebody has to.
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Okay? All we do is give. Hey, everybody, it's Alison Gill, host of the Daily Beans podcast. Thank you so much for joining me here on the Midas Touch Network for the breakdown. This week, we actually got to look inside the Situation Room when top White house officials, including J.D. vance, who I like to call JV Dance, the Vice President and the deputy Attorney general at the time, Todd Blanche, they actually met with a bunch of other White House officials in the Situation Room to discuss how to protect Donald Trump from his associations with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in the Situation. Now, we. We had known from previous reporting that they had met in the Situation Room without Donald Trump to discuss the Epstein matter, but now we know the details of what they discussed. Did they discuss transparency? No, absolutely not. Did they discuss how to better help protect and find justice for the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein? No. Their sole central goal was to protect Donald Trump from the fallout. That's it. And in these reports, it was revealed that Blanche had actually devised a plan to use the courts, manipulate the judicial system to provide cover for Donald Trump. Now, at the time, we all assumed the petitions to the court for grand jury materials were a ruse. And now we have confirmation. Way back on November 23, days after the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Kyle Cheney posted this. You know Kyle Cheney from Politico, who, who is an excellent journalist. He posted this just in. DOJ makes a new attempt to unseal all Epstein grand jury records in Florida, saying that the law, newly signed by Trump overrides grand jury secrecy laws. Now, I quote, posted him, as you can see, saying, huh, I wonder if the DOJ is going to try to pass this off and as having tried to release the Epstein Files. This represents about 76 pages of testimony from one FBI official that was way back in November. Now, this week we learned that's the case, that the DOJ wasn't going for transparency. They were faking it to protect one man, Donald Trump. And we're going to go over that bombshell on today's episode of the Breakdown.
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Foreign.
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Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Breakdown. I'm Alison Gill. If you thought that Trump suing his own IRS to eventually score a settlement with tax immunity and a 1.8 billion dollar slush fund for his January Six co conspirators, wait until you see the fraud Todd Blanche perpetrated on the court to help protect Donald Trump from the Epstein files. Now, last December, I spoke here on the breakdown to Epstein survivor Annie Farmer about how the Justice Department had left the survivors out of every step of the investigations. Every they left them out of the loop. In pretty much everything they did, the government did. The government supposed to protect and find justice for survivors instead shut them out and then is using them as pawns, like going back to the sweetheart deal. Right. They were not notified about that deal orchestrated by Alex Acosta, who by the way, would eventually be rewarded with a job as Trump's Labor Secretary. From that to leaving them out of the rollout of the Epstein files and, you know, obviously being so careless as to leave names and photos unredacted of the survivors. And then they were left out of consideration when Todd Blanche petitioned the courts in Florida and New York to release grand jury materials in the Epstein and Maxwell cases, something that's actually required. And that's when we discussed Todd Blanche's possible motives for petitioning the court to release those grand jury transcripts. Watch. You were also left out. The survivors writ large were left out of when the Department of Justice went to the judges to unseal grand jury material. Now, it's pretty banal material because it's just, you know, a single FBI agent's Testimony. It's only 76 pages. But they left you out of that process, too. And it was the judge who sua sponte on their own stood up and said, do you mind acknowledging the survivors here? You need to do that. And had to instruct them to do that.
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Alison, it is a theme in this whole case and you can see it continuing to unfold, right? Like, oh, wait, what about the survivors here? Right. I mean, it's like, I think that what I felt I, that came out of, you know, Julie Brown's reporting in, you know, 2017, 2018. Like, what I felt like was really important about that was how much it highlighted, you know, amongst other things like Epstein's crimes Of course. But also the ways that the government had failed the victims. And. And. And it has been very disheartening to see that. Like, it feels like they still haven't learned their lesson. And even, you know, with this rollout of materials for us to know so little about what's happening. You know, we work so hard to get this law passed, and it seems like, okay, you know, everyone's signed on. We're all on the same page here. You know, we believe that transparency is best for this country, for the survivors. And then, you know, this happens. We don't even. We don't know what's coming. And what. What is. What comes out is in many ways very disappointing. So it feels like more the same.
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Right. And. And you and your attorneys actually wrote a letter to the judge and said, hey, just. We just want to make. We want you to make it clear that releasing this grand jury material has nothing to do with the, you know, 300 gigabytes or whatever information the Department of Justice has been sitting on for a long time. And I'm so glad that you did that, because I knew that they were going to try to credit themselves, pat themselves on the back. We went to the Department of Justice, we went to the courts to try to release this grand jury. What do you mean? We're transparent? Check us out. We went to the courts and that they would say, oh, you know, if they did release it or if they didn't, they would say, oh, the court said, we can't release any Epstein files. And if they did, they would say, there, we're done. We've released the Epstein files. And you had actually. And your lawyer wrote a letter to the judge to remind the court, to remind the administration that this doesn't count for any of that. And by the way, here's that letter from Annie Farmer and her lawyers to one of the judges in this case. It reads, Ms. Farmer therefore respectfully requests any decision as to the instant motions. Make abundantly clear that the court's ruling does not affect the Department of Justice's ability to release documents subject to the Transparency Act. For the avoidance of doubt, this would mean that nothing in the court's rulings affect the Department of Justice's ability to release other materials, including those contained in the more than 300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence in the government's possession. That the government styled its motions as ones to, in part, modify a protective order. It reinforces Ms. Farmer's concerns that the government will use orders issued by this court. And as a Public excuse to continue to withhold crucial information. Now, she filed that letter on December 3, before she and I spoke here on the breakdown, but after I'd posted about Blanche's possible motives, what I thought they were in that post that I showed you at the top of the show. But at the time, it was all speculation. But it made sense if you understood that Blanche wasn't about protecting survivors or finding justice. He was only about protecting Donald Trump, as he was paid $10 million to do as his personal attorney. And that speculation was confirmed this week by the New York Times in the Situation Room. Blanche had put forth two options to help shield Trump from public scrutiny in the Epstein matter. According to the Times, quote, option one was to petition federal district courts in Florida and New York to unseal the grand jury testimonies, the secret transcripts of prosecutors, presentations of witnesses and evidence in their efforts to obtain indictments in the past Epstein related cases, as those were almost certain to contain no significant new information. Everyone agreed that this option was a good idea, and not only because a release was unlikely to damage the President. But under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the secrecy of grand jury materials is regarded by most federal judges as almost always inviolate, and the bar for any release is exceptionally high. If the courts refused to unseal them, as Blanche predicted, they could shift the blame for withholding the Epstein material away from the Trump administration and onto the judges. And all the better if the judges had been appointed by Democratic presidents. Blanche's suggestion would make it appear that the White House wanted those materials released. And when it was almost certain not to happen, there it is. It's exactly what Annie Farmer was worried about, exactly what we talked about and exactly what I said was happening and why she wrote that letter to the court. Let's be clear. In this One case, the 67 pages of one FBI grand jury, one FBI agent's grand jury testimony, is kind of irrelevant when you consider there are at least, you know, we've got 3 million documents released, and that's just about half of what's been released. So let's go to the courts and petition them for something we know they'll say no to, so we can blame them for not releasing the Epstein files. We tried. We tried to get those files released. You have them all at the doj, and that's what Annie Farmer's letter was about. And did you know that one of Trump's DOJ attorneys that went along with that ruse was none other than Jay Clayton? Seems like everybody who is helping Trump cover up his ties to Epstein, gets a cushy job in his administrations. Alex Acosta getting to be Labor Secretary after arranging the sweetheart deal for Epstein. Todd Blanche getting nominated for Attorney General. Now Jay Clayton, who has no intel experience being nominated as the Director of National Intelligence. And remember Maureen Comey? She worked on the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, but was fired on July 16, 2025, one day before Todd Blanche pitched his ideas about how to protect Trump in the Situation Room. And just one week before Blanche met with Ghislaine Maxwell, just a couple weeks before she was moved to a low security prison facility in Bryan, Texas, having her sex offender status waived. And Maureen Comey was fired one week before Bondi and Patel issued that FBI memo saying there's no more investigations into Epstein's co conspirators. There's no client list, in fact. Oh, and by the way, there's no, there's no blackmail. Apropos of nothing, but put a pin in that blackmail thing. But Maureen Comey was fired a week after that memo came out. Was Maureen Comey working on the active investigation into Epstein co conspirators that Trump shut down when he took office? It was opened during the Biden administration, as alleged in a letter from Jamie Raskin to Pam Bondi. Well, according to the Times, guess who had a hand in firing Maureen Comey. Quote, a brief memorandum informing Ms. Comey of her termination gave no explanation for the firing, but cited Article 2 in the lawsuit. Ms. Comey said that the U.S. attorney, Jay Clayton was unable to provide her with a rationale. Quote, all I can say is it came from Washington. Mr. Clayton told her, according to the lawsuit, I can't tell you anything else. Can't or won't? Yeah, I bet you can't tell us anything else. So the guy who helped Blanche use the courts manipulate the judicial system to protect Donald Trump from the Epstein files with the fake Epstein files release. And the guy who helped usher out Maureen Comey after the DOJ shut down an actual investigation into Epstein co conspirators. That guy is being nominated for a cushy job atop 18 US intelligence agencies. Nothing to see here. Well, remember when I told you to put a pin in the part of that DOJ memo from Bondi and Patel that said there was no blackmail? We found out this week that there was. Bill Gates testified that there was, saying Epstein blackmailed him over his extramarital affairs. Epstein survivors have issued a statement, by the way, after learning Todd Blanche orchestrated this cover up in the Situation Room to protect Donald it says we are deeply disturbe to learn that so many senior members of the administration gathered in the Situation Room to discuss the release of the Epstein files as a reputational problem rather than an opportunity to pursue investigative leads and try to figure out what actually happened. These revelations confirm our worst fears about the administration prioritizing political expediency over justice for survivors and the truth for the American people. We're especially concerned that Todd Blanch, the person nominated for the highest law enforcement position in the country, was at that table. Blanche has consistently minimized legitimate concerns about how the files have been handled, including problematic redactions and the exposure of survivors personal information. Blanche failed to deliver transparency and he has gravely failed survivors. This is failing upward, plain and simple. We deserve better. We deserve truth, transparency and accountability. We deserve to be taken seriously when we come forward. And we deserve an attorney General who will use the full power of that office to pursue justice, justice, protect others, and ensure that what happened to us never happens again. So that's the Survivor statement. The man nominated for Attorney general devised a plot to manipulate the courts to help Donald Trump in the Epstein affair. If I were that judge down in Florida who's just reopened the Trump versus the IRS case, the one that ended in the settlement that gave his gives him, you know, blanket tax immunity and that set up the $1.776 billion slush fund. If I were that judge and I were looking to see whether or not Todd Blanche and Donald Trump did a fraud on the court and colluded together to manipulate the court, I might think about this revelation that he's done it before. So thanks to the New York Times for that reporting. I'm going to leave the survivors there with that's going to be the last word today, except for to say please call your senators and tell them to block the nomination of Jay Clayton and Todd Blanche for abusing their powers to protect one man at the expense of justice for all. Thanks to everybody for watching. Please check out the Daily Beans podcast if you haven't. It's free. There's some swears in there, but yeah, I think they're appropriate. And thanks to Midas Touch for hosting this show. I'll see you next week on the Breakdown.
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Hello, Martin Sheen here and it seems to me that no day of the week is without its endless barrage of bad news. Even on Sunday. For God's sake, let's change that. What do you say? Together, let's make Sunday immune to bad news. Available now every Sunday. Season three of the Martin Sheen Podcast with yours truly, Martin Sheen has begun. Yeah. 10 brand new episodes are already underway. So join me, Martin sheen, for a 20 minute journey as I share my personal stories, a bit of poetry, and insightful reflections that will encourage you to take a deep breath and enjoy a relaxing moment. Of course, it's important to know and understand what's happening in the world, but I also believe there's nothing wrong with taking a step back to find strength and clarity. And Lord knows we need that now more than ever. A moment of thoughtfulness and calm may be rare these days, but it doesn't have to be. So what do you say? You want to take back your Sundays? So do I. And guess what? I've already done it with the Martin Sheen Podcast, Season three. Available now. Don't mess with my Sunday, and thank you for listening.