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- [00:00]
Tara Palmeri
AI had the time of my life A I never felt this way before.
- [00:10]
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- [00:22]
Tara Palmeri
And I owe it all to you.
- [00:25]
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- [00:32]
Tara Palmeri
Welcome back to the Tara Palmeri show. I know it's been Epstein, Epstein, Epstein. But it's not just on this show. It's everywhere. It's in Washington. It's all anyone can really talk about. The vote is coming. It will be next week. Mike Johnson is scrambling to keep his caucus in line, but every single day he loses another vote. Another Republican member looks to his constituents and realizes that he cannot vote against releasing the Epstein files. But in the meantime, a very important cultural figure in the MAGA movement, Megyn Kelly, once a foe of President Trump, said that it wasn't very strange what Jeffrey Epstein was up to. She said that, you know, he wasn't a pedophile. Actually, crazy enough, she says Jeffrey Epstein was not a pedophile. He was into the barely legal type. Like he liked 15 year olds. There's a difference between a 15 year old and a 5 year old. I am recapping what she said, but I'll give you a flavor here.
- [01:38]
Megyn Kelly (quoted)
As for Epstein, I've said this before, but just as a reminder, I do know somebody very, very close to this case who is in a position to know virtually everything, not everything, but virtually everything. And this person has told me that from the start, years and years ago, that Jeffrey Epstein, in this person's view, was not a pedophile. This is this person's view who was there for a lot of this, but that he was into the barely legal type. Like he liked 15 year old girls. And I, I realize this is disgusting. I'm definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I'm just giving you facts that he wasn't into like 8 year olds, but he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were but would look legal to a passerby. We have yet to see anybody come forward and say I was a, like a, I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview. I look, it's, you can say that's a distinction without a difference.
- [02:42]
Tara Palmeri
Now that is Megyn Kelly today, now that she is fully a part of the MAGA movement. This is not the same Megyn Kelly who believed at one time that President Trump possibly poisoned her before the debate in which he said there was blood coming out of her eyes. No one can forget that debate. Back in 2018 when she was working for NBC, she said there is no consent for a 14 or even a 17 year old. I mean, she should know. She is a trained attorney, right? Megyn Kelly of all people should know the law. Although when Trump's borders are. Tom Hammond is accused of taking $50,000 in a Cava bag in exchange for, you know, some sort of political influence, some sort of favor in his new job. She says that's no big deal, as if she doesn't know the law. Well, I just want to, I just want to break it down for Megyn Kelly because I have done years and years of reporting on this Epstein story for the broken Seeking justice podcast Power the Maxwells. And I have listened to the tapes from the survivors from those girls that Joseph Ricardi, the detective in Palm beach and Police Chief Michael Ryder spoke to. And these are 14 year olds like Courtney Wilde who showed up on his doorstep with braces on and they sound like children. One of those 14 year olds literally called his penis a wee wee. Okay, I want you to listen to some of the tapes of these girls. Take a listen here.
- [04:24]
Survivor or victim recording
He had a cook that was there and he had, there was like two other girls that I got to live with him. Who you went to do one of his girlfriends, one of his like slaves that he has lived with them. When I say slaves, like one of the girls that he bought to like have sex with him.
- [04:41]
Tara Palmeri
You cannot tell me that these girls were allowed to consent or were able to consent with a then 52 year old wealthy man who was running a pyramid scheme out of their high school. And these were poor girls who to them 200, $300 was more than their parents were making in a week. This is probably one of the craziest arguments I have heard out there, by the way. It really is. I mean, really, Megan, you know, the law, you know, Mora, I would. And morality, you have a daughter. It, it blows my mind. And that is why I had to start with this on the show, because I, I thought, I just think if you have that sort of platform, you have to be more responsible. I don't know what the grips, I don't know what sort of grip that President Trump has on her.
- [05:43]
To even.
- [05:44]
Make that kind of argument. I mean, crimes against children are bipartisan. People are against them. But yeah, this is another episode of a show that I was on. I'm being asked to Go on a lot of different shows right now to, to present my expertise on this topic. I went on last night with Julia K. Brown, who was the executive producer of the podcast Broken Seeking Justice. And we had some technical difficulties in the beginning, and I wasn't able to chime in right away. But it was a really great conversation. If you stick in, stick, stick with it. And obviously, Julie deserves a lot of credit for being one of the few journalists to dig into, into that sweetheart deal and into the grave injustice that happened in Florida. Without her, we wouldn't know. People wouldn't know what happened. Every single day. These emails, these 19,000 emails that people are pouring through right now, 20,000 emails, they just keep linking President Trump and Epstein. Even more and more and more they show Epstein's obsession with Trump. I mean, he clearly knew a lot about his finances and his accounting. And, you know, Epstein was giving apparently accounting services to people like Mark Rowan at Apollo. Maybe he was doing the same for Trump. I mean, they seem to be very intimately involved. From the level of information that he claimed to have on Epstein, I still can't believe that he was trying to advise world leaders like Putin on how to manipulate President Trump and claiming that he had dirt on him. That dirt like. Like that he was sitting, you know, on the counter in his house with girls. And all this time, the White House has said President Trump kicked him out of Mar A Lago. Turns out from the emails, Epstein was never a member. Everything the White House says about Jeffrey Epstein and President Trump's relationship cannot be considered valid because there is no Merta in the White House. They aren't even allowed to talk to President Trump about it. He is so sensitive about it. The stories keep changing over and over and over again. He claims he was never in Epstein's home. We see that that's not the case. Also, I know from my interview with Brad Edwards that Trump had admitted that he had gone to Epstein's house, but thought it was strange to see all these girls that Epstein said were a part of a Big Brother, Big Sister program. There is so much more that we have that we don't even know yet. Tip of the iceberg, like I keep saying. So take a listen to this interview. I hope you keep learning more and more by sticking with my channel. And of course, go to Tara Palmeri dot com. It's where you can get my exclusive independent journalism straight to your inbox by signing up for the Red Letter. It's also a way to support my independent journalism. I am working on so many different pieces right now. It's been a lot. I am churning it out. But you know, these are the moments when change happens. So take a listen here.
- [08:47]
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- [09:14]
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- [09:18]
Interviewer/Host
Julie Brown's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative journalist for the Miami Herald who wrote the book on Jeffrey Epstein, literally. Tara Palmieri is the author of the Red Letter Substack who's been covering the story incredibly extensively. They join me now. Julie, I want to start with you as just someone who's as immersed in the reporting and the context of this as anyone to just to get your reaction to a few of these emails, particularly the one in which Epstein says that a victim, which was later revealed by the White House to be Virginia Giuffre because they unredacted it was with, was, was at Epstein's house with Epstein and Trump for hours. What do you, what do you make of that?
- [09:58]
Tara Palmeri
It's a little, it's a little broken up.
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Interviewer/Host
Julie, that's for you. Yes.
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Julie Brown
Well, you know, it's, it's hard to understand because a lot of these emails are not in context. They're out of order. And there we don't have the context of what he's talking about when he says that. We also know that Virginia has been quite public in both in her, in, in her testimony in court and in her memoir that was published after her, that she never encountered any inappropriate behavior from Trump. So in fact, she is the person that is mentioned. It seems to be almost a red flag that there's a problem here because there's no indication that she had been abused by Trump.
- [10:53]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah. And I also think it's worth talking here about taking Epstein's claims themselves with some sort of grain of salt skepticism. Just because he's deceased and he wrote an email doesn't mean that it's true. I mean, the guy was kind of notoriously a liar. But I do want to ask again about that, the thing he says to Michael Wolff, which again, to me, this is the place where it seems the hardest to come to a charitable interpretation which is, of course, he knew about the girls. He asked Glenn to stop. And that seems to sync up with stories that we've heard that at some point he told, you know, don't poach people from Mar a Lago. But also seems to indicate that like Trump kind of knew what Jeffrey Epstein was up to. What do you think of that?
- [11:40]
Julie Brown
Well, you know, look at the sheer number of times that Trump's names are in this email. I mean, we counted over 2,700 times that Trump's name is mentioned in these emails. Now, some of them are duplicative. It's hard to measure them because they're just in so many different places, but they're hit. His name appears, Trump's name appears more than anybody else's in these emails. So this is, you have to wonder why Trump is, is so dominant in these emails, particularly since the timeframe of these emails starts in 2011 through Epstein's arrest in 2019. So this is a time when Epstein's relationship with Trump was waning. I think what we really need to see are all the emails pre2011 at the time when we know they had a relationship. And we have asked the House Oversight Committee whether they obtained those earlier emails and calendars from the estate. We haven't really gotten a straight answer about whether they, I think they've asked for everything. But we don't know whether maybe that this is coming, whether they're expecting more or whether this is it because really the key time period is pre 2011 with Trump, not post 2011.
- [13:07]
Interviewer/Host
Tara, that email about the dog that didn't bark is striking to me is maybe the most striking for a few reasons. One, it's Epstein talk talking to Glenn Maxwell. So he's not talking to a reporter or someone that he's that presumably he's trying to kind of like perform for or you know, bs. He's like, that seems like a much more confidential relationship. It's also the closest time wise to the end of that relation to whatever happened between him and Trump in terms of friendship and him also getting ultimately prosecuted and then slapped on the wrist. What do you make of the dog that didn't bark as Trump?
- [13:45]
Tara Palmeri
I mean, it suggests that they know something about President Trump and they are surprised that it hasn't been revealed. And as we know, they were very close with Trump not just during a decade. I mean, Ghislaine Maxwell knew him for decades through her father, the media mogul Robert Maxwell, back to when she was in her 20s. And you know, one of the first things she said in her interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was that she had never seen Donald Trump behaving inappropriately around women. And as you can see from this email, that directly contradicts speaking as, you know, people confidants who know each other not thinking that their emails are ever going to be read right, or on TV or anywhere for that matter. So I don't know why they would be bluffing each other for whatever reason. You know, conspiracy theorists will try to say at this point, but it's, you know, it's, it's, it's shocking because it directly refutes, you know, her testimony, which I don't understand why she even had a chance to have that moment as a charge perjurer and a convicted sex offender. And then seeing from that moment her moving moved over to a prison camp where she can get a puppy. I mean, it's absurd. And I think it makes it really difficult for the president to continue to say, like, you know, comments that are like, I wish her well or I haven't thought about her in a while. It's so obvious that they had a very long relationship and that she's not some random woman that will be asking for a commutation. She's a person that has been in his life for decades that he has a long standing relationship with to the point where he said Glenn has to stop. But she's doing at the club.
- [15:30]
What did she do at the club?
- [15:31]
Recruit Virginia Giuffre.
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Interviewer/Host
Julie, this other, there's this other exchange where Jeffrey Epstein is writing to, I believe, a New York Times reporter who is my understanding, is fired from New York Times in 2019 because he had solicited a $30,000 donation to a pre K from Jeffrey Epstein. And he sends this email saying this is during the 2016 campaign, if I'm not mistaken. Would you like photos of Donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen? Now, subsequently, that reporter says those emails were never sent. And I should also note here, a thing that I think is a little confusing and also really disgusting is that Epstein uses the term girls for like, women and girls in 8 ranging in age from like actual girls who are 13 or 14 up to 22. So when he says girls, you're not quite sure which one he's talking about. But it does seem like Epstein suggesting, like, I do have some goods on him or I have evidence of whatever he used to get up to. What do you think?
- [16:34]
Julie Brown
Well, I think that Epstein had dirt on everybody, quite frankly. I mean, I think he used that as his currency. And we don't know the extent of the information that he had on Trump, but he was friends with them for a long time. And we've seen the videos of him partying with, with Trump, and we, we just know that they were close at one time. So inevitably, he has some information about Trump that maybe isn't all that becoming of him. And we don't, like I said, we don't really know what that is, but he does enough in these emails to lead people to believe that he sort of has the goods on him.
- [17:14]
Interviewer/Host
Yeah.
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Julie Brown
And that is sort of like a bait that he uses for these reporters, you know, and others like Michael Wolf to keep coming back to him and saying, tell me, tell me more. And he's sort of like, you know, trying to lure them in and get and dangle this kind of information in front of them.
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Interviewer/Host
Finally, quickly, to you, Tara, do you think there's more to learn in the full DOJ files that are. They're pushing a release?
- [17:47]
Tara Palmeri
Absolutely. I mean, these aren't even the files. These are just emails from the estate. The files will show the depositions of the thousand victims that the FBI says as many as a thousand victims. If they are actually unredacted, it will show the names of the perpetrators. As Pam Bondi says, there were no, you know, John Does. But that contradicts everything that the victims have said, that there were other men involved and it would expose the full trafficking ring and why he got this sweetheart deal. So, yes, there is so much more to know.
- [18:21]
There's so much more to know.
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Interviewer/Host
Julie's point, and the one I'm looking for is like, I want to see everything about that 2007, 2008, what went down with that part of justice and Alex Acosta and how he ended up getting away with the slap on the wrist. That's what I'm most laser focused on. Julie Brown, Tara Palmeri, thank you both.
- [18:36]
Tara Palmeri
That was another episode of the Tara Palmeri Show. Thank you so much for tuning in. You can rate, subscribe, comment, share this with all of your friends. This is a community. You can support my independent journalism by going to tarapalmieri.com that's T A R A P A l m e r I.com Only1i. And signing up for the Red Letter. That is my newsletter where you can get my exclusive reporting straight to your inbox. And if you become a paid subscriber, you can support my independent journalism and get exclusive access and reporting. I want to thank my producer, Eric Abenate, I want to thank Abby Baker, who is handling social media research reporting, and Adam Stewart, who is handling the graphics, and Dan Rosen, who is helping me with my growth. It is happening so quickly. Thanks to all of you. We are just getting started here. See you again tomorrow.