Trump goes FULL PANIC as Epstein news bears down

I'm joined now by the anchor of The Beat with Ari Melber. Ari Melber. Ari, thanks for joining me. Great to see you. How you doing? So Ari, we have seen very recently Donald Trump's effort to kind of skirt his involvement in the Epstein files by, of course, firing Pam Bondi and replacing her with Todd Blanche, who just got his big promotion as he was nominated for attorney general in a permanent capacity. So can you talk a little bit about what you think in terms of Trump being able to kind of insulate himself from any accountability as it relates to Epstein by putting in place somebody who has shown that he is shameless, if nothing else, when it comes to burying any of Trump's involvement or running cover for Trump as it relates to Epstein? I think Epstein is a huge piece of this, and we've both covered it. Blanche was running the exact program that everyone has criticized, including many conservatives and Republicans, because they weren't transparent, they weren't honest, they buried and hid a lot of stuff. In any normal environment, you don't promote that person because it looks like you're rewarding Epstein's secrecy, which you are. But here Donald Trump is shown again and again. I think it's interesting to see his approval numbers crash because more of his supporters either realize it or are just over it that he's not into public interest. And so someone who actually went that far against the political winds, including on the right, to just save him, protect him and do Epstein's secrecy, whatever it is they're hiding, that to him, to Trump is a win. And so again, I think it's the type of thing that has legs because plenty of his supporters have woken up to this. And Blanche's signature was on the initial misleading documents. He was on the letters to Congress that oversaw materials that had redaction errors that cared more about hiding Trump than hiding the the real victims and others who Trump had claimed he cared about. So I think all of that hangs over this and it's documented. Do you think that this has an impact? And I ask that because there are, I mean, countless issues every month. There's another kind of discourse du jour or story du jour where we're like, OK, there's no way he can wriggle out of this one. And then, of course, lo and behold, he does. Obviously, the Epstein thing has a lot of legs because this was an issue that was championed by Trump and his acolytes themselves. And so this obviously has more potency than just, you know, kind of an issue where both sides can retreat to their partisan corners. This one was really elevated by by the right. But with that said, like we had watched as Trump kind of has been able to kind of keep a floor in place. Granted, it's been chipped away at recently. But in terms of the the potency of Epstein as a persuasion issue, do you think that it's going to make an impact one way or the other? I think it already has made a huge impact because it broke the dam in the in the votes and was the first big revolt that was a veto proof revolt. So you had a supermajority on that issue. And then after that, you had pushed back on other things, not all as important, but it was only after the Republican revolt at Epstein that you got pushed back on the budget. You got bigger ice cutbacks. You got pushed back on the ballroom even by some Republicans. And now just this week, you had a war powers vote, which, yes, was mostly Democrats or Republicans joined Massey led that. So the Epstein tormentor to to Donald Trump has now beat him more than once on the House floor. That's not a usual thing. So, yes, I think there's a cascade. Then there's the other point you made, which I think is smart. And I think people online who follow this stuff independently get it better sometimes call it better than than in D.C., because D.C. bounces between the two parties. That's kind of its thing. And when it comes to Trump, I think both parties have made mistakes. The Democrats have run repeated campaigns just on saying you don't like him, as if that's a winning message you need to sell when more often than not, I could show you the charts. The country's already there. They don't like him. But whether they bring him back in and compare to the alternative is a different question. Right. Just like you could dislike a teacher a lot and then they bring in a substitute is so bad that you say, I still don't like that teacher, but man, we prefer him to this new one. And so that's that's the Democrats mistake. The Republicans mistake is that they've constantly tried to say, oh, you counted him out and he connects with real America because he had these surprising comebacks. That's not real math. He got fewer votes in 16. He got wiped out in the blue wave in 18 and he lost in 20 with fewer votes. Right. We all know that they underperformed in 22, including after the big Supreme Court abortion decision. So the only time he ever got more votes was was 24. That's that's a one off, actually. And we'll see how he does in 26. I think Senate Republicans are reminded or waking up to how hard he is to run with. So the comeback narrative is a D.C. narrative. It's not really a comeback. If you were never liked, you won once. And unlike some other people, call it fair and square. I covered that election. There was a big, high participation. He won 24 once. You know, I think what's interesting about all of this is like he is quietly doing his work behind the scenes where he just rids the party, excommunicates the party of anybody who is willing to come forward and support the discharge petition for the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Like it might not seem so overt because this is kind of the the the slow running machinations of of the electoral process. But like Thomas Massey is out. He signed the he co-sponsored the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Lauren Boebert was forced to run in the fourth congressional district in Colorado because she wasn't going to be able to win in the third, certainly without the support of Trump, who'd been busy calling her dumb and low IQ. Meanwhile, you have Marjorie Taylor Greene, who left Congress outright. And when she even approached the White House because she and her family were getting death threats, Trump basically doubled down and said, you know, you had what's coming to you. And then Nancy Mace, Trump decided to endorse her primary opponent in the South Carolina gubernatorial race. And so one by one, like this is again, this is like a slow plotting process, but he was able to be successful in excommunicating the people who put him in this situation in the first place where the Epstein Files Transparency Act was even advanced because of those people who were willing to buck the party line. And so that's like the one piece of doubt I have in terms of whether whether it's still going to be as easy for these Republicans to buck Trump, recognizing that every time it happens, whether it's on Epstein with those four that I just mentioned, whether it's Bill Cassidy, who of course had voted in favor of of his impeachment, John Cornyn. I mean, the guy was so far up Trump's ass he could touch the back of his teeth posting pictures of of of himself reading the art of the deal. Even he wasn't loyal enough to get the endorsement over Ken Paxton. So there is that there is that backdrop of, OK, you can you can speak out for something that you agree with, you know, that that isn't that flies in the face of what the White House's stance is. But your job is going to be on the line. Yeah, I mean, that makes me think of two things, one on Epstein and one on this type of politics. For Epstein, given how much has come out that already makes Trump look bad. And I'm always careful to say as a legal journalist and I'm an attorney, we have not seen criminal level evidence. We've seen stuff that is embarrassing. Many people would say disqualifying. But unlike some other individuals, the material that's become public about Trump and Epstein doesn't currently implicate Trump as a criminal. So that makes you say, OK, that's already out there and he already took the lumps. What else is he hiding? Right. And I'm not the type, you know me, I'm not the type to say, well, if it looks that bad, it must be that sometimes I've covered stories like this that look one way and they change. But it doesn't look good. It doesn't make sense logically, basically, to have this much come out and then have Trump still be acting like there's something else to hide. Now, does that mean that it's the worst thing that someone could think of? No, it could be malfeasance in how Epstein was dealt with as a prisoner foul play in the jail cell, which is something the whole Congress has now legitimated. It started out. People said, oh, is that a conspiracy? If you read the files legislation, as I'm sure you have and I'm sure some of your viewers have, one of the enumerated items is all the additional information about the treatment of Epstein under the control of who? Trump, DOJ and the Bureau of Prisons. Now, by the way, would that alone be a huge scandal if there were foul play? I think so. Which is, again, what I'm saying is a different explanation than if you were hiding, say, some earlier illicit conduct. But whatever it is, he is acting like someone who is going all that way to have something to hide. That's on Epstein. Then on the politics, look, on the one hand, what everything you said is true and explains why even when Trump could be polling in the 30s, the power he has in Republican primaries and over that base, which is not even the whole Republican party, let alone the whole country in the electorate. That's our gerrymandered system, which a partisan Supreme Court has made worse, helping Republicans. That still gives him power even when he's basically lame duck D.O.A. politically. Yeah. And then on top of that, he's willing to do something other presidents have. It's still a type of weakness, I think, Brian, that he spent with his allies more on a single House primary of the Epstein proponent for transparency, Massey, than any other House primary in American history. That comes from a point of weakness, right? It's like if you you get into a dispute with someone and you come back and you bring 20 hired security, right? One of these billionaires, you say, oh, what do they do? Yeah, they could hire a lot of off duty cops with guns. And on the one hand, you say, well, you're not going to beat them up today, right? Literally. On the other hand, while they must be really scared and that is a lot of firepower that they bought more on that race than any in American history. I mean, that tells you a lot about the fear and the power that Massey built up, which then, yes, House member versus president, you know, that's usually not a fair fight. I think that that's a really good segue into another topic that I wanted to talk about, because as far as Trump operating from a place of fear is concerned, he wouldn't need to move to consolidate so much support in the media space if he was able to, you know, convey his message by virtue of how he was governing. Like if he was doing a good enough job, he wouldn't need to to level all these attacks and buy up all of these media outlets. We've seen him either sue or have his allies kind of seek to be as heavy handed as they can within the media, you know, whether it's whether it's CBS or, you know, imminently CNN. We've also seen him sue ABC, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Meta. I mean, you name it. We just recently saw Scott Pelly get fired at 60 Minutes. And, you know, the the fate of that institution obviously is in doubt. I think what you guys do at MSNOW is is really important because it's one of the few, if not the only, legacy media outlet left that's willing to actually buck Trump and criticize him when it's necessary to do so. And so, you know, from your vantage, recognizing that Trump has gone after everyone, really, I mean, he seems to be just taking his way down the list. How does that make you feel about about your your obligation, your responsibility to speak out? And also beyond that, like, you know, it's it feels almost inevitable that once he's done with CBS and CNN, attacking MSNOW is going to be next up on the list. And so just it's it's it's not it's not going to be easy when the person with the biggest megaphone in the entire country sets his sights on either your network or on you individually. And so just kind of planning out for something like that. How have you thought about that? Yeah, I mean, it's a fair question with what's going on with CBS, which remains the highest rated news program. We can all talk about how the Internet's changed a lot and some for the good. But 60 Minutes competes with NFL football for the largest audience, highest ad rate. And does it with as we've seen, because you just saw them stand up to this incredible internal corporate magnet pressure, does it with independence? I firmly believe, based on what I know and being in this business, that if a radical socialist went after 60 Minutes with somehow you got to really do a lot of legwork here, but got a hold of the state control of the company, I think they would go up against leftist intervention just as much as magnet intervention. Those are serious people. Yeah. The problem for Trump is those serious people, nonpartisan, are calling him out. And that's because of the plays they're trying to run to abuse their oversight of the media merger system in order to get favorable coverage. And if you could prove it out enough, if you had an independent investigation, which you're not going to get from this the other day, you'd have to investigate whether they've crossed the line into quid pro quo bribery and other crimes, because it is illegal for government officials to say, I need X from you to do Y in the government. And usually it's softer, right? We have all the campaign donations. It's softer. It's hard to prove. If that happened, that's already that. Second to your question, we're going to continue to stand on business and be independent. And, you know, sometimes it's like I'm posting about my show or I'm promoting myself here. I'm not really about me. I'm really fortunate to work with people like Rachel and Nicole and Lawrence, who stood up, by the way, Lawrence's clash with Donald Trump for 15 years, stayed on the air, faced the threat. Now it's heavier for the reason you say. So we're led by those people and a team. We're more independent than we were before, because we're now a fully independent company versus we trade as our own company. Most people aren't interested in all the details. But the bottom line is we're more independent than we were a few years ago. So that's what we're doing. We're standing up. The wider point, though, that you made is really important. When you're up 20 in the fourth quarter, you're not really doing a lot of cheating, even if you sometimes cheat. But it makes no sense. He is sliding and crashing. And yes, he has a probably an emotional vendetta against media. And I think in all honesty, if he were doing better, he might still be complaining and attacking Kimmel and that type of stuff. But the extreme way that they are trying to censor, mute and control the press going into these midterms and presumably they're not going to stop going into the the big the big presidential election shows how weak they think they are without that kind of of pressure or cheating. As we watch the DOJ and the FCC be so heavy handed in what they're trying to do, like obviously Brendan Carr has a huge hand in all of this. And of course, we were just talking about Todd Blanche, how he is basically I mean, look, the guy's violating the law because we still have three million Epstein files that haven't been released. He's made it clear that he has no intention of releasing anything else. And so he's participating in this government cover up at the same time, violating existing law. As we move forward, I think we looked at what happened in the aftermath of Joe Biden winning in 2020 and installing Merrick Garland as attorney general. And I think there was this sense, in retrospect, misguided, I think, where it was more important to protect the you know, to prevent against the optics of politicization and to get back to normal politics and just calm everything down. And obviously, that didn't work. And in fact, the unwillingness to hold these people to account for what they'd done, Trump specifically, kind of emboldened him to recognize that he could do it a hundred times faster and harder than he had done before. And now we're in a situation where the corruption is so egregious, like people are selling, you know, shorting stocks and buying buying stocks that just make them turn them into millionaires 10, you know, 10 times over. We're watching this massive pay to play scheme. You know, we just had this report come out, I believe, in The Washington Post like a day ago that showed that a number of the companies that had donated money to Trump's ballroom were then granted government contracts that were worth far more than what they had donated. And so like we have reached full Banana Republic levels of corruption. How do you think that the next Democratic attorney general should take this stuff into account, recognizing that there are going to be those people who say, you know, let's put the politics of retribution behind us. But then there's also going to be people who say an unwillingness to actually uphold the law is the exact thing that emboldens criminal behavior in the future. And so what do you think, you know, what do you think should be the move moving forward, especially from somebody who has a lot of experience in the legal realm? I think you describe it accurately. I think any honest future Justice Department must deal with the corruption, the looting, the revenge prosecutions that have basically infected multiple parts of the government. I mean, we have the housing partisan warrior in Pulte, who was based on what we can tell, misusing access to information there to go after opponents. That's like secret police stuff. And now he's going to run the intelligence services for a little little temporary stint is what Trump said. So it's at at DOJ, it's at housing, it's at FBI. They were visiting the Georgia voting voting station. And now it's at Intel. He oversees CIA. I mean, this sounds like a movie when you say, wait, CIA director is going to meet with the guy who's already been caught misusing information to go after domestic opponents. Right. Is that so you have to completely go in after all of that without pure favor? And I say that and people say, oh, I'm sounding potentially naive, but that's any honest non-MAGA administration. Obviously, that would hopefully include the Democrats. That's what they're telegraphing. But if you had an honest John McCain style Republican, I don't know that they're going to win the nomination, but I would expect a McCain style administration also do this. I've seen it's very fashionable now to say everyone's the worst, but I've seen and covered Republican administrations where the DOJ was much more independent. Yeah. And nonpartisan than this one. So we are not we we just what we watched Joe Biden's DOJ prosecute his son, like prosecute the president's son. The notion that that investigation would even be allowed to be open, much less go to prosecution, go to go to go to conviction would be just I mean, it's it's laughable at this point. You shouldn't see Don Jr. Get prosecuted. And Reagan Bush, according to legal experts or law schools, the Reagan Bush DOJ are not held up as some high watermark. But again, if we're just going to be proportionate, they had open probes into their own administration, including Iran Contra. And by the end, there were deals and pardons. I just want to be clear, this administration doesn't allow anything like that. And they didn't have the level of revenge prosecutions we have right now. So history has helped that way. So I would say any non-MAGA honest DOJ has an obligation to do this first and do it strongly. And that means looking at what's always hardest in Washington, which is, you know, you have all this this pro wrestling and then you have a hell of a lot of people who they go in and out of office and you say, why does it seem like the Democrats are giving in and they're not fighting that hard? And then you look up and two years later, the guys who were fake fighting on the Senate floor in the same lobbying shop and other crap like that. And so the DOJ has to really look fully at what they sometimes see as their contemporaries, which is, oh, well, I knew that guy when we were at DOJ 10 years ago. Yeah, well, we don't care if he was covering up the Epstein files or helping Todd Blanche make up stories or going into grand juries to help make it a slightly less severe revenge. I don't care if they broke the rules of the law. They should be disbarred, investigated if they if they committed a crime like anyone else. I don't care that you knew them back when they were different and worked in a different DOJ. So we have to deal with that. And if we don't, you know, there was a writer I quoted when I did a piece about January 6th, who said a failed coup without accountability becomes a training exercise. Yeah. Well, boy, have we seen that? And we're going to see more of that. And then the corruption they're looting. The last one I would make is, you know, I when I'm trying to report and get people's attention, I use analogies because I feel like you're only talking about the thing. We only know what you think about the thing. So let me compare it to another thing, OK? A heck of a lot of conservative minded people and some people were sympathetic to Trump or maybe they voted for him once and they regret it. They look at that looting that you see sometimes where a city has a blackout or burned down buildings and people go in and they say, God, these people, they got the opportunity and in one hour they started taking TV. You say that's wrong. What about the local store owner? OK, insurance pays for it, but it's still it's still stealing. Right. And those type of folks who say, gosh, you know, that looting is wrong. And then you got to you got to turn around those people. OK, that's less than one percent of the scale of the premeditated first degree, long acting looting, including of the Pentagon and places where we would care about national security. So, yeah, if you cared about that looting, you should care about this looting. It's Trump family looting. It's allied companies. And I don't predict the future, man. I would tell you, if we don't deal with it as a society, it will get worse, not better, even if even if the politics change a little bit. Well, you know, the ultimate irony of that is like that was a message that resonated with Trump's voters from Trump himself. And the first thing he did was install Elon Musk, who promised to like eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. And what does he do with his power? Fires all of the people who serve as as, you know, the the watchmen of all of their respective departments and agencies. And then Elon went on after all of the all of the inspectors general were fired and basically eliminated any barriers to the to the companies, the agencies that regulate his companies and then awarded himself a bunch of government contracts. And so right there, all of that that trust was just completely decimated. But the extent to which we're seeing it now has become so overt and so egregious and and almost like I mean, they're almost like proud of it to to come out and say, I'm going to sue my own federal government for $10 billion and then think that it's some gift to us to say, you know what, let's just compromise with a $2 billion slush fund to turn each one of the 1500 insurrectionists into millionaires, but also will give me tax amnesty for myself, my family forever. That could also cost the government $100 million in in funding that that would get paid to the federal government and now won't. I mean, the the corruption in that sense, it's almost like the administration is kind of poking poking its finger in the eye of the American people, because this is the exact kind of stuff that, you know, that Trump and Fox would have had a field day with. Well, I think you're making a subtle point about, if I may, the the culture of their degradation of our system. Yeah, they think it's a flex to say, see what I can get away with, see what I can steal. I mean, the the fund that is in so much trouble now, I'll remind folks, it is already paused in court. It was paused, which is a procedural step under review. But if you have a fully, obviously legal thing, they don't pause it. OK, there's plenty of stuff the government does that doesn't get paused in this early stage. A judge already paused it. A separate judge is looking at whether the whole deal is a fraud, as you mentioned. So that's how controversial the fund is. But if you're watching this in America, it's your money. They're seizing and stealing your money. They don't claim that it was appropriated by Congress. They don't claim that there's any reason they think that's a flex. Now, on some of these issues, more and more Republicans don't. And a lot of people, when they learn the details, don't. But they think it's a flex in the same way that autocrats take a kind of pride in getting other people, even you'll see this in senior cabinet meetings in Russia or whatever, to say that up is down and red is blue because it shows, oh, look, this person will embarrass and debase themselves, their sense of reality for our power. That's how much power we have. I would observe that there are other people who have power in a way that I think is better long term leadership. I can list off other leaders who are different. But yes, it's a type of cynical. They think it's cynical. I think it's cynical. They think it's a kind of flex to say, look what we can get away with. Ari, last question here. Nix in how many? Five. Is that a good answer? That's a good answer. I'm in New York. I've lived in New York more than any other place. I can just tell you I live in Brooklyn walking around. Everyone's going crazy. Everyone's into it. So I want to support. I don't want to say seven. And then it sounds like it's going to be too tough. Yeah, just on that level, as someone who's been in New York this long, the energy, I mean, you walk near Fort Greene where there's the Spike Lee's, there's a bar he likes to go to. And it's really community because people know each other. And it's like people are going nuts. So it's definitely a fun time to be in New York in the summer. Well, it's cool because like, look, I'm I'm from born in New York, grew up in New Jersey originally. So all of my sports teams are New York sports teams, diehard Giants fan. I've been a Yankees fan since I was five years old living out in L.A. I've been out here for 15 years and like we have first of all, the city is so sprawling. So there's never a ton of people like you can walk down the street in New York and you're just there is a there is a mob of people wherever you go. Right. L.A. just isn't like that. So you never feel like you're immersed in like a mob of people in the same way. And we also have, you know, the Dodgers are in L.A. We have the Anaheim Angels like that are that are just an hour outside of L.A. like it doesn't have the same feel within the city. We have a lot of sports teams, too. There's a lot going on and and it just doesn't it doesn't take over the city like we don't have, you know, even when the Kings I mean, the Rams are Super Bowl champions previous year. The the our hockey team was was NHL champions. You can you you can walk through the city and not know that that happened. I feel like the same thing isn't isn't going on in New York, which is which is really cool. And so, you know, I'm not a you know, I get a hundred. I mean, and not not to make it political, but, you know, a lot of times around America, it's the places where there's very little diversity and not many immigrants. And that's where people are like, oh, my God, the immigrants. And you walk around New York and it is for folks who sometimes feel like, oh, is this whole American experiment, is this thing breaking down a lot of places? It's not you walk around. First of all, they got a new mayor and they got new stuff they're trying. But also you walk around and you got such diversity. And when they're rooting for the Knicks, if you want to make an American great, they're rooting for America. It's in English, yada yada, if that's your cup of tea. But also you see people who moved here, came here and they're sharing something geographically, culturally. I love that. Yeah, it's awesome. Highly recommend for anybody who's watching right now. First of all, check out Ari on the beat on MSNOW weekdays at 6 p.m. Eastern. But also I'm going to put a link to to Ari's YouTube channel right here on the screen and also in the post description. If you're listening on the podcast, I'm going to throw it into the show notes. This is the kind of thing where we all have to come together and support and support any media that is willing to tell the truth about what's happening right now. That takes the form of folks who are doing doing good work and pushing back on legacy media, which has been, you know, Donald Trump's focus in censoring since the beginning of this administration, all the way down to independent media folks and creators. But it's it's a group effort here to make sure that we elevate these voices who are willing to to do the work. So I'm going to put that link right here on the screen and also in the post description. If you're not yet subscribed, please go ahead and hit the subscribe button. Ari, thank you so much for taking the time and I appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks to all your viewers and listeners. Stay informed. Stay hydrated. Stay at it. Peace, everyone.