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At 5 p.m. Eastern, take a tour of the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where we look at the lunar lander that touched down on the moon, Charles Lindbergh's plane that flew across the Atlantic, and the X-15 flown by Neil Armstrong. | |
| And at 8 p.m. Eastern on Lectures in History, a discussion on the U.S. and the Arab-Israel peace process with Trinity College professor James Stoker. | ||
| Looking at the history of the U.S. negotiating ends to Israeli-Arab conflicts, including the 1967 Six-Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and the 2023 Israel-Hamas War. | ||
| Exploring the American story, watch American History TV Saturdays on C-SPAN 2 and find a full schedule on your program guide or watch online anytime at c-span.org slash history. | ||
| Ankhosh Kodori is back at our desk. | ||
| He's a former federal prosecutor who now writes a legal affairs column titled Rules of Law for Politico magazine. | ||
| Thanks for coming back. | ||
| Plenty of legal affairs issues for a political writer today. | ||
| Start with the release of these emails from the Epstein files. | ||
| And how concerned legally should President Trump be today? | ||
| Legally, I don't think he should be concerned at all. | ||
| I mean, look, it's a practical matter. | ||
| The Epstein investigation, the criminal investigation, is over. | ||
| It has been over for years. | ||
| Now, we've had a political controversy and arguments over disclosures or more records from that investigation, but the reality is the Trump Justice Department is not going to somehow investigate Trump's involvement or to the extent he even had any or any awareness, right? | ||
| We can see no evidence that he was actually aware of any criminal misconduct. | ||
| With respect to like the sort of the release of the emails, and this is something I think we've talked about before on this show, I don't think it is a particularly good idea for people to pluck emails from large tranches of documents and then to offer up interpretations as if they're the definitive fact. | ||
| As someone who spent probably too much of his life reading emails from other people as a lawyer and a former federal prosecutor, I can tell you that's a very perilous way. | ||
| And for context, these are just a handful of emails, two of them eight years apart from a trove of about 23,000 documents that were handed over. | ||
| Yeah, and of course, Epstein is not a reputable figure or a trustworthy figure, so it is a little foolish to just assume that everything he is saying in emails is true. | ||
| So, you know, this is one of the reasons why I did not think it was a good idea for us to be, you know, the government to quote unquote release the Epstein files because what is going to happen is a lot more of this. | ||
| You're going to get just a bunch of emails decontextualized without any corroborating correspondence, the witness statements about what those emails were or not accurately describing, and this could just go on endlessly. | ||
| How concerned should we be about victim privacy here now that this is being done by a congressional committee and not the judicial process to release documents to the public? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, we should, of course, be very concerned about the victim confidentiality. | ||
| I mean, I think sadly their interests have not been at the top of the mind of the Trump White House or House Republicans as they've been sort of running around on this. | ||
| I think it's been a pretty unfortunate situation that the victims have been put through this year, really unnecessary and unwarranted. | ||
| But of course, you know, just as the members of the judiciary have a responsibility to try to protect those victims' rights and identities, so too do the members of Congress. | ||
| And I would hope that they would ensure that that obligation is satisfied. | ||
| Come back to what the Justice Department has and hasn't done when it comes to Epstein and the Epstein files. | ||
| And what did you think about Todd Blanche visiting Ghelaine Maxwell in prison and what's happened with where she's been placed since? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, The way the Trump Justice Department responded to the political controversy that emerged earlier this year was, I think, through sort of quote-unquote investigative moves that were pretty much designed to accomplish nothing, right? | ||
| We saw them go to try to get the release of grand jury transcripts from courts that said no and also said, by the way, there's nothing here. | ||
| Why are you misleading the public? | ||
| The judges actually put these things in opinions and rejecting that effort. | ||
| Then there was the effort to go for Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, to go down and spend a couple of days with Gilan Maxwell. | ||
| A truly terrible idea, considering that she is the only person who has been convicted and is in prison on these charges, has an incredible incentive to lie, and is herself a pretty disgusting human being all around, given the conduct that she engaged in. | ||
| I cannot imagine any credible prosecutor going there hat in hand and expecting her to tell them the truth and treating her as some credible witness. | ||
| One thing I will say about what we can perhaps glean from the emails is that given the references to Trump and the fact that Maxwell is on some of these emails, there is reason to believe that she lied to Todd Blanche during that proper session, in which case she could be exposed for federal prosecution for lying. | ||
| I do not see this Justice Department doing that because they had the misguided idea of going to talk to her in the first place, as if that would accomplish anything. | ||
| So the Justice Department has done a whole lot of nothing, and I think that's not been an accident. | ||
| We've had reporting since earlier this year that Trump was apprised in May, according to the Wall Street Journal's reporting, that he was in these materials, and perhaps some of these documents are the ones that report was referencing. | ||
| And it appears to be the case that ever since then they've tried to move along, say nothing to see here. | ||
| The Democrats are spinning this up. | ||
| It's a hoax. | ||
| That is false because of course the people who really kept this in the news and kept it going for the last few years was the Republican Party. | ||
| Trump himself, his vice president, his FBI director, Kash Patel, and his deputy director, Dan Bongino. | ||
| These people made careers out of fanning the flames around this conspiracy. | ||
| And now we find ourselves this year in a frankly bizarre situation where the FBI director is debunking himself. | ||
| He had to debunk himself earlier this year with the memo saying Epstein killed himself and there's nothing else here. | ||
| And of course he won't talk about that. | ||
| He just goes and runs around and has a good time on the FBI jet, upsetting everybody in the FBI and DOJ. | ||
| So I think the Justice Department has just been sort of flailing around kind of deliberately. | ||
| So what are you watching for next, especially as we approach a discharge petition vote? | ||
| We're expecting next week on the floor of the House for the entire Epstein files, whatever that officially means, to be released. | ||
| Well, look, I mean, we'll see how things progress. | ||
| It seems to me that the odds that this actually reaches a point where it's signed into law and then sort of obligates the president or the Trump Justice Department to do anything. | ||
| I think it's remote, right? | ||
| It has to pass the House. | ||
| It's not clear that the Senate will take it up. | ||
| That has to pass there. | ||
| Trump would have to sign it into law. | ||
| He can veto it. | ||
| And I don't think we're in the realm of veto-proof majorities here. | ||
| On Koch Kadori is our guest, Politico Magazine senior writer. | ||
| It's time for you to call in with questions or comments. | ||
| 202-748-8000 for Democrats. | ||
| 202-748-8001 for Republicans. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| As folks are calling in, let me stay on Epstein for one more second and show you the remarks of Caroline Levitt yesterday from the White House press stand in the Brady briefing room. | ||
| This is what she had to say. | ||
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In the interest of transparency, why not just go ahead, release the full files on Epstein, get this all over with? | |
| We have, this administration has done more with respect to transparency when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein than any administration ever. | ||
| In fact, this administration, the Department of Justice, has turned over tens of thousands of documents to the American people. | ||
| We are cooperating and showing support for the House Oversight Committee. | ||
| That's part of the reason you are seeing these documents that were released today because of the House Oversight Committees and Republicans' efforts to get these out to the public. | ||
| This administration also moved, the Department of Justice also moved to unseal grand jury testimony, which we know unfortunately a judge declined those requests. | ||
| So this administration has done more than any. | ||
| And it just shows how this is truly a manufactured hoax by the Democrat Party for now they're talking about it all of a sudden because President Trump is in the Oval Office. | ||
| But when Joe Biden was sitting in there, the Democrats never brought this up. | ||
| This wasn't an issue that they cared about because they actually don't care about the victims in these cases. | ||
| They care about trying to score political points against President Trump, as we have, of course, seen with this government shutdown. | ||
| And this entire thing, again, it's not a coincidence to the American people at home. | ||
| There are no coincidences in Washington, D.C. | ||
| And it is not a coincidence that the Democrats leaked these emails to the fake news this morning ahead of Republicans reopening the government. | ||
| This is another distraction campaign by the Democrat and the liberal media, and it's why I'm being asked questions about Epstein instead of the government reopening because of Republicans and President Trump and transparency, Caroline, why are White House officials then meeting with Representative Boebert in an effort to try and get her to not sign this petition calling for the release of the files? | ||
| Doesn't it show transparency that members of the Trump administration are willing to brief members of Congress whenever they please? | ||
| Doesn't that show our level of transparency? | ||
| Doesn't that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns? | ||
| That is a defining factor of transparency. | ||
| Having discussions with members of Congress about various issues. | ||
| And I'm not going to detail conversations that took place in the Situation Room in the press briefing room. | ||
| Caroline Levitt, there, her description of the Trump administration's efforts when it comes to the Epstein files, a bit more productive than how you described it earlier. | ||
| Yeah, I had never heard anyone describe a meeting in the Situation Room as transparent. | ||
| That was a new one. | ||
| I thought we heard a whole bunch of nonsense there. | ||
| First of all, the effort to unseal grand jury transcripts was a transparent waste of time. | ||
| The judges told us this. | ||
| The judges actually, in rather unusual language, chastised the Justice Department for providing language to the public that the judges said was misleading and said that there's nothing in these grand jury transcripts that's not already public. | ||
| With respect to the relevance of the investigation by House Republicans, let's set aside whether or not that investigation is good, bad, productive. | ||
| It's going well. | ||
| They don't need an investigation by the House Republicans or anyone in Congress to disclose the vast majority of material in their possession. | ||
| For instance, the emails that we saw yesterday, I would not be surprised if the government is already in possession of those emails, perhaps because they were voluntarily disclosed by the Epstein estate or they were obtained through a search warrant. | ||
| That material could be voluntarily released by the Justice Department. | ||
| In fact, the vast majority of the information that they gathered in the course of their investigation, I believe, could be released by them voluntarily if they wanted. | ||
| Whether they should is a separate idea, all right? | ||
| It's a separate question. | ||
| But the notion that she just offered, like, oh, we're cooperating this event, I mean, this has just been, I think, a fairly elaborate partisan effort coordinated by the White House and House Republicans to try to run out the clock and say there's really no there there. | ||
| Plenty of folks for you to chat with. | ||
| Start first with Jane out of Washington, Line for Republicans. | ||
| Jane, you're on with Ankush Kadori of Politico magazine. | ||
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Yes, I'm just reading in a commentary that the Democrats released the emails that were redacted, but the person's name that was redacted was Miss Guthrie, who had exonerated Trump verbally many times in the press. | |
| So I think it's a specious kind of a chase. | ||
| And I also think that one of the reasons the Justice Department doesn't want it released is that there are so many powerful people that have been blackmailed that it may really, really be damaging to our government overall for both sides. | ||
| You know, I think that your caller makes a good point about really a broader point about like, don't just assume that what you have seen in an email, even particularly with a redaction, means that you can definitively interpret what it means. | ||
| I think that that is a really important lesson. | ||
| I have to say this is a lesson in life, too, right? | ||
| I've seen this not just in my own professional capacity, but I see this like internally at organizations I've worked with. | ||
| Someone gets their hands on an email or a message and they say, oh my gosh, they think they figured it all out. | ||
| And it's like, no, no, no, no, you have to, you've got to ask roughly 1,000 questions before you jump to your conclusions. | ||
| With respect to the concern that people have that your caller referenced about implicating sort of other third parties or whether or not you think that's a concern or simply a fact that would happen as a result of the disclosure, I will say one thing, | ||
| one compromise position you could take is that the Trump administration should at least produce the references to Trump in the material that they have gathered since he is the sitting president and he committed last year in an interview with Fox News to declassify and release the Epstein files. | ||
| So I think he ought to be held to a slightly different standard. | ||
| He is the sitting president. | ||
| To Tommy in Tennessee Independent, good morning. | ||
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Good morning. | |
| I was just wanting to speak my viewpoint that if there was anything incriminating against Donald Trump in the Epstein files, it would have been brought out by the Biden administration for the 2024 election because it seems like now that's what they're trying to do, try to find something that would throw the president of the United States in a bad light. | ||
| Now, these reporters and mainstream media, you can tell that they are also trying to do their best to put the president to a bad light. | ||
| Now, I think you should hold respect for the office, no matter who's in office. |