Zelensky Rejects Trump's Ukraine Proposal; What Happened to the Epstein Files? Plus: Richard Medhurst Facing Criminal Charges in UK for Israel Reporting
Zelensky rejects Trump's Ukraine proposal, prolonging the Ukraine war. Then: Are the Epstein files being buried because of ties to Israeli intelligence? Finally: Journalist Richard Medhurst on his arrest in the UK under a terrorism law. ------------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight, the war in Ukraine.
Remember that?
Grinds on with the U.S. continuing to fund and arm Ukraine.
To its credit, the Trump administration is engaged in very serious efforts, by far more serious than anything tried by their predecessors or anyone in the EU to negotiate an end to this war.
There have been some significant, if not encouraging, new developments in these negotiations, which we want to tell you about and break down the significance of.
Then, one of Donald Trump's campaign promises throughout 2024 was to release a series of investigative files in the government's control that should have been released long ago.
They made good on these promises when releasing much of the files about the JFK assassination, with the files on the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, by all accounts, reportedly on their way.
What has not been released, however, are the ample files in the U.S. government's possession regarding the serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
One of the most consequential questions about that case, perhaps the only real consequential question left, is whether Jeffrey Epstein worked for or with foreign intelligence agencies or even domestic ones in operating his pedophile ring.
Back in early February, Attorney General Pam Bondi made a very melodramatic showing.
Trumpeting the fact that she was now releasing what she called the Epstein files, invited a bunch of right-wing influencers to the White House and gave them binders, only for it all to turn out that those documents she gave them had been long ago released to the public.
They contained absolutely nothing new.
Now we're being told, to the extent the White House commented on it at all, that the holdup is that multi-agency redactions are needed to "protect national security."
But other than trying to obscure or hide the involvement of intelligence agencies, whether our own or a foreign country, it's hard to see what possible redactions would be required before these files can be released to the public.
We'll review the relevant facts on these Epstein files, which sort of have seemed to have disappeared from the news cycle, I think by intention, and see what it is that is really going on.
And then finally, independent journalist Richard Medhurst has built Quite an audience through intrepid reporting on matters such as the Julian Assange saga, the U.S. dirty war in Syria, and especially over the last 18 months, lots of reporting on the Israeli destruction of Gaza.
Medhurst, a British citizen, lives in Austria.
But last August, he was arrested at Heathrow Airport in London under anti-terrorism laws and had his phones and other electronic devices seized in connection with the reporting he's been doing on Israel.
The criminal investigation is actually escalating, and he faces a very real possibility of being charged with terrorism crimes.
Richard will be with us tonight to discuss the latest attack on this genuinely chilling assault on basic press freedoms that are taking place in the EU.
Now, before we get to all of that, we have a few delightful programming notes.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update starting right now.
So I want to talk about the events in Ukraine.
That is the plan for the show, and I'm about to go do that.
But before I get to it, I just want to share, I want to expel a little bit of frustration.
And irritation with the fact that every day now there is a new assault on press freedom on American campuses and elsewhere in American society in the name of protecting Israel.
So many of them, in fact, that we cannot possibly report on them all.
We can't possibly keep up with them.
Earlier today it was reported, for example, that a singer who had been invited to perform at Cornell University had her invitation officially rescinded by the school administration.
Because she had, in the past, criticized Israel in a way that was, of course, deemed pro-Hamas or anti-Semitic or whatever, and now she has had her show literally canceled.
Remember all the right-wing grievance about cancel culture?
This is actually continuously...
Cancel culture.
There have been other pro-Palestinian speakers or other people who have come to speak about the war in Gaza who have been similarly uninvited because the climate has already been successfully created where people are afraid now to have speak on campus.
Anyone who might criticize Israel because they know that the hammer, the federal government, will come smashing down upon them if they are perceived to allow any criticism of Israel on their campus.
And in the course of all of this reporting I've been doing, I've been appearing in a lot of places, doing a lot of interviews, and as usual, having exchanges of people online in good faith trying to explain what it is that's happening and to watch the number of people who are on the right,
who are conservatives, who are Trump supporters, be so willing to justify this systemic censorship of an unprecedented kind.
I spent a lot of time during the Biden administration talking about and denouncing the Biden administration's pressure on big tech to remove dissent from the Internet.
That was an extremely grave assault on free press, on free speech.
What we have here in so many ways is so much worse.
Talking about people being swept up off the street by plainclothes agents and put into prison for the crime of writing op-eds that are critical of Israel.
Having our most important and our finest academic research institution stripped of funding, including people trying to find treatments and cures for diseases if they don't sign loyalty pledges saying they won't boycott Israel or if there's a perception at all that they aren't loyal to Israel.
We have the Trump administration imposing expanded hate speech codes on campuses just to protect Israel.
And American Jewish students and nobody else and even demanding that Middle East Studies programs and their curricula be put under receivership so that the Trump administration is satisfied that there's enough pro-Israel content being taught as part of this curricula and not too much pro-Palestinian content.
We're talking here not about seventh grade or third grade or ninth grade.
We're talking about adults and colleges where academic freedom is supposed to reign.
And watching the number of Trump supporters who have spent the last 10 years pretending to believe in free speech and being outraged by censorship.
I know I've said this before.
I'm just kind of venting a little bit.
Hearing from them so often with the most obscene justifications for why this censorship is permissible.
We're just making up outright lies about the people who are being deported, saying they harass Jewish students or attack Jewish students or vandalize buildings or occupied buildings, none of which is true for the cases that we're discussing, is just, I don't even have the words for it any longer,
just the level of fraud that this movement is guilty of from having branded themselves in a certain way for a full decade only to switch on a dime.
In the face of one of the most systemic censorship regimes I've ever seen in my life, one that threatens academic freedom and free speech throughout the country, is really quite nauseating, really quite sickening.
And it doesn't seem like it has any end in sight because the more the Trump administration does it, and every day there's new measures being announced.
Yesterday, of course, we talked about the new NIH guidelines designed to deny funding and grants to medical researchers if they don't sign a pledge saying they don't participate in a boycott of Israel.
Every time a new measure is announced, Trump supporters feel even more compelled to support their leader, to support their president, and they invent new theories all the time, which, by the way, aren't really even new.
They sound exactly like the left liberal censorship theories that they spent the last decade mocking in order to support it more and more.
And you have more censorship being fortified every day.
From an administration that just three months ago was ushered in based on an explicit promise to end censorship, J.D. Vance went to Europe to castigate them for not sharing in American values of free speech by imposing political censorship.
And yet the censorship against people who are critical of Israel could not be any greater.
And we're going to have a journalist on, Richie Medhurst, in just a little bit, who is actually under very serious and active criminal investigation.
In the EU for having reported negatively on Israel.
That's something, of course, J.D. Vance submitted when he went to the EU to scold them about their censorship.
So it's just really remarkable to see.
We're not going to report on it specifically tonight of all the venting that I just did on it, but it was something that I just had to remark upon.
All right, let's get to Ukraine, which is the first topic that we had actually planned to do, because...
This war, even though we don't talk about it anymore, and I don't mean we specifically on the show, sometimes we do, but I mean we collectively, we as a country, just kind of a war that goes on.
People are dying still every day.
People are being bombed.
People are being chased with drones.
There are all kinds of missiles being launched continuously.
The dangers of escalation continue to unfold.
And I have to say, the Trump administration, despite my many critiques of much of what they're doing, deserves a lot of credit because they really are following through in a very aggressive way in an attempt to bring about an end to this war diplomatically.
And the reality of the war, whether people like it or not, is that Russia is winning the war.
Russia has been dominating the war.
Ukraine has far more of a reason to end the war than Russia does.
And, of course, whatever diplomatic solution, whatever diplomatic resolution is achieved will be more favorable to Russia than it is to Ukraine.
And yet we're already seeing people accusing Trump of being some sort of surrender, having surrendered to the Russians or capitulating to the Russians because the proposals that they're talking about, which are the only ones that have any chance of ending the war.
Have terms that are favorable to Russia in them for the obvious reason that Russia is winning and Russia would never accept terms not favorable to it.
And it seems as though many of the terms that Zelenskyy is going to end up having to accept are ones he's refusing to accept and Trump's frustration with Ukraine is growing and growing and we'll see where that ends up.
leading first of all here from CNN earlier today Trump administration is ready to recognize the Russian control of Crimea as part of a framework to end
Now, as you might recall, Crimea had for centuries been part of Russia.
It ended up being part of Ukraine through a series of complicated transactions that Putin has said many times he regards as an error.
In 2014, when the United States government with Victoria Nuland and John McCain and Chris Murphy, the whole gang went over and helped overthrow the democratically elected government in Kiev that was more leaning toward Moscow than to the EU,
and that was the reason we overthrew them and instead installed a much more pro-EU, pro-US government in response to having the EU and the US.
so now dominant inside Ukraine on the other side of the Russian border that they were even
The Russians took Crimea, an extremely geostrategically important spot.
It's what gives them access to the Black Sea.
And the reality is that the people of Crimea, nobody doubts this, overwhelmingly, I'm talking about 90%, identify as Russian, not as Ukrainian.
They are far more loyal to the Russians.
They want to be governed by Moscow and not by Kiev.
No possibility that the Russians will ever give back Crimea, especially with NATO so involved in Ukraine.
And so what the Trump administration is doing is simply saying that we, the United States, will recognize that Crimea is part of Russia.
Not that the Ukrainians have to, not that the Europeans have to, just that we, the Americans, will.
Because the reality is that Crimea is never going back to Ukraine.
And yet that's something Zelensky refuses to accept.
Quote, Adding that quote,
for us, the red line is the recognition of the Ukrainian temporarily occupied territories as Russian.
We will not go for it.
I have news for Zelensky.
Russia is occupying and controlling Ukraine and those other provinces in eastern Ukraine, whether he likes it or not.
He may wish there was a fantasy world where Ukraine was going to control it, but there is no world in which that will ever happen.
And so obviously the Americans are trying to work within the Russian reality and the Ukrainian reality when you try and negotiate a war.
And Steve Whitcoff, by all accounts, has been doing an excellent job of genuinely trying to foster an end to this war.
And what he has been saying and others have been saying is that you need to understand things from the Russian perspective and the Ukrainian perspective to understand what's possible on a deal, which is basic diplomacy.
The Biden administration won't even talk to Russia.
The EU won't even talk to Russia.
So the Trump administration is doing so.
In a way that will advance this diplomacy.
According to Financial Times, also today, Vladimir Putin offers to halt Ukraine invasion along the current front line.
The U.S. floats recognition of Russian annexation of Crimea as a peace plan efforts continue.
The Russian president told Steve Witkoff, Trump's special envoy, during a meeting in St. Petersburg this month that Moscow could relinquish its claims to areas of four partly occupied Ukrainian regions that remain under Kiev's control.
Three of the people said the U.S. have since floated ideas for a possible settlement that includes Washington's recognition of the U.S.
Washington is recognizing Russian ownership of Ukrainians' Crimea Peninsula, the people added, as well as at least acknowledging the Kremlin's de facto control over the parts of the four regions it currently holds.
The proposal is the first formal indication Putin has given since the war's early months that three years ago, three years ago, that Russia could step back from its maximalist demands to end the invasion.
This has always been the obvious outline of some kind of resolution.
We've been talking about it on this show for three years now.
The real Russian objective was never to take over all of Ukraine.
That might have been their view at the very beginning.
I even doubt that.
Their concern was with these eastern provinces of Ukraine, where the majority of people, the vast majority of people, are Russian-speaking and ethnic Russian.
And the perception was, correctly, That the Kyiv government had become increasingly brutalizing and abusive of their rights, had disregarded their cultural history and their religious traditions.
And that was why there was a low-grade civil war, basically a war for independence going back to 2014 between these eastern provinces, these provinces in eastern Ukraine and Kyiv.
And the Russians, on top of wanting to preserve and protect the rights of the people who live there, also want that as a buffer zone.
So if they have these four provinces, it's not as easy for NATO to go up to the Russian border.
And that was always the solution.
NATO doesn't go in Ukraine, and Crimea stays with Russia, and these four provinces have some sort of semi-autonomous or autonomous status, depending on what they want in a referendum, or join Russia and become part of Russia.
And that gives the Russians the buffer zone and the security that they need that Ukraine won't be in NATO as well.
And then Ukraine gets some sort of ambiguous security guarantee from some combination of Europe and the U.S. This is what the kind of negotiation looked at like at the beginning of the war back in March and April of 2022 when the two sides were very close to negotiating an agreement that could have averted this war.
And that was when Boris Johnson and Victoria Nuland swept in and told Zelensky...
That under no circumstances can he agree to that resolution, and they will promise to give him all the money and weapons he needs to fight the Russians until the very end, and those are the people who have all this blood on their hands.
Now, it is always strange that Zelensky is in this position where he depends upon the United States, depends upon the Trump administration to fund his war effort, to give him the weapons he needs to even be able to stay competitive in this war.
And when that happens, when you're dependent, kind of a vassal state, and that state tells you, look, we're not going to continue to support this war.
Here's an agreement that we think is fair for you.
And you keep telling that country, we don't want this.
We're not going to accept this.
As Trump told Zelensky in the White House, you don't have that many cards to play.
And yet Zelensky continues to act as though he's the one dictating the terms.
Here from the Wall Street Journal earlier today, Ukraine's Zelensky pushes back on a U.S. peace plan.
The Ukrainian president said his country would never recognize Russian control of Crimea, a key Russian demand.
Quote, Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea, Zelensky said at a press conference here on Tuesday.
There's nothing to talk about here.
This is against our constitution.
Zelensky's dismissal upends Trump's latest gambit to halt the war in Ukraine, now in its fourth year, and casts new uncertainty on the future of the relationship between Kiev and Washington, which Trump has made conditional on a quick deal.
Zelensky said Russia should agree to a ceasefire before further talks to demonstrate, quote, serious steps and not childishness.
The Russians have always said they're never going to agree to a ceasefire without a full deal being in place that would just allow the Ukrainians to rearm.
And the only way to meaningfully end this war is to have an actual resolution that will end the war as opposed to just freezing the conflict.
Now, when Zelensky said, and if you see the video of him saying it, he's very kind of arrogant about it.
He's very definitive about it.
He's saying, look, we're not ever going to accept.
That Crimea belongs to Russia.
And note that the peace plan put forward by the Trump administration didn't even require Ukraine to acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia.
Who cares if Ukraine acknowledges that or not?
That's still the reality whether Ukraine accepts it or not.
The peace plan was that the United States would recognize Crimea as being Russian.
But the defiance of Zelensky yet again When he depends upon the Trump administration of the United States and the American taxpayer to fund his war was something that, to put it mildly, did not sit well with Trump,
and he had one of those reactions he's had to Zelensky in the past.
Quote, this is what he posted on True Social earlier today.
Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky is boasting on the front page of the Wall Street Journal that, quote, Ukraine will not legally recognize the occupation of Crimea.
There's nothing to talk about here.
This statement is very harmful to the peace negotiations with Russia in that Crimea was lost years ago under the auspices of President Barack Hussein Obama and is not even a point of discussion.
Nobody is asking Zelensky to recognize Crimea as Russian territory, but if he wants Crimea, why didn't they fight for it 11 years ago when it was handed over to Russia without a shot being fired?
The area also houses for many years before, quote, the Obama handover, many Russian submarine bases.
It's inflammatory statements like Zelensky's that makes it so difficult to settle this war.
He has nothing to boast about.
The situation for Ukraine is dire.
He can have peace or he can fight for another three years before losing the whole country.
I have nothing to do with Russia, but have much to do with wanting to save, on average, 5,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers a week who are dying for no reason whatsoever.
The statement made by Zelensky today will do nothing but prolong the, quote, killing field, and nobody wants that.
We are very close to a deal, but the man with, quote, no cards to play.
I look forward to being able to help Ukraine and Russia get out of this complete and total mess that would never have started if I were president.
Again, it is true that the United States, independent of who you think is right or wrong or what you think the right outcome is, has a very strong interest in ending this war.
We're paying for the war.
Not all of it.
The Europeans are paying for a lot of it as well.
Our stockpiles are being depleted, especially when we also have to feed the Israelis' arms, and now we're using a ton of arms ourselves to bomb Yemen.
We have this rapidly depleting stockpile.
And the American government should have as its primary concern the interests of the American people in the United States.
And it has never been in the interests of the American people, and I've said this from the very start, to fight a war with Russia, even a proxy war over who rules various provinces of eastern Ukraine.
Whether they stay under the governance of Kiev, whether they end up autonomous or semi-autonomous, whether they end up— With Moscow, where most of the people prefer, what impact does that have on the American people, on their material well-being at all?
And the Trump administration seems to be reaching the end of their rope in terms of their willingness to allow Zelensky to act as though he has equal leverage in any of this when he clearly doesn't.
Here's the New York Times yesterday.
Marco Rubio is skipping Ukraine talks.
As Zelensky rebuffs the U.S. on Crimea, We'll still meet in London on Wednesday to continue hammering out a ceasefire proposal.
But the back-to-back developments are a double blow, raising fresh questions about how much progress is being made toward winding down the three-year war.
Mr. Rubio left the meeting with Ukrainian and European officials in Paris, sounding an even more ominous note.
Quote, we're not going to continue with this endeavor for weeks and months on end, he told reporters.
The State Department said that General Greg Kellogg, Mr. Trump's special envoy to Ukraine, would still attend the London meeting, but it is not clear whether Steve Whitcoff, the president's envoy to Russia, will be there.
Now, here is a headline about the reaction not only of Trump, but also J.D. Vance, to what is clearly becoming their increasing frustration with Zelensky.
From CBS News earlier today, Donald Trump blasts Zelensky as J.D. Vance threatens to, quote, walk away from the peace deal.
Quote, we've issued a very explicit proposal to both the Russians and the Ukrainians, and it's time for them to either say yes or for the United States to walk away from this process.
Vance told reporters in India where he is on a four-day visit.
Now, when JD Vance says it's time for us to walk away, it's unclear whether he means we're just going to walk away from the peace process and not try and resolve the war diplomatically any longer, which Ukraine would love if that meant that the United States would continue to arm and fund Ukraine in its war against Russia,
or whether JD Vance means We're going to walk away in the sense that we're just going to wash our hands of this war, which is probably what the United States should be doing if Ukraine, and Zelensky in particular, continue to impede a diplomatic resolution of the war.
But given all the various conflicts taking place, the green light that the Trump administration gave to the Israelis to destroy Gaza even further, The occupation of the Israelis have increasing amounts of territory,
both in Syria and Lebanon, their ethnic cleansing taking place with very little attention being paid in the West Bank, the resumption and escalation of the Biden bombing campaign by Trump in Yemen, and the threats that are being issued on a daily basis now to Iran,
ones that we covered at length last night.
It's absolutely imperative to American national security that this war come to an end, to financial security and economic security and military national security as well.
And if the Trump administration continues to perceive that Zelensky simply doesn't want to end the war, because he has been told repeatedly by the U.S. that they will give him whatever he wants, at some point the only solution is to withdraw that funding,
withdraw that.
The Trump administration hasn't wanted to do yet, because if they did that, it would make a negotiation impossible.
Russia would have zero incentive to do so.
But at some point, if the perception continues to be accurately that the impediment to ending this war is Zelensky, that will become the only outcome.
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Remember the Epstein files?
The Epstein files, those are the things that Donald Trump spent 2024 promising to release, and those were the files that were supposedly released back in February when Pam Bondi invited a bunch of right-wing influencers to the White House and handing them big,
flamboyant notebooks that said on them Epstein files, and they were all smiling, thinking that they had an exclusive.
On all this good stuff that was for the first time going to be publicly revealed.
And as it turned out, the whole thing was a sham.
All these documents had been long ago made public in a whole variety of ways through various litigations and FOIA requests on the party media outlets.
There was absolutely nothing new in any of them.
And here is Pam Bondi talking about that on Fox News on February 21st, 2025, which is basically two full months ago now.
OJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients.
Will that really happen?
It's sitting on my desk right now to review.
That's been a directive by President Trump.
I'm reviewing that.
I'm reviewing JFK files, MLK files.
That's all in the process of being reviewed because that was done at the directive of the president from all of these agencies.
So have you seen anything that you said, oh my gosh?
Not yet.
Okay.
Now, the whole issue of the client list and the like, I understand why that gets people interested and excited.
But the reality is that we've already seen so much evidence of the people with whom Jeffrey Epstein was cavorting.
People just of the highest status and wealth throughout the world that basically brought down Prince Andrew of the British royal family.
We know Bill Clinton and Donald Trump both had extensive relationships, social relationships with Jeffrey Epstein, which doesn't mean that they were on his island or having sex with underage girls.
But we know all the people who have been associated with Jeffrey Epstein for a long time.
There may be some client lists, although Pam Bondi says I haven't seen anything shocking so far.
But to me, that's not really the most interesting question, just because of how much disclosure there's already been around.
Who's been on those flights?
Who's been to the island?
We pretty much know the answers to all of those questions.
To me, the much more interesting question is the geopolitical one.
Obviously, when you have the most powerful people on the planet being put into compromising positions on Jeffrey Epstein's island, on his plane, in his mansion in Palm Beach,
in his mansion in the middle of Manhattan, And we know that there's all kinds of tapes and recordings that have been made that gives enormous amounts of blackmail power over these people.
The questions of whether foreign governments, whether intelligence agencies in our country or others, in some way exploited that information, helped arrange it.
There's always been a question of what was the real source of Jeffrey Epstein's massive wealth.
We're talking here about a kind of wealth that is a multi-billionaire wealth.
He wasn't just somebody who was extremely wealthy.
There's zillions of people like those.
There's all sorts of ways to become wealthy on that level.
We're talking about somebody who had just the kind of wealth that only billionaires have.
Constant flying jets, massive jets that were private that he took everywhere.
80 to 100 million dollar properties all over the world.
The ability to purchase a private island, to donate massive sums of money to gain entrance into all sorts of— where did that money come from?
Nobody really has ever been able to answer that.
We know a couple of things, including his relationship with somebody named Les Wexler, who himself is a multi-billionaire, with whom Jeffrey Epstein worked.
But there's no real expertise, identifiable expertise, that Jeffrey Epstein had.
He never did anything on Wall Street that was particularly impressive.
And the question has always been, was there some government, some intelligence agency behind him with whom he was working or for whom he was working to create essentially a honey trap that would give these intelligence agencies knowledge of and therefore power over what a lot of people were doing?
That, to me, is the answer that we don't have any resolution on.
Now, maybe the answer to that is no.
But we really haven't had any sort of Documentation providing guidance on that one way or the other, and we know for certain that these files are in the custody of the U.S. government, which has repeatedly promised to release them, pretended to release them back in February,
although they didn't.
And the question is, where are the answers to that question?
When will we get the answers to that question, if ever?
And what we're being told right now is that the reason we can't have them is because there's a lot of redactions that need to take place for national security purposes.
I understand that some of these files would need to be redacted before released.
You don't want to release the names, for example, of victims who haven't been identified, who don't want to be identified, of some of the girls who were sex trafficked.
That'll make sense.
And perhaps you don't even want to release the names of the people who were Jeffrey Epstein associates.
But where you have no evidence they engage in any wrongdoing because that can harm their reputation.
I understand that as well.
But why would there be national security redactions unless Jeffrey Epstein had relationships with foreign governments?
And if Jeffrey Epstein had a relationship with foreign governments, it seems like we could probably narrow down which are the most likely.
And then that leads me to the question of whether or not it's really possible.
But if those answers exist within the files of the U.S. government under the Trump administration, whether we will ever actually see those at all.
And at the very least, we ought to keep up the pressure.
Here was the Department of Justice, the Public Affairs Division, on February 27th of this year, with the title, Attorney General Pam Bondi Releases First Phase of Declassified Epstein Files.
And that was when it turned out that they made a big fanfare out of, oh look, we're pulling our promise, you're getting the Epstein files.
They invited these Twitter influencers to the White House.
Here's Rogan O 'Hanley.
And they posted pictures of themselves.
There they are.
I think that's Taya Ryak, too, the proprietor of Libs of TikTok.
Walking out with their binders.
The binders said, Epstein files.
They showed them to the public.
You see, it's like, the Epstein files.
Look, we got the Epstein files.
We're so happy.
We're so smiley.
We're celebrating.
We're finally going to get the answers.
Look, they're giving it to independent media.
We're right outside the White House.
And there you see the close-up, the Epstein files, phase one.
And it turned out these documents were an absolute joke.
Not a single page that was in them that was previously unseen.
Now Trump has been asked about this on a couple of occasions, including on April 22nd, which was yesterday.
He was in the Oval Office.
I don't know.
Speak to the attorney general about that.
I really don't know.
I know that we've done the RFK.
The Kennedy, Martin Luther King is out there very shortly.
So we'll find out.
And we've really, really announced we're doing them in full transparency.
When we did JFK, people would say, oh, maybe it wasn't all.
It was all.
He's absolutely right about that.
There was a Full disclosure of the JFK files.
Now, there's still some files within the CIA and other places that haven't quite been released.
But the documents they released, they did it in unredacted fashion.
And that's why I have those questions about the Epstein files.
Why are all these redactions necessary for this, but not for the JFK files?
And again, the things that concern me the most are when they start saying that the redactions are for national security purposes.
What possible national security implications are there or aspects are there to the Jeffrey Epstein case unless we're talking about relationships with domestic intelligence agencies or foreign intelligence agencies?
We do have some clues about some of the people, the extremely wealthy people who surrounded Jeffrey Epstein.
Who seemed responsible in some way for his ability to have constructed this very powerful network of highly connected people and what their connections are.
Here from the Middle East Monitor January of 2020, Jeffrey Epstein was blackmailing politicians for Israel's Mossad.
The claims are being made by the alleged former Israeli spy Ari Ben-Manshain in his soon-to-be-released book, Epstein, Dead Man Tells No Tales, in which he said that he was the handler of Ghazain's father,
Robert Maxwell, who was also an Israeli espionage agent and was the one who introduced his daughter and Epstein to Mossad.
The handler, Ben Mishain himself, an Iran-born Israeli businessman who said he worked for Mossad from 1977 to 1987, is a mysterious figure who was arrested in 1989 in the U.S. on charges of arms dealing.
He was acquitted in 1990, however, only after a jury accepted that he was acting on behalf of the Israeli state.
Israel then denied that Munchain had any links with his intelligence services and attempted to distance itself from him, despite the fact that other news reports both in the U.S. and Israel confirmed he was acting on the country's behalf.
The new book, which also speculates that Maxwell may have worked for other governments as a double or triple agent, says that despite reports Epstein and Ghislaine met in the early 1990s in New York that in fact Now,
let me make clear, I'm not endorsing all of this, or any of this.
This has been out in the ether for a long time.
These are very sketchy figures.
But we do know for sure that Robert Maxwell, the publishing tycoon, the British publishing tycoon, who died under very mysterious circumstances, who was the father of Ghazain Maxwell, who was Jeffrey Epstein's Right-hand person who is now serving a long time in prison for helping him traffic young girls,
was a huge supporter of Israel, had all kinds of connections to Israel as well.
When he died here from the Washington Post, November of 1991, Israel gives Robert Maxwell a farewell fit for a hero.
Publisher Robert Maxwell today was given a funeral befitting a national hero by Israel.
The country with which he developed an intimate and sometimes controversial relationship in the last three years of his life, Maxwell, whose body was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean off the Canary Islands last Tuesday after he disappeared from his yacht, was buried late this afternoon in Judaism's most prestigious spot,
the cemetery on Jerusalem's Mount of Olives facing the Western Wall.
His funeral service in Jerusalem's Hall of the People was attended by a host of Israeli politicians led by Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and President Chaim Herzog, who eulogized the self-made tycoon as a, quote, man cast in heroic mold.
Only a week before his death, the volatile owner of the New York Daily News and Britain's Mirror newspaper group became involved in an exchange of lawsuits with author Seymour Hersh.
Who accused Maxwell of working with Israel's Mossad intelligence agency.
Maxwell's death at sea only intensified the speculation in London, where Hirsch promised to produce further revelations of the 68-year-old publisher's clandestine Israeli connections.
That's Ghazain, Maxwell's father.
Now, in the New York Times in 1994, There was this headline, U.S. Author Gets an Apology in Libel Case.
Quote, the out-of-court settlement announced in high court in London also ended a countersuit brought by the author Seymour Hersh and the publisher of Favor and Favor Limited.
The Maxwell lawsuit was prompted by Mr. Hersh's 1991 book, The Samson Option, about Israel's nuclear weapons program.
In yesterday's proceeding, a lawyer for the Mirror Group, which was controlled by Mr. Maxwell before his death in November 1991, Senate acknowledged that Mr. Hersh, quote, is an author of an excellent reputation of the highest integrity who would never write anything
which he did not believe to be true and that he was in this instance fully justified in re-reaching.
That was the end of the lawsuit.
Was heaping this kind of praise on Seymour Hersh as an author of Great Integrity after he had accused Robert Maxwell of having very close ties to Israeli intelligence.
The person who was closest to Jeffrey Epstein was Les Wexler, a big-time Wall Street tycoon and investor, multi-multi-multi-billionaire, unquestionably gave massive amounts of money to Jeffrey Epstein.
Nobody really understood why.
He claimed once it became a scandal that it was because Jeffrey Epstein had developed these extremely innovative techniques to help Les Wexler save huge amounts of tax money, even if that were true.
The amount of wealth Jeffrey Epstein amassed would be nowhere near any kind of rational relationship to that sort of claim.
Les Wexler had a very close relationship to Israel as well.
The Vanity Fair in June of 2021, The Mogul and the Monster, inside Jeffrey Epstein's decades-long relationship with his biggest clients, quote, of the many mysteries that still surround the life and crimes of the notorious financier, the source of his wealth and thus his power may be the greatest.
His longstanding business ties with his most prominent client, billionaire retail magnate Leslie Wexner held the key, quote, during the 1990s, both Epstein and Wexner's profile Wexner's foundation commissioned GOP messaging guru Frank
Luntz to advise American Jewish leaders on how to rally support for Israel.
Quote, for a year, a solid year, you should be invoking the name of Saddam Hussein and how Israel was always behind American efforts to rid the world of this ruthless dictator and liberate their people.
Glunt's recommendation stated, Epstein kept close in that circle of influence.
U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson and Middle East envoy George Mitchell allegedly participated in Epstein's sex ring, according to a lawsuit filed by Guif.
That was the woman who also claimed to have been pimped out, essentially, to Prince Andrew when she was a minor.
That was where that picture of her...
Prince Andrew appeared that basically destroyed his reputation.
Richardson and Mitchell adamantly denied the allegation.
Israel Prime Minister Ed Ehud Baruch was an Epstein confidant.
Epstein invested $1 million in one of Barack's business ventures.
Barack reportedly visited the 66th Street condo building.
Alan Dershowitz told me he once arrived at Epstein's townhouse as Epstein and Barack were wrapping up lunch.
On a chalkboard, Barack had drawn a map of how the West Bank should be divided.
Barack could not be reached for comment, but in 2019, he denied any wrongdoing related to the condo visits.
Here from the Times of Israel, 2019, Netanyahu again goes after Barack for ties to accused billionaire Jeffrey Epstein.
Prime Minister highlights payment to political rival from Wexner Foundation linked to U.S. tycoon who allegedly sex trafficked minors.
The video was published with the headline, quote, What else has sex offender Epstein given to Barack?
According to Netanyahu's video, Epstein manages the Wexner Foundation.
Forbes said he serves as a trustee, and a spokesperson for the institution told the financial news outlet that Les Wexner, founder of the organization, served ties with, severed ties with Epstein over a decade ago.
So we have a lot of Information here that clearly shows that people closest to Jeffrey Epstein themselves were heavily involved in the state of Israel, in supporting the state of Israel,
in having very close operative relationships with Israeli intelligence.
There's also reporting people claim that Jeffrey Epstein had relationships with Gulf state intelligence agencies, including the Emiratis.
Potentially the Qataris and the Saudis.
But there's certainly enough here to wonder, and again, I'm not in any way suggesting that this is dispositive.
What's dispositive are the records in the possession of the Trump administration.
And what concerns me, aside from how long it's taking, is the fact that we're being told that there has to be redactions made for national security.
And for me, If there's some secret client list that we haven't seen before that contains a bunch of names of people who had sex with Jeffrey Epstein's girls, of course, I guess we should see that, especially if it contains the names of powerful people.
I don't think that's the sort of thing that has been concealed given all the litigation.
But I do think what is substantive and what is very possibly...
Out there in documentation is the extent to which Jeffrey Epstein had ties to intelligence agencies, our own or others, and to what extent these operations were part of those intelligence agencies.
And I guess I should say that I have some doubt, given everything we've seen.
In the Trump administration about the first three months and the importance of Israel and the Gulf states in everything that they're doing, that if such documents exist, they would actually ever see the light of day.
But given that people have basically stopped talking about the Epstein documents, we thought it was time to remind people that they're still out there, that they have not been released, that there was that fake showing of releasing them at the beginning of the administration that resulted in nothing.
The only way to make sure that these documents get released and get released in a form that is actually meaningful is to keep the pressure up.
The only way to make sure that these documents get released is the only way to make sure that these documents are available.
I know I talk about this sometimes, but it really is true that so many people I know who, as they get older, start thinking that they've learned everything there is to learn.
We even have that cliche that captures this sort of thinking, which is you can't teach an old dog new tricks.
I always try and convince people, and I've actually tried to learn.
Myself and teach myself and make sure I remember that actually your brain is always growing and is always capable of learning new things.
And it's not only possible but important to continue to do that for the health of your brain, for the satisfaction that you get from continuing to expand your brain.
There's so much out there, no matter how much you study, no matter how many places you've been, that you just don't know about that are really worth knowing.
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And so I had a lot of fun seeing how it interacted, for example, with the late Baroque period.
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Richard Madhurst is a truly independent journalist and political commentator who was born in Damascus, Syria.
He regularly hosts...
Live broadcast discussing all sorts of political controversies from around the globe, U.S. politics, international relations in the Middle East, rooted in an anti-imperialist worldview.
In my view, he's become one of the most knowledgeable journalists on a wide variety of issues, including multipolarity.
And he covered the Assange trial, as well as anybody I know.
He's also been someone who has covered the civil war for the last six, seven years, the dirty war from the United States in Syria, where he obviously...
He has ties to.
And for the last several years, two years at least, his focus primarily has been on what a lot of our focus has been, which is on the Israeli war in Gaza.
He's on Patreon, YouTube.
We have become fans of him before many people knew him.
I reached out to him.
We've had him on our show several times.
And we're here to talk about a particularly disturbing case where he is now facing not just the threat but the very real possibility of criminal prosecution.
In the EU and in the UK as a result of the reporting that he's been doing on Israel and not just prosecution, but prosecution under terrorism laws.
Richard, I wish we were seeing you under better circumstances, but we really appreciate your taking the time to talk to us.
We had you on back in August, I think it was, when you were actually arrested at Heathrow Airport.
And, of course, there's always a little personal resonance for me because, as you know, my husband was detained at Heathrow under these anti-terrorism laws.
I really got to understand how chilling they were, although his case never went nearly as far as yours has.
For people who didn't watch that, who hasn't been following your case, before we get to the most recent developments, which are even more chilling, talk about, just as a reminder, a kind of summary way, what happened back then and why.
Yeah, thanks, Glenn, for having me on.
And, you know, when that happened to David, that was the first time that I also got to understand, you know, what this Schedule 7 was, what these terrorism laws were.
And, yeah, so I landed at Heathrow, and they didn't let anyone disembark.
They, like, called me to the front of the plane.
And I thought it was a Schedule 7, which is when they detain you.
And it turned out to be, like, a full arrest.
Like, they put me in cuffs.
They jailed me for 24 hours.
And they didn't use Schedule 7, they used Section 12 1A.
So that was like the first time they've ever used that against a journalist.
And the reason it's so chilling is because if you look at the law, it kind of is very broad.
It's very, very broad.
So, you know, if you give the impression or, you know, you say something that could be completely factual but makes it sound like, you know, a lawyer can twist into you supporting X or Y. They can arrest you and charge you and put you in jail for it.
And that's why it's so chilling for someone who's a journalist to be arrested because then you're basically being in prison for doing your job.
And they questioned me for about two hours the next day.
So I had no idea why I was even there.
I was put in this nasty cell.
And then they released me on bail.
And I've been on bail ever since.
And they've been extending it every three months.
So I have to go back on May 15th.
For now, unless they decide to charge me or to extend it again or to drop it.
And that's almost nine months now that I've been under investigation for so-called terrorism.
And, you know, it's really stifled my work and it stopped me from being able to do my job because if reporting is now a criminal offence, you know, I mean, what's next?
And we saw what happened with Julian.
Julian was also...
Yeah, attacked and put in jail under a different political charge, which was espionage.
And I feel like they've decided to now use terrorism, which is also political, against me and try and make an example out of me because of my reporting on the genocide in Gaza.
So this is an important distinction, and I want to emphasize that you alluded to it, which is, in the case of my husband, who was detained in Heathrow...
During the Snowden reporting, when he was passing through on his way back from Germany to come to Rio, he was detained under Schedule 7, so he wasn't officially arrested.
This was a provision that says if you come to the airport and you have some sort of suspicion of terrorist activity, you can be detained and questioned.
They seized his electronic devices, and yet at the end of the— It was supposed to be a nine-hour period of detention.
You can go to the court and convert it to an arrest.
And they kept threatening that they would, but they didn't.
They ended up letting him go, primarily because it became such a big diplomatic scandal.
But because they let him go and they didn't arrest him the way they did with you, and yours became a more serious case, he was able to sue.
And in the course of suing, they were forced to say why it is that they detained him.
And they said it was because of his work with the Snowden.
In other words, they had accused him of somehow being a suspect in a terrorism case as a result of the work he was doing with myself and Laura Poitras and The Guardian when it came to journalism.
Have you had any sort of clear explanation about what the basis was for your arrest and for this ongoing investigation?
Do you know for certain why this is?
No, I really don't.
I mean, they obviously hinted at things that they were upset about during the questioning, which I'm not allowed to talk about.
But honestly, I can't tell you 100% why I was arrested.
I still think that they kind of just, they got mad at me because of my job.
They even made a point that I have a large number of followers, and they were showing me my YouTube channel and my Twitter and commenting on how...
How big my reach is.
And making it very clear that basically this was the reason I was a menace.
Why else would you bring this up?
So the point is basically that I'm a bad influence on society or something.
So I think this was really the basis of it.
But I'm sure there are other things that they couldn't necessarily arrest me for that annoyed them.
For example, a few weeks before I got arrested, I did this massive investigation on Israeli athletes, you know, and the football teams, the national football team, the Olympic team, because the Russians had got banned within four days of the Ukraine war, but the Israelis hadn't.
And so I showed through.
You know, the whole social media, how all of these athletes were saying genocidal things.
So I thought maybe that angered them.
Maybe the fact that I covered the, you know, this gang rape that was happening in the State Aiman detention facility.
I think it was all of these things.
But again, it doesn't mean I deserve to be arrested.
But I think it's in general my reporting on that and perhaps my reporting on Julian Assange's case as well.
Maybe that angered the UK and US authorities.
So I think it's a mix of these things.
And yeah, they...
They certainly escalated it to an arrest.
And I think everybody else who had come through Heathrow, even other journalists, they had only been, well, only in quotation marks, been detained.
And with Schedule 7, as they did to your husband, to David, they forced you to answer all the questions and hand over your electronics.
With me, I was able to no comment, the interview, and...
They, nevertheless, made me give my electronics.
And, as a matter of fact, I might face a second case using that because I refuse to give my password.
So, this is another law.
It's called REPA.
And it's just as oppressive as the Terrorism Act.
And, you know, if they go to a judge and they get a court order, and you still refuse to give them the passwords, you can go to prison for, like, two to five years automatically.
And I refuse to give them the passwords because they...
They took my phones, these are journalistic tools, and I'm not going to compromise the safety of sources, acquaintances, and other people.
I just can't.
It's an ethical obligation, so that's why I refuse.
You know, one of the reasons I'm asking is because...
Well, I remember, I think I really did start watching you on YouTube.
I found your show when you still had like something like 5,000 subscribers.
It was really at the beginning.
I mean, sometimes people come and say, oh, I've been reading your work since your unclaimed territory blog way before Snowden, way before Salon even.
And I always feel like, oh, this is like one of the hardcore original viewers of my show.
I kind of feel like that with you.
And one of the things that attracted me to your show is that you are extremely passionate.
You don't hold back at all, but it's always very, very fact-based.
But to the kind of, I don't know, especially on a topic that people consider sensitive, like Israel and Gaza, you use language that a lot of people would regard as intemperate.
You don't really dilute what it is that you're feeling.
And when you're talking about something like the Israeli destruction of Gaza in particular, I think that is what is appropriate.
But it means that you probably do stand out to a government like the UK.
As opposed to a bunch of other people who are speaking critically of Israel and Gaza in sort of more restrained tones.
But what's really concerning me about your case is that there is this ongoing, this kind of increasing tendency to equate criticism of Israel With support for terrorism.
I can't tell you how often, for example, in these cases in the United States where these students are being arrested and snatched off the street and deported, the only thing they're quote-unquote guilty of is protesting the war in Israel.
And in a lot of people's minds, that instantly becomes equated with support for Hamas or support for terrorism, which itself is a crime.
And I'm wondering whether...
And I know there's some legal constraints that you're operating under because you really do have a serious criminal case pending.
But whether the theory seems to be that kind of by being so out there and you've now grown your audience, you have several hundred thousand.
Oh, I think we lost Richard.
Oh, no, you're back, right?
You can hear me?
Yeah.
So you now have several hundred thousand YouTube subscribers that Whether the theory seems to be that by being so vocally denouncing and condemning of the Israeli state,
that in some sense it amounts to support for terrorism, does it seem like that's a theory that is being used to justify your criminal prosecution?
It is.
Yeah, it absolutely is.
So what they did to me in Austria afterwards, where they They continue this case.
So they ambushed me again, you know, not on a plane, but they lured me to immigration.
And you know this thing they've been doing with Mahmoud Khalil in the U.S. where they threatened to rescind his green card.
So about a month before that, they started it with me in Austria.
They told me to come to immigration, to immigration authorities.
And, you know, I'd never been summoned before there in my life.
So I knew something was up.
And they threatened to...
To take away my permanent residency because of my reporting.
And if that wasn't enough, they then had these intelligence agents ambush me with a search warrant.
And I asked them what unit they were.
They told me very explicitly that they're the equivalent of MI5 in Austria.
And they served me with this search warrant.
And they accused me in the warrant of being a Hamas member.
And not just a member, but in the military wing.
They specifically cited the Kassan brigades.
And...
Again, when I heard that, I couldn't help but burst out laughing.
I was like, this must be a dream or something.
This is madness.
And they not only...
You'll be familiar with this, Glenn, in the U.S. legal system.
I think it's called alleged conduct.
So when you add a bunch of narrative in a prosecution to kind of paint someone as a villain, they're not additional charges, but they make you look bad and they can lead to harsher sentencing.
That's what they did in the warrant.
They added these things about rape on October 7 and trying to connect me to those.
So, yeah, they basically equated all of my reporting with not just terrorism, but all of the crimes that they said happened on October 7. And, you know, they not only threatened to take away my residency, but they also accused me of being an actual member of the organization of Hamas.
So, yeah, it's actually gone that far.
It's gone that far, and I'm shocked that they can even subject me to two investigations.
In two countries.
I mean, just because of my reporting.
Again, it's 100% to do with my reporting.
Nothing else.
So, and, you know, the examples they've cited are also outlandish.
Like, one of the things the prosecutor in Vienna says in the warrant is, like, I allegedly showed a video of Hamas fighters eating triangle-shaped desserts.
You know, I don't even know what to say to all this, but I'm really starting to understand that they have a target on my back, and...
You know, just to underscore your point about the way that I'm reporting things, I think that they really just want to stop me from doing my job, put me behind bars, or just kind of like wage lawfare and psychological warfare against me, because I expose...
So I think we-- I don't know if his connection is frozen or if he's going to come back.
We lost him for a second just a little bit ago.
I don't know if we-- Yeah.
So I was going to ask him.
And when he comes back, I'm going to ask him again.
This is the point I wanted to make.
We have actually had a lot of these stories where we've had people come on our show who have been investigated, who have been detained, who have been summoned as a result of their reporting on Israel.
Are you able to hear me now, Richie?
Yeah, I don't know.
Yeah, no, it's fine.
It just seems to be a sketchy internet connection.
But, you know, I was saying just briefly while you were gone, which is that...
A lot of this has become normalized in the sense that I can't even count at this point how many people we've had on our show who report critically on Israel from gray zone, from other places, and they get detained at airports, they get summoned, they've had their houses searched and seized,
they've had their devices taken, and obviously part of this is to create a climate where people are afraid, where they know that if they criticize Israel too, they might end up In these kinds of situations.
But in your case, it seems to have really gone a lot further in that it wasn't just that you had this kind of, you know, intimidating moment at Heathrow.
It clearly is now continuing to the point where you are facing the real prospect that you could be forced to go back to the UK and have to actually confront an indictment and potentially a trial under terrorism laws.
Based on a very kind of vague theory about what you might have done that might have prompted the view that you're in some way supporting Hamas, where is the current situation and what are the choices that you're facing?
Yeah, so they keep extending the investigation every quarter, every three months.
And the police apply for that, and they always get permission, of course.
So that's one option for them, is to keep me in the...
Permanent state of limbo where I can't work properly and they still get to benefit from me being silent and them not having to take it to court and deal with the drama of, you know, an attack on press freedoms and everything that would ensue.
And, yeah, I don't know where I got cut off before, but it's also like the case in Austria where I'm also facing a potential indictment and with them taking away my residency, potentially.
So...
I was saying earlier that they tried that with Khalil in the U.S., but about a month before ICE agents took him, they ambushed me in Vienna.
They told me to come to immigration authorities, and they threatened to take away my residency, my permanent residency, because of my reporting.
Like, no other reason.
And then I got ambushed with a search warrant by these intelligence agents, and the prosecutor accused me of being a Hamas member.
So they escalated it, not just from...
"supporting Hamas," but now to actually being a member of Hamas and being a member of the armed military wing.
They specifically say that in the first paragraph of the warrant, which is insane, beyond insane.
And I tried to explain to them that I'm Christian.
They don't allow Christians in Hamas.
And, you know, their response is, we're just following orders.
It's up to us.
We're just executing the warrant.
You know, and they came in here in my studio, in my home.
They ransacked the place.
I mean, they did everything but rob me.
You know, like, it took thousands of euros' worth of gear.
Every computer I've owned, every piece of gear I've bought since I started this job.
And I think that was another attempt to kneecap me.
You know, similarly to how in Heathrow they took my microphones, like analog wired microphones.
What are you going to investigate with an analog microphone?
It's just a screw with you to stop you from working.
So I think that was a very clear sequel to what they've done in Heathrow.
And now they're trying to corner me so that they either put me in jail in England or they put me in jail here or make my life hell in both countries.
And it's beyond an escalation.
It's just madness, frankly.
Yeah, and even if it doesn't end up going to those extremes, and there's by no means a guarantee that it won't, just the intimidation alone, the fact that you have to constantly have this on your mind, It automatically detracts from the work that you're able to do,
but it also, again, is intended by design to send a signal to other people who are similarly critical of Israel in a similar way within the EU that if you think you can say what you want about Israel, you better think again, because we will use the criminal force of law to harass you in very serious ways and even threaten you with imprisonment.
It's actually amazing.
How quickly these things get normalized and the fact that it's gotten this far in your case with very little mainstream media attention, of course, needless to say, just gives you a kind of sense for how...
How decayed things have become on the press freedom front when it comes to this issue?
In terms of people who might want to help with your—I'm sure you have defense costs.
I'm sure you have other costs in terms of the things that they've taken.
How is it that people can help you and follow your work as well?
I have a GoFundMe set up.
I don't know the link exactly, but patreon.com /richardmedhurst, that's where people can also donate.
And I'll have updates about my case on my Twitter.
So just look up Richard Medhurst on Twitter and you'll find my account.
And yeah, just a short parenthesis on press coverage.
The British press, like six months later, haven't said a word about what happened to me.
They didn't report on the UN letter that was sent to Keir Starmer as well, signed by four UN special rapporteurs.
And the Austrian press at least covered the raid that happened to me, and they covered it in a more or less balanced or neutral way.
So I just thought I'd say that because I think it once again underscores how sold out the whole UK press establishment is.
Yeah, no question about it.
Well, you know we're here for you.
Whenever you need to come on, want to come on, want to talk about anything, we're definitely here for you.
We are rooting for you and supporting you.
I really regard your case as a serious threat to press freedom, but one that unfortunately is becoming increasingly common.
I wish I could say it's so operational and so extraordinary, but it really, really isn't.
And it's always great to see you.
I hope you take care of yourself and stay in touch.
