JD Vance: Does SCOTUS Have the Power to Reject the Majority's Will?; The Lingering Epstein Question: Did he Work with Foreign Intel Agencies?; An Insane Online Gambling Scandal from Brazil; And More
JD Vance argues that the court decisions ruling against Trump's deportation policies under the Alien Enemies Act violate the will of the U.S. majority. Glenn unpacks why this argument is a flagrant misinterpretation of the Constitution. Plus: Dan Bongino and Kash Patel say Epstein did in fact kill himself, but critical questions about Epstein's potential ties to foreign intelligence remain unanswered. Finally: Major stories from Brazil including a major online gambling scandal. -------------- 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, there are multiple stories we want to cover in more rapid-fire style than we normally do, beginning with comments that Vice President J.D. Vance made today in an interview with The New York Times' Ross Duthat.
When asked about rulings that courts have been issuing, But regardless of what one thinks of the specific immigration rulings that have been happening recently,
the reality is that the founders, who most feared majoritarian mobs and majoritarian factions, Created both the Bill of Rights and the judiciary specifically to impose limits on what majorities can do, no matter how much support they muster for it.
That's why we're not a pure democracy but a republic.
We'll delve into this vital but often overlooked topic.
Then, the current FBI Director Cash Patel and his deputy Dan Bongino surprised many people, especially their most ardent supporters, in a recent interview on Fox where they stated in the most matter-of-fact, and I would say...
awkward way that they are 100% certain that Jeffrey Epstein did in fact commit suicide in prison that nobody killed him.
What made that particularly odd is that both of them, those two individuals, Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, for years, had been in the media on their shows strongly suggesting exactly the opposite.
But okay, maybe they changed their minds after seeing the files.
That's possible.
But still, the far bigger and still unanswered question about this entire Epstein matters Then,
a Ukrainian opponent of President Zelenskyy was brutally murdered today in a targeted assassination in Madrid, Spain, as Zelenskyy Prepares for elections by seemingly sidelining or potentially killing his adversaries.
We'll examine the implications of that EU-based murder.
Then Jake Tapper continues his humiliation tour trying to justify how he and others like him in media can still possibly pretend that they did not know about Biden's cognitive decline even while most Americans did.
And then we have several short items to share with you regarding Brazil.
Including testimony that Marco Rubio gave today in Congress that are as hilarious and pathetic as they are consequential.
We wanted to share those with you.
Before we get to all of that, just one programming note.
We, as independent media, as you know, rely on the support of our readers and members.
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For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.
All right, so there has been, of course, a series of judicial rulings which have been adverse to the administration almost from the very beginning.
After Donald Trump was inaugurated, first coming from federal district courts, then appellate courts, and after that from even the Supreme Court.
And while the narrative has been that these are all leftist activists, judges, trying to commandeer American policy independent of the election, the reality is that a lot of the judges who have ruled against the Trump administration aren't just conservative judges, but Trump-appointed judges in many cases.
The Supreme Court twice ruled nine to zero against the Trump administration.
One in the question of whether people being deported under the Alien Enemies Act have the right of habeas corpus.
All nine justices in the Supreme Court said they did.
And then also on the question of the Abrego Garcia case where the government admitted that they That's going back to the court based on the apparent decision by the Trump administration to essentially do nothing to try and facilitate his release.
So it's really not true that these are left-wing judges.
Many of them are the most beloved conservative judges, the most beloved Trump-appointed justices throughout the federal system.
In fact, it was a Trump-appointed district court judge which ruled that Trump can't even, to begin with, invoke the Alien Enemies Act because we're not at war sufficiently as the statute envisioned it.
And that has been appalled by an appellate court, too.
So that was a Trump-appointed judge after the Supreme Court by 9-0 ruled that these detainees who are about to be removed have the right to bring that question to court.
Earlier today, or at least I don't know when the interview took place, but it was published earlier today in the New York Times.
Vice President J.D. Vance gave an interview to the New York Times columnist Ross Dufat.
He talked about a lot of things, the new pope, Catholicism.
I always think J.D. Vance is a very smart and interesting figure.
And we'll see that even more, I think, once he is no longer the vice president, but will presumably run for president on his own, and then he's not as bound by...
The Trump administration and their policies to save things, obviously no vice president can come out and contradict the president.
It's really not the job to do that.
But still, he does speak openly and often expresses ideas in a very coherent way.
And he said something today with Ross Dufat about these court rulings, including from the Supreme Court, that I think is very notable because it's a very tendentious argument, if not a false argument, about how our...
American founding, how the system of government was created.
J.D. Vance went to Yale Law School.
He understands the law extremely well.
So let's just take a look at this part of the conversation.
Let me just make one final sort of philosophical point here.
I worry that unless the Supreme Court steps in here, or unless the district courts exercise a little bit more discretion, we're running...
Into a real conflict between two important principles in the United States.
Principle one, of course, is the courts interpret the law.
I think principle two is that the American people decide how they're governed, right?
That's the fundamental small-d democratic principle that's at the heart of the American project.
I think that you are seeing, and I know this is inflammatory, but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally Overturn the will of the American people.
And to be clear, it's not most courts.
But I think what the Supreme Court has to do, and I saw an interview with Justice Roberts, Chief Justice Roberts recently, where he said...
job is to obviously decide cases, but in the course of that, check the excesses of Congress or the executive, and that does require a degree of independence.
The role of the court is to check the excesses of the executive.
I thought that was a profoundly wrong sentiment.
That's one half of his job.
The other half of his job is to check the excesses of his own branch.
And you cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing.
Immigration enforcement.
And the courts tell the American people they're not allowed to have what they voted for.
And that's where we are right now.
We're going to keep working it through the immigration court process, through the Supreme Court as much as possible.
And look, success to me is not so much a number, though obviously I'd love to see the gross majority of the illegal immigrants who came in under Biden.
That actually is a secondary metric of success.
Success to me is that we have established a set of rules and principles that the courts are comfortable with and that we have the infrastructure to do that allows us to deport large numbers of illegal aliens when large numbers of illegal aliens come into the country.
That, to me, is real success.
But I think whether we're able to get there is a function, of course, of our efforts, but also of the courts themselves.
All right, so like I said, that's a very well-thought-through, cogent argument.
You understand the points he's making.
As usual, he's very articulate.
But I still want to make a few quick points before I get to the primary point that I think is crucial to note about what he said.
So first of all, I agree with his premise that the American people have made abundantly clear that they want mass deportation of people who have entered the country illegally.
Whether they differentiate between people who committed crimes or committed violence or whether they want really all 11 million people or however many it is who entered the country illegally in the last few years deported, let's assume that a majority does actually want that.
They've expressed that in polls.
Obviously, Donald Trump ran on that as one of his defining principle goals in 2016, 2020, and 2024, and he was elected twice.
By the American people, understanding that that was one of his goals.
So let's concede that a majority of people actually want the Trump administration to remove everybody who's in the United States illegally.
Now, he also said the Supreme Court is at some point going to have to step in.
Now, as I said, the Supreme Court has stepped in twice.
And by nine to zero rulings, They ruled against what the Trump administration was doing, saying that it violated the Constitution.
There was one time that the Trump administration, in the middle of the night, deported 237 people, all Venezuelans to El Salvador to go into prison for life with no hearing, no ability of those people to say, I'm not in a drug gang.
And the Supreme Court ruled by 9-0 that you cannot remove people under the Alien Enemies Act without first giving them the right of habeas corpus to at least say, like, hey, they got this wrong.
This tattoo that they interpreted as my being a drug gang is actually something else.
And there were several people who pretty clearly were not part of drug gangs who were removed by that, and that's because they were given no evidentiary hearing.
And, of course, governments are going to make mistakes when they accuse people of things.
Unless they get a hearing, that's why habeas corpus exists.
So the Supreme Court has twice ruled against them, also in the Abrego Garcia case, nine to zero.
The other issue is that, and this is really important to get, and I think so many people have become misled and deceived on this point, confused by it on purpose.
We have a system of laws that permit the administration to deport people who are in the United States without legal authorization.
It is not a long, protracted process.
In fact, you don't even get to an Article III court, which is like a real court, a federal court.
All you can do if the government says, we know you're here illegally and we want to remove you, deport you, the only thing you're entitled to is you get a quick hearing inside the Homeland Security Department.
It's not a court in the judiciary.
It's a court in the executive branch, a deportation court that basically rubber stamps what the Homeland Security wants to do, what ICE wants to do.
And the only question in the hearing is not, are they criminals?
Do they do something bad?
The only question is, are you here in the United States without legal authorization?
We claim you are, and then it's up to the person to show that they have legal authorization.
If they can't, they're deported.
It's quick.
It's easy.
It's cheap.
It's how President Obama, for example, deported millions of people.
So we have a system that the Supreme Court has no interest in messing in.
The judiciary has no interest in messing in.
Demonstrate in any way an attempt to impede that?
The entire reason there's a controversy here with court and the entire reason why these courts have been deeply concerned is because the Trump administration decided, for multiple reasons, that they didn't only want to use standard deportation law.
They wanted to give themselves way more power than that to invoke what is called the Alien Enemies Act, which is a law passed in 1798.
That says in wartime, the president has basically unlimited authority to do whatever he wants with people who are alien enemies, people who are not American citizens but who are enemies of the country because basically they're siding with their original government with war and not with the United States where they're here to subvert or undermine the United States as warfighting.
And because it's such a draconian statute, because it gives the president so much power, it's only been invoked three times in American history when there were real wars taking place, the War of 1812, World War I, World War II.
And this is the law that FDR used to order all Japanese Americans in detention camps pending the end of the war, which is considered one of the worst civil liberties disgraces of the 20th century.
So it's only his invocation of the law and all the immense power that that gives that has caused the courts to even be concerned in the first place.
Does he really have the right to invoke the Alien Enemies Act under the statute?
Are we really at war in the way the statute intends?
And then the second question, which the Supreme Court already answered by 9-0, is even during wartime under the Alien Enemies Act, for example, when they wanted to put...
Nazi sympathizers in camps or to deport them.
Even they got hearings so they could disprove the accusations against them.
So what the Trump administration is doing is not deporting people back to their country of origin or they could just use standard deportation law and there'd be no problem.
What they want to do is do things like put them in Guantanamo, send them to horrific dungeons in El Salvador and pay the El Salvadoran government to keep them imprisoned basically for life.
They're talking about sending them to South Sudan or Libya?
These are way outside normal deportation proceedings, and that's why they wanted to invoke this very extreme law.
So anyone who tells you, oh, the Supreme Court is saying you have to give 20 million people a trial before you—no.
Totally false.
Totally false.
If you're deporting people under standard immigration law, it's quick and easy through the Homeland Security once I arrest them, and they're out.
And the only issue is, are they here illegally?
But when you invoke the Alien Enemies Act, there are major constitutional questions involved, and that's why courts have stepped in.
So this idea that, oh, the American people told us to deport, and the courts are preventing us from deporting, no, they're not.
They're preventing you from invoking the Alien Enemies Act, or at least doing so, in some cases, at a...
At all, because we're not at war, or in some cases saying that the people you want to accuse of being members of a drug gang or a violent gang at least have the right to contest the charges against them, much like they ruled that Guantanamo detainees have the right to habeas corpus.
You can't just call them terrorists and put them in prison forever, even if they're non-citizens.
They have the right under a constitution, because the rights of the constitution are for anybody under the control of the United States government, not just citizens.
To go into court with a habeas case and disprove the accusations against them.
And of course, many people in Guantanamo, once they got that right in 2008 in the Supreme Court ruling, went into court and disproved the accusations against them, proved their innocence, and they were let out.
Because if you give government the power to punish people with no trial, there's going to be all kinds of mistakes, all kinds of malice, and huge numbers of innocent people are going to end up being punished.
And a founding principle of our government, as we've showed you before.
Thomas Jefferson said it.
Benjamin Franklin said it.
It comes from Blackstone, the British legal theorist who became the foundation of Anglo-American law, said it's better to allow 10 guilty people to go free than it is to punish a single innocent person.
That punishing a single innocent person is such a grave crime, such a grave injustice, you take away their liberty, you throw them in a prison somewhere, even though they've done nothing wrong, that the evil of that...
It's infinitely better than even allowing 10 guilty people to go free.
Benjamin Franklin, probably one of the top three most important founders of the United States, actually said it's better to let 100 guilty people go free than to punish one innocent person.
The Bill of Rights does that.
The Bill of Rights places all kinds of barriers in the government's way when they want to pick up a suspected criminal, when they want to convict them.
There's massive barriers that they have to overcome.
They can't enter people's houses without a warrant.
People have the right against self-incrimination.
They just can refuse to answer questions.
They have a right to the jury of their peers, to a lawyer.
On and on and on.
Things that make it difficult for the government to convict guilty people.
Due process.
Because that's a principle, a founding principle of our country is that you don't punish people who you haven't proven have committed crimes.
Again.
If it's just a question of are they in the country illegally, you just deport them under normal deportation level.
You're not sending them to some foreign country or to be in a prison.
You can only do that under the Alien Enemies Act by claiming, oh, no, these are alien enemies, and that's why they deserve to go to prison.
So those are all important things to take of note, but I want to make this part extremely clear.
It's so important.
It's so foundational to our system.
And J.D. Vance knows this and is kind of playing with the fact, exploiting the fact that most people, Don't understand it because it's not intuitive.
You have to either study the law or have read about the Constitution or know the concept of law, but he's basically saying the minute a majority of Americans want a policy, they want mass deportation, they're in favor of this, they're in favor of that, court shouldn't intervene.
He's saying we have a democracy.
A democracy means that when the majority of people want something, they get it.
That's what we are.
We're democracy, and that means when the majority decides something, the courts can't intervene and tell them they can't have it.
This is exactly the opposite of how our country was structured.
Just go look at any of the Bill of Rights.
Let's take the First Amendment that guarantees freedom of religion.
What does that mean?
Even if, let's say, 93% of Americans, almost all of them, favor criminalizing Christianity, Or criminalize the practice of Judaism or Islam.
No matter how much support you get for it, the government still can't do it.
The Bill of Rights is an imposition on what the majority wants.
Let's say the majority, huge majority, favors banning certain speech.
We want to criminalize racist speech.
And polls show 93% of the people want that.
Politicians who promise to criminalize righteous speech keep getting elected.
Clearly the majority of Americans favor it.
It doesn't matter.
Because the Bill of Rights says we don't care how much support you have for limiting speech.
Congress still shall make no law limiting speech.
The Constitution is there to put limits on what majorities want.
That's why the United States isn't a pure democracy.
It's a constitutional republic.
If we were per democracy, JD Vance would be right.
Just let the majority decide everything.
Have a referendum on everything.
Let the government, let the majority decide everything.
Whatever the majority wants, they get.
But the founders were elitists.
They were petrified of majoritarian rule, of majoritarian passion, of majoritarian mobs, of majoritarian factions.
These were all wealthy landowners.
One of the things they were petrified of is that majorities of people would rise up who were poorer and didn't have land.
And vote to nationalize their land or take away land from the landowners and just distribute it.
And that's why they put limitations on that, that you can't deprive people of their property without due process of law.
You can't take away, the government can't seize their property without just compensation.
So much of this was a fear of what majorities would do.
JD Vance knows that.
And it's not just JD Vance who knows that, but our system has always operated that way.
Do you know how many times conservatives have run into court?
To ask district court judges and then appellate court judges and the Supreme Court to nullify a president's policy, even when it's incredibly popular, on the grounds that it's unconstitutional.
So the Republican Party always says, yeah, this might be popular.
You still can't do it.
The Constitution prohibits it.
So many examples.
Here's one from NBC News, September of 2022.
Six Republican-led states sued Joe Biden's administration over his student loan forgiveness plan.
in.
So Joe Biden wanted to cancel student debt.
He ran on a promise to do that.
He got elected.
Polls show majorities favor that.
And yet Republicans still went into court and said, No matter how popular this is, you still can't do it.
The states, Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, and South Carolina jointly filed a 36-page complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri, the second legal challenge this week against President Biden's debt cancellation plan.
Their lawsuit echoes some of the arguments made in a complaint filed Tuesday in Indiana by a lawyer who works for a conservative-leaning firm.
attorneys general or solicitor general, formed the six states, argued in the suit that the president's plan violates the separation of powers and a law that dictates how federal agencies can craft regulations.
They also predicted that it will financially harm them, saying, for example, that the mass debt cancellation would cost those state tax revenues, quote, in addition to being economically unwise and downright unfair, the Biden administration's mass debt cancellation is yet another example, they said, out of a long line of unlawful regulatory actions, quote, Now,
The American people voted for the politicians in the Democratic Party, Joe Biden, Barack Obama.
Obama never promised it, but many members of Congress that they would cancel all or part of student loan debt.
That it was, we don't want a country where only wealthy people can go to college and the people who aren't wealthy end up leaving school with massive debt that burdens them for life.
And so conservatives repeatedly sued over Over Joe Biden's attempt to try and cancel those loans, even though, there you see another one, conservative group sued to block Biden's plan, canceling $39 billion in student loans.
We go to the next one.
In Newsweek from 2023, Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness fight gets a boost before the SCOTUS ruling.
And we can say what the article is saying is that, look, the conservatives are trying to...
Have courts nullify Joe Biden's student loan policy, even though he promised to do it when he ran and won?
And even though it's popular, quote, a new poll by Redfield and Wilson Strategies conducted on behalf of Newsweek found that 62% of Americans support the Biden administration's student loan forgiveness plan.
THE SAME PERCENTAGE SAID THEY BACKED THE PLAN IN A POLL CONDUCTED IN MARCH, INDICATING WIDESPREAD SUPPORT FOR THE PLAN HAS REMAINED STEADY IN RECENT MONTHS.
SUPPORT WAS HIGHEST AMONG YOUNGER AMERICANS, THE POLLS FOUND.
MORE THAN TWO-THIRDS, 67% OF THOSE AGED 18-24 SAID THEY SUPPORT THE PLAN, AS WELL AS 76% OF THOSE AGED 25-34.
So you have widespread support among various demographic groups.
You have overwhelming support in the citizenry for Joe Biden's loan forgiveness plan.
He ran on a promise to do it.
Americans elected him.
It's exactly the argument that J.D. Vance is making about mass deportation.
And it's true.
Both of those cases, the American people wanted it.
Nonetheless, the Republicans said, courts, you need to step in and do this, no matter how popular it is, because it's violating the Constitution.
Exactly what courts are doing now with the way in which the Trump administration is trying to engineer mass deportation through the Alien Enemies Act.
J.D. Vance knows it is not a principle of the American republic that majorities get whatever they want.
The whole point of the Bill of Rights is to limit what majorities can demand and basically say that no matter how popular these things are, then you still can't do them.
Get courts to ban a popular Biden plan by going to the courts and arguing that the Constitution doesn't permit it no matter how popular it is.
Here from Reuters in May of last year, quote, Republican-led U.S. states sue to block expanded gun background checks.
More than 2,000 Republican state attorneys sued the Biden administration on Wednesday to stop a new rule that would require gun dealers to obtain licenses and conduct background checks when selling firearms at gun shows online.
The lawsuit challenges a rule finalized last month by the GOJ that the official said is aimed at closing the, quote, gun show loophole.
Under the rule, those selling weapons at gun shows, other venues, and over the Internet are subject to the same requirements as gun stores to check the backgrounds of potential buyers.
The rule, which has not yet taken effect, will affect tens of thousands of gun sales a year, according to the Biden administration.
Thank you.
According to The Hill, 88% of Americans, 88% favor background checks on all gun sales.
88%.
You almost can't find any contested policy that commands that level of majoritarian support.
And yet the view of the argument of the Republicans was, and they were right, if their constitutional assessment was true, it doesn't matter how popular this gun policy is.
Because the Second Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, and this violates it.
Even if 88% of the people want it, you still can't do it because the Bill of Rights imposes limits on what the majority want.
This is so basic to how our country functions and always has, that to hear J.D. Vance using this kind of rhetoric, this sophistry, to say things he knows isn't really true, like how dare the courts try and stop the American people, a majority of the American people, from getting what they want.
I mean, I could show you under Obama and Clinton and going back to every Democratic president, JFK and Lyndon Johnson, Republicans and conservatives running into federal courts, asking those courts to stop very popular policies on the part of the government on the grounds that it violates the Constitution.
It doesn't matter how many people support it.
And the reason why is often stated, as I said, by James Madison, among others, in the Federalist Papers.
What they wanted to do is, yes, we wanted democracy.
Americans can choose their leaders.
But we want to make sure that majoritarian mobs and majoritarian passions don't run roughshod over the rights of the minorities, like a minority religion.
Lots of times in history, majorities that believe in one religion want to criminalize or suppress or ban or drive out the minority religion.
And one of the points of the First Amendment's free exercise clause is it doesn't matter how many Americans, what percentage of Americans hate a particular religion, you can't ban it.
Here's what James Madison said in Federalist 10. Quote, among the numerous advantages promised by a well-constructed union, none deserves to be more accurately developed than its tendency to break and control the violence of factions who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion or of
interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community, to secure the public good and private rights against the danger of subsafaction and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.
It wasn't just a goal of how the American founding was created or the structure of the government was created.
It was central, he said.
One of our principal inquiries.
It's how to prevent majoritarian passions from running roughshod over the rights of others.
And for anyone thinking like, yeah, it's only for citizens, we've shown you many times before how for 150 years the Supreme Court, including people like Justice Scalia and every justice basically, has said the Bill of Rights applies not to a special group of people called citizens.
It's a tool to restrain what the government can do to anybody under its control, which is why non-citizens at Guantanamo Had the right to habeas hearings.
Hear from James Madison in popular election of the first branch of the legislature.
In 1787, he wrote the following quote, "In all cases where a majority are united by a common interest or passion, the rights of the minority are in danger." This is the whole point of our Bill of Rights and Constitution.
Not to create a pure democracy.
Where the majority gets its way no matter what.
Here, James Madison, Federalist 48, quote, Exactly what...
John Roberts said that J.D. Vance objected to.
John Roberts said, the Supreme Chief Justice said, one of the goals of the judiciary, one of its functions, is that if the president or the Congress oversteps the bounds of the Constitution, we're the ones who are supposed to limit and check it.
That's part of the checks and balances.
That's how you have checks on the presidency.
It's what James Madison said almost verbatim.
And again, J.D. Vance knows that very well.
Here's Alexander Hamilton in 1787 remarks on the term of office for members of the second branch of the legislature.
"Real liberty is neither found in despotism nor the extremes of democracy but in moderate governments." So often people talk about the sanctity of the Constitution but don't really believe in a lot of its principles.
When the Supreme Court Overturned Roe versus Wade in the Dobbs decision in 2022.
I read an article about this because I heard so many Democrats saying the Supreme Court doesn't believe in democracy.
They're destroying American democracy.
These rights have been established for decades now, and the Supreme Court is taking it away because they're anti-democratic.
And it was driving me crazy.
For this reason, the title of the article was The Irrational Misguided Discourse Surrounding Supreme Court Controversies Such as Roe vs.
Wade.
And I wrote this, quote, The court, like the U.S. Constitution, was designed to be a limit on the excesses of democracy.
Roe denied, not upheld, the rights of citizens to decide democratically, meaning it was Roe vs.
Wade that took away the question of abortion from the democratic process by saying, I don't care if 90% of the people in a state want to ban abortion.
They said they found a right somewhere in the Constitution to abortion and they said majorities can't take it away.
And when the Supreme Court overturned Roe, which has long been considered a very poorly reasoned decision regardless of your views on abortion, including by liberal justices, it was not a showcase for how It was bizarre hearing Democrats say that when the Supreme Court overruled Roe,
they were attacking democracy because actually all they were doing was saying this abortion ruling shouldn't be decided by courts, this abortion question shouldn't be decided by courts, but by the people.
The people should vote on whether abortion is legal or not.
They gave back That question to the democratic process.
And by the way, once they did that, in almost all cases, the overwhelming majority, people, including in red states, voted against most restrictions on abortion.
It turned out the right of abortion didn't depend on Roe v.
Wade and on the Supreme Court imposing it.
It instead was something that the people of the country are willing to do.
And it's just...
I think it's so important.
These are not complex questions.
These are not complex concepts.
I think it's very important to just take a step back and try and understand exactly what the founding of our republic was designed to do so that you don't just make claims about how our country works based on whatever the convenience is of the moment.
Thank you.
All of that, and that was unplanned, is the perfect segue to talk about a longtime sponsor of our show, which I really admire, which is Hillsdale College, which is based on the idea that we often think that studying and learning is only for kids or teenagers or young adults in college, when in reality, continuing to learn and educate yourself and study and consider things.
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hillsdale.edu /glen The Jeffrey Epstein case continues to hover above American politics, and I think for good reason.
The more people learned about the extent of his degenerate sex trafficking and use of minors for sexual pleasure, how many elites and powerful people were associated with Jeffrey Epstein, friends with him, traveled on his plane with him, went to that island with him, the more people began to question, like, What is this?
Why is this known pedophile, someone who was convicted back in 2010 for having sex with minors and got a sweetheart deal, which I think is very important, a deal unimaginably generous?
Why is someone like that so embraced in so many elite circles?
And when Jeffrey Epstein finally was arrested and people thought he was finally going to be put on trial, we were finally going to have transparency, and instead he ended up dying with the prison claiming that he committed suicide.
A lot of people were understandably doubtful about that because you're talking about a high profile, high, high profile prisoner in a federal prison.
Understandably, people were skeptical of the claim that he actually committed suicide.
People thought, well, I think there's a good possibility that he was probably murdered.
And among the people who have been suggesting that and raising that very vocally for many years are Kash Patel, who was a conservative pundit, somebody who had worked in the government, was very admired among the American right.
And also Dan Bongino, who became one of the most popular pundits anywhere.
And at some point we're going to find the video for you where they went on Fox News just a little bit ago this week and were asked basically, like, why hasn't the Epstein file been released yet?
And are you able to tell us whether...
Jeffrey Epstein killed himself.
Remember, the administration made a big showing.
Pam Bondi, the attorney general, made a big showing.
She was going to sound the trumpet.
She was releasing the Epstein file, the first part of it, the first stash of it.
She called a bunch of conservative influencers and commentators to the White House.
They all raved around the Epstein files, part one.
And as it turned out, it was...
A complete debacle and humiliation because there wasn't a single document in this binder that hadn't already been made publicly available through reporting, through trials, through all kinds of processes.
Not a single document.
No revelations.
And so then people started asking, wait a minute, what's going on here?
You repeatedly, vocally promised all of you who were inside the Trump administration that you would release the Epstein files.
What's going on?
Where are they?
And this got inflamed this week because of comments by Kash Patel and Dan Bongino when they went on Fox News and were asked explicitly, did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself?
And this is what they said.
You said Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide.
People don't believe it.
Well, I mean, listen, they have a right to their opinion, but as someone who has worked as a public defender, as a prosecutor, who's been in that prison system, who's been in the Metropolitan Detention Center, who's been in segregated housing, you know a suicide when you see one, and that's what that was.
He killed himself.
Again, you want me to get—I've seen the whole file.
He killed himself.
Now, you can make your own judgments about...
Their body posture, their demeanor, whatever.
I particularly don't think they looked entirely comfortable, but that might just be because they know that their most ardent supporters don't believe Jeffrey Epstein killed himself and are going to want to see the proof.
They're saying, we read the file.
Well, why haven't we read the file?
Why haven't we, the public, seen the file?
If there's such definitive evidence that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself and it convinced you, where is that?
And it's particularly notable because, as I said, both Dan Bongino and Cash Patel have been along raising the questions that other people have.
Here, for example, is Dan Bongino speaking to Tim Poole on his podcast in May of 2023.
About...
A year and a half after that, I'm in a green room at Fox, and I'm not going to say who because they didn't give me permission to share it, but the short story, but not who they are.
He says, you know Epstein's an intelligence asset for people in the Middle East, right?
I'm like, no, I didn't know that.
I'm like, you sure of that?
The person, let's say, is like, I'm absolutely sure of that.
That he's either a winning or unwitting asset, intelligence asset.
Meaning...
His plane and that island, the cameras, there's a big assumption out there that these videotapes were exclusively in the custody of Epstein.
That's a huge mistake.
The reason they wanted this story to go away is because there's an assumption like, oh yeah, Epstein had him.
No, he wasn't the only one who had him, according to this source.
These assets, that's why this blackmail story makes so much sense.
Which Middle Eastern countries they are, I don't know, but this person who's a very, very good reporter, I mean...
Aces, right?
Swore Epstein was either a witting or unwitting intelligence asset, and they may have had his plane wired up, and they're the ones who have all this stuff.
So the point is, to sum it up, how do you know some of these countries aren't going to some of these power players who aren't making decisions?
Because, hey, he wouldn't want this video out there, right?
How do you know?
100%.
I mean, let's...
I could not agree more with everything Dan Mangino said there.
I know there's a lot of interest in the quote-unquote client list, and reporters who have followed this case very closely who have been very intrepid will tell you the client list has been long known.
The people who visited the island is long known.
But maybe there's information about other people who were his clients, because it is true he was guilty of sex trafficking, yet there's nobody to whom he trafficked these minors who has been convicted.
But what Dan Bongino said was the key question there.
I totally agree is the key question.
Like, that's the one that interests me most.
Obviously, if there were elites having sex with minors furnished by Jeffrey Epstein, I want to know that.
But the question I really think we need the answer to is exactly what Dan Bongino said there that people have been talking about for a long time.
Did Jeffrey Epstein work with or for foreign intelligence agencies?
Was this kind of scam to lure elites into compromising positions so the foreign intelligence agencies could have that on them?
Compromising information?
It's always been a question, like, where did Jeffrey Epstein's vast wealth come from?
I mean, he wasn't just very rich.
He was buying $30 and $40 million homes in New York City and West Palm Beach and that private island and flying around on private jets.
I mean, he was living like a multi-billionaire, even though there's nothing Ever known that he really did that would give him that kind of wealth.
So then the question becomes, why don't we know the answer to that question?
I believe, you know, Pam Bondi said last week when asked about this, oh, we have so many tapes of Jeffrey Epstein having sex with minors, thousands of them, and that takes time to go through.
No one wants to see those.
No one is interested in those.
Jeffrey Epstein having sex with minors.
We know he had sex with minors.
Everybody knows that.
All right, go through the videos, but those should be the last priority.
That's not an excuse for refusing to release information on this question.
Were there foreign intelligence agencies involved with Jeffrey Epstein?
Or, as Dan Bongino said, maybe they compromised him.
Maybe they had a plane wired.
Maybe they got information at his home video.
We should know this.
This is a crucial question.
And it's long been suggested that He was working, as Dan Bajino said, with a Middle East foreign intelligence agency.
Could be Qatar, could be the Saudis, could be Israel.
And so why don't we know that?
And as we don't know that, you have both of them sitting there just very tightly wound saying, he killed himself.
Believe us.
We can't show you what we know, even though we promised you so, but believe us.
He killed himself.
Here's Kash Patel speaking to Glenn Beck in December of 2023.
Who has Jeffrey Epstein's black book?
FBI.
But who?
That's under direct control of the director of the FBI.
Just like the manifesto from the Nashville school shooting of the Catholic school.
We still haven't seen that, right?
It's not the Nashville police or PD saying we don't want this out.
The FBI airmailed into that operation and said this is not getting out.
Because they do that because this is another government gangster operation.
All these local law enforcement communities get funding from the DOJ and FBI for local programs.
And if you don't cooperate, you're not getting your million dollars for this.
And that's a lot of money to these local districts.
That's how they play the game.
That's why you don't have a black book.
But the black book is not just sitting.
I mean, that's Hoover power times 10. And to me, that's a thing I think President Trump should run on.
On day one, roll out the black book.
And not just that.
On day one, roll out all of the text messages and communications we were told were deleted.
On day one, play the rest of the video of the pipe bomber.
One of the reforms I talk about in government gangsters is you need a central node to be continuously declassifying.
This is another thing they do.
They overclassify.
And I'm telling you, as a former number two in the IC, they overclassify 50% of the stuff there to protect the deep state.
Oh, no, you can't see that.
Nothing to see here.
Gina was a master at it, of doing it.
And we still haven't seen half of the Russiagate report that we wrote.
Still under lock and key.
On how the ICA was originally constructed.
We put 10,000 man hours against John Brennan's team that did it.
And we found out why they came up with their bogus conclusions.
But we couldn't sell it to the world because we couldn't talk about it.
And the government gangsters came in and buried it.
All of these things, there needs to be a continuing central power, whether it's the White House or off-site, that says every request that comes in...
Isn't it so notable how different people sound when they're out of power and are just going around on the pundit shows or just being an activist and then they get to Washington and they get into power and they just sound like completely different people?
It reminds me of And we talked about this before, how Mike Johnson, before he was speaker, when he was just kind of a backbench member of Congress, I had him on my show because he had very vehemently denounced the FBI director for abusing spying powers, for abusing FISA.
And he came to my show and he talked about the urgent need to reform FISA.
It can't be renewed.
It gives the FBI too much power with no safeguards.
I was like, God, I love Mike Johnson.
He's really taken up this cause.
He really understands it.
And then becomes speaker, and within, like, weeks, he's not only lifting his opposition to the renewal of the FISA bill with no reforms, he's leading the way in ensuring and shepherding the FISA bill to passage with no reforms, the exact opposite of what he had been saying for so long.
And then when people asked him, like, What's going on?
You've been saying this for so long, the FISA bill can't be passed without major reforms, and now suddenly you're the leader in trying to get it passed with no reforms?
And he's like, yeah, it was taken to a secret briefing, and the CIA showed me why this law is so important, it can't have reforms, and I believe them.
So now I'm in favor.
Everything Kash Patel said there is absolutely right.
And notice he said, There's a black book that Jeffrey Epstein has.
I don't know if he has a black book or not, but this is what Kash Patel said.
It's under the direct control of the FBI director.
It's outrageous that they won't release it, and that should be released on day one, or on day 100 and whatever.
Why hasn't Kash Patel released that?
This is two years ago.
And more importantly, why don't we know?
Whether he worked with or foreign intelligence, that is something that Kash Patel, Dan Bajino, Pam Bondi could easily know.
And that's the only thing that gives me suspicion about the extraordinary delays they're claiming they need in releasing these documents, as well as the bizarre excuses they're offering, like we have thousands of tapes of Jeffrey Epstein having sex with minors.
Feel free to go look at them on your own time whenever you want.
But in the meantime, give us the relevant information.
That's not an excuse for holding that up.
Here is Alan Dershowitz, who of course was Jeffrey Epstein's lawyer, talking to Benny Johnson yesterday, I believe.
The reason I'm asking is because the entire internet was pretty shocked when Kash Patel and Dan Bongino said, no, no, no, he definitely killed himself in the prison cell, and you're saying that you believe that this was possible.
You have been a skeptic about the official Epstein story for a long time.
I'm not a skeptic about the fact that he didn't do it alone.
He could not have simply killed himself alone.
If he killed himself, it was with the assistance of some guards.
Some guards have been disciplined for turning off their videos and for other actions that allowed him to kill himself.
But it wouldn't surprise me if somebody managed to get into the prison and kill him, because I don't understand what his motive would have been.
He could have killed himself at any time.
And if he was going to be let out on bail...
Then why would he kill himself?
So I've always had my doubts, my questions, but it's certainly plausible that he may have killed himself.
Yeah, that's what I think.
Maybe he killed himself.
People do kill themselves.
And when they're actually in prison and facing that hardcore reality that they're likely to be in prison for the rest of their lives, I can understand suicide as an option.
I don't really understand quite how we don't have, especially with the highest profile...
Defendants with the highest suicide risk, obviously, in a federal prison, not some state prison or local prison, how you can't prevent prisoners from killing themselves, that seems odd to me.
But, obviously, Alan Dershowitz thinks it's odd, too.
But, again, I'm willing to believe that.
I just want to see what—I think we should see what convinced Kash Patel after all this time he went around saying that it wasn't true.
I think we have another one from Alan Dershowitz here that's also from yesterday.
And he addresses this question of whether Jeffrey Epstein worked for or with foreign intelligence agencies.
I was told that Epstein belonged to Intel and to leave it alone.
And that's what Acosta said before.
That's the U.S. attorney from Miami who gave Jeffrey Epstein an insanely light plea deal given the accusations against him.
You think serial pedophiles are often offered like six months in prison and six months on release with community service requirements?
And the U.S. attorney in Miami, when asked about this much later on, like, why did you give him a deal like that?
He said, I was told Epstein belonged to intelligence and to leave it alone.
And he worked in the Justice Department.
That by itself makes his question urgent and credible.
Or a Senate committee looking to confirm him in the first Trump term.
Can you expound on that?
Could you unpack that for us?
Yeah, I would be shocked if that were true.
Jeffrey Epstein was not a reliable person.
I can't imagine that any intelligence service would be using him, but I've heard the claim.
I heard the claim that the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agents, used him just the way they used Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Maxwell.
And you know, you never know.
One thing about intelligence services, they act in secret.
So you never know, but I can't imagine any thoughtful intelligence service using a guy like Jeffrey Epstein, but it's certainly possible.
If so, I didn't know anything about it.
No, I don't think it's that surprising that Alan Dershowitz...
In the face of rumors that the Mossad was involved with Jeffrey Epstein, I doubt it.
I can't even imagine how that might be happening.
Let's just see the documents on that.
Let's see the information and the evidence on that.
Now, we've talked about before, we did this show in March, which you can go look at, where we delved into the Jeffrey Epstein question.
I'm not sure if this is...
The right one.
It doesn't suggest that in the title.
But there is one that we did that we'll put the link to.
It could be this one.
But in any event, we delved into all these important aspects of Jeffrey Epstein.
I was suggesting before, where did his wealth come from?
He was an extremely close associate to this multi-billionaire, Les Wexner, who is a major funder of Zionist causes, very closely linked to...
The Israeli government, and he provided Jeffrey Epstein with a lot of his wealth.
And then Alan Dershowitz alluded to the fact that Jose Maxwell, who's been convicted for being the key right-hand man of Jeffrey Epstein, her father, Robert Maxwell, who was a media baron and died under mysterious causes, he slipped off a boat, that he was heavily involved in Israeli intelligence, the Mossad.
There's no question about that.
Maybe it's not Israeli intelligence.
Maybe it's Qatari intelligence.
Maybe it's Saudi intelligence.
Let's see these records.
Of course the government has information on that.
And the fact that all these people were so gung-ho in demanding the release of this information, this exact information when they were out of government, got into government based on a promise to release it all, and now come up with nothing but excuses as to why they can't, obviously fuels those suspicions for any rational person far more than before.
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All right, so there was a shooting by a Ukrainian Longtime Ukrainian official inside the government.
He's been in governments, including the one that the U.S. helped to overthrow in 2014 that led to a far more pro-EU and pro-U.S.
government.
And he was assassinated today in Madrid, in Spain.
And it's hard to imagine that it didn't come from Ukraine, whether it be a hit job from Ukraine, a political assassination, or...
Perhaps a contract killing of some kind, but we do want to follow that.
I'm going to skip that segment tonight until we learn more in the interest of time because we just want to cover a couple other things of the time we have left.
But that is an interesting and important topic to cover because you now have Ukrainians actually going through the EU and murdering people that are enemies of the government or enemies of oligarchs inside Ukraine.
And if those are the kind of...
Neighbors that the EU wants.
Those are the kind of people that the European countries that are arming Ukraine have been continuously bringing in.
Those are some of the results that you're going to have.
You have a lot of extremists, violent, unstable extremists in Ukraine.
People used to always document that and talk about that before it became prohibited in 2022 when the Russians invaded.
And a lot of these people are making their way, who are heavily armed, heavily financed, thanks to the United States and Europe funding this war, pouring huge amounts of billions and billions of dollars into Ukraine and many, many arms.
And I think you're going to see a lot more of the outcome of funding extremist and radical groups.
All right.
CNN's Jake Topper, as you undoubtedly know, we've covered it several times, somehow convinced himself that he should write a book.
That purports to blow the whistle on the scandal of how Joe Biden's cognitive decline was covered up throughout 2023 and 2024, so that believing he was going to be the nominee, they didn't allow a primary, he was going to be the candidate, so you couldn't allow anything bad to be said about Joe Biden.
And he wrote this book with Alex Thompson of Axios, who actually was doing reporting at the time, unlike Jake Tapper on Showing the questions around Biden's cognitive decline, and a lot of people have started to kind of become repelled by this obvious,
bizarre, humiliating spectacle of Jake Tapper, of all people, going around purporting to write the book that exposed Joe Biden's cognitive decline when Jake Tapper was one of the primary people in the media.
Who constantly denied it and concealed it and covered it up and attacked the character and integrity of anyone who went on his show and raised it.
To the point when Laura Trump did, he accused her of bullying and making life difficult for kids with a stutter.
He was still on that stutter thing they invented where they're like, no, Joe Biden is stumbling over his words, not because he's old and in cognitive climate, but because he's always had a lifetime stutter.
And anyone who's raising these questions, Jake Tapper said, are mocking a stutter.
And he did much more.
We did a whole segment on that.
And it got to the point where his credibility was so in tatters as this all viralized, all these clips of him, just showing the audacity of him putting his name on this book and making millions of dollars from it when he was the leader of the cover-up, one of them in the media, that he hired a crisis PR firm.
He went on Megyn Kelly's show on Tuesday, which I knew was going to be bad for him.
I'd known Megyn for a long time.
Whatever you think of her or her politics or whatever, she comes very prepared.
She has a great staff.
There's no stone left unturned.
She understands every fact when she goes into an interview, so no one can get away with anything, and she pummeled him.
Pummeled him with facts for anything he tried to say, and then she was right there saying, "That's untrue." And he kept saying like a zombie.
He was at first very defensive about all this, insisting he did nothing wrong, attacking anyone like me who was reporting on this for lying, for taking things out of context.
But ever since he got his PR crisis firm, it's like they programmed him to go around saying, no, look, I mean, I look back on my reporting with humility.
I look back on my coverage with humility, understanding that maybe I should have done things differently, which is the kind of thing a PR crisis firm tells you to say, programs you to say.
So that it appears as if you're holding yourself accountable, when of course you're really not.
And that was his posture had totally changed.
Today he went on Ezra Klein's podcast at the New York Times.
And Ezra Klein was, I guess to his credit, one of the people in Democratic Party circles, a real Democratic Party partisan, who was one of the first to say, in early 2024, Joe Biden shouldn't run again because the- If the public perceives him as too old and he's likely to lose, they should replace him.
Now, Ezra Klein wasn't saying Joe Biden is in fact cognitively declined.
But he was saying because the American public perceives him as too old, it'd be better for Democrats to replace him on the ticket.
And he did get a lot of attacks from his Democratic comrades.
Because their attitude was basically like, look, Joe Biden is all we have.
So anyone who says anything negative about Joe Biden is weakening Joe Biden and helping Donald Trump.
And that, of course, is the reason why people like Jake Tapper and all these people in media pretended not to see Joe Biden's cognitive decline, even though the entire country did.
But neither of them really...
Said what should have been said, what a lot of journalists were saying who aren't enslaved to the Democratic Party, what the public saw, that Joe Biden is in fact in cognitive decline.
So they kind of got together in this very self-congratulatory way today.
Like Ezra Klein saying congratulations on this important piece of investigative journalism.
Jake Tapper saying congratulations Ezra on your courage and having come out and said that they should have replaced Biden at the top of the ticket.
Both of them just so impressed with each other's journalistic chops and courage.
And they had a conversation that was...
They were trying to, again, have this posture of humility.
But they're so arrogant.
And what they really are is incestuous.
They don't care about and they don't hear what the American public thinks.
They just don't listen.
They don't value it at all.
They think those people are idiots.
They're ignorant.
They're dumb.
Who cares if they think Joe Biden is incognitively kind?
What matters are what people in Washington are saying.
Even what the people in the White House are saying.
And they kept saying, all we were hearing from the White House is Biden's great.
And so that's why we believed it.
As though it doesn't occur to them.
The most basic realization as a journalist that politicians lie to journalists because they want the journalists to go do their bidding to spread their narrative.
It's like it never occurred to them before.
And in particular, these were not just politicians.
These were Democratic Party operatives who have been around Washington forever.
These are their friends, these Democratic officials.
So it's like they trust these people.
And when they said, look, I promise you, Jake, I promise you, Ezra, Biden is great at meetings.
He's fantastic in judgment.
They're like, well, I guess it's true.
And that's why they would go and attack people who said, Joe Biden isn't cognitive decline.
Again, Ezra Klein's only point was politically it's bad, because even if Joe Biden isn't in the cognitive decline, people think he is, and he's likely to lose the election to Trump.
That's all Ezra Klein said.
But I want to show you a clip.
The whole thing is amazing, actually.
This is an hour into it.
And I think they thought they were being incredibly candid and coming to grips with the truth of what happened.
and pretending to engage in self-reflection but so much of what they were doing was actually victimizing themselves and blaming others in a way that shows you how insulated these people really are.
The massive gap between what they think and what they hear and what they talk about and what they believe versus the rest of the country.
Here's part of it.
It's hard to argue that any of us, in retrospect, cover this sufficiently.
Although there was, I do, I want to give credit to a bunch of my newsroom colleagues here and Alex and others.
There were a bunch of stories.
Great Times stories, great Wall Street Journal stories, Axios stories.
100%.
It was harder to get people to say anything.
That's the point.
And it's hard to get, I mean, you need evidence for stories.
Well, look, I mean, we have...
But we were trying to crack this.
We, well, that's my point, is if a president's inner circle is willing to lie, and if they don't even think they're lying...
That's an incredibly dangerous thing.
I wish I had, like, a solution.
Here are the three things we need to do, and, like, then this will never happen again.
One of the things that we talk about in the book, and we have Jonathan Reiner, a doctor at GW, who's an advisor to the White House Medical Office, who says that he thinks the White House medical reports should be affirmed under threat of perjury and given to Congress every year so that there could be no lying or dissembling.
But beyond that, what can we do?
I don't know.
I mean, just think about what they're saying there.
Jake Tapper's saying, look, if the people in the White House are lying to us, we don't have any choice.
We have to believe them.
What else can we do?
Like, yeah, I see Joe Biden incapable of finishing his sentences or talking in complete nonsense or falling down continuously, barely being able to be audible.
I see that he's incapable of holding a press conference or a cabinet meeting, that they're hiding him because they know that he can't speak, his brain is melting.
I know all that.
But when the White House officials tell me, no, no, it's not true, and they're willing to lie, who can blame us?
We're stuck.
I know the whole Watergate and Washington Post, Woodward and Bernstein thing have been completely mythologized and simplified.
And there's a lot of questions about that as you look into it more, but let's just take it on its face value the way the narrative is sold.
It would be like if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein heard that the Nixon administration had covered up the break-in at the DNC or paid slush funds to the criminals or lied and destroyed documents, and they went to the White House, and they're like, Hey, we're hearing this happen.
Did it?
And the Nixon White House is like, no.
Of course, we didn't do that.
No, it's totally wrong.
And they're like, okay.
Guess there's nothing else for us to do.
The White House lied.
The White House told us none of this is happening.
Who are we to question the government?
Politicians don't lie.
If they tell us there's no wrongdoing here, that we had nothing to do with the cover-up of the break-in, or if they tell us Joe Biden's fine, what else can we do?
I remember at the beginning of the Snowden reporting when we had, you know, eight, ten stories at the very beginning ready to go to say nothing of all the other reporting we did.
And it was so obvious, the proof was so clear about their wrongdoing, their abuse of surveillance authorities, spying on Americans en masse the way they had denied.
And we went to the government and they kept saying, you don't understand these documents.
None of this happened.
This is wrong.
This document comes in a whole broader context.
Of course they lie to you.
The very famous and well-regarded independent journalist, I.F. Stone, a lot of people think he's a communist, whatever, but what he definitely was was a very feisty outside independent journalist who used to work inside the mainstream media, and then he decided to go to the outside because he was too constrained in what he could say.
And he created A newsletter.
He was basically like the first blogger, the first independent journalist.
He created a newsletter, and people would pay like $5 a month, and he and his wife would just sit at the table, and they would mail out his newsletter.
And the newsletter would question government narratives and give an alternative version of the way of seeing things.
And his kind of ethos, his primary axiom in journalism was all governments lie.
And if you don't know that, If you don't think that way, if you're not instantly skeptical of what White House officials are telling you rather than blindly gullible because they're your friends, because you're both in the Democratic Party, because you depend on them as your sources so you need to curry favor with them and so you just believe whatever they say and don't contradict them, just get out of journalism.
Get out of journalism.
That is such an amazing excuse for them to say, and they both said it, like, yeah, we were lied to.
We were told all the time it was fine.
How do you get past that?
How can you prove it?
It's like everyone saw the proof.
It's right in front of you.
And this is the sort of thing that got them into so much trouble that I think will make Democrats have so little faith from the public for a long time, is that there are things in government that governments do.
That requires specialized knowledge to understand.
The FISA court is a good example.
We had to spend a lot of time explaining what happened there, what metadata is.
People don't instinctively know that because why would they?
But most people have had the experience of having loved ones, grandparents, parents, neighbors, uncles, aunts, friends.
Cognitively decline as a result of age or some other disease.
People recognize that.
People don't need specialists to say, oh yeah, that's happening.
They can see it for themselves.
We all saw it for ourselves.
Going back to 2019, not just 2023.
And so for them to sit there and say, yeah, the White House told us it wasn't happening.
What can I do?
Is such an unbelievably revealing and incriminating mindset about how these people think, namely that they're so entrenched in Washington politics in this little D.C. media politics bubble that they can't even see reality for themselves.
They just need the people they think are important, the people that they think are trustworthy, to tell them what to say, give them the license what to say before they can say it.
I really think Jake Tapper is...
Self-destructive as he is, as much credibility is in totters of his, on this humiliation tour is really revealing a lot, not just about himself, but about the DC media in general and the reason why they have justifiably lost so much trust and faith in the media.
All right, I want to tell you a little bit about Brazil, and I want to actually start with a...
The comment that Marco Rubio made while testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee today, there has been a movement on the part of the American right for quite a while to make known the fact that in Brazil there is an incomparably authoritarian judge who is ruling over the entire country.
People are petrified of him.
He puts critics in prison.
He goes around censoring and jailing people just on a whim.
And because he's primarily doing that to the Bolsonaro movement, both the establishment and the left have turned him into a national hero.
He just operates with no limits.
He's an absolute tyrant.
So Marco Rubio today was asked whether they're planning on imposing sanctions on this Supreme Court judge in Brazil on the grounds that he's been systemically violating human rights under this Magnitsky law.
That the U.S. government has used both members of both parties to put sanctions on whoever is violating human rights.
And here's the question asked by Congressman Corey Mills, and here is Marco Rubio's response.
I want to switch to Brazil, if I may.
Mr. Secretary, as you're certainly aware, the alarming human rights decline in Brazil.
We've seen pervasive censorship, political persecution targeting the entire opposition, including journalists and ordinary citizens.
What they're now doing is an eminent politically motivated imprisonment of former President Bolsonaro.
This crackdown has extended beyond Brazil's borders, impacting individuals on U.S. soil.
The 2023 Financial Times article actually talked about this.
What do you intend to do, and would you be looking at Supreme Court Justice?
That's a pretty significant statement.
That Magnitsky law is no joke.
That's what they use to sanction Russians and oligarchs and all sorts of people.
And because the US has the dollar, which is the reserve currency, if you sanction somebody, it means that Nobody else can do business with them, including banking.
And if they do, they'll also then be sanctioned.
So no institution wants to have anything to do with you.
You get excluded from the financial system.
It has a lot of power.
It's the reason why a lot of countries, including Brazil, want to overthrow the dollar as the reserve currency because it gives the U.S. so much power in the sanctioned regime.
And so Marco Rubio is saying that we're looking at it actively right now, and there's a great possibility it's going to happen.
I knew it was going to happen.
I've been saying in Brazil.
I testified in the Brazilian Senate three weeks ago.
I've been telling people in every interview, it's just a question of time before Moraes and these Brazilian tyrants captured the attention of the Trump administration.
Remember, Moraes not only banned Elon Musk's acts from functioning in Brazil because he refused to censor, but when he imposed multi-million dollar fines, all just on his own doing, and X didn't have those funds in Brazil because they don't have a very active presence in Brazil.
He ordered the bank accounts of Starlink to be frozen, even though Starlink is a completely different company.
I mean, obviously Elon Musk is a major figure in Starlink like he is in Twitter, but they're completely separate corporate entities.
They have completely different stockholders, and even people in Brazil were shocked by that.
Expect people to do business in Brazil if you have this madman who just goes around freezing bank accounts that has nothing to do with the corporations before him because somebody he hates is involved in that corporation as well.
And he did.
He actually took the money out of the Starlink accounts to pay the multimillion-dollar fines for X. And that was when Elon Musk said repeatedly, you're a criminal, you're a dictator, trust me, your day is coming, you're going to be in prison.
And Elon Musk is not the kind of person that forgets something like that.
So, as I've said, it's only a question of time before the people in Brazil who have abused the rights of so many people, including people who have legal residence in the United States, it's only a matter before that all comes.
Now, I have questions and doubts about the sanctions regime, whether the U.S. ought to be sanctioning people based on claims that they're violating human rights in these other countries.
Like, why is the U.S. government the policeman of the world?
But that's the role the U.S. government has undertaken.
We're talking right now about sanctioning South Africa.
Which, coincidentally, is the country of origin of Elon Musk, and which also is the country that led the way in bringing war crimes charges against Israel, sanctioning them because they're not treating their white farmers well, or they're exposed to criminality or whatever.
So this is the role the U.S. plays.
Even though we say we want to focus on our country, we're constantly focusing on others.
And if there's a tyrant in South America, it's Alessandro de Mareche.
Now, I just want to show you something else that happened in Brazil because it's both interesting and important but also incredibly pathetic but also darkly hilarious.
Brazil has a major problem with gambling.
It legalized gambling in 2017.
There was this interim president who took over when they impeached the elected president.
He was incredibly unpopular.
He left office with a 4% approval rating.
He was basically there to carry out an agenda of serving banks and austerity that nobody elected.
But he ascended to the presidency.
And in his lame duck period, when he was already on his way out, when the election had happened, and they elected Bolsonaro, and he was on his way out, he issued an order legalizing sports betting in Brazil.
And almost overnight, there were dozens of companies.
With apps allowing anyone to bet.
You transfer your money into the betting account and then you start betting.
And it grew very quickly, including slot machines and other computer gambling.
And what has happened is it was done basically without any regulations.
And a huge number of poor people, Brazil as a country with massive income inequality, a lot of poor people survive on a pretty innovative Welfare program where they give monthly payments to mothers as long as they keep their kids health certificate updated, take them to the doctor, ensure they're going to school.
So they demand things of the family to get this payment.
And other people just have, you know, very small amounts of resources.
They get the paycheck once a month that barely pays their expenses.
And so many of these people now are addicted to gambling.
They just have the apps right in front of them.
They immediately get this money.
They transfer it to the gambling apps.
Obviously, they're doing it because they're told that they have a chance to get out of poverty and become wealthy.
And instead, as you can imagine, huge numbers are going massively into debt.
And some people have committed suicide over it.
It's a horrific problem that has really exacerbated the problem of poverty and income inequality in Brazil.
And one of the most Significant drivers of this, of poor people downloading these apps and betting all their money to feed their family, to pay their rent, is that you have these gigantic influencers, like Instagram influencers, kind of like Kim Kardashian types, who are just, you know, mega famous for being Instagram influencers.
They're beloved primarily by younger people, by poor people.
And these companies, these gambling companies, are paying these influencers millions and millions of dollars to constantly promote gambling to their fans, their poor fans, their young fans.
They're like, oh, this is the way that you can get rich.
They fabricate videos showing the influencer betting and winning all this money.
And they're like, you can win tons of money.
And obviously, people look up to these people.
They have very wealthy lifestyles.
They want to be like them.
And they're getting very rich, these influencers, on encouraging people to gamble, even knowing they have a very young audience, huge numbers of poor people.
And then oftentimes these multimillion-dollar contracts with these influencers include a provision that says if you increase our profits by a certain percent, in addition to the million dollars, you get a cut of that increase in profit, meaning these influencers have an incentive to Create as much loss for their following, for their audience, their fans, as they can.
The more money their fans lose by betting on their links or part of their app, the more money they make.
It's such a dystopian thing.
I mean, these people are so rich.
These people with tens of millions of followers on Instagram for doing nothing but being influencers.
And then on top of that, you need so much money more to encourage people you know can't afford it whose lives are going to be ruined.
Just constantly bet by encouraging them, by using your influence and the credibility that you have over them.
So the Senate, the Brazilian Senate, decided it was going to create a formal committee, like the U.S. Congress does, that gives them the power to subpoena people to conduct an investigation.
And they decided they were going to subpoena these influencers, these mega-famous Influencers, mega-rich, mega-famous influencers, to go and testify before the Senate about this very serious matter.
And last week, they began with, or maybe she was second, this woman named Vanessa Fonseca, Virginia Fonseca, who is basically the most famous and beloved Instagram influencer in Brazil.
I guess you could call her other Kim Kardashian in Brazil.
Quite as globally known, obviously.
But she has like 55 million Instagram followers, hundreds of millions of followers across platforms.
I mean, she goes anywhere.
You know, there's a huge uproar.
So they decided that they were going to call her and interrogate her, like you would in an investigative committee, about her contract with them, about what she's doing, about whether she even thinks about the harm she's causing.
And instead, these senators were so giddy and enamored.
That they were in the presence of this 26-year-old Instagram influencer.
All their wives and daughters love her.
That instead of questioning her, they were like throwing compliments at her.
And then in the middle of the session, one senator, this is a federally elected senator, after praising her and defending her, he stood up and Asked her whether he could bring his phone up so that she would make a selfie and a video saying a little message to his wife and daughter who are huge fans.
Let me just show you this.
Here's what happened.
His name is Senator Clechino and you just have to see this to believe it.
He says, you are a generator of wealth.
You create wealth for the society.
You create jobs.
So keep bringing this to the society.
What we need is for us politicians here, with all due respect, to the excellent president here.
But the real excellence is her, who pays our salaries.
Her taxes are rigorously paid while we are a source of expenditures.
I'm not here today to point my finger at you, but to persuade you to try and touch your heart so that you may now start doing advertisements against the society.
It's kind of gambling.
In fact, I'm finishing up here.
Can I quickly ask you to send a greeting to my wife and my daughter?
And they all laugh.
And she's like, "For sure!" And she has a little pink cup there and her sweatshirt.
And he comes up and she asks what the names are of the wife and the daughter.
And she does a little selfie video for them.
Pass them on the back.
He seems not at all embarrassed.
And can you imagine being a senator?
And then calling this 26-year-old influencer who's doing immense harm.
You have created a committee to investigate it.
Instead, you're like, thank you so much.
Your wealth is so important to us.
You pay our salaries.
You're doing great things.
Do you mind if I come up?
And then after, the leaders of the committee and all the other senators lined up to take selfies with her.
Here's several of the senators.
There she is in her sweatshirt that she decided to wear with her jeans.
To the Senate, to testify in the Senate.
There's actually a rule, by the way, that if you testify in the Senate, you're supposed to wear a suit, but it didn't apply to her.
And there these senators are posing, smiling, when the whole point is supposed to be that she's this evil person who's getting richer and richer by destroying the lives of her young and poor fans by encouraging them to engage in an addictive behavior that destroys their lives and their families' lives.
I don't know.
It's just one of the most amazing things I've ever seen.
One of the most pathetic.
All right, last story from Brazil that I just want to leave you with.
Lula da Silva's wife is the First Lady of Brazil, obviously.
It's his second wife.
His longtime wife died, I think back in 2018, when he was still in prison, actually, 2017.
And then he remarried.
And her name is Xanja.
So Xanja da Silva.
And...
Lula and his wife and a big contingent of Brazilian officials went to first Russia for that multi-country ceremony that China was at and other countries as well to celebrate Victory Day, the Russian Victory Day that they celebrate when they played a major role in defeating the Nazis.
And they have a military parade and China was a major part of it.
And then afterwards, Lula went to China to visit President Xi.
China is an important trading partner of Brazil, now their largest trading partner.
They passed the United States.
They're in BRICS together with Russia and India, South Africa, and also China.
And, you know, there's a big meeting of multiple heads of state, lots of protocol.
But Zhang Zha, the first lady, decided to take the opportunity to, like, basically call over President Xi, like, hey, I have something to ask you about.
And she basically said, TikTok allows a lot of right-wing speech in our country and it's harming our country.
What are you going to do about it?
And to say that that was embarrassing, that that was a breach of protocol, is to radically understate the case.
President Xi was very visibly irritated.
Here's what Folio of Sao Paulo, the country's largest newspaper, reported about that.
Xanxia's comment about TikTok causes tension during a meeting between Lula and President Xi.
The First Lady reportedly mentioned the harmful effects of the platform, TikTok.
Lula denies discomfort and criticizes disclosure of conversations.
A remark by Brazil's First Lady, Zhangja Da Silva, caused discomfort during a meeting between President Lula Da Silva and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Zhangja reportedly mentioned TikTok's harmful effects to Xi during the conversation.
Folia confirmed with two sources, one from the Brazilian delegation in Beijing and another close to the Chinese side, that Xanzha's intervention caused discomfort among the Chinese.
According to Lula, Xi responded, look, if you don't like TikTok, quote, Brazil has the right to regulate its social media platforms.
Quote, we can't allow social media to keep committing the absurdities they do while we lack the ability to regulate them.
That's what Lula said.
So she was like, Hey, you have this app in our country, TikTok.
There's all kinds of right-wing fascists.
She's claiming also her concern was that somehow it's detrimental to young women and girls.
And she's just like, she's not the president.
She's the first lady.
And she just kind of accosted President Xi and was like, what are you doing about this TikTok thing in our country?
It's causing harm.
You need to stop this right-wing speech.
And he was like, look.
You have the power to regulate it all you want, to ban it from our country?
Like, what do you want from me?
It just wasn't what the purpose of the meeting is.
And then, obviously, this created a lot of criticism over her.
And you'll never guess what she did.
She stood up and said, look, I will never stop fighting for the rights of Brazilian girls and Brazilian women.
And all this talk about protocol is basically a way of telling women they have to keep their mouth shut.
Like, how dare you?
Breach Protocol is basically saying, you're a woman, you keep your mouth shut.
And she's like, this woman is not going to keep her mouth shut.
So, of course, implying that misogyny is behind the whole embarrassment, this diplomatic scandal.
But also it shows just how obsessed they are with censoring free discourse.
She goes to China and she's like, stop allowing this speech I don't like on TikTok.
And then puts herself as a victim saying, you're trying to tell women to shut up even though The point is that she's not actually any elected official.
She doesn't have any position or power in Brazil.
Nobody elected her.
And he just summoned the president of Xi, the president of China, with no advance notice to anyone and just started out of the blue complaining about what he allows on TikTok because he's supposed to go fix TikTok for Brazil for her.
I mean, it was just an incredible embarrassment.
All right.
That was a lot of stories.
We're going to leave the Ukrainian story for tomorrow.
I think there's going to be more developments on it.
So, yeah.
Thank you.
That was such a smooth transition.
I think I deserve a lot of credit for that.
That does conclude our show for this evening.
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