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Sept. 5, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:52:15
Trump and Rubio Apply Panama Regime Change Playbook to Venezuela; Michael Tracey is Kicked-Out of Epstein Press Conference

Glenn goes over the recent attack by the US on the Venezuelan boat allegedly carrying drugs, and is joined by Michael Tracey to discuss the Epstein drama.   ------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok

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Time Text
Vital Issues and Lies 00:04:01
Good evening.
It's Tuesday, September 4th.
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.
I know some of you have been a bit cantankerous about the fact that we've missed several shows this week, Tuesday and Wednesday after the Labor Day holiday, as well as last week.
It's because I've been traveling a lot.
I just had this lingering flu.
I think it keeps going away.
Then it comes back.
I go back and do the show.
Then it comes back.
I believe it's gone for good now.
So hopefully we can maintain our regular schedule, which, as you know, is every Monday through Friday, 7 p.m. Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble.
Now, tonight, the Trump administration proudly announced yesterday that it blew up a small speedboat out of the water near Venezuela.
It claimed the Trump administration did, without presenting even a shred of evidence, that the boat carried 11 members of the Trendaragua gang and that the boat was filled with drugs.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, whose lifelong dream has been engineering coups and regime changes in Latin American countries like Venezuela and Cuba, claimed at first that the boat was headed toward the nearby island nation of Trinidad.
But after President Trump claimed that the boat was actually headed to the United States, where it intended to drop all sorts of drugs into the country, Secretary of State Rubio changed his story to align with Trump's and claimed that the boat was in fact headed to the United States.
There are numerous vital issues and questions here.
First, have Trump supporters not learned the lesson yet that when the U.S. government makes assertions and claims to justify its violence, that evidence ought to be required before simply assuming that political leaders are telling the truth?
Second, what is the basis, the legal or constitutional basis that permits Donald Trump to simply order boats in international waters to be bombed with U.S. helicopters or drones instead of, for example, interdicting the boat if you believe there's drugs on it to actually prove that the people are guilty before just evaporating them off of the planet?
And then third, and perhaps most importantly, is all of this, as it seems, merely a prelude to yet another U.S. regime change war, this time one aimed at the government of oil-rich Venezuela.
We'll examine all of these events and implications, including the very glaring parallels between what is being done now to what the Bush 41 administration did in 1989 when invading Panama in order to oppose its one-time ally, President Manuel Noriega, based on exactly the same claims the Trump administration is now making about Venezuela.
For a political movement that claims to hate Bush neocon foreign policy, many Trump supporters and Trump officials sure do find ways to support the wars that constitute the essence of this ideology they claim to hate.
Then, the independent journalist and friend of the show, Michael Tracy, was physically removed from a press conference in Washington, D.C. yesterday, one to which he was invited, that was convened by the so-called survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and their lawyer.
Michael's apparent crime was that he did what a journalist should be doing.
He asked a question that undercut the narrative of the press event and documented the lies of one of the key Epstein accusers.
Lies that the Epstein accuser herself admits to having told.
Now, all this is part of Michael's now months-long journalistic crusade to debunk large parts of the Epstein melodrama, efforts that include claims he's made with which I have sometimes disagree, but it's undeniable that the work he's doing is journalistically valuable.
In every instance, we always need questioning and critical scrutiny of Bob Justice or emotion-driven consensus to ask whether there's really evidence to support all of the claims.
Combative RFK Jr. Exchanges 00:03:16
And that's what Michael has been doing.
And he's basically been standing alone while doing it.
And he'll be here to discuss yesterday's expulsion from this press conference, as well as the broader implications of the work he's been trying to do.
And then finally, RFK Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, testified before the Senate Finance Committee today, and he had extremely combative and vituperative exchanges with multiple members of that Senate committee, mostly Democrats, but also some Republicans.
And in these disputes lay many important revelations about how DC continues to view the elite health policy establishment with the reverence, notwithstanding the wake of destruction and lies and corruption and sickness that health establishment has left in its wake, most visible during the COVID epidemic, but also before that and after that as well.
Time permitting, we'll examine some of the most raucous exchanges on this live show.
But if we run out of time, as we might, we'll then broadcast the Slack segment, either in whole or part, exclusively on our locals community.
Before we get to that, a couple of quick programming notes.
First of all, System Update is also available in podcast form.
You can listen to every episode 12 hours after the first broadcast live here on Rumble on Spotify, Apple, and all of the major podcasting platforms, where if you rate, review, and follow our program, it really does help spread the visibility of the show.
Finally, as independent journalists, we do rely upon the support of our viewers and members, which you can provide by joining our locals community.
You simply click the red join button right below the video player on the Rumble page.
It will take you there.
You get a whole variety of unique benefits.
Every Friday night, we do a Q ⁇ A where we take questions solely from our locals members.
We have interactive features throughout the week.
We also sometimes stream exclusively, as we're likely to do tonight with this third segment about RFK Jr., either in whole or in part, solely on our locals platform.
And most of all, it is the community on which we really do rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
If you want to join, you simply click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly there.
now welcome to a new episode of system update starting right now all right so before we get into tonight's segments i just want to say earlier today i appeared on megan kelly's program for two full hours I always enjoy talking to Megan, even when we disagree.
In fact, sometimes, especially when we disagree, we have no problem going on and debating and even arguing about things where we have differences.
It doesn't affect the fact that I have a lot of respect for her and consider her a personal friend.
We covered a lot of issues earlier today, including the legal trouble that Lisa Cook, the member of the Federal Reserve Board, seems to have found herself in, Barry Weiss's likely sale of the free press for more than $100 million to Larry Ellison's son and her elevation to some sort of supreme ideological enforcer at CBS News.
We talked about the RFK Jr. hearings and the general view of the health policy establishment, even in the wake of COVID, how there's still reverence for it in DC and many other topics as well.
U.S. Backyard Rivalry 00:03:49
If you want to check that out, there's a lot of topics that we discussed there that we won't cover on the show tonight.
So if that's something that interests you, feel free.
All right, for tonight, there clearly has been a deliberate buildup of tensions on the part of the Trump administration with the country of Venezuela.
It has been a long time, very bipartisan goal to engineer regime change in Venezuela, both because Venezuela is part of the part of the world that we consider to be our domain, our backyard, ever since the Monroe Doctrine.
We rule all of the hemisphere.
And if there's a government we dislike, that government has to be removed.
You may remember that for years, both parties in Washington indulged this absolutely delusional fantasy that the real president of Venezuela was not first Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro who were actually in charge of governing Venezuela, but instead someone named Juan Guaido, who we just singled out some very pro-U.S., pro-Western puppet.
And we're like, he's the president of Venezuela, even though he never received any votes.
And he came to Washington and there was a State of the Union address and Donald Trump introduced him as the legitimate president of Venezuela.
Nancy Pelosi jumped to her feet faster than you've ever seen her do, except when Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the Congress and began applauding and celebrating, all the Democrats, all the Republicans joining together.
So regime change in Venezuela, very oil-rich Venezuela, just total coincidence, but it's worth noting, has been a longtime goal of both parties in Washington, but particularly of Marco Rubio, because Marco Rubio is, for many reasons, fixated on Latin America.
His parents came as refugees from Cuba.
Now he likes to tell the story without mentioning that they were driven out of Cuba, not by Castro, but by the predecessor, the very U.S. supported and friendly Batista regime that was overthrown by the Cuban Revolution.
But he comes from Cuba.
His parents were Cuban refugees.
He has had a obsession the way a lot of people who are Cuban and come to this country and live in Miami have with Latin America.
They want the U.S. government to change the countries and transform the regimes throughout Latin America, the way many people want the U.S. to do in the Middle East with Israel and other people want the U.S. to do with Ukraine.
There's a huge political faction, very powerful in Florida, out of which Marco Rubio emerges that wants the U.S. government to rule Latin America.
Now that he's Secretary of State, it's his time to do so.
And engineering regime change in Cuba and Venezuela probably are his two biggest dreams.
And he's now in a position of power inside the U.S. government to do that.
And it seems like the U.S. government is on its way.
There were efforts actually in the first Trump administration to engineer regime change in Venezuela led by John Bolton.
And one of the reasons why Trump had a falling out with John Bolton and ended up firing him is because it didn't go nearly as quickly or as easily as Bolton suggested to Trump would happen.
And in fact, Trump ended up with some sort of respect for Maduro, the way he has respect for what he considers to be tough guys, like tough leaders, strong men, as a result of Maduro's ability to stay in power, even despite the United States' best effort to remove him.
But now these efforts seem to be really escalating.
The U.S. has deployed major military assets off the coast of Venezuela, constant warships and aircraft carriers and submarines, clearly signaling to Caracas that the U.S. is seeking some kind of military conflict, or at least trying to have Maduro perceive the threat.
U.S. Strikes Narco-Terrorists 00:15:10
And all of that escalated into something quite concrete yesterday when Donald Trump went on to Truth Social and made this announcement, quote, early this morning on my orders, the U.S. military forces conducted a kinetic strike against positively identified Trendaragua narco-terrorists in the Southcom area of responsibility.
TDA is a designated foreign terrorist organization operating under the control of Nicolas Maduro, responsible for mass murder, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, and acts of violence and terror across the United States and Western hemisphere.
The strike occurred while the terrorists were at sea in international waters transporting illegal narcotics heading toward the United States.
The strike resulted in 11 terrorists killed in action.
No U.S. forces were harmed in the strike.
Please let this serve as notice to anybody even thinking about bringing drugs into the United States of America.
Beware.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
multiple exclamation points.
And to melodramatize the event, Trump posted a video of this ship obviously being surveilled by U.S. surveillance technology and then blown up.
It's not a big ship to put that mildly.
It seems like you could carry an amount of cocaine on a ship like this or a boat like this is not a ship at all.
It's just like a speedboat that might, I don't know, have enough cocaine to fuel, say, like a big bachelor party or wedding party, like the Jeff Bezos wedding.
Not saying there was cocaine used there, but if there were, seems like this might be the amount.
You probably would actually need more.
There's nothing about a big amount here.
They also claim there are 11 people on this small little boat, which doesn't make a lot of sense.
Why would you pack a boat that you want to carry drugs with 11 people?
The more people you have, the less space there is for the drug.
But as you'll see, the United States military just zapped it out of existence without any apparent warning.
And Trump declassified the footage in order to show us.
here is what we saw and you see a couple of people moving on the boat It's a pretty close-up picture.
It's just going through the water.
And you're about to see very shortly.
There's a more distant visual of the boat.
And then something, either a helicopter, according to the U.S. government dropping a bomb or a drone dropping a bomb, quite a significant bomb, blows the boat into pieces out of water and sets it on fire.
Clearly, all the people on the boat died.
And the Trump administration's claim was, and you'll notice in Trump's language, it's very deliberate.
It's clearly vetted by lawyers.
And it's intended to provide the legal justification for this strike.
He uses the term terrorist multiple times.
Now, the term terrorism has a lot of significance in our discourse.
It's used constantly, not just for propagandistic purposes or to demonize, but also to justify legally all sorts of actions.
But it's really a term that has no real meaning, which is what makes it a valuable propagandistic term.
It just gets applied to whoever the government wants it to apply it to.
There's no criterion for it.
There's no criteria for it.
There's no metrics for it.
At one point, it used to mean threatening or using violence against civilian populations with the goal of fostering political change.
Trendel Aragua doesn't even remotely do that.
They're not interested in political change.
They're not interested in threatening violence against civilians.
They're interested in, if the government's claims are correct, in profiteering.
They're a drug trafficking gang.
They're looking to profit through the sale of drugs, something that drug traffickers have been doing for as long as drugs have existed.
What does it have to do with terrorism?
The reason it's important for Trump to call them terrorists is because there is no legal authority for Trump to just decide to blow up whatever boats he wants to blow up in the middle of the ocean in international waters.
The only conceivable authorization there is legally for him to do that are the authorization to use military force that was enacted by the Congress in the wake of 9-11 that authorized U.S. military force against first al-Qaeda and any groups that were associated with al-Qaeda.
And there's been a lot of efforts to try and repeal that UAMF, the authorization to use military force, based on the concern that at some point presidents will just start using it for any kind of bombing, any kind of wars they want to start.
They'll just call them terrorists and they'll say, oh, look, I have this authorization to use military force passed back in 2001 in the wake of the war on terror.
As long as I call someone a terrorist, it means that I get to blow them up.
Now, the reality is the UAMF that was passed in 2001 was quite narrow.
It only authorized the use of military force against the group that perpetrated the 9-11 attack, which we were told was al-Qaeda, and any groups affiliated with it.
But then it just stayed around for so long that it basically became carte blanche, like a blank check for first the Bush administration, then the Trump, then the Obama administration, then the Trump administration, to just bomb anyone in the Middle East.
It had nothing to do with al-Qaeda.
And say, oh, yeah, we're bombing because we're attacking terrorists.
Sometimes, even like in Syria, for example, we fought on the same side as al-Qaeda.
We were fighting to remove the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and so is Al-Qaeda.
We were allies with Al-Qaeda and ISIS.
And we would just bomb Syria.
And it's like, well, what justification do you have to bomb Syria?
Oh, we have this authorization to use military force.
But that was supposed to be against al-Qaeda.
You're fighting on the same side as al-Qaeda.
But it got stretched beyond recognition to justify bombing all throughout the Middle East.
And a lot of people have said, hey, we should repeal this.
The war on terror is over.
And it never got repealed because once the Congress gives itself or the government power, it almost never gets taken away.
Remember, the Patriot Act was supposed to be temporary.
That was going to be repealed when we no longer needed it.
And now it's just a permanent part of our government.
Nobody ever talks about repealing it.
And so Trump is basically trying to saying this is a terrorist group like al-Qaeda or ISIS.
And the congressional authorization for me to use military force against terrorism means that as long as I call someone a terrorist, I can now bomb them and go to war.
And that's how Trendaragua went from being a drug trafficking gang to being a terrorist group.
I mean, does Trendaragua sound like, based on everything even that the government says about it, if you want to believe it, like what terrorism is supposed to represent as a term?
When have they threatened to use violence or use violence against civilians as a means of fostering political change?
That's not what they're about, even remotely.
But who cares?
Terrorism is a word that means whatever the wielder of it wants it to mean.
And according to the Trump administration, even allows it to just basically start a war by just bombing speedboats in the middle of the ocean.
There's other claims in what Trump said that are extremely important.
He said Trendaragua is controlled by Nicolas Maduro.
Very similar to how liberals were saying that the hacking of the 2016 election was controlled by Vladimir Putin or that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9-11 attack because he was in an alliance with al-Qaeda.
Where is there any evidence that Nicolas Maduro controls or directs this terrorist group?
Obviously, they're trying to say that because what they want to do, and I hope you can see this, it's as clear as day.
This is not about drugs coming to the United States.
The drugs that come into the United States don't come principally from Venezuela at all.
For years, we heard fentanyl was coming from China and Mexico.
And cocaine comes from Colombia, Mexico.
The U.S. government's own studies don't even mention Venezuela as a major source of drugs.
This is not about drugs.
That's the pretext.
The real goal is to remove Maduro because he's the head of a very oil-rich country, doesn't allow access to the oil that Western oil companies want.
Same old story as we've been doing for decades, just a continuation of the same foreign policy.
And the U.S. government wants to control Venezuela through a puppet or wants to break it up into little pieces like we did in Syria and have militias fighting each other for our own interests, having nothing to do with Venezuelans or anything like that.
And this is what all of this is about.
But on top of that, there's also no evidence that there was any members of Trendaragua on this boat.
If that's something you want to believe, and I can't tell you how many people I heard today, Trump supporters, insisting that as usual, not as usual, as always, what Trump did was right, because this was Trendaragua delivering drugs to the United States.
There was zero evidence.
Where is the evidence?
Do you need any evidence at all?
Before you believe that, that this was Trendaragua on these boats, on this boat?
No evidence that they were heading to the United States to deliver these drugs.
In fact, as we said, Marco Rubio's initial statement said that it was heading to Trinidad.
Why would you use a tiny little boat go from all the way from Venezuela to the United States?
It's not easy on such a small little speedboat to get there.
It's easy to get to Trinidad, which is much closer.
So there's all these claims being made that have absolutely no evidence attached to them, accompanying them, just assertions from political leaders, knowing that followers of politicians like to believe whatever they say without any evidence.
That's how wars are so easily started always.
But they have major, major implications.
I mean, if Trump, if what Trump said is true, that Nicolas Maduro is the head of a terrorist organization and is a terrorist, of course the Trump administration is going to assert that it has authority to go to war with Venezuela.
It doesn't need Congress.
It doesn't need anything.
I mean, if Maduro was a terrorist, they're going to use that authorization to use military force against terrorists to justify anything they do to Venezuela.
Here's the New York Times story on this from earlier today.
Trump says U.S. attacked a boat carrying Venezuelan gang members, killing 11.
Quote, President Trump said on Tuesday that the United States had carried out a single strike, carried out a strike against a boat carrying drugs and killed 11, quote, terrorists.
The administration's latest military escalation in Mr. Trump's war against Venezuelan drug cartels that he is blamed for bringing fentanyl into the country.
A senior U.S. official said a special operations aircraft, either an attack helicopter or an MQ-9 Reaper drone, carried out the attack on Tuesday morning against a four-engine speedboat loaded with drugs.
U.S. surveillance aircraft and other censors had been monitoring cartel maritime traffic for weeks before the strike, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operation details.
A second U.S. official who also was speaking on a condition of anonymity said there would be more such attacks against cartel boats.
The action comes amid a major backup buildup of U.S. naval forces outside Venezuela's waters.
The administration has also stepped up belligerent rhetoric about fighting drug cartels and labeled Venezuela's president, Nicolas Maduro, a terrorist cartel leader.
Quote, the president is very clear that he's going to use the full power of America, the full might of the United States, to take on and eradicate these drug cartels, no matter where they're operating from.
And no matter how long they've been able to act with impunity, said Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, before boarding a plane in Florida to head to Mexico.
This is a question I genuinely have at this point.
And I'm somebody who had believed, and in some cases still believe, that MAGA officials, MAGA influencers, MA pundits genuinely find neoconservative ideology to be destructive and are opposed to it.
But leave them aside and let's look at the actions of the Trump administration and what they're saying.
We're fighting terrorism.
We have to just bomb whatever boats we think are terrorists, filled with terrorists, kind of like Obama bombing wedding parties because he said terrorists were there.
So often turned out to be false.
We just blew up civilians and wedding parties.
We're fighting against terror.
How is this remotely different from 2002-2003 neocon ideology, neocon rhetoric, neocon discourse, neocon mentality, neocon legal justifications?
What is the objections at this point that MAGA has to bush-chaining neoconservatism?
I really don't see them.
Especially since, as we're about to show you, what they're doing in Venezuela is basically a verbatim copy of what the first George Bush, former CIA director, ultimate deep state representative, did in Panama to justify the 1989 invasion of Panama, where we went to war with Panama, killed thousands of Panamanians, bombed Panama, and did so based on the claim that the president of Panama, Manuel Noriega,
a longtime U.S. ally in the past, had turned into a terrorist and a drug trafficker.
We needed to go and change the government of Panama in order to arrest him and bring him to the United States to stand trial, which the United States then did another glorious regime change war in Panama.
Congratulations to the U.S.
And all the same language used by the Bush administration then to do that is exactly what's being used now.
So I need someone to tell me who's a MAGA adherent who supports this.
What is the problem that you had with neoconservatism?
Was it that it wasn't militaristic enough?
Here is Marco Rubio's original claim before Trump came out and claimed the boat was headed to the United States and delivered drugs, where Marco Rubio said something much different.
The president made the announcement and said it was a lethal strike.
I think the Pentagon will have more details and other things to offer you here in the next few hours.
Yeah, that's a drug vessel.
It's carrying drugs inside.
I'll refer you to the Pentagon.
They'll give you more details on that when in the next, I anticipate shortly, probably while we're in the air.
How many deaths with the lethal force were key on?
Again, look, I'm trying to be evasive.
I'll let the Pentagon answer that.
Suffice it to say that the president is going to be on offense against drug cartels and drug trafficking in the United States.
It destabilizes not just the country, but the entire Caribbean basin.
These particular drugs are probably headed to Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean, at which point they just contribute to the instability these boat was headed toward Trinidad or some other country in the Caribbean.
Cuban Comparison to Panama Coup 00:15:35
And he said it destabilizes the Caribbean.
He didn't even pretend that this boat was carrying drugs to the United States or to Americans.
And then Trump decided to come out and just say that, and then Marco Rubio retroactively changed his story.
Did he actually not know that?
Did Marco Rubio not know?
I mean, he was the one, he's the State Department, he's the Secretary of State, he was sent out to announce it and to explain it.
And he said very explicitly this boat was headed toward Trinidad or some other Caribbean island.
And then Trump comes out and says, no, no, it's coming.
It was headed to the United States.
We're going to drop drugs for Americans.
Does that not raise any doubts or skepticism at all?
Like, I don't know, is the government telling the truth?
Given how often they've not told the truth?
Does it raise any skepticism that the justifications were leaked to the New York Times through anonymous U.S. officials in the same way that every program of government deceit involving war and everything else has been leaked?
Not attached to any name, but just to anonymous claims that the New York Times mindlessly prints with no skepticism.
Here's a report from the Drug Enforcement Agency, which is the federal government agency charged with being the ultimate authority on drug trafficking internationally and domestically.
This is from 2024.
It's the most recent report.
And this is their annual report on cocaine.
Venezuela is not even mentioned in this report.
So now we're supposed to believe in 2025 when it's time to regime change Venezuela that, oh, it's Venezuela dumping huge amounts of cocaine into the United States.
Except here was the 2024 report and it said this, quote, Colombia was identified as the primary source of USC's cocaine analyzed through the CSP.
Approximately 84% of U.S. samples were classified as originating from Colombian coca.
84% of cocaine entering the United States comes from Colombia.
The predominant sub-regional source of U.S. samples was southwestern Colombia, identified in approximately 42% of samples.
Cocaine from Peruvian coca was identified in approximately 4% of U.S. samples.
So Venezuela wasn't even, nobody even pretended that they were a major source of drugs.
And as far as fentanyl was concerned, there's zero evidence this boat had fentanyl on it.
We've heard for years that the main source of fentanyl is China and Mexico, that it comes through Mexico from China, that it's China flooding our country with fentanyl.
Why isn't Trump blowing up boats coming from China that are supposedly delivering fentanyl to the United States?
It's because we're not interested in regime change in China.
President Trump loves President Xi.
He heaps praise on him all the time.
He talks about how great of a relationship they have.
There's less antagonism toward China now than there has been, than there certainly was under the Obama administration.
This is all a pretext to do regime change in Venezuela.
This is the WMD of Venezuela.
This is the Benghazi and the no-fly zone that Obama invoked to regime change in Libya.
Do you not see this?
Our drug problem doesn't emanate from Venezuela.
Really, it emanates from the fact that so many Americans want to do drugs and get addicted to drugs.
We ought to ask the question of why that is.
And the idea that we're just going to go around bombing random boats that we suspect to have drugs as a way of preventing the United States from being flooded with drugs is lunacy.
Now, as I said, this is not the first time that the Trump administration tried to engineer regime change in Venezuela.
It happened as well in the first Trump term.
Here from NBC News, July 22nd, former National Security Advisor John Bolton admits to planning foreign coups.
Pressed about his involvement, Bolton cited an unsuccessful attempt to oust Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro during the Trump administration.
Here's Marco Rubio when he was a senator from Florida, from Miami in particular, where they're fanatical about regime change in these countries that are of interest to them because of their origin, not because they're related to U.S. interests.
In April of 2019, which was of course the second to last year of the Trump administration, and he tweeted this, quote, just saw CNN shamefully call what is happening today in Venezuela a quote coup attempt.
Juan Guaido is recognized as the legitimate interim president of Venezuela by a constitution over 50 countries and the OAS.
The only coup was the one carried out by Cuba in support of dictator Maduro.
So the attempt to coup the United States was not trying to install somebody never elected named Juan Guaido, a Western puppet as president of Venezuela.
No, the coup was somehow what Cuba did in Venezuela.
Here from Axios in April of 2021, they say the coup actually came close to succeeding in the first Trump administration, the day Maduro almost fell, the inside story of a failed uprising.
Quote, John Bolton's day began with a 5.25 a.m. phone call from the Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
By then, it was clear to both officials that, quote, this was the day.
Bolton tells Axios, for the first time in his tenure as national security advisor, Bolton woke Donald Trump.
He relayed the message that Guaido was putting his plan to split the regime and Alice Maduro into action and that the day could end with either Venezuelan leader imprisoned.
And it's in the early afternoon, by which time the situation had, quote, taken a dip downhill, Bolton emerged in front of the White House and shocked the international media by declaring that Padrinho, Moreno, and Ivan Hernandez-Dalla, the head of the Presidential Guard, had all conspired against Maduro.
Quote, I just want everyone to be sure that we know what was going on, that we knew that the people in the Maduro regime had been taking part in this plot, Bolton says.
The regime insiders never fully trusted the opposition's promises.
The military was only going to side with the winning team, and Maduro kept the cool kept as cool, the source who was coordinating between the sides say.
One by one, the regime's top figures took their places behind Maduro.
The following morning, Padrinho was on state TV smiling alongside his commander-in-chief.
So the whole thing ended up to be a failure.
The obvious comparison here is to what George Bush 41 did in Panama.
Here is from the United States Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York in March of 2020.
Manhattan U.S. Attorney announces narco-terrorism charges against Nicolas Maduro, current and former Venezuelan officials, and the FARC leadership.
William Barr, the Attorney General of the United States, Jeffrey Berman, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced the unsealing of two separate indictments charging current and former Venezuelan officials and FARC leadership.
One superseding indictment includes narco-terrorism, drug trafficking, and weapons charges against Maduro.
The U.S. Secretary of the Department of State, through its narcotics reward program, is now offering rewards of up to $15 million for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Maduro.
And they increased that subsequently this month to $50 million here from CBS News, August 7th.
Trump doubles Nicolas Maduro bounty offers, $50 million reward for arrest of Venezuelans' president.
So you see what's happening.
They want to remove Nicolas Maduro from power and control a country of great importance to Marco Rubio's constituency in South Florida and to Marco Rubio himself.
This has nothing to do with American interest.
Regime change wars in Venezuela, like the regime change war that Bush 41 did in Panama, has nothing to do with the lives of the American people.
It's about controlling this region for the same interest as we always fight wars for.
Now, Rubio has been calling Maduro a, has long been calling Maduro a fugitive from justice, which obviously means that the U.S. believes it has the right to go and capture him and bring him back to the U.S.
And this is exactly, it's a complete replica of what happened with the U.S. war in Panama, this completely senseless, stupid war.
Many of you don't might not remember, but when George Bush 41 was elected, there was this very common theme that he had this wimp energy, unlike the great, powerful Ronald Reagan.
Even though Ronald Reagan avoided war, was an actor, well, George H.W. Bush was a genuine war hero in World War II, and then ran the CIA.
But somehow it was Reagan who was like this strong, courageous military leader, even though he never got near a war.
Whereas George H.W. Bush, who actually risked his life and came close to dying and was an actual war hero in World War II, was somehow the wimp.
And they wanted a war quickly so that he could lose this wimp status.
And they picked Panama to invade because why not?
It's like Reagan invaded Grenada.
Just, you know, you just pick up a country, pick a country, just kind of invade it, show the U.S. means business, whatever.
And the New York Times actually ran a front-page story saying, no more WIMP factor for George H.W. Bush now that he invaded Panama.
And the rationale used to invade Panama due regime change there here from the New York Times September 1st, 1989.
This is 36 years ago, even though it could be today.
U.S. renews attacks on Noriega offering evidence of ties to drugs.
Quote, a new effort to turn world opinion against General Manuel Antonio Noriega, the United States, asserted today that the Panamanian strongman continued to play a major role in the laundering of drug money and the shipment of narcotics through his country.
The Bush administration also said the general had built a personal fortune of $200 million to $300 million, mainly through drug trafficking and other national criminal activities.
Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleberger, addressing a special session of the Organization of American States, presented a catalog of evidence to support accusations that General Noriega had turned Panama into, quote, a haven for drug traffickers.
They just recycle these scripts every 20 to 30 years.
People don't remember them.
They seem new.
People get all riled up.
They're like, yeah, get the terrorists.
Kill the terrorists.
Kill the drug traffickers.
And that's how we end up in this war.
Here from the New York, from the Washington Post, December of 1989, Noriega's CIA ties complicated the decision.
Quote, the 1988 indictments of General Manuel Antonio Noriega, used by the Bush administration to justify efforts to capture and arrest the Panamanian leader, climaxed an intense debate within the U.S. government on the unprecedented legal, diplomatic, and national security issues raised by bringing criminal charges against a foreign leader who had once had a close relationship with the U.S. intelligence agencies.
Noriega's long-standing association with the CIA, the DEA, and other branches of the U.S. government continues to haunt the case.
Current and former U.S. officials said yesterday, meaning maybe the CIA or the DEA itself have been involved in drug trafficking before and were perfectly happy to support Noriega.
And then for geopolitical reasons, when it wanted to remove him, cited his drug trafficking status, even though he was in bed with the CIA and the DIA doing exactly that for a long time.
By the way, the code name, the phrase given to that invasion was Operation Just Cause.
And here is George H.W. Bush losing his WIMP status by sending people in the United States to war in Panama, announcing at the White House why we were doing this.
Nevertheless, his apprehension and return to the United States should send a clear signal that the United States is serious in its determination that those charged with promoting the distribution of drugs cannot escape the scrutiny of justice.
The return of General Noriega marks a significant milestone in Operation Just Cause.
Now, can I ask you a question?
We did this because we were showing the world we meant business.
That we were not going to tolerate international drug traffickers into our country.
How did that work?
Did drugs dry up in the United States?
Did drug addiction problems go away?
Did we end the war on drugs that put millions of Americans into prison cells based on nonviolent drug offenses?
Is that what happened?
I don't think it worked very well if that were actually the goal.
So why 35 years later are people willing to believe that that's actually the reason that we think we're going to end the problem of towns being overwhelmed with drug addiction by taking out some tiny little Latin American country that isn't even the source of most or even close to most of the drugs entering the United States?
While completely ignoring the actual reasons why so many Americans end up addicted to drugs Although this was a dumb, easy, pointless war, it was actually quite a destructive one from the LA Times October 1990, the title of which was Invasion Ghosts.
Panama tries to bury rumors of mass graves.
Allegations persist that up to 4,000 civilians were killed in the U.S. invasion.
Quote, some in Panama and the United States insist that many, as many as 4,000 Panamanians died in the fighting, most of them civilians.
There are allegations of mass graves throughout the country where U.S. soldiers intent on a cover-up dumped the bodies of victims.
The official casualty estimates of the U.S. Southern Command is that 515 Panamanians were killed.
Of those, 202 were civilians and 51 members of the Panamanian military.
The rest could not be classified because many Panamanian soldiers were in civilian clothes and others, members of a regular military unit called dignity battalions, had no uniforms, U.S. sources said.
Oh, they used human shields, whatever.
The Independent Respected Panamanian Committee for Human Rights said its investigation showed that a total of 565 Panamanians died.
An extensive investigation in the spring by the U.S. Physicians for Human Rights came up with similar figures.
Why Would They Gather? 00:02:10
So for sure, we're going to kill a bunch of people.
Who knows how many, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, whatever.
We just have to make sure we have the governments in place of these countries that we want instead of the ones that the people in that country want.
Or even if they don't want it, we just do regime change if we think that we feel like doing it.
And this is the road we're on.
So don't deceive yourself.
And if you're going to deceive yourself that, oh, it's really about drugs, please have skepticism when Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and the rest of these people make claims that you're supposed to believe, even though they're showing you no evidence for it.
It's being leaked to the New York Times by anonymous officials.
I hope I don't even have to say why that weren't so much skepticism.
We did see this before in April when Trump decided that he was going to reinitiate and escalate Joe Biden's campaign of bombing Yemen, which, by the way, Donald Trump condemned when Biden was doing it, said it was unnecessary.
He gets into office.
He's like, hey, I'd like to bomb Yemen too.
And he went on X, Donald Trump did, and he showed a really cool video of 40 Yemenis, maybe 60, standing around in what looks like kind of a prayer circle or a tribal circle.
And he posted this video.
There you see it on the screen.
They were standing there and the United States is just like, your lives are over.
We just bombed you.
And Trump claimed, quote, these Houthis gathered for instructions on an attack.
Oops, there will be no attack by these Houthis.
They will never sink our ships again.
Why would the Houthis, knowing the United States is bombing their country, constantly monitoring them, constantly surveilling them, just stand out in the open in a big, huge circle?
And why would Trump supporters believe when he just asserts with no evidence that, oh, they were planning attacks on U.S. ships?
Department Defense to War 00:04:12
There was plenty of evidence to believe that this is a common tribal Yemeni prayer practice.
They weren't even armed.
It was traditional practices of the kind that Yemenis engage in.
There you can see an up-close picture of other similar types of prayers where they're in the exact same formation.
But Trump said, oh, we obliterated terrorists and a bunch of Trump supporters.
No evidence needed.
Like, yeah, get the terrorists as though they were Dick Cheney or Liz Cheney in 2002.
Leading me again to question, like, what is the difference at this point between the MAGA movement as it exists in power, not how it presented itself during the campaign, but as it exists in power, versus the 2002, 2003 neocons that we were told MAGA was so violently and vehemently opposed to.
What is the difference?
Finally, just to underscore the point before we get to a very patient and Zen-like Michael Tracy, who's waiting to speak with us about various events that happened yesterday and his other work relating to Epstein, just to underscore the point, just before we went on air, it was announced that the Department of Defense is going to undergo a name change, not because Congress is changing its name, which is how agencies have in the past had their name changed.
Like it used to be called the Department, HUD, the, what was it?
HUD was, it had a name change.
It was to be of urban development.
And then also the Health and Human Services Agency also had a name change all done through Congress.
Trump wants to change the name of the Department of Defense back to its original name, which was the Department of War, which I guess is more honest because the reason it changed from Department of War to Department of Defense was because if it was really just the Department of War, we weren't supposed to need it at all times.
We're not supposed to be in permanent war.
So they changed it to Department of Defense to say, no, what this is really about is defending our country.
So we need a permanent cabinet ministry for that.
But now it's going to be called the Department of War again, according to Pete Hexeth and Donald Trump, a much more honest name for this agency.
That is what this agency does.
It doesn't defend the United States.
Venezuela is not attacking the United States.
Yemen wasn't attacking the United States.
You go on and on with all these wars that we fought that weren't about defending the United States.
It is actually a Department of War.
That's what it is.
And Pete Hexeth seems very excited by this.
He's going to have a really cool name change.
He's not going to be the Department of the Secretary of Defense anymore.
It's like a soft, woke, gay name.
He has a much cooler name, way more badass, Department of War.
So here you see Fox News exclusive White House reveals it will bring back the Department of War name for the Department of Defense.
And Pete Hegseth went on X and above that and all caps wrote, Department of War.
I mean, the excitement is palpable.
He's going to be the Secretary of War.
And this is the direction that Trump foreign policy is clearly headed in.
We bombed seven, eight countries.
We're on our way to a regime change war in Venezuela, something that neocons and the Mark Ruby is of the world have long dreamed of.
Our next guest, Michael Tracy, once said, the safest bet, where you'll never go broke, is if you simply bet on the continuation of bipartisan foreign policy, no matter what the outcome of elections are, no matter what the candidates say.
In this case, you could almost say it's not really even a continuation of bipartisan foreign policy.
It's really quite an intense escalation, both in terms of the theories they're embracing, the rhetoric that they're spouting, and the actions they're taking to taking to continuously finance and arm multiple wars and fight and bomb multiple other countries as well.
Bannon's Unseen Interview Footage 00:15:28
All right, Michael Tracy, as you know, is an extremely close friend of our show.
He's also a very intrepid independent journalist.
He has been single-mindedly focused on various aspects of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
His argument has been, and he'll be here in a second to speak for himself, essentially, that there have been hugely sensationalized parts of the Epstein scandal, all kinds of claims made that turned out to, in his mind, be either free of evidence or affirmatively debunked.
As part of this work, he yesterday went to a press conference that was convened by two members of Congress, Roe Conna, the Democrat of California, and Thomas Masty, the Republican of Kentucky, who are trying to do nothing more than what Donald Trump and many of his top officials in 2024 promised that they would do, which is release the Epstein files, all of the Epstein files.
And to do that, they held a press conference where they convened multiple women who they said were victims of Jeffrey Epstein, or in terms that the Me Too movement likes to use, that is now used for the Epstein case, survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and Gose Maxwell.
And Michael went at the invitation of RoCanna, who convened the press event.
It was a press event, a press conference.
He did what he was supposed to do.
He asked a question.
And as a result of his question being uncomfortable and contrary to the narrative they were trying to provoke, many of the women interrupted him and said, Don't answer.
The lawyer said, We're not answering you.
They ignored him completely, and then they escorted him out.
So that is the setup for what happened.
We want to talk a little bit more broadly about some of the work he's been doing.
As always, we are very delighted to welcome Michael Tracy to the show.
Good evening, Michael.
I'm really looking forward to a very focused, concise, and sober conversation with you about all of this.
Glenn, it's so wonderful to talk to you.
I know you've expressed misgivings about complying with the demands of thousands of commenters to talk to me about Jeffrey Epstein.
So I'm glad that you've regained your confidence and are willing to have this hard discussion.
I think it'll be very fruitful.
As you know, Michael, there's probably nothing I've devoted more time to over the past two to three months than talking to you about the Jeffrey Epstein case and the work that you've been doing on it.
So I used to do it on the show.
Now that you're in the news, now that you've managed to make yourself viralized and become the center of the story, we thought it prudent to have you on to talk about it.
All right, let's begin with just the very simple events that happened yesterday from your perspective.
And I talked about how you were expelled for the question you asked, but talk more about the question that you did ask, how you came to be at the event, why you asked that question, and then what happened.
Yeah, so just by way of background, this press conference was announced several weeks ago.
And when it was announced, Rokana's staff expressly invited me to attend the press conference because I've spoken to Rokana about various dimensions of the Epstein issue.
Rokana has made a point to present himself as somebody who's on the vanguard of demanding maximum disclosure and transparency around the Epstein issue.
So we communicated around this interesting little nugget having to do with Steve Bannon possessing 15 or 16 hours of interview footage that he conducted with Jeffrey Epstein, one-on-one TV style in 2018 or 2019 that Bannon has continued to conceal for over six years.
So if anybody's in possession of some really remarkably interesting Epstein files, it's Steve Bannon, believe it or not.
How do you know he did that?
How do you know that he has that?
And what was the context for this one-on-one interview?
How do I know that Steve Bannon has this interview footage?
Because he's confirmed it himself.
It was reported by Ben Smith in the New York Times in 2021.
Danny Bannon confirmed it to the New York Times, and he's confirmed it elsewhere.
The context of this interview footage being conducted or created by Bannon was that in the wake of the Miami Herald series by Julie K. Brown in November 2018, that breathed new life into the Jeffrey Epstein case.
Julie K. Brown celebrates that she's able to harness the power culturally and politically of Me Too to get everybody focused on the Jeffrey Epstein case in 2018.
It's interesting that somebody, tough guy, right-wingers on the internet who would ordinarily posture as very skeptical and critical of the tenets of Me Too are like all of a sudden Me Too active when it comes to the Jeffrey Epstein case.
So maybe we can talk about that irony among others.
But Steve Bannon was basically introduced to Jeffrey Epstein around this very time because Bannon was known as, or it's understood to be, perceived to be, rightly or wrongly, as Donald Trump Svengali that helped him win his improbable victory in the 2016 election.
And therefore, his services were in high demand.
He did serve at a senior level in the first Trump administration until August of 2017.
So there were many political parties in Europe and elsewhere and other organizations that wanted to contract Steve Bannon to provide them with communication services.
So we don't know what exactly relationship Bannon had to Epstein in terms of business size, but we do know based on the reporting that's been done and partially based on Bannon's own statements, although he's strangely cagey about this.
I've talked to him before.
I've interviewed him actually before for your show, Glenn.
And Steve Bannon is very much not interested in talking about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein for one reason or another.
So we can draw our own conclusions from that.
But we know that he has accumulated, he accumulated 15 plus hours of interview footage with Jeffrey Epstein, which is remarkable because Jeffrey actually never sat for a TV-style interview.
What Bannon was doing was basically prepping Epstein for what they wanted or what they projected could be an opportunity for Epstein to rehabilitate his image, believe it or not, and show that he was sensitive to the new cultural mores around Me Too.
And he would sit for an interview with like 60 Minutes or Gail King or some other conventional network TV interview.
And Bannon would be the guy to prepare him for the interview.
So he did 15 or 16 hours of preparatory interviews with Epstein that Bannon has continued to conceal for six years.
And he won't explain why.
He claims that there's some potentially forthcoming documentary that might come out in six or nine or 12 months.
But he said that before, and then there's never any documentary.
So anyway, I was the one.
Let me just interject there, which is, yeah, my understanding, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that the only other video footage we have of Jeffrey Epstein talking about any of these allegations about his sexual crimes and improprieties is during a deposition that was conducted by video that's on the internet where, for the most part, he pled the fifth and refused to answer every question.
Are there any other instances where Jeffrey Epstein answered questions about or spoke publicly regarding the allegations lodged against him?
Not that I know, at least at any length, which was what makes this interview footage in Bannon's possession so unique because Epstein was very averse to the press, especially post-2008-2009 entry of a guilty plea in Florida for prostitution charges.
And never.
They weren't quite prostitution.
They were involved in the profit.
They were literally prostitution charges.
Well, I mean, they were literally prostitution charges, Glenn.
This is why I've been involving minors, not involving minors, just ordinary.
I'll explain to you.
Do you want me to explain?
Yeah, yeah, I do.
Okay.
Okay.
I'll explain it happily.
So pursuant to the federal non-prosecution agreement that Alex Acosta oversaw when he interceded into the local Palm Beach County prosecution against Epstein, Epstein was compelled to plead guilty to two state-level charges in Florida.
Number one was felony solicitation of prostitution.
That's the literal name of the Florida statute.
You can go look it up, which referred to adults.
And secondarily, as a result of the federal intercession by Acosta, Epstein was also required to plead guilty to procuring person under 18 for prostitution.
So that was the literal charge.
So yes, they were.
Okay, exactly.
So the reason why I interjected was because when you say he was forced to plead guilty to charges relating to prostitution, it makes it sound much more benign or trivial than it really was.
It wasn't just prostitution.
He plead guilty.
Literally prostitution in the name of the state.
Hold on, let me conclude and then you can talk.
I think it's the best way to conduct the conversation.
He was charged with procuring minors, people under 18.
You're wrong.
Glenn, you're wrong.
You just said that.
Minor or singular.
Okay.
No, I said minor.
A minor.
That's fine.
That's fine.
It wasn't just that he was charged with prostitution.
He was charged with soliciting or obtaining a prostitute under the age of 18, a minor, for prostitution purposes, which is why he had to end up registering as a sex offender.
Correct.
As a result of the intercession of Alex Acosta and federal prosecutors who saw to it, who sought to force him to plead to state-level charges in Florida that would have required him to be subjected to more onerous punishment than he otherwise would have been if it were left solely to the state.
Is it your position?
Succumbing to some degree of incarceration, a term of incarceration, acceding to a mechanism whereby monetary damages agreed would be paid to individuals that the government designated as victims that had not been formally adjudicated as such.
So yes, that stems from the second charge that was added as a result of Alex Acosta's intercession, despite the folklore around the story being that Alex Acosta was by Jeffrey Epstein, supposedly belonging to intelligence, according to a random Daily Beast article in 2019, and therefore was told to back off or lay off Jeffrey Epstein.
We'll get to that in a second.
I just want to go through this.
I know you're penned up about that.
I just want to go through this systematically so we understand exactly.
I know, Glenn, you said you've had so many disagreements with me in the abstract about Epstein, but don't spell them out.
So I'm very hopeful we can get into them.
Well, like one of them is just like how cavalier you are about describing these charges, almost like you're his defense lawyer saying, oh, yeah, it was like a prostitution charge.
Michael, you have to let me speak.
You can't keep interrupting me after four words.
Otherwise, this is not going to be a constructive conversation, let alone a pleasant one.
The way that you so cavalierly referred to what he pled guilty to as being just prostitution, as though he had just engaged the services of a prostitute, which is not considered a serious crime in the United States, either culturally or legally.
It doesn't require you to register as a sex offender.
The reality is, is that he pled guilty as well to a charge of procuring a minor for prostitution.
So I want to ask you, just to get some clarity on what your position is.
Jeffrey Epstein at this point is a billionaire, certainly close to a billionaire living the life of a billionaire.
He has access to the best possible defense attorneys you could possibly have for a charge like this, the people who know Alex Acosta, who know the federal prosecutors, who call mean justice and get them on the line.
Do you believe that Jeffrey Epstein, with regard to that charge of procuring a minor for prostitution, pled guilty to a crime that he did not in fact commit?
Or do you believe that he did procure a minor for prostitution?
Well, I mean, Glenn, you and I have talked about this.
I've readily acknowledged that there are minors because, you know, let's remember Florida has the highest age of consent probably of the entire world.
The age of consent is 18.
Well, there's like eight states, eight states that have that.
That was Matt Gates' problem, was that he was charged with Matt Gates when he was wrongly maligned for those charges that fell apart.
But Jeffrey Epstein, yes, there is evidence and people can go view it for themselves.
Please don't take my word for any of this.
No, no, I'm just, I just want to get clarity on your position.
In the case of Matt Gates.
In the case of Matt's Gates, the issue was that he had procured multiple prostitutes according to the charges or the allegations, one of whom ended up being 17, even though she had lied to him on this website and said she was of age.
As far as Jeffrey Epstein is concerned, is it your understanding that the only prostitutes he procured who were underage or the only women or girls with whom he had sex who were underage were all 17 or were they younger than 17?
No, I know the circumstances were distinct with Matt Gates.
I was just noting that the usually high age of consent in Florida was a factor on which the potential but aborted prosecution of Matt Gates hinged.
Whereas if he had gone north to Georgia, then it would have been much different because I'm asking about Epstein.
Is it your understanding?
Is it your understanding that the girl or girls with whom Epstein had sex who were underage were 17 or were they also younger, 16, 15, 14?
Okay, yeah, I'll answer.
Please do.
It's the third time I asked.
Okay, so yeah, when Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida, you can go look at the transcript.
There is a 17-year-old who at that point was older than 17, but had testified to the grand jury and had also given an interview to Palm Beach police investigators who asked her to describe her relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
And she did begin relations, including some sexual contact with Epstein, when she was, I think, approximately 16.
It then lasted till she was 17.
She was one of Epstein's, let's say, favorite girls, to use the kind of perverse way of putting it, but she was a regular sort of participant with Epstein in terms of his sexual desires.
And she said that she consensually, to the extent that a 17-year-old can consent to anything, I'm not even weighing in on that.
I'm just telling you, this is what she told the police investigator.
This woman, then a 17-year-old girl at the time of the sexual encounter, said that she had consensual sex intercourse, which was sort of unusual if you have studied Epstein's habits, which unfortunately I've been forced to.
It rarely was the case that he would have full sexual intercourse with these girls, but he did have sexual intercourse with this one girl.
She said consensually a day before her 18th birthday, and that was the victim, quote unquote, that was cited as the minor singular to whom Epstein was pleading guilty to procuring as a minor for prostitution.
Reckless Encounters 00:15:35
Now, there are other allegations.
They had sex when she was 16.
They had sexual contact.
They didn't have full intercourse.
So, yes.
Look, I'm not denying.
Epstein obviously was reckless and impulsive around this time.
Gillay Maxwell, in her proffer interview with Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General, which was legitimately fascinating.
If anybody's at all interested in this story, I really implore them to go read or listen to that.
I read that.
What did she say about Jeffrey Epstein in terms of his character with respect to young girls?
No, this is what I'm getting to.
She says that she observed behavioral changes on Epstein's part by the early 2000s because, according to Maxwell, he was taking what she regarded to be disturbingly high doses of testosterone.
So that led to him becoming more aggressive, she said.
And of course, given the physiological impact of any male taking high degrees of high doses of testosterone, it could lead to an extremely high sex drive for a man who is at that point in his 50s.
So, or a recklessness and an impulsiveness and so forth.
So, yes, I'm not denying that in the Palm Beach sort of phase of the Epstein saga, so the early 2000s, roughly 2002 to 2005, Epstein clearly was reckless and impulsive and had teenage girls, whether just above or just below the age of consent, being constantly ferried to his Palm Beach estate to engage with massages of varying degrees of sexualization.
When I say I disagree with you, this is the kind of thing that makes me uncomfortable.
Like the way you seem to be like minimizing, like, hey, it wasn't vaginal, intercourse.
It was just like sexual contact.
And like, you seem to be.
I'm not minimizing it.
You asked me what kind of sexual contact they had.
No, I didn't.
I did not.
I asked whether he had sexual relations with girls who are not just 17.
What I want to understand is whether you believe there is evidence that Jeffrey Epstein had sex with multiple girls who were not just 17, but also 16 and 15.
Yes, absolutely.
So he doesn't mind if he's ever been cultivated.
So he was a serial?
So he was a serial abuser of girls.
A sexual abuser of girls.
What's that?
You agree with that characterization, right?
Can I answer?
Yes, that's what I'm asking.
A serial abuser of girls?
Yes.
If you define serial abuse of girls as any contacts, any sexual contact whatsoever with girls who are 16, yes.
I don't know.
Yes, I do.
I do define that.
I do define abuse as a 15-year-old banned as having sexual contact with a girl who is 15 or 16.
So using that definition, is that something that Epstein was guilty of?
Having sexual contact with girls who were not 15%, whether they were 16 or 17.
No, 15 or 16.
There was a 16-year-old.
If you go, Glenn, you got to let me answer.
If you go and look at the public records that were produced by Palm Beach County after Ron DeSantis signed legislation in Florida that allowed for certain materials related to the Jeffrey Epstein to be produced,
even though some of them were grand jury materials that would otherwise have to remain concealed by statute, there is a girl who I deem to be credible, who is 16, who says that she and Epstein knowingly engaged in sexual contact with her while she was 16.
She doesn't claim that she was coerced.
She doesn't claim that she was ever raped or that any violent act was committed upon her, but she does say that Epstein knowingly engaged in sexual contact with her at 16.
So yes, that accords with With Epstein becoming much more impulsive, much more reckless, maybe having an untameable sex strive as a result of his taking these high levels of testosterone.
That I'm perfectly willing to grant.
My mission has never been to absolve Jeffrey Epstein morally of his lifestyle choices and surrounding himself with a parade of teenage girls for the local high school in the Palm Beach area.
Obviously, that's a gigantic mess waiting to happen.
I would advise against it.
Any father who was sane, who had a daughter, whether she was 16, 17, 18, or 19, would more than likely advise the daughter strongly to not get engaged in the kind of operation that Epstein had going and that these teenage girls were recruiting one another to participate in, sometimes by telling one another to lie about their ages.
Actually, one of the so-called Epstein survivors or victims who admits, Haley Robson, her name is, that she was a ringleader in telling these girls to lie about her ages, their ages, so that they could come to the Palm Beach House of Epstein and get $200 to participate in one of these massages.
She was presented at this press conference yesterday as just a survivor.
And because Thomas Massey and O'Conna, I'm sorry to say, I like them on some level.
They're two of the few members of Congress that I have any respect for whatsoever.
They're willing to buck consensus in their own parties.
Thomas Massey is one of the fleetingly few Republicans who's not totally subservient to Donald Trump.
RoConna will engage with diverse media, including right-wing media, despite being a Democrat.
So I like them on some level or admire them on some level.
But I'm sorry to say I've talked to them both.
They just simply don't know that much about the Jeffrey Epstein case and they've latched onto it and they allowed themselves to become aligned with this lawyer, Bradley Edwards, who I promise you when you get to all that.
And I don't think that either of them claim full expertise in the Epstein in the Epstein case.
I think their position is.
Well, they're leading the charge.
Let's just hold on.
I think their position is we want a release of all the files so that we can learn the truth.
That is what they say their position is.
But the legislation doesn't.
I just need to, I do think this has been part of, and as I've said before, I think a lot of the work that you're doing is very valuable.
I think you did extremely legitimate and important journalism at this press conference yesterday.
Of course, you should not have been expelled.
That raised a lot of serious doubts about the credibility of what they were doing.
I think that's clear.
After Marjorie Taylor Greene wild up.
Okay.
I think the problem that you have is that you do sometimes seem, not just to other people who I've seen saying this, but also to me, who is generally somebody who defends what you're doing and tries to give it its most generous interpretation, that you do seem quite defensive of Jeffrey Epstein.
And I'll tell you why I say that.
I asked him.
Let me just say that.
You keep emphasizing that these girls say these girls say that they consented.
Factual details.
Okay, Michael, you keep saying that these girls consented to having sex with him despite being 16.
The entire point of the law is that, oh, so now it's not 16 anymore?
He didn't.
I was talking about a no, no, no.
I was talking about a specific 17-year-old who was asked by Joe Rickeri, the Palm Beach police investigator, who asked her on camera, you can go watch the video.
Was the sexual intercourse that you had with Jeffrey Epstein at 17, just before your 18th birthday, consensual?
And she says, yes.
I'm just relaying that to you.
I'm donating it.
I'm not trying to minimize it.
I'm just giving you the facts.
It doesn't matter.
It's so divorced.
Okay.
So they can say, Michael, it doesn't matter because the idea of kiddo ring.
Okay.
Do you believe there's evidence that besides having sex with a 17-year-old girl or multiple 17-year-old girls?
And I'm going to ask this again, and I swear it's the fifth time.
And I'm asking it again because I don't know your answer.
Is there evidence in your view, compelling evidence that he also had sex with 15-year-old girls and 16-year-old girls?
I've answered you, Glenn.
There's a 16-year-old who is in this Palm Beach document dump who anybody can go look, who I think credibly attests to having had sexual contact with Epstein when she was 16.
And she was asked, Did Epstein know you were 16?
And I think she credibly says that she knows Epstein to have known that she was 16.
In other circumstances, the girls were strategizing amongst themselves to lie about their age so they could go to his house and collect the $200 that they could go to the mall afterwards after performing a massage of differing degrees of sexualization, whether it was just stripping down to their underwear and not engaging in any outright sexual acts or sometimes maybe engaging in some like, you know, more honest sexual acts.
Again, I'm not defending any of it.
I'm just reciting these facts to you because you're asking me about this issue.
And it leads to this ridiculous speculation that creates a moral panic and mass hysteria that then abridges civil liberties.
Is there evidence that he had sex with 15-year-old girls?
Is there evidence, credible evidence that he had sex with 15-year-old girls?
Had full-blown sexuality.
No, no, sexual contact.
Sexual contact of the kind the law prohibits.
You know, I'm not 100% sure off the top of my head.
I think there's probably some evidence, but I would have to go back and double check.
I'm not going to say something that I can't 100% confirm to you factually off the top of my head, but there are, I think there was clear evidence in any event, even if it was just in a sexualized sort of scenario, right, where he's he's not being, he's not checking if they're 18.
He's just sort of taking things for granted or being reckless.
It's still, to me, morally condemnable behavior to even put yourself in a situation where you can even come close to being in a sexualized criminal situation with a 15-year-old.
So, of course, I'm not defending the moral character of Jeffrey Epstein for having engaged in these acts.
And I kind of resent you accusing me of having done so.
I'm telling you, that's what it appears like.
And it sounds like to a lot of people, including me.
Well, it shouldn't appear that way because I've just clarified.
Okay, well, maybe you should be more careful on how you communicate this.
Then let me ask you this question.
When this investigation was ongoing in the Palm Beach prosecutor's office and then ultimately with Alex Acosta and Jeffrey Epstein had retained these very high-powered and expensive lawyers who had a lot of influence in the federal government and in the local Palm Beach area as well, was there a time that he left the United States for a foreign country and remained there pending these negotiations?
Okay, I'll answer that.
I want to clarify, though, because people are going to try to accuse me of having omitted this suspiciously.
There was a 14-year-old girl whose interaction with Epstein ended up prompting the initiation of the Palm Beach police investigation.
So there's a 14-year-old girl who was, she said, you know, she gave conflicting stories.
It was suggested that she was told to lie by other girls to go to the house in case she was asked and say she was 18.
And then it's unclear what kind of tech she gave, she engaged in.
I don't condone in any way having a 14-year-old present for even something that could potentially become sexualized if you're a man in your 50s, right?
So I condemn morally Epstein on that ground.
I'm just saying it's not clear what kind of sexual she might have engaged in.
And she got in a fight at the local high school because there was gossip around her having gone to this place.
So she got in a fight with another girl.
She got called into the principal's office.
The mother ends up getting notified and the mother prized the information out of her that she's trying to keep secret.
And then the police get notified and that's sort of what leads to the Palm Beach investigation.
As to the investigation as a whole and its intercession and the federal intercession and the investigation by Acosta, you're asking me, is there ever any evidence that Epstein was able to go to a foreign country?
Yes, I think for a period, Epstein did go to Israel.
I know we're all supposed to now shiver with frenzied anticipations.
Went to the tourist trip or why did he go there?
Why did he go there?
Do you have any ideas of why he went there during the pending investigation into whether or not he engaged criminal contact with younger age girls?
What?
No, he went there because he was conspiring to learn how to best execute the family.
No, Jesse, do you have any, does it interest you at all to understand why, of all the countries in the world that Jeffrey Epstein might have gone to?
And it's interesting as well that he was allowed to leave the country despite the gravity of these charges that were pending against him.
Why did he do anything yet?
Do you have any ideas as to why he went to Israel during this period?
Yeah, I do have an idea that he was not convicted of anything yet.
So there was a non-prosecution agreement that he signed in September of 2007 that had yet to be finalized because it would come into effect upon his country of a guilty plea, which he did in June of 2008.
Prior to June of 2008, yes, there are news reports about him having gone to Israel and then he flew from Israel back to Florida or entered the United States from Israel.
He obviously had this relationship with Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister at the time.
They were involved in various business dealings.
That was one of his best friends.
I'm all in favor, Glenn.
Hold on.
I'm all in favor of maximum disclosure and reporting around every single last aspect of Jeffrey Epstein's life.
I'm all in favor.
That's why I disagree with the Connor and Massey bill because it provides for these exceptions whereby the government can continue concealing Epstein-related files.
That's ironic.
All I did was ask you if you have an understanding as to why during this period when Jeffrey Epstein was being charged with extremely serious felonies that he went to Israel, that he left the United States and went to Israel.
I mean, was it like just he wanted to go on a tourist trip?
Did he have like business plans?
Was it the fact that Israel is a well-known haven for Jewish Americans who get accused of pedophilia that they won't then extradite back to the United States, as many news reports have long documented?
Why was he in Israel during, like for me, if I were being charged with some of the most serious crimes that I would probably want to stay and fight them, but he went to Israel.
Do you have any understanding as to why he did that?
That's my only question.
Okay, I'd just like to factually clarify something.
He had not been federally charged with anything at this point when he went to Israel.
There was a pending non-prosecution agreement that the federal prosecutors were attempting to compel him to sign, had compelled him to sign, and then were seeking to further compel him to finalize by entering his guilty plea to state-level charter.
So he had not been charged with any federal crimes.
I just want to clarify that.
State crimes.
State crimes.
Yes, he did have this business relationship with Ehud Barak, the former Israeli prime minister, with investing in various firms associated with Israel.
I'm not denying that at all.
So is it because he are you suggesting that he was attempting to abscond to Israel?
It could be.
I don't know that to have any factual basis, but it's possible.
Do you have any factual basis to speculate that he was attempting to abscond to Israel, meaning to flee American justice and relocate to Israel?
Well, the reason why I think these questions are important, Michael, is because one of the reasons why there ended up being so much interest in this case is because you have this billionaire with some of the most elite connections that any human being on the other side is.
He never had a billion dollars.
He was multi-hundreds of billionaires.
Plea Deal Controversy 00:16:05
Okay, he was certainly living like his net worth was around $600 million, just to clarify.
Okay.
He was certainly an extreme, one of the wealthiest people on the planet.
And not only that, but he was extremely well connected.
And so you have this person who is charged with crimes that society generally treats very, very harshly.
Like if you get accused of procuring a minor for prostitution and for sexual gratification, you tend to go to prison for a long time.
He was able to sign a plea deal that was shockingly lenient in the view of how people with these crimes are treated.
He barely spent a day in prison.
He didn't even get more than a year in prison.
He was allowed to spend most of it doing community service and living in his mansion in Manhattan.
No, in West Palm Beach.
That's not true.
What was his punishment?
What was his punishment?
How long did he stay in prison?
How long did he spend in prison?
I'll give you the dates.
I will give you the dates.
June of 2008 to July of 2009.
So yes, it was over a year.
People are going to say, oh, it's so suspicious that you're clarifying the dates as though I'm trying to downplay your agenda.
So how long was it?
What was the period that he spent in prison?
June.
He pleaded guilty and then had to enter his term of incarceration on, I know the date by memory now, June 30th, 2008.
And then I think it was July 22nd or late July of 2009 is when his term of incarceration.
13 months.
Yes.
And during that 13 months, when he was in prison for the crime of procuring an underage girl for prostitution, was he allowed to leave?
Or was he just like most prisoners consigned to prison?
Well, he was granted work release.
Which meant why?
Go and look at the internal reports, which I know all these Epstein researchers don't bother to read.
You know, Daryl Cooper, Whitney Webb.
I'm just asking.
I'm just asking you factual questions.
I'm just asking you factual questions.
You don't need to go on these tangents.
I'm answering.
I'm saying I have read there is a report that one can read if they wanted to, which I know these like vaunted researchers in the Epstein space, like Daryl Cooper and Murgurg.
You got that on your system.
They don't bother to read.
But there's a report detailing the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office custody of incarceration of Jeffrey Epstein from 2008 to 2009.
And the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office maintained that Epstein was granted work release within a few months of his prison term, according to the same criteria that any other would be granted work release.
Now, you can deny that.
You can claim that they're lying or you can claim.
I'm just trying to get the facts, Michael.
And you're claiming you're just interested in reporting the facts.
But every time I ask you a factual question that's very specific, you go off on these candles about Whitney Webb and Daryl Prime Minister.
Postparting issues around this story.
How long did he actually say that?
How early mathematics is that?
Michael.
Michael.
How long was he in prison where he was a prisoner not allowed to leave the prison?
Like, how long was he actually incarcerated for this felony charge?
Yeah.
I think that was only, I think that was approximately only a few months, if you're not mistaken.
Yes.
I mean, Glenn, I mean, you're trying to insinuate that I'm like being called out on something.
I'm telling you that, yes, within a few months of his service incarceration, he was deemed eligible for work release.
I believe it was by October of 08, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
But it was, you know, relatively soon, relatively quickly into his term of incarceration.
He was granted work release.
So yes, during the day, he had set up for him something called the Florida Science Foundation, pretty much a funny office that was basically adjacent to his lawyer's office in Palm Beach that he could go to under the auspices of work.
And the claim was that he could run his money management business or his other endeavors out of that office.
And then he would have to come back at night to the jail.
And so, yes, that's what he did.
He was on work release, and that's what he did.
And he slept in prison every night during that 13-month period.
My understanding is that, yes, he had to return at night after working during the days, pursuant to the ordinary provisions of work release in Palm Beach County, Florida.
When during this period when this investigation was being undertaken and where apparently they believed they had enough evidence to, and apparently his lawyers did as well, where he pled guilty to two very serious crimes.
One very serious crime that required him to register as a sex offender for life.
During that time...
As a result of the federal intercession.
When he...
Yes, when he was in Israel, was there anything that compelled him to return?
Or was his ability to remain in Israel and never come back to the United States to face the music similar to the current accused pedophile in Nevada who was allowed to leave to go back to Israel, the cyber warfare official who didn't come back to the United States for his arraignment.
Was there anything compelling him while he was in Israel to return to the United States and face charges if, for example, the plea deal had been much harsher than the one that he was given?
Well, let's get the timeline straight.
He, as far as I know, and if anybody has different evidence on this, please send it to me.
As far as I know, he took the trip to Israel prior to entering his guilty plea.
So prior to June 30th of 2008, I believe it would have been around April of 2008.
So this is before he had been convicted of anything.
This is before he had been, he hadn't been charged with the privilege of being able to figure out.
Exactly.
So if I were Jeffrey Epstein's attorney.
Did they compel him to go back?
You know, I guess not.
I guess he could have absconded conceivably, but he did return.
Well, right, for a great deal.
If I were Jeffrey Epstein's attorney and I were negotiating and trying to get the best possible deal for him, like spending three months in real prison and then like another nine or 10 months in like fake prison where you get to leave during the day and go live your life as a very rich person, I would argue to the prosecutors, you can try and put him in jail for 10 years, but if you do, he's just going to stay in Israel and they're never going to extradite him back because he's a Jew with the right to stay in Israel.
That's one of the arguments I would make for why the prosecutors were kind of obligated or it was in their interest to offer a much better plea deal than many, many people think he deserved given the nature of these crimes.
Is that a theory you reject?
Well, I mean, maybe you're a more creative lawyer than Alan Dershowitz or Ken Starr or Day Lefkowitz or Roy Black.
You're claiming none of his lawyers use that?
None of his lawyers use that?
I don't know.
Do you know they did?
I haven't seen any evidence that they did.
Do you know that they did?
Can you share any information?
No, I'm saying it's a thing that it seems like clear leverage that Jeffrey Epsom have, but are you denying that that happened?
I don't know it to have happened, do you?
No, but I think it's very likely, given the way I know lawyers work, I was a lawyer for almost 15 years and I know how lawyers work.
They use every bit of leverage that they have.
I just simply don't have, I don't know it to have happened.
It could have.
I just have never seen any evidence that it happened.
I have read the 350-page Department of Justice Office of Professional Responsibility report, which goes over very meticulous, laborious detail, the ins and outs of how it is that this non-prosecution agreement came to be negotiated and finalized with Epstein, and there's no mention of that.
Does that mean that never happened?
I would love to know.
You know, I have lawyer requests with the Department of Justice for the underlying materials that they used to generate this report.
So I would love to know if there was ever dangled or if it was ever referenced by his defense attorneys that he had the option of potentially going to Israel.
And that's why they gave him a supposedly known in the public record.
It wasn't an option.
He was in Israel.
He was in Israel.
And his best, best friend is the former prime minister of Israel.
He doesn't intend to stay there permanently to flee American justice.
Like many American Jews have done when faced with similar charges.
But I don't know that Jeffrey Epstein ever threatened that or that his lawyers ever threatened it on his behalf.
Do you?
No, no, I don't.
I'd like the Epstein files to be released so that we can figure that out.
What I'm trying to tell you, Michael, is that the major part of your work that I have very much supported and I've long believed in is that people like Dan Bongino and Kash Patel and Pam Bondi, who spent all these years have spent all these years.
I think the people in government are more cooperative than whatever podcast is.
I think the people who are at high level, the highest levels of the Trump administration, who spent the prior four years creating the most maximalist conspiracy theories, accusing the Biden administration of trying to hide all these globalist pedophiles like Bill Clinton and Bill Gates, who were all proven guilty of pedophilia inside these Epstein files, which were released.
Now, even Trump and the position of the Trump administration is that, no, there's nothing in these files that even remotely suggests any of that is true.
So clearly there was a very exploitative and sensationalized effort to turn this into a global conspiracy theory based on absolutely nothing.
And you've been one of the people most aggressive, and I think have done a very good job of pointing that out.
I think the other side of that, however, is that there is a lot of reason why people became interested in this case, which is that you have here an extremely wealthy, well-connected person who, in the eyes of most people,
committed among the worst crimes you can possibly commit that our society punishes very harshly, who seemed to get away more or less scot-free, both in terms of this crappy, dumb little fake prison term that he had to serve, which was barely a year and not even the fact that he continued to circulate in the highest levels of international elite society as though none of it had ever happened.
And a lot of people think that this goes a lot.
Let me just finish.
A lot of people believe, including myself, that that is why the interest in this case is more than just about what one rich guy happened to do in terms of his private life and the crimes that he committed and having sexual contact with underage girls.
It goes to a lot about how very powerful people who are connected can get away with a lot of things that people who aren't can't, how people with relations with the Israeli government in particular seem to enjoy all sorts of leverage and benefits.
And the fact that his best friend was literally the former prime minister of Israel, the fact that the red carpet was rolled out for him all the time, and the fact that he continued to circulate with all of the most powerful people in the country.
Bill Clinton was fighting on his private sector.
I agree.
I agree.
He did continue to circulate.
I agree.
He did continue to circulate with the likes of Noam Chomsky and Peter Thiel and others.
And if we want to therefore infer that Noam Chomsky and Peter Thierre are guilty of enabling child sex predation, I think that's an idiotic comment that's not remotely what I'm suggesting.
He had varying degrees of contact with different people.
I think he had dinner once or twice with Noam Chomsky.
He funded a lab of Bill Ackman's wife, who happily took his funding.
He went on private planes multiple times with Bill Clinton and Bill Gates to the point where Bill Gates' wife divorced to the point where Bill Gates' wife divorced him over how close of a relationship he was maintaining with Jeffrey Epstein.
This says Melinda Gates has never said I divorced Bill Gates because of his relationship with Jeffrey Edwards.
Bill Gates has said that that was a major factor.
Because it will bolster their narrative.
But Glenn, can I just give you explain to you why it is that I asked the question that I asked at this press conference yesterday?
And I've gotten a ton of questions.
Okay, let's get to that.
So, you went to the press conference and you asked the question and got expelled.
What question did you ask, and why did you think that was so important?
Okay, and it was really important because so Thomas Mackey and Roquana, who I mentioned before, are really among two members of Congress who I have any respect for whatsoever.
However, they've chosen to align with this extortionist lawyer, Bradley Edwards, who has basically been the one the key ringleader in fomenting the mass hysteria and moral panic around the Jeffrey Epstein story.
Because it was Bradley Edwards who is representing this woman, Virginia Roberts Gouffray, in 2014, when Edwards, along with another lawyer, a former federal judge named Paul Cassell, filed a motion on Goufre's behalf.
And at this time, they were filing what was called a motion for joinder because the idea was they were going to petition court to allow Guffray to join pending litigation around the Crime Victims Rights Act and whether the purported or government-identified victims of Epstein had been properly notified in advance of the federal non-prosecution agreement being brokered in 2007-2008.
Edwards wanted to represent Gufray to join that lawsuit, right?
And in that motion, this is where it is introduced that there are these grandiose claims that are basically formed based on the crux of the Epstein mythology, so to say, that is still very widely and popularly believed, probably amongst people who watch this show or listen to Dopey podcasts.
Not saying system update is Dopey, but there are other Dopey podcasts that basically just take this stuff for a grant for granted.
So in this motion for joinder, Guffray specifically accuses Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew of committing sexual crimes against her as a minor.
And she also gestures towards this broader category of prominent people like foreign princes and prime ministers.
And she had a photo of herself with Prince Andrew when she was at a very allegation.
She had a photo with Prince Andrew.
Yes, that's correct.
And but nothing was ever proven in terms of Prince Andrew.
And in terms of Dershowitz, Bradley Edwards, again, the MC essentially of this press conference yesterday in front of the Capitol, he sued Dershowitz on Guffray's behalf for defamation because after Guffray accused Dershowitz of heinous sex crimes against a minor, Dershowitz came out and said, wait a second, this is entirely made up.
I've never met this woman.
I certainly never had sex with this woman.
This is a fabrication.
He called for the disarmament of Edwards and Cassell.
He actually got the judge to whom that motion for joinder was filed to issue a reprimand of sorts against Edwards for making unsubstantiated allegations or frivolous or egregious allegations in that motion.
And Epstein and Dershowitz was nonetheless sued for defamation and he pursued that litigation very furiously for years.
He vowed that he would be vindicated and he was because in 2022, he was able to finally extract an admission, a humiliating admission, by Bradley Edwards and also Dave Boyce, the high-powered attorney that was likewise representing Virginia Roberts Guffray at the time and making tons of money doing it, billions of dollars.
Virginia Roberts Guffray, despite being a chronic fabricator, was a multi-multi-multi-millionaire, lived a life of luxury.
Supposedly, she's this downtrodden martyr.
Yesterday at the press conference, every other speaker was invoking her as though she was like the Joan of Arc or she was the saint of a modern saint of our time.
She had this unblemished record of credibility.
She was, I can't imagine a less credible person who's ever walked the earth than her in terms of the quantity of sheer bullshit that she spewed and fomented mass hysteria in relation to.
Okay.
So I wanted to ask Bradley Edwards, ask Bradley because Dershowitz admitted it compelled or The culmination of the litigation with Dershowitz resulted in Frake recanting her allegations against Dershowitz.
Last Question Disrupted 00:15:44
So she didn't just generically claim she had been abused by him sexually.
She graphically and luridly described in the most kind of repulsive detail, each individual instance, at least six occasions on which she claimed that she had been abused sexually by Dershowitz.
She got into his ejaculation habits and all this.
I know it's a family show, so I won't get into the details, but it's revolting.
And she was adamant that this occurred to her, that Dershowitz committed these crimes against her.
And then finally, she recanted the crimes and she engaged in all kinds of other fabrications.
She wrote a so-called memoir manuscript where she accused the former majority leader of the U.S. Senate of sex crimes.
She accused a random Harvard professor named Stephen of sex crimes and then retracted that when she was under deposition.
This person was a chronic serial fabricator.
And so I really did want to ask, given her centrality, given the centrality of the allegedly deceased Virginia Roberts Guffray in spawning this whole mythology around the so-called child sex trafficking and blackmail operation, because she introduced the blackmail aspect too in her phony motion of rejoinder that Bradley Edwards filed for her in 2014.
I wanted to ask Bradley Edwards to please address because he was basically running the press conference.
Massey and Conna kind of were had stepped aside.
They let Bradley Edwards, the extortionist lawyer, run things.
And so I put a question, you know, I waited my turn.
I had been invited to this press conference by Rokana's staff.
I waited for them to call upon me.
And then I did something terribly shocking and appalling, which is that I asked the only critical question that anybody present would ever dream of asking.
You know, you could tell the journalists on hand were very much opposed to me, right?
So they were offended that I would bother, I would go to a press conference and ask a critical question.
What these journalists conceive of their role is to serve as the PR vehicle for these purported victims or survivors, most of whom are just full of shit.
Most of whom who spoke yesterday were literal adults when they claimed that they were victimized or abused by Epstein and or Maxwell.
And, you know, women in their 20s who allowed themselves to be conflated with child sex crime victims because the general public has no ability to distinguish between this stuff and the media doesn't care to distinguish because they'd rather just foment the mass hysteria and then also just rather take cheap shots against Donald Trump, who again was asked about this yesterday and called it a hoax.
So I asked Edwards and he brushed me off.
He brushed me off.
You wouldn't hear that.
The women interrupted and said, don't answer.
The women interrupted and said, don't answer him.
We're not talking about that.
Don't answer him.
The so-called victims who were behind podium were, you know, started to get all exercised and agitated and were like, don't answer him, don't answer him.
One of whom I know, she probably recognized me because I tried to interview her earlier on, Haley Robson, who was a person who admits essentially that she told other teenage girls to lie about their age so they could visit Jeffrey Epstein's house.
And she actually even sued Julie K. Brown, the author of the Miami Herald series and the book Perversion of Justice, claiming that Julie K. Brown defamed her.
And I talked to her about that, but she didn't seem to care for me.
So she was trying to rile up a fur amongst the so-called survivors.
And you could see them like whispering to one another.
And then Edwards refuses to answer the question.
And then he moves on to point to another journalist to call upon.
And then what happens next is that Roquanna, who I know on some level, not like her best friends, but I know him well enough, he wanted to address my question.
So he approaches the podium.
And I appreciate Rokana, who has said that he opposed my being ejected from this event.
And he did even in real time attempt to sort of prevent you from being dragged out of the instructors not to eject me.
Yes, yes.
But what happened was the mob was junked up already.
So RoConna was overridden by the mob.
And the bing leader of the mob was Marjorie Taylor Greene, who I know you have such profound respect for because of all her brave stances.
But in this instance, what she did, and it's on video, it's indisputable, is she points to the Capitol Police.
She says, get them out of here.
She's commanding as a member of the body that presides over or has jurisdiction over the Capitol Police.
She's commanding the Capitol police officers to forcibly eject me from the press conference that I had been duly invited and admitted to because she did not like the content of the question that I asked.
So Marjorie Taylor Greene, if you happen to be listening to this, it's a bridge too far.
I'm not joking.
I know I'm a very humorous guy ordinarily.
I like to joke around, but this is different because a very contentious, heated political debate, political agreement, even political debate that can get nasty and unruly at times.
That's all perfectly fine with me.
But when you're directing police officers to arrest me, you're trying to get me arrested for asking a question as a journalist at a press conference I've been invited to because you've chosen to join this mob of fake survivors, then that's a bridge too far.
That's fine.
That's fine.
In the interest of the time, I gotta ask you one question.
Glenn, you would agree with me.
I have to ask you one last question.
To be clear, do you agree with me on Marjorie Taylor Greene?
I have enormous respect for Marjorie Taylor Green because she speaks out against her own party and president more than almost any member of Congress I've ever seen on things that are kind of important.
Not like sensationalized sex scandals.
Let me finish.
But things like the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the U.S. paying for it or the bombing of Iran or the bombing of Yemen, things like that, that she speaks out against with great risk to her own political career in a way that is obviously driven by conscience.
I have a great deal of respect for her.
That doesn't mean everything she does is I support.
I don't think it was just the content of your question that compelled her to demand that you be removed, but also the fact that you are persisting in asking it, which I also think is an appropriate thing to do.
But I do think the context of what happened is clear.
Once they said they weren't going to answer your question, you continued to persist in demanding that your question be answered.
No, Glenn, you're wrong.
I watched the video, Michael.
I watched the video.
But what happened, Glenn?
No, no, no.
Yes.
Glenn, I have to clarify this because that's not correct.
That is correct.
Bradley Edwards brushed me off.
It's not, then RoCanna interjected and re-engaged me.
That's the only reason why I was confused.
You behaved the way you're behaving now.
And then I asked him a question.
I didn't continue to.
It's fine.
I made very clear.
I made very clear that I'm opposed to having a journalist objected for asking questions.
I'm not justifying it.
I'm just, I don't, I just don't want to have this kind of like, oh, I'm just a little innocent reporter who just asked one simple question and then I stopped and I got arrested.
That's not what happened.
I've been a decent little reporter saying what Marjorie Taylor Greene did was despicable.
That's fine.
You've made yourself clear on that.
I also don't agree with what she did.
I JUST WANT TO ASK YOU THIS LAST QUESTION.
ANY TIME THERE'S A KIND OF- AND CREDIT ME WITH ARREST BY THE WAY.
OKAY.
They threaten me with arrest at her direction.
I got it.
And you've said that several times.
Anytime there is.
I want to emphasize repeating.
It's this behavior that is what I'm saying was behavior you were actually engaging in, not just like the little demure question that you then stopped the once they said they weren't going to answer.
I wasn't demure.
I was assertive.
I wanted the question answered.
I know that's appalling.
I know.
You're very disruptive.
You're very disruptive in your conduct, which I don't think justifies ordering you removed.
But I'm saying that is, in fact, what happened.
Not the version of events that you offered.
Anyway, the video is out there.
The problem was that I asked a question that did not just affirm.
You did this.
You did this.
You don't stop.
You can't stop.
You can't control yourself.
So, I just want to ask you this last question.
Anytime there's a opportunity to make money.
I'm passionate about what I do.
Very good.
Actually, what I want to ask you about is this, what is absolutely the last question I'd like you to just answer in as concise a manner as possible, which is anytime.
By the way, we hug afterwards.
Anytime there's this kind of gravy train where some extremely wealthy person is not just accused, but by your own admission, has engaged in very serious wrongdoing, namely having sex with or sexual relations with underage girls for which they were actually convicted.
And then there's an opportunity to sue that person.
There's always going to be lawyers who are unscrupulous, who want to jump on this gravy train.
There's always going to be women who are willing to fabricate accusations to get part of this money.
A lot of these quote-unquote survivors, including ones with very dubious stories that you've done a very good job in publicizing, have become extremely wealthy as a result of many of these fabrications.
They kind of were dressed in a way that made it almost look like they were the cast of like real housewives of Epstein Island.
I mean, all decked out in Gucci and Yves St. Laurent because of the money that they've made.
So I don't think there's any question that, as is true in most of these cases, some of the quote-unquote victims are lying for profit.
Their lawyers are also lying for profit.
They get a big chunk of whatever they recover.
And there were a lot of payouts.
The question that I think a lot of people have that I definitely have is, given that we know for sure that Epstein was guilty of some of these crimes, that he was guilty of having sexual contact that is criminal with minors, that he was extremely well connected, that he got a deal that you cannot deny is a pretty good deal, given what those charges are.
Even if you want to claim it's within the realm of normality, which I don't think it is, but even if you want to claim that, he got a pretty good deal.
He continued to circulate, not just in decent society, but at the highest levels of global power.
That is the reason why people have so much interest in this case.
So even if it's true, which I think you've done a very good job of demonstrating that some of these women, including some of the ones most centrally featured, are either wildly exaggerating their claims or outright lying.
Why is that so significant given that his criminal behavior is not in doubt?
Well, because the criminal behavior that was established by virtue of his guilty plea in Florida in 2008 that related to the Palm Beach phase of the saga, where there were teenage girls, whether above, just above or just below the age of consent,
who were constantly being ferried to his house to provide subject degrees of sexualization, that's entirely different than the mythology that later got inaugurated by the claims of this Virginia Roberts Guffray character whom Bradley Edwards represented for many years.
She's the one who introduced the notion that there was this sprawling trafficking operation that Epstein orchestrated and enforced by blackmail to ensnare prominent individuals in so he could blackmail them and I don't know, get paid by intelligence agencies or something like that.
That all stemmed from or sprung from the claims of one particular accuser, Virginia Roberts Guffray, whom Bradley Edwards represented and then refused to answer my questions to simply address why it is that he would contend or these other so-called survivors who were paying homage to this deceased martyr and truth teller is that anyone to the general public should believe such a person had any credibility.
I'm telling you, this person is going to be betified like a saint in the Catholic Church if there's not any rational scrutiny applied.
So that's why it matters.
It's not to absolve Epstein of the conduct that he committed in relation to the Palm Beach case.
I disagree that it's just so obviously straightforwardly and lenient of a deal that he got.
There were massive evidentiary problems.
There were questions as to whether Epstein could even be convicted at trial.
If it went to trial, given the evidentiary problems, there were supposed victims, quote unquote, who the government had identified as victims, sent a notice to telling them that they had been identified as victims who denied that they were victims, who wanted to exonerate Epstein, who wanted not to prosecute Epstein, but to prosecute other girls.
And so yes, the very high-power defense counsel that he was able to employ, given his vast resources, would have had a plausible opportunity to cross-examine those witnesses and examine the government's evidence and potentially even get him acquitted at trial.
That's what Alex Acosta and his colleagues feared, which is why they wanted to compel him to plea, to agree to a plea deal or not prosecution agreement, rather than risking going to trial, potentially loosen the case entirely, and Epstein would face no punishment at all.
Instead, he was forced to register for life as a sex offender, which is a giant, onerous burden for anybody who has to do that.
Oh, yeah, it really had a very detrimental impact on his life.
I can't imagine any worse punishment.
Well, it kind of did.
I mean, it kind of did.
Well, in any event, because if you have to register as a sex offender, Glenn, and like Epstein, you have properties in multiple states or jurisdictions, you then have to communicate in very intricate fashion as to reporting your movements or determining whether or not certain movements must be reported.
So, for example, he had a ranch in New Mexico.
The requirements for the movements he was required to report in that state were different from Florida, which were different from New York, different from the U.S. Virgin Islands.
There was a legal sort of dispute that his lawyers represented to him in over his requirements in terms of the sex offender registry.
But yes, did he continue to still consult prominent people like Noam Chomsky and Peter Thiel and Ehud Barak and Larry Summers and Woody Allen and so forth?
And Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton.
And like, what?
You're talking about like heads and flat.
You're wrong.
You're wrong.
You're factually wrong.
You got to get your facts straight.
What do you mean?
He didn't.
He did not consort with Bill Clinton after 2009, after he served out his term of incarceration.
That is false.
There is no evidence of that ever that Bill Clinton consorted or with Donald Trump or with Donald Trump or with Donald Trump.
But he certainly had.
He certainly was investigated by the Palm Beach police.
He did not consort.
There's no evidence that he meaningfully consorted with either Donald Trump or Bill Clinton.
I know.
But he maintained very good friends with people like Prince Andrew, the member of a central member of the British royal family.
He met with Prince Andrew one more time in 2010.
He stayed at his house, Michael.
Prince Andrew went to New York and stayed at Jeffrey Epstein's house.
After the Palm Beach prosecution, yeah, stayed at his house.
So this idea that somehow he was heavily impacted or that he somehow suffered some kind of lost opportunity.
He continued to live an extremely wealthy lifestyle.
He continued to have a private island, massive mansions, and all over the world.
So I don't think that in the context of how society typically treats people guilty of the crimes that he pled guilty to, that the punishment that he received was anywhere near what we would normally expect a person to receive.
And then when you add on top of that, the fact that he was in Israel hiding out that his best friend was the former prime minister of Israel and continued to be his best friend up until the time that he died.
Thanking Michael for His Time 00:03:18
Just to say nothing of all these other high-I mean, Bill Gates, he had access to the most powerful people in the world.
That's the reason why so many people have found this case so important.
And the fact that some of these accusers have either exaggerated or fabricated their accusations against him for self-interested purposes, to me, doesn't subvert in any way the legitimate interest in the story.
All right, having you on with this, Michael, we have to go.
I gave you enormous amounts of time.
I gave you enormous amounts of time.
I know you wanted to avoid this like the plan, so I appreciate you allowing me to characterize my own views at length.
Lots of people have asked me to engage with you or asked you to engage with me.
And, you know, I know I can get it.
I know it can be a little abrasive, but you know, no, no, no, not at all, not at all, not at all.
You're the model of professionalism and eloquence and civility.
And that's why everyone finds it such a pleasure to interact with you, including myself.
So I want to thank you very much for the time.
I know you were much in demand today.
Very much in the news.
So thank you, Michael.
Come to see you.
Have a nice evening.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
All right.
What am I doing?
Am I just so exhausted after that and so drained?
Am I doing this segment on locals?
Okay.
All right.
So that concludes our show for this evening.
Thank you so much to the lovely and charming Michael Tracy, as always, for his presence on our show.
I found it very energizing, very uplifting.
I hope you found it at least educational in terms of what Michael's work and his views have been.
There have been people asking me to have him on the show because they're not the ones who have to endure what I've endured, but I gave the people what they want, as I always try and do.
So we are going to now examine what I think is the far more important issue.
There are actually, in my view, a lot of issues far more important than whether Virginia Guffray was telling the truth or things like that.
One of which was RFK Jr.'s appearance today at the Senate Finance Committee.
But because of how much time we've taken on our show on Rebel, we are going to stream that exclusively on locals for our locals members.
If you're a local member already, all you have to do is just remain on the local stream or go to the local screen.
We're going to start the segment essentially immediately.
If you're somebody who is not a local member but would like to become one, which gives you access to a whole wide array of features, including a lot of exclusive content.
And as I always say, it's most of all, it's the community on which to rely to support the independent journalism that we do here every night.
All you have to do is click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page.
It will take you directly there.
You'll have access to this third segment that will be gloriously free of Michael Tracy.
And we'll be covering the RFK Jr. hearing and a lot of, I think, the interesting and important revelations that it presented.
For those who have been watching this show, we are need to say very appreciative.
As I said, we expect to be on a much more regular schedule than we have been during the last couple of weeks as a little Labor Day holiday, as well as just some minor health issues that I've had that I believe I'm fully recovered from.
So we hope to see you back tomorrow night and every night at 7 p.m. Eastern Live, exclusively here on Rebel.
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