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Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dig into the so-called “Epstein files” vote, why Trump suddenly wants everything released, and why everyone should expect a Mueller-style scrub instead of real accountability. They talk Larry Summers slinking off “from public life,” the national security state’s role in hiding the full story, and why this scandal is really about a ruling class that treats organized crime like a business model.
From there, they break down a new Democratic video urging the military and intel community to refuse illegal orders, Trump’s response calling it “seditious” and punishable by death, and what that says about a cornered fascist who openly envies the power of Mohammed bin Salman. Then it is on to Nvidia, Peter Thiel dumping stock, the AI bubble sitting under the entire economy, and the familiar feeling of a roaring market heading toward a crash. They close with some cultural brain bleach, from the new Running Man to Hallmark Christmas movies and Robert Johnson on repeat.
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Oh, that was one of the better ones I've ever had.
Oh, okay.
Welcome to the weekender.
I'm Jared J. Sexton.
I'm here with my friend, my co-conspirator, Nick Houseman.
How you doing, bud?
I'm doing okay.
I'm doing okay.
Just, you know, keeping warm out here in LA.
Oh, man, what a subplot.
What a subplot.
You know, when it gets to a certain degree, people, it gets to be that tipping point where we're cold.
Oh, Angelinos.
You sweet, sweet, soft people.
I love Angelinos so much.
It's one of my favorite subplots of this show.
Welcome to the weekender.
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All right, Nick, we've got developments all over the place.
First things first, after Donald Trump in the middle of the night, man, he has been popping off.
And we got to talk about all these different ways that this is happening because I do think that we are in a new chapter of not just this presidency, but in MAGA in general.
But after he popped off calling for the Congress to release the Epstein files, which fact check here, Nick, did he need Congress to vote on that?
No, he did not.
No, he did not.
But then Congress did.
And a near unanimous vote, Clay Higgins is the only person who voted again.
He was so concerned about instant people getting harmed in this whole thing.
A near unanimous vote has approved it.
Trump, without any sort of a photo op, apparently signed it.
We are now waiting for what people will refer to as the Epstein files.
And whatever that means, whatever it is that we're going to be given, I have my doubts about it.
I'm sure you do as well.
We are now waiting for that information to drop.
And I have concerns, Nick.
I know this is going to be wild.
I have concerns about whether or not the actual information is going to be released.
Well, I was actually amazed that he didn't veto it.
It felt like he could have gotten that far and been like, wait a minute, there's a problem with this bill.
The Senate didn't do what Mike Johnson wanted them to do.
We got to veto it, right?
But he didn't.
And there was no like a line item veto.
You couldn't do that either to kind of adjust it before he signed it.
So I don't really know what to make of this because it's a little bit strange.
He even publicly had called the let's just release it before they passed the bill.
So, you know, he seems on board, right?
And the only explanation in my mind, short of them releasing everything and being transparent is that they've just been scrubbing this since the fall, since last fall or whatever, since they got into office.
So I think that might be what's obviously the play here is let's just make sure we get some juicy tidbits about Clinton.
Maybe Obama's in there a little bit.
That'd be even better.
And then, you know, they won't notice that like no Republicans are listed in this thing.
Yeah, I, Nick, I just want to remind people, I want to go back deep in history.
Like, you know, if this was Wayne's world, doo-doo-doo, doo-doo, doo-doo-doo.
I'm talking about ancient history here back to March 22nd, 2019.
I know, I know it's beyond our memory.
I know that in your mind, it's sepia toned.
It's black and white.
Like there are stage coaches.
Were there cell phones back then?
I don't believe so.
I think at that point there were car phones.
But March 22nd, 2019, I remember sitting in my living room as the Mueller report was being ready to be released.
And lo and behold, instead of the Mueller report being released, I remember Bill Barr coming on and giving a summary of what the Mueller report said.
And it turned out the Mueller report just completely exonerated Donald Trump and in fact said that it was a hoax that there was any investigation into him in the first place, which was wild because it certainly seemed like there was a lot of smoke to that fire.
And then I remember for days at a time, our media was just continually reporting about it.
Like this has been a big misunderstanding.
And we've told everybody there wasn't anything going on here.
And then, of course, the actual report ended up dropping.
There was a lot of meat on that bone, a lot of fire to that smoke, but it didn't matter because it was preempted.
And I think what we're about to experience, there's no way that Donald Trump would want this released if it was going to incriminate him.
We've already heard reports and leaks that the DOJ not only told him that he was in the Epstein files, but that they were actively going into the reports and the files and scrubbing his name and also the name of any other Republican who was found in it.
I have no doubt that that is what is going to be released.
And yeah, it's probably going to be a bad day for people like Bill Clinton and Larry Summers and maybe even Bill Gates, Noam Chomsky, you name it.
God knows, you know, who all they're going to focus on and I, you know, the banks that worked with them, the financiers that worked with them.
And by the way, good.
I'm glad it will be a bad day for them because those people deserve to eat shit.
But what we're about to be given is yet another chapter in this cover-up.
I have no like, I have no hope whatsoever that this is going to be an accurate portrayal of what has actually occurred.
Well, I appreciate you bringing up the days where we would have interesting interpretations of how to pronounce the word Mueller.
So thanks, Jared.
So I remember though, those were the solid days, Jared, I suppose.
Weren't they?
And we're waiting for the same kind of shoe to drop.
This is going to be it.
This is finally going to get him, right?
And I would agree with everything you said.
And I think that, you know, certainly anybody who's involved in this kind of thing.
And by the way, banking records are now being subpoenaed as well.
JP Morgan Chase perhaps is, you know, again, there had to be some looking away in theory of what Epstein was involved in while they're funding these things or, you know, funding the loans he wants from these banks or even just housing the money that he is depositing, right?
Because at some point, they were still doing this after the investigation had taken place and after he had been found guilty originally in Florida.
Pam Gondi is also implicated in this.
She was the attorney general of Florida for a lot of what he was doing after he got out and continued to do trafficking and she did nothing.
I think that Kash Patel is probably on the hook for a little bit of a light, not, you know, light lying to Congress, you know, probably, because they were asking him specific questions about, you know, how many times Trump was mentioned and he really didn't seem to know.
And I suspect that we might find out that he, of course, he did.
So, yeah, I don't know.
The incompetence of this administration would lead me to believe that they're going to screw something up here, right?
And someone's going to find things that they didn't mean to release, perhaps, and it's going to implicate Trump.
Is that a possibility in your mind?
I mean, I don't know.
I had heard somebody float that idea that, you know, maybe they weren't even able to go through it in a competent way.
I wouldn't be shocked if they used AI to do it.
I really truly wouldn't, you know, if this is, you know, one of those chat GPT mistakes, like that, they do this shit all the time.
I think in this case, that this is one of those instances in which the story that everybody is focusing on, it isn't the actual story.
And I don't mean the Epstein scandal.
I mean the release of these documents.
I think it reveals that a lot of people are still waiting for institutions to figure this thing out.
That, you know, he was put in a corner and there's absolutely nothing he can do.
He's caught dead to rights and he's going to have to release this stuff because of pressure.
And then what will happen, Nick?
What will happen is a doctored thing, a completely slanted thing will be released.
And then the question is this.
Will the media fall for it?
Absolutely they will.
Of course they will, because they don't want to actually get into this thing and they don't want to know the actual truth and the extent of it.
Then you have the question, will the Democratic Party simply say, oh, oh, no, you caught some of the Democrats doing this stuff?
And then they'll shy away from it.
And then the question will be whether or not the Democratic Party will own up to this.
There's a real possibility that they will.
But the best thing I can say, and I told someone this the other day on the strategy call, like if Bill Clinton's on there, and of course he is, fuck Bill Clinton.
Tell them.
Yes, by all means, go after him.
Go after anybody.
Larry Summers, go after him.
Go after anybody in the party who has had, I mean, Hakeem Jeffries solicited him for a donation.
Like absolutely, go after every one of these assholes, but you cannot let these people.
And this administration is deeply incompetent.
This administration is not talented.
What they're going to put out there is going to be very transparent.
They're playing this game on easy mode and they can't even do well on that.
So like, do not go into this thing, getting your hopes up that what gets released is going to be accurate or real or damning and get ready for what's going to happen after the release.
And that's the problem here is that everybody just keeps waiting on this thing to solve itself and none of it works that way.
I mean, we didn't really even get a chance to talk about Larry Summers.
You mentioned briefly that he was communicating about, you know, a mentee of his and he was trying to get dating advice, right?
How craven do you have to be to get dating advice?
Well, it just came out that he went to Epstein's Island on his honeymoon.
So best of luck.
Yeah.
And the timing is such that he knew it was after a lot of the public revelations of what Epstein was about.
He continued to do that.
So he's going to step away from public life now, Jerry.
Oh, good for him.
Yeah.
And by the way, stepping away from public life, I wonder if he's going to stop taking millions of dollars from the Democratic Party and their donors to create their future economic agenda.
Because I doubt that's the case.
And I doubt the Democratic Party is going to quit him even after this has happened, which shows how deep this corruption and rot goes.
Well, what were we waiting for in March of 2019 from the mother report to come out?
What was that going to do?
What was the end result of that supposed to be?
The end result was supposed to show that Donald Trump had colluded with Russia.
And instead, it showed light collusion and coincidental organized crime collusion is what happened.
But and like, okay, that means he has to now go away, right?
That was.
He would have to go away at that point.
Yes.
And so are we in the same boat now where we're like, okay, look here, look, the Epstein files, he's in it.
He has to now go away.
Is that what we're thinking?
I mean, I'm not thinking that.
Okay.
Yeah.
I'm not thinking that at all.
Then, you know, okay, they won't release.
Probably there's indications they're not going to release like, you know, video.
You know, there's all this video that's considered pornography, child pornography, right?
And they don't want to release that.
You could blur it in theory if you're trying to like protect the identity.
I don't need any of that stuff to be released, but I do think that there needs to be somebody that goes through this kind of stuff.
But I don't think that stuff's going to get released.
I don't think there's any possibility of it.
And I'm sure there's probably like pictures of, you know, of Trump with, you know, even women, you know, in very risque, like, you know, they're in bikinis and whatever.
It looks whatever.
They probably want to release that stuff too.
But you were kind of telling me before we started recording that this notion of national security is going to somehow give them cover.
And I just wanted to explore that for about 30 seconds because otherwise it makes me shudder.
I don't understand how national security plays a part in this versus like, okay, protecting victims, like they really care about them as my eyes roll.
But this national security thing is interesting.
And I wonder if you had a take on that.
Well, yeah, because Jeffrey Epstein and people like him are a connective tissue between American intelligence, the institutions of power and international intelligence, in this case, particularly Mossad or with Israel.
So in order to actually show what he was up to, where his money came from, who he was talking to, who he was providing information to, that would be considered sharing state secrets.
And in all of that, I mean, national security is a catch-all.
It's the same thing as we talked about, like what the designation of a terrorist or enemy of the state is.
You can call anything and anything you want national security and you get away with it, which is one of the big giant problems of the post-World War II era.
In this case, they are basically going to try and say that they can't tell the entirety of the story of Epstein.
And God knows what all they're going to put in there because they're going to try and protect intelligence gathering methods.
And in this case, it's probably going to keep us from understanding that he was a sort of connector between these multiple intelligence agencies and that the United States of America and probably Israel were involved in blackmailing and surveillance and that they probably used Jeffrey Epstein and child abuse trafficking rings in order to do that.
I mean, no question.
Trump does have this ability to like, you know, identify someone that he could benefit from and study them and learn like Cohen is lawyer.
And he learned a lot about how to deal with people in a very negative way, but he did.
And I, you know, I would suspect that the same thing's happening with Epstein because, yes, it seems pretty clear that Epstein has blackmail on people to do their, to make him do their bidding.
And it seems also clear to me that the Trump administration blackmails people as well to make them bend to their will, right?
There's very few other explanations for some of the people that would just basically destroy their careers and their credibility for it.
Other than, oh, yeah, the whole thing about money and corruption that they get or whatever.
But still, I feel like there's always a little something else in the background that too.
But, you know, there's no question in my mind.
And yes, that Epstein was connected in that way.
And then it was a perfect front because he would have these summits with these very intelligent people and very wealthy people.
And we're just going to have a meeting.
We're going to have a discussion.
We're going to learn more about life.
It'll be a whole celebration.
But it's great cover for all manner of things that he was really doing behind the scenes.
And it's been incredible cover for what governments and states have been doing now for decades, which is they have been engaging.
And I'm going to call it something here, organized crime.
This has been organized crime for a very, very long time.
The amount of things that everyone, again, and it's not just the U.S. and Israel, it's, you know, every major state is involved in crimes that are being done in order to gain an advantage in geopolitics, the economy, you name it.
And that, that quite simply, it brings us to the larger thesis here.
This shit needs to end.
This shit needs to be brought to the light and we need to understand what these people have done and we need to choose a new direction.
But I guarantee that a lot of this is going to be hidden behind national security concerns.
And we've seen this time and time again.
We'll talk in a little bit about Saudi Arabia.
Like, you know, like we never learned the actual truth of 9-11 simply because national security, you know, the relationships that we have with other countries.
So when you look at all of this and you see what's coming out, people need to understand they're not getting the actual information.
It will be treated like the actual information, which is going to benefit Trump.
And so again, we have a situation where you have to ask, what are we hiding?
And is it worth hiding?
And none of it is worth hiding.
All of this shit needs to come out and all of it needs to come to light because if you want to, if you want to continue the status quo, you are on the side of this.
If you want to like restore what we had back to 2015, I'm sorry, Jeffrey Epstein and others like him were doing these things in 2015.
So you either break from that period and say it was wrong and move on, or you are on the side of this.
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