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Jan. 9, 2024 - Uncensored - Piers Morgan
47:25
20240109_piers-morgan-uncensored-more-epstein-files-details
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Epstein's Powerful Friends 00:04:16
I'm Piers Morgan uncensored tonight in Los Angeles.
More bombshell court documents and more lurid claims about paedophile Jeffrey Epstein's powerful friends.
But who knew what and when?
I'll talk exclusively to his brother.
And Donald Trump appears in court again, but are is mounting legal woes, making him ever more popular.
I sit down with a Democrat presidential candidate who says, Biden, never mind Trump, is unfit for office.
This is Piers Morgan uncensored.
Good evening from Los Angeles.
Welcome to Piers Morgan Uncensored.
Jeffrey Epstein was a paedophile.
He was also very rich and friends of some of the most powerful people in the world.
They flew on his private jets.
They parted at his home on Fifth Avenue.
They holidayed on his now infamous Caribbean island.
We know that Ghillaine Maxwell, his ex-girlfriend and longtime fixer, trafficked young women and underage girls to the island for Epstein to sexually abuse.
We also know that Maxwell, a woman, is the only person so far to be held accountable for the heinous deeds of a sick man whose crimes must have been abetted by at least some of his male friends.
What we still don't know is exactly who else knew about it, when they knew about it, and why they decided to turn a blind eye.
Those who knew Epstein before his conviction may have some plausible deniability.
It's certainly possible they orbited his lavish world without knowing what he was really about.
But what about after that?
Epstein was first arrested in 2006 and in 2008 he played guilty to soliciting prostitution from an underage girl.
He got 18 months in jail, but he cut a secret deal with a US attorney that meant he avoided federal charges.
They let him leave prison during the day to work from his own office, then released him five months early.
That now looks like a massive slap on the wrist for a serial sex offender.
And, well, pretty much a deal with the devil.
So how did he get that?
Why did so many people, including Prince Andrew, the late Queen's favourite son, continue to call him a friend afterwards?
Was I right in having him as a friend at the time?
And bearing in mind, this was some years before he was accused of being a sex offender.
I don't think there was anything wrong then.
The problem was the fact that once he had been convicted... You stayed with him.
I stayed with him.
And that's the bit that, as it were, I kick myself for on a daily basis.
Yeah, that was a problem, right?
Most of Prince Andrew's answers to the questions on this subject, it just didn't stack up.
It defies credulity to claim that none of the men in Epstein's life knew that he sexually abused young women.
And as more and more legal documents are unsealed, the picture gets only murkier.
There are many lurid claims and emphatic denials.
Documents released yesterday surfaced discredited allegations, or maybe they're not discredited.
We don't really know that Epstein has sex tapes of Prince Andrew and potentially of former presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump, and even Sir Richard Branson, although his spokesman said that the claims are baseless and unfounded, and they may well be.
This is exactly how conspiracy theories start and are allowed to prosper.
There are many, many unanswered questions about Jeffrey Epstein and many important people who are choosing not to answer them.
Well, joining me now via phone call because he would prefer not to be seen on camera is Jeffrey Epstein's brother, Mark Epstein.
Mark Epstein, thank you very much indeed for joining me.
Let me first of all ask you, what did you know about your brother?
I mean, it's an obvious question, but you are his relative, his sibling.
When this all came out about him, were you as shocked as everybody else, or did you have concerns about him?
Well, back in 2006, when he first got into trouble, he told me that he was getting into trouble, you know, for what he was doing.
And so I knew from early on what was happening.
Yeah, so he told me early on.
The Body and the Cover-Up 00:05:54
Did you know the scale of it?
I mean, obviously, he had that conviction.
He served time in prison, but the sheer scale of what is...
I made it real clear.
I'm not discussing anything about my brother and his charges against him.
I have nothing to do with that.
I wasn't involved.
I have no more information.
The only thing I'm interested in discussing is the circumstances surrounding his murder.
Okay, well, you say it's a murder.
Obviously, it was ruled as suicide.
Why do you believe that's not true?
Well, first, the actual pathologist who did the autopsy did not determine it was a suicide.
They couldn't.
They said it looked more like a homicide.
But on the initial death certificate, on cause of death, it said pending, meaning pending further investigation, which is proper.
And then a few days later, you know, Bill Barr claims it was a suicide.
And then the chief pathologist of New York, who did not see the body, claims it's a suicide.
So the point, the question becomes, what investigating was done in a matter of days to make them come out with that determination?
And it turns out that because it was called a suicide, there doesn't seem to have been an investigation.
Because if you declare somebody died by suicide, there's really nothing to investigate.
You know, the only questions about a suicide is how did they do it?
Did they hang themselves?
Did they shoot themselves?
Did they jump out of a window?
And that's a pretty obvious answer at the time of the death.
So there's no investigation was done.
The EMTs that went to the prison were never questioned.
The hospital personnel were never questioned.
We can't seem to find the medical records.
We can't get the 911 pool.
That this was a suicide.
Why are all these things hidden?
And why did you make that ridiculous statement?
Right.
Let's talk about the night that your brother died.
He was found hanged.
What is it about what happened that night?
Yeah, well, okay.
That's what was reported.
So tell me why you think that what happened that night is so suspicious.
Okay, first of all, for four years, we were trying to find out what position his body was in when he was found, because that's very telly.
But we couldn't find out because they moved his body after he was found to the infirmary of the prison.
When the EMTs were called and they got to the prison, he was already dead in the infirmary.
Understand something.
He had been dead for at least two hours before he was found.
That's what the autopsy showed.
And that's not a question.
That's a fact.
He could have been dead for six hours, but at least two.
Now, they said in the DOJ report that finally came out that he was found hanging.
They said he was in a seated position with his legs extended in front of him.
And when he was tied to the top bunk, and when they either cut him or tore him down, his buttocks was an inch and an inch and a half off the ground, which if you picture that, it means basically his entire body weight or the bulk of his body weight was hanging by the neck.
Yes, there was probably some weight on his feet at the end of his legs, but the bulk of his body was hanging.
So the mark on his neck left by the ligature is in the middle of his neck and goes straight back.
If he was hanging, as they said, the ligature would have slid up high up under his chin and then went up back sort of behind his ears up to whatever he was tied to.
So the ligature mark on his neck is inconsistent with the way they describe him.
And another important thing is that when you die, when a person dies, you know, their blood isn't circulating anymore.
And what happens, the blood starts to settle in the body to the lowest point.
Gravity just takes the blood through the tissue.
So you get a pooling of the blood under the skin, which is why they tell you to never move a dead body, because they can tell a lot of things.
If you find a dead body laying on its face and the back has this lividity, it's pooled blood, that means the body died on its back and somebody eventually turned it over.
So if you picture the way they describe Jeffrey as hanging, well, he should have lividity in the back of his legs and in his buttocks, which was the lowest part of his body.
Okay, if he let me ask you this: if he didn't take his own life, who do you think took it?
Who killed him, in your estimation?
It's a good question.
You know, Bill Barr said that no one went in there out of the tier, so he concluded it was a suicide.
But there were something like 11 or 12 other prisoners on that tier that could have gone in and killed him.
Now, if another prisoner killed him, it's sort of why would they go to the extent to cover it up?
You know, it's like if you remember the case of Whitey Bulger, he was in prison and he got killed by three other inmates.
Well, they got the guys and they prosecuted them for killing Whitey Bulger in jail.
If it was just another prisoner that killed Jeff, why would they not just find out who it was and prosecute him for murder?
There doesn't seem to be a reason to cover that up.
Also, we can't get a list of who were those prisoners that were already on the tier.
I know one was the Cataglione, who was Jeff's cellmate for a while.
So the question becomes: who was on the tier that night?
When were they put there?
And when were they transferred out?
Because I was told that after the death, a number of prisoners were transferred off of that tier to other places.
Trump as a Crook 00:03:14
So there's a lot of people.
Let me ask you, Mark Epstein.
Let me ask you: do you believe, obviously, Jeffrey, your brother, had relationships, friendships with many, many of the most rich, famous, powerful people in the world.
Do you believe that, you know, if it's taken this theory to a conclusion here, do you think that one of those people who may have had a vested interest in shutting him up and not talking about what he knew about them potentially may have played a part in his death?
Yes, that's what I think happened.
And then you have to question: out of the rich and powerful people he knew, who would have the ability to pull something like this off?
That's another question.
Who would have the ability to ban somebody in there if that's the way it was done?
Who would have the ability to have the Justice Department come up with this, you know, pardon the language, this bullshit report?
You know, in the Justice Department report, it just says that it was declared dead by the pathologist.
But that's not true.
It was declared undetermined by the pathologists that did the actual report.
And then for some reason, you've claimed.
You've claimed, Mark Epstein, that your brother had information on Donald Trump and Bill Clinton that was so incendiary that the 2016 election would have been canceled if that information had come out.
What was that information?
No, that's wait, wait, Pierce, that's incorrect.
But Jeffrey told me during the 2016 election, we were just discussing the election, just two brothers talking about current things.
What he said was that if he said what he knew about both candidates, they'd have to cancel the election.
So he was talking about Donald Trump and he was talking about Hillary, but Bill wasn't running at that point in time.
And Jeffrey used to sometimes tell me things about people he was with.
I never heard Jeffrey say anything bad about Bill Clinton.
Jeffrey always liked Bill Clinton.
He admired Bill Clinton.
So I don't think that, you know, he didn't say he had information on Bill Clinton.
He mentioned the candidate.
So I want to keep the record straight.
I like to keep facts out there, not speculation.
What information do you think he had on Donald Trump, for example, that could have disqualified him?
I don't know any specific information, but I've also heard Jeffrey say that he stopped hanging out with Donald Trump when he realized Trump was a crook.
That's on tape.
I heard a videotape interview with Jeff, and he said that he stopped hanging out with Donald Trump when he realized Trump was a crook.
Do you believe that there are...
Do you believe that there are these videotapes, which came out in the unsealed documents yesterday, that there are videotapes which apparently were from cameras that your brother put in place recording famous people from Prince Andrew to Bill Clinton to Richard Branson and others having sex on tape?
Do you believe that?
You know, I've heard those stories and it's sort of like doesn't matter if I believe it or not.
I don't know.
So again, I shy away from speculating on things I have no backs on.
The Case Remains Open 00:03:35
Okay.
I was told by somebody who supposedly knew that there were not cameras in the New York House.
You know, I know there were cameras around the entryways and for security.
I was told there was no cameras inside.
But again, I don't know if that's how reliable that I thought it was reliable, you know, and I don't have any reason to doubt it.
But again, I don't want to speculate.
So I have no knowledge of any tapes or anything.
Okay.
Mark Epstein, I appreciate you joining me.
Thank you very much.
You're welcome.
Love you.
Well, I'm joined now by Gloria Alred, who represents over 20 of Jeffrey Epstein's victims.
Gloria, what did you make of that conversation with Mark Epstein?
Well, I like the fact that he was fact-based.
I do think there is quite a bit of rumor, conspiracy theory, filling the vacuum of, you know, the facts that didn't come out as soon as they might have.
So I still think that there are a lot of questions about whether it was a suicide, whether it was a homicide, whether it was some kind of natural death.
I don't know.
I know there have been a report, I believe, by the, you know, many investigations which decided or concluded that it was a suicide.
But I think there's still an open question.
I remember seeing Jeffrey Epstein the last time he appeared in court in New York.
And I know that many of the victims that I represented, 20 that I represent, many of those 20, were hoping and expecting that there would be other hearings, other, you know, in the prosecution that was taking place of him.
And they were so thrilled that finally there might be some justice in the case in the criminal justice system.
Of course, his death ended in a way that was, and at a time that was so unexpected and was devastating to many of the victims who hoped to be able to confront him in that court of law in federal court in New York.
People who don't know Jeffrey Epstein just know all these rumor mill stuff, and some of it's true, some of it isn't.
You know, it's hard to really piece together the reality here about him.
What is your belief about Jeffrey Epstein, Gloria?
Well, definitely, I called him, I call him a child sex abuser, a sex trafficker of underage girls.
And that's what, of course, Ghelane Maxwell was charged with and was convicted in federal court.
By the way, I never use the word pedophile because that means a lover of children.
And a man who exploits and hurts and traffics and, you know, does what he did to underage girls and often to adult women as well, is not a lover of children, is not a lover of women.
He's a manipulator.
And he's a sex predator.
There's a lot of ongoing speculation about Prince Andrew's friendship with Epstein and what he knew or didn't know.
The bottom line is he paid Virginia Duffray a reported $11 million to settle a case with her that he said he was never going to settle.
Virginia Duffray Ransom 00:15:10
What do you read into that?
I mean, is there any way in a normal world that somebody would pay someone that amount of money to stop a case proceeding if they didn't have something to hide?
I've done countless settlements after litigation or what we call pre-litigation.
And the accused person never admits that he did it.
But when we do it, you know, we present a great deal of evidence to the accused through his lawyers.
And then there is a process, often a mediation process with a retired judge or a professional mediator, where there's conversation, which is really a negotiation, and there's a result.
So bottom line, I can't say whether he did it or not, but it certainly raises the question if he paid substantial millions of dollars to resolve and settle the case.
Gloria Royd, as always, great to have you on the program.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Well, Uncensored next.
I'll be getting more on this story with my panel, including Epstein's former lawyer, Alan Dershowitz.
Welcome back to Uncensored from Los Angeles.
Let's get more now on the bombshell court documents about pedophile Jeffrey Epstein's powerful friends, John Minaz's former lawyer and the author Alan Dershowitz, the investigative journalist Vicki Ward and Fox News host Tommy Lehron.
Well, welcome to all of you.
Alan Dershowitz, let me start with you.
You've obviously, your name has appeared in these unsealed documents in various places.
What should we read into these documents?
There's so much claim, counterclaim, denial, suspicious silence in some cases.
What should the public make of it?
Well, first, I want every document to come out, every single one.
I want every videotape to be revealed.
I hope there are videotapes of every single sexual encounter that anybody ever had in any property of Jeffrey Epstein.
And I hereby waive any right of privacy because I know I did nothing wrong.
I had sex with one woman from the day I met Jeffrey Epstein till the day he died my wife.
And these tapes have revealed exculpatory material.
Sharon Churcher, for example, there were emails that show that she put my name into the head of Virginia Guffray.
She said, although we know Dershowitz didn't do anything wrong, we couldn't prove anything against him.
It would be a good name for you to put in your book because he's famous.
He represented Klaus von Bulow.
A movie was made about him.
And then she put me in her book as somebody she did not have sex with.
So, you know, these disclosed materials have helped people who were falsely accused by me.
They don't help people who have been truthfully accused.
There's another woman named Sarah Ransom, who also now it's been disclosed that she claimed to have sex tapes of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
And now she's admitted that she made the whole thing up.
So it's a very good thing that these tapes and these pictures and these emails have come out.
I want more to come out.
There are FBI reports.
I've seen an FBI report, but it's redacted.
There are tape recordings that are relevant to the innocence or guilt of people who are accused.
The one thing we shouldn't do is engage in McCarthyism.
We shouldn't do what McCarthy did.
He held up lists and said, if your name is on the list, you're guilty.
My name is on the list.
Of course it is.
I was his lawyer.
But my name is on the list in an exculpatory way.
And so I'm very pleased that these materials have come out.
I want more to come out.
We filed a brief the other day in court demanding even more information to come out because all the information will prove that I did nothing wrong.
I was his lawyer.
If you don't like that, well, then complain about our legal system.
But I never had any improper relation with anybody connected to Jeffrey Epstein or anyone else.
You mentioned Sarah Ransom there.
She is one of Epstein's victims.
And she made the claims about the existence of these sex tapes.
Then she did retract them.
But interestingly, she's now come out and doubled down on her original claim in an interview with my old show, Good Morning Britain.
Let's take a look.
There are videos that exist.
The people that know they exist.
I'm sure are very frightened of them being released.
So how do you know then that Epstein had cameras on the island?
It's no secret that everything was recorded.
Multiple victims have come forward confirming my account along with others.
I've also seen recordings in his office.
Well, Vicki Ward, you actually met Sarah Ransom.
It's hard to know where the truth lies, given that she has said one set of claims, then she's retracted them, and now she's doubled down on the original claims.
What do you think?
Well, I think if you listen to her language, just there appears, she's not quite doubling down on the specifics of the original claims.
She's just saying there are tapes.
She's not saying specifically of who.
I think, look, Sarah Ransom in 2022 published a memoir called Silence No More, which you know will have had to have gone through pretty rigorous legal vetting and fact checking.
And none of the specific allegations that we read in the document dumped yesterday are in there.
And Sarah Ransom was not a witness or an accuser taking the stand in Gillen Maxwell's criminal trial, nor was Virginia Roberts.
Nonetheless, the pattern of behavior that both of them described did form the backbone of the substance being discussed at that trial.
And I think that is why it's important.
Four other victims were the victims who took the stand in Gillen Maxwell's trial.
They also, by the way, got things wrong.
when they were first interviewed by the FBI, they then either forgot it or had to sort of say they misremembered it when under cross-examination.
It happens with stories of extreme sexual abuse.
It does.
All of this does make it really hard for journalists like us to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
And this story, you know, the whole Jeffrey Epstein story still remains a huge mystery because, you know, in these latest filings, we get this lurid picture into endless depravity.
The man seems to have had so much sexual activity a day, it leaves you wondering when he had time to do anything else.
And if he didn't have time to do anything else, then why were all these really important, powerful world leaders floating around him?
There are lots of questions here that are still outstanding.
Yeah, I mean, Tommy Lerin, looking at this in totality, you've got a guy that was clearly a serial abuser, often of underage girls, doing it in plain sight, whilst also maintaining a position as financier and socialite friend of the most rich, powerful, famous people on earth.
And yet the only person so far who's been brought to justice over any of this is his former fixer, Ghillane Maxwell.
Not a single man has been brought to account here, despite the welter of evidence that they're all there at the time, a lot of these people.
What do you think of it?
Well, I'll tell you this, money is power.
And we know from looking at Hollywood, especially over the last 10 years, and we've had more revelations thanks to the Me Too movement, which is very selective, by the way, that pedophiles and predators protect one another because Hollywood and places of power, D.C. included, are crawling with predators and pedophiles.
That's why it's taken so long for us to get this information.
That's why so many have protected not only Epstein, but have protected the logs that have protected these document dumps from coming out.
We get redacted versions.
We get sensationalism with names being thrown around.
But will we ever really get to the bottom of it?
Will we ever really get to the bottom of what happened to Jeffrey Epstein?
A lot of us are not confident we ever will because we understand what I said.
Predators and pedophiles protect one another.
And the fact that Hollywood and the elites have been coddling this man and this information for so long tells you everything that you need to know about the inner workings, the dungeons that make up Hollywood, D.C., and political elites around the world.
They protect each other.
Alan, do you believe that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself or do you believe, as his brother said earlier, that he was murdered?
Well, I don't know for sure.
I think he had a motive to kill himself.
He couldn't stand the idea of spending the rest of his life in prison, but the circumstances demand investigation.
I don't believe if he committed suicide, he did it by himself.
He would have had to pay off.
I think some of the guards, I think some of the guards have been disciplined.
Everybody who has any culpability should be held responsible.
I'm on the same side as the victims in this case.
I want all the evidence to come out so that the true victims are vindicated, but I also want the evidence to come out that shows that there are some credibility questions about people like Ransom and others.
You said that Prince Andrew shouldn't have settled with Virginia Duffray.
That's Renee Roberts, obviously.
Why do you believe that?
Well, even if everything they said about him was true, she was over the age of consent.
She bragged to people about how wonderful it was.
And to pay millions of dollars for that, a jury would never have come back that way.
And I think he could have won the case on legal grounds.
but I suspect that he was concerned about what would happen during a deposition.
Not about necessarily the person who accused him, but about his whole life, because depositions are wide open.
I think it was a terrible mistake for Prince Andrew to have settled the case.
I wish he could reopen it because I don't think there was jurisdiction in the federal court.
I don't think that there was the statute of limitations satisfied.
There are all kinds of legal issues that he could have won on, but I suspect his mother did not want the embarrassment that would have come out had he sat for a deposition.
Okay, Vicki, you've worked extensively for Vanity Fair.
One of the emails that came out was between Virginia Dufray and Sharon Churcher, suggesting that Bill Clinton had stormed into the Vanity Fair offices and threatened them not to write a sex trafficking expose of Epstein.
Do you have any knowledge of that?
Do we know if that actually happened?
Did Clinton do that?
I've never heard that.
And I know that Graydon Carter, who is the editor at the time, has categorically denied it.
You know, what did happen and what I think sort of probably made its way in a convoluted, ultimately inaccurate form to Virginia many years later, writing that email was that Jeffrey Epstein appeared in the Vanity Fair offices and had a conversation, the contents of which I've never learned.
But it was while my article on him was being fact-checked and supposed to be closing.
And all I know, remember I was on bedrest, pregnant with my twins at the time.
I was not in the office, was that at the 11th, the allegations of Maria and Annie Farmer were cut from the article.
So I think that somehow Virginia learnt a version of what had happened that was wrong.
Tommy, finally, look at the politics of this.
Normally you'd say one side could latch onto it, the other side could latch onto it.
It's the problem here is you've got prominent figures on both sides.
You've got Republican icons like Donald Trump.
You've got Democrat icons like the Clintons and so on.
Is this a kind of situation where actually a stain on all their houses?
No one can really get political gain from this scandal.
Yeah, I think that you know this as well as I do, Piers, that if Donald Trump were implicated in anything illegal or anything nefarious, that would be the first thing that would be explored to the 20th degree because Donald Trump can't breathe without them indicting him.
So I think actually Donald Trump's name being mentioned, but nothing really beyond a mention, I think that goes to show that Donald Trump is probably very innocent of doing anything nefarious or anything awful, because if he had, that would be, you know, another stain on him.
And the media runs to do that at every opportunity if they could.
I think we both know they absolutely would.
Tommy Lehr and Alan Doshowitz, Vicky Award, thank you all very much indeed.
This scandal will run and run and we may never actually get to the truth, sadly, but I appreciate you joining me.
On Sergeant Next, he's a presidential hopeful who has had many heated debates over the Israel-Hamas war on this very show.
I sit down with the young Turks host, Jenk Uger, here in LA to talk about the war, the Epstein files, Trump, and why he thinks that Biden is also unfit for office.
He's one of the biggest liars in the history of global politics.
I was raised Catholic, so that makes me Jewish-ish.
You could be dressed up in drag once!
I ran in 2020 for the same exact seat.
I got away with it then.
Now he's been expelled from America's Congress, and he could face up to 20 years in jail.
The expulsion of the gentleman from New York, Mr. Santos.
Did you not think people would find this out?
I've been a terrible liar.
Can George Santos finally tell me the truth?
From Los Angeles, here's Morgan Arsene.
Welcome back to Uncensored from Los Angeles.
When the news of Jeffrey Epstein's suicide was announced, Jenk Uger of the massively popular Young Turks Network said if you were trying to set up a conspiracy, this is how you do it.
So what do you think about this revelations in this incredible story and about the US presidential race where he's a candidate?
I sat down face to face with Jenk to get his take on it and the ongoing war of course between Israel and Mass on which he's been very vocal.
Jenkins, it's great to see you here in Los Angeles.
I feel like we've been seeing each other from across the water, often in very quite tense and fractures circumstances with big debates.
Videotapes and Conspiracy 00:04:15
So it's good to see you just one-on-one.
And we're going to come to Israel and we'll come to the U.S. election.
You're of course running for president.
But first, let's talk about the Epstein scandal, which every single day seems to produce ever more lurid headlines.
What do you make of it?
Well, it's important because it's people in power that did terrible things and seem to have largely gotten away with it.
So I like that people care about accountability on this issue.
The problem is we don't really know exactly who did it and exactly what they did.
So, you know, you've got Bill Clinton saying I was on the plane, but I wasn't on the island.
You've got Richard Branson, who's come out vehemently denying there's any sex tape of him, as was supposedly revealed yesterday.
There's lots of claim, counterclaim going on.
Very little hard evidence, which is indisputable, which could lead to potential consequence.
Yeah, so when he first died in prison, I thought, okay, there's going to be something that's determinative here.
Did the video in the hallway in the prison work or did it not work?
If it worked and we see that no one went into his cell, okay, then it's a suicide.
I'm, you know, I'm not particularly fond of conspiracy theories, et cetera.
But if it didn't work, okay, well, then that's a totally different issue.
And as it turns out, oh, golly, gee, the guards were off and the video didn't work.
Well, that leads you to many other speculation by nature of this beast, right?
But look, even Trump, Trump was terrific friends with Epstein for a long, long time and said he knows that Epstein likes them young, so there's no question that he knew that Epstein was up to terrible things.
But did he do it?
I don't know.
It's easy for the two sides to say Clinton definitely did it.
Trump definitely did it.
A lot of political game playing going on with the various names and different attitudes depending if it's one of your party.
There's also, I think, with the Epstein scandal, a sense that you look at it in totality.
You have Epstein who was in jail and may have taken his own life or may have had it taken from him.
We'll probably never know.
The only other person who's been brought to account is Ghillé Maxwell, his kind of madame figure in the whole thing.
None of the other men who must have either known about Epstein's proclivities or actively joined him in some of them have ever been properly brought to book for this.
Do you think they ever will?
Well, hard to tell, but one of the things that makes me wondering why I brought up the videotape in the prison is because Epstein was supposed to have videotapes of a lot of this.
Right.
And yet we magically still haven't found the videotapes.
And under the Bush administration, the guy who let him go wound up, by the way, being the labor secretary for Trump.
He's the one that let Epstein off the hook in the first place, right?
Back in 2008.
So magically, everyone keeps getting let off the hook in this case, except Ghillaine Maxwell.
And of course, on that one, Trump said that he was very fond of her.
Also, it seems to me there's sort of life before his first conviction and life after it, i.e. before the first conviction, then you can completely believe that people may have been conned by this guy.
But once he had that conviction in the early 2000s for effectively a sex crime with a minor, pedophilia, once that happened, everyone who then continued to deal with him from Prince Andrew onwards, they surely are culpable by association.
Yeah, I think after 2008, you have no excuses at all.
And everybody, I remember covering that story.
And I remember saying, this is ridiculous.
This is a slap on the wrist for a guy who might have done an enormous amount of pedophilia and been connected to, at the time we already knew he was connected to, tons of people in finance, politics, people in power.
After that, going back and still associating with him probably means you're an addict.
Probably means you not only don't mind that at all, but can't help but go and seek that out.
Media Wars with Biden 00:04:34
And what about that deal that was done at that time?
I mean, it was such a murky, looking back now, terrible deal with the devil, it seems.
In the Epstein case, you have this guy who says, oh, this child molester, serial child molester, is going to serve a short time in prison, but he's not even really going to be in prison.
He's going to get to go out during the day and still conduct business and still make a lot of money.
Will it have any bearing on the election this year?
Probably not because, A, people on both sides are implicated.
And of course, they're treated differently, right?
The Republicans think it's only Democrats because they have a mind freeze on anything that involves Trump.
Even though Trump says, I was great friends with him, he's a terrific guy, he said back in the day, and I knew that he likes him young, right?
They're like, nope, I don't hear it.
I'm MAGA.
Let's come to the election.
You're running for president.
I mean, do you genuinely have any belief you could win?
What is your real purpose for running?
Yeah, so I have three missions.
So let me tell you the first one, which is Joe Biden's going to lose, and I need to push him out.
He's at 33% right now.
No one has ever recovered from being that low as an incumbent for any federal office, let alone president.
He's down 14 points with independents.
He's down four points with younger voters.
He's down five points with Latinos.
It is a disaster for Joe Biden.
And right now, if we don't get him out, we are definitely going to lose to Donald Trump.
He's losing every single swing state.
We have to act now to get new candidates in, and that's mission number one.
He would say, I beat him last time.
Look, Piers, I can give you 100 stats, but the bottom line is, no one with an approval rating this low has ever won for any federal office when they were this far down in election season.
That means Joe Biden would have to pull off literally the greatest political comeback in American history.
Does anyone in their right mind think he's capable of that?
There's no way he can do it.
How much of Biden's unpopularity is specific to his age?
In other words, if he was a, if he was Gavin Newsom, who is currently the incumbent president, with the record that Biden has had in the last three years, would he be polling much higher?
So yes and no.
A lot has to do with his age.
77% of Americans have said that they are concerned that he will not be healthy enough to finish a second term.
But that is not the only issue.
So in office, how has he done?
You know, people say, oh my God, he did more than a normal Democratic president.
That is a very low bar.
Democratic presidents barely try.
So did he do most of his agenda?
No.
85% of his agenda is dead, and there's no dispute over that.
It's incredible to people outside of America that Donald Trump, who lost last time, has been pretty much a consistent loser in the electoral process since 2016.
He's now facing nearly 100 criminal charges, and yet all that has done is fuel him and make him more popular, allow him to play the victim and see his poll numbers go up.
What does that say about America and your political system?
So Donald Trump deserves almost all the criticism that he gets, and he breaks so many laws that he floods the zone.
And then you don't know what to respond to because he says something maniacal here, he broke that law there, he's a lifelong criminal, etc.
But the number one issue is the one that the media doesn't talk about, which is he's anti-establishment.
That's why people like him.
Democrats underestimate him at their peril and they do it over and over again.
So there's three issues here.
One is, yes, he did do all those things, and sometimes the Democrats overreach anyway, right?
Number two is what you're pointing out, which is that he's telegenic.
Not in terms of looks, but in terms of he's entertaining.
He's charismatic.
Yes, and what Democrats don't understand is, sorry, but politics is now all media wars.
That's what it is.
Where do people get the information on who they're going to vote?
Media, some form of media, not necessarily mainstream media, but some form of media.
So you have to engage in the media wars.
And Trump is fantastic at engaging in the media wars.
He goes to wherever the cameras are.
He grabs the spotlight.
What does Biden do?
Biden made his first speech against Trump just a couple of days ago.
What are you waiting for, brother?
He's done 200 speeches in the time that you've done one.
That is a colossal media advantage and hence a colossal political advantage.
But the third part of it is he's giving a giant middle finger to the established.
Now, I don't want Donald Trump to win.
Netanyahu and Authority 00:06:24
I'm in this race.
Why do I want to knock Biden out?
Because I don't want him to lose the Trump.
If Biden is the candidate, do you think Trump wins if he wins the Republican nomination?
It's near 100%.
So look.
And what would that mean for America?
Disaster.
Total, epic disaster.
Even Republicans who don't support Trump are now supporting him in large numbers because they believe the Democrats have overreached in the way that he's being prosecuted.
And I can understand that.
It's the same way they try to take him off the ballot.
My first reaction was, why would you do that?
All that does is make him more popular.
And by the way, the Supreme Court inevitably will throw this out anyway.
There's still folks that I have a lot of adjectives for.
I'll try to keep it under control.
That still say 91 indictments.
Well, all it's done is made him more popular.
When are you going to get it through your thick, thick skull that people don't think like you do?
So this normal person who's a liberal in Washington is like, well, I am outraged and I would never vote for anyone with 91 indictments.
Yeah, brother, but you're not the average voter.
The average voter doesn't see it that way and hasn't seen it that way.
And the polling has shown it for nearly a year.
Let's turn to Israel and the war in Gaza.
We've had some very emotive debates involving you and many other people.
Had a little break.
I've come back now to see nothing's changed on the ground.
Perhaps the world's attention is less obsessively now on there than it was.
What is your take on where we are with this war?
Yeah, so today we read that Israel's going to start to withdraw a little bit from Gaza.
We'll see.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Israel has been brutal.
They've now killed about 20 times the number of people that Hamas did.
I don't believe that a state is immune from charges of terrorism or genocide.
They say, well, we're a state, so we don't, we can't, when we murder civilians, it's perfectly kosher.
Sorry, it isn't.
Israel is dropping 2,000-pound bombs, and a lot of them are unguided.
What that means is, I don't give a damn who it kills.
I don't care if it's a terrorist, which, by the way, are mainly under the tunnels.
What I laughed at was the idea that they killed 10,000 Hamas fighters.
No, we don't know.
IDF has shown through their own videos that the tunnels are largely intact.
We know Hamas is in the tunnels.
So all logic and evidence indicates that they barely got any Hamas fighters.
I don't actually think Hamas has shown by its behavior in the last 17 years where they've had power in Gaza that they have any real concern for the welfare of Palestinians.
No, I don't think they do.
Hamas is Muslim fundamentalists.
And so whenever you have oppression, unfortunately, fundamentalism grows.
That's a great breakthrough.
But there can't be a future with Hamas in charge, can they?
Yeah, I don't think so.
No.
I mean, let's cut to the quick here about how this ends.
People talk about the day after the war.
How do you think this ends?
And what is the smartest way for everyone to go forward when the war is over?
So let me handle that in two ways.
The current path that Israel is on is, well, Hamas made us kill all your kids.
That's an absurd thing to claim.
If you're so powerful, why is Hamas making you kill their civilians?
That's absurd.
And then they say, oh, we're going to, the war ends when Hamas surrenders.
Nobody thinks they're going to surrender.
That's an absurd standard.
What are they going to say?
Okay, I'm right here.
Come and bomb me.
Come and arrest me.
But there is a real way that it can end.
So you make a deal with the Palestinian Authority, and the Biden administration has finally woken up and begun to go in this direction.
But then our plot is totally discredited.
No.
Riddled with corruption.
That's right.
I mean, I would say Hamas is also responsible.
I would say that Netanyahu is very damaged.
He may not survive this himself.
And he is at the behest now and under control of his right-wing cabinet, which is incredibly unfortunate for those like you and I who would like to see peace be achieved here.
How long do you think this war is going to go on for?
So we have a problem with Netanyahu on a second front, which is that he's corrupt, he has these charges, he's lost the Israeli population, and I don't want people making assumptions about Israel and the people that live there.
Look at how unpopular Netanyahu is with his own population.
He is.
And there is no democracy in Israel overall because they imprisoned 5 million Palestinians, but there is democracy within Israel itself for them, right?
And within that democracy, you have a vibrant media, et cetera, that criticizes Netanyahu.
So the reason why I say Netanyahu is primarily responsible is because even if you blame Hamas, and that's fair, well, he's the one that aided and abetted Hamas.
He's the one that helped them get funding.
He's the one that thought it was a brilliant idea to have them as a counterweight to the Palestinian authority.
The problem is the polls show that whilst there's a lot of unpopularity for Netanyahu, and he would certainly lose an election if it was held tomorrow on that basis, and a lot of it is driven by they blame him for what happened on October the 7th, there's also widespread support in Israel for what the IDF are doing in terms of response.
So you have these two things running concurrently.
Netanyahu is personally very unpopular, but what the IDF are doing under his command as prime minister is very popular.
Yeah, so look, there's two issues.
One is Netanyahu's in charge and we don't have elections and we can't get him out even though the Israelis want him second.
We want him to get out.
The second issue is you're right, it's not just Netanyahu problem.
It's an Israeli right-wing problem.
And right now the rest of his cabinet is a bunch of monsters, ghouls and goblins, who are openly, brazenly talking about ethnically cleansing the Palestinians in ways that are sometimes even more vicious than Netanyahu.
And talking about starting a war in Lebanon, starting a war in Iran, that is insanity, total insanity.
So look, at some point if the Israeli population does not choose peace, we're all doomed for endless war in the Middle East.
But if the Israeli population in an election chooses peace for the first time since the Itzhak Rabin, then all of this can be solved and we could end this thing forever.
Jake, great to see you.
All right, great to see you.
It's really good to chat over the issues.
I wish you all the best for 2023.
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