Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Nicole Hemmer: Great to be back with you, Greg.
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Did you ever tell the attorney general that Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files?
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Did you tell the Attorney General that Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files? And we have released where President Trump’s is in the simple question. Did you tell the Attorney General that the President’s name is in the Epstein files?
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): The question is simple. Who- You can tell the Attorney General that Donald Trump’s name is in the files. Yes or no?
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Yes or no? No?
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): It sounds like you don’t want to tell us. Did you tell the Attorney General that Donald Trump’s name was in the Epstein files?
Greg Sargent: So Patel would not answer when repeatedly asked whether he told the Attorney General that Trump’s name is in the files. Nicole, clearly if the answer to that question were no, Patel, who was under oath, would have said so. Your reaction to this?
Sargent: Well, Fox News had this unbelievable report about how Patel’s really on thin ice with Trump allies leaking stuff. When they start to leak from the inside about the FBI director being in trouble, he’s really in trouble. You know how this works. Is that right, Nicole?
Sargent: And it’s interesting because Patel is really kind of one of MAGA’s own in a way that Pam Bondi isn’t quite, but we can get into that. The exchanges got even better. Congressmen Swalwell grilled Patel on the number of times Trump is in the Epstein files and Patel said he didn’t know. Then this happened.
Kash Patel (voiceover): It’s not. It’s not.
Kash Patel (voiceover): No.
Kash Patel (voiceover): No.
Kash Patel (voiceover): I don’t know the number, but it’s not that.
Kash Patel (voiceover): My job is to provide for the safety and security of this country. My job is not to engage in political innuendo.
Hemmer: It’s such an obvious trap that Swalwell is laying for him. Patel indicates at first that he has no idea if there’s any information about Trump and the files and then gives a very decisive and conclusive answers about, “I know it’s definitely not a thousand. I know it’s definitely not 500. I know it’s definitely not 100.” And now you’ve narrowed it down so much that you must have a rough idea how many times it appears in there. And that’s the sort of trap Swalwell caught him in. He clearly has some knowledge on both of his answers to Swalwell that make it clear that he is familiar enough with these files to know that Trump is mentioned in them and likely knows at least roughly how many times he’s mentioned.
Hemmer: And there’s real righteous indignation there, too. It’s like as soon as Swalwell says a thousand, Patel is just like, No, just like the idea that it was a thousand is unfathomable, that it’s 500 is unfathomable, that it’s 100 is unfathomable, and then suddenly you’re in the realm of the fathomable. And that’s where his kind of both reflexive defense of Trump and his decisiveness with those earlier answers, just, doesn’t work as a convincing answer.
Hemmer: Well, the truth is that they’re not entirely overlooking it. This is a new schism in the MAGA movement and it has become one of those testing points for loyalty and fealty to Trump. So this is something that Charlie Kirk, before his death, had become very adamant that Trump had no relationship to Epstein. Patel and Bondi have been demonstrating their loyalty by providing cover for Trump. And there are other members and people in the MAGA world who are going along with this. But then there are other parts of MAGA who are furious that they’re not able to see the Epstein files because they really have believed for years that this is part of a global pedophile ring as you’ve mentioned that the elites across America have been involved in across the world have been involved in and they want answers. They’ve been promised answers and they’re not getting them. And so there is a division between like do you want the Epstein files or do you want to show your loyalty to Trump? And that’s where the dividing line is right now.
Hemmer: What I find so fascinating about it too, Greg, is that the problem for them is if you see, even what we’ve seen so far from the Epstein files, take the birthday book that was released over the past week or so, that has all of these letters and drawings from high profile people, including Donald Trump, including Bill Clinton, who are celebrating their ties to Epstein. And also in a way sort of winkingly acknowledging his connections to young women, his pedophilia, and they don’t seem to care about it. And so here is a case where you actually do have elites who are seeing themselves as above the law, who see themselves in this rarefied world where it doesn’t matter if they hang out with pedophiles because they’re special. And that should be reinforcing of MAGA politics, but the problem is they turn Donald Trump into the avatar of their movement and he is implicated in the Epstein files. And there’s such a cognitive dissonance there that I think for many of them, they just can’t square it.
Hemmer: It’s an actual deep state coverup and it is an actual example of elite corruption. Like this is the kind of thing that populist movements arise in response to. And if MAGA is a genuine populist movement, then it should be leading the way on this.
Jared Moskowitz (voiceover): The president has, you’ve seen the picture of the woman’s body with the writing and the president’s signature. The president says that’s not his. President says it’s not his. The Republican colleagues say it’s not his. The administration say it’s not his. Will you be opening up an investigation into the Epstein estate for putting out a fake document with the president’s signature linking him to the world’s largest pedophile ring? Will you be opening that investigation into that?
Jared Moskowitz (voiceover): They literally put out a fake document according to the president with a fake signature. It’s a forgery of the President of the United States signature. That’s the basis.
Jared Moskowitz (voiceover): OK. I look forward to that investigation.
Hemmer: It’s it’s fascinating because Patel commits himself to this investigation, which he is clearly not going to undertake. It’s like that hot dog meme. Like, who did this? When you’re the one who obviously is responsible for it. This is this is a pledge that he is making in the moment to try to get himself out of a no-win situation for him. Like he can’t honestly answer the question. He’s under oath and doesn’t want to be prosecuted later for perjury. So he makes this pledge. A, I don’t think that there’s going to be any meaningful investigation into the reality of Donald Trump’s signatures. I think they know it’s real. But also who knows that if Patel is going to be in that position long enough to even launch an investigation.
Hemmer: Right. And it creates a context for follow-up questions from members of Congress and from journalists, right? If listeners haven’t seen this clip yet either, there was real back and forth about, you’re the head of the FBI. If the Epstein estate has all of these other files and the DOJ and FBI have all of these files, why don’t you just release them or why don’t you subpoena them and get them from the estate? And in both instances, Patel acted like he had no power at all. He in fact said that the DOJ couldn’t release its files because they were prevented to by a court order. But in fact, that’s a misleading answer. They certainly could release more of the files if they wanted to.
Hemmer: Conspiracy theories have certainly had a long history on the right. They’re pretty popular in American politics more generally, but they have been a key part of the rights’ ideology over the past hundred years or so. And this is things like the John Birch Society and conspiracy theories about fluoride in the water, which are coming home to roost these days as states begin to take fluoride out of the water. So they can be long living like that.
I think what’s different about this one is this has been a pretty extensive deep conspiracy theory on the right. Not that Epstein was a pedophile. Epstein was a pedophile and running a pedophile ring from everything that we know. But this idea that the Democratic Party is run by pedophiles and that QAnon is based on these pedophile conspiracies. There are these conspiracies that have been really enervating the right in really important ways. And now the problem is their main champion is caught up in the conspiracy theory. And so you either have to create a very ornate extra conspiracy to explain why that is. And QAnon is one of those that helps. Or you have to accept that he is one of the evil people who you are fighting against. And again, that’s difficult for the right to do.
Hemmer: Yes, it’s one of those Frankenstein monsters stories, right? You create the monster and then you can’t control it after. And that’s certainly what the right is experiencing in this case. And what’s going to be fascinating to see is not only how they navigate this for the rest of the Trump administration. And I actually do think that right wing noise machine that is responsible for creating that miasma is going to try to kick up enough dust to protect Trump throughout his presidency. But in some future, when Trump is no longer president, there’s every chance that he then gets consumed by that miasma and they say, see, we really can’t trust anyone. And it feeds into that broader project of nihilism and that broader project of you can’t trust anyone. You can’t trust any institution. You can only trust us, the right wing that’s talking to you.
Hemmer: They’re proving very ineffective at keeping a lid on it. I was really struck by this over the past week or so, because when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, suddenly the Epstein story was no longer on the front page and it seemed unlikely to be reappearing anytime soon. And yet, you have these hearings in the House that suddenly bring it back into the news. You just had the UK ambassador to the US forced to resign because his deep connections with Epstein have just been revealed in a series of emails. And so Donald Trump heading over to the UK for the state visit this week is facing an environment in which a picture of Trump and Epstein is being projected onto Windsor Castle. Like, he can’t escape Epstein, because so many people want to understand this story and want to understand his role in it. And it has become one of those stories that—as much as the Trump noise machine, the Trump ability to throw so much out there so you can’t focus on any one thing—they’ve tried that with the Epstein story, and it just doesn’t seem to work. It’s a story that keeps coming up and, even though they try to whack-a-mole back down, they’re just not successful in getting people’s attention off of the story.
Hemmer: Thanks for having me back. Good to speak to you, Greg.
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