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00:00Epstein. The cover-up continues as Trump's DOJ releases some of the Epstein
00:07files and blacks out the rest. Some of the documents I've just been scanning
00:11them have very heavy redactions. The law is very clear that any redaction has to
00:17be justified in writing. We'll tell you what we know and what we don't as the
00:21administration drags its feet on full disclosure. It's clear the Justice
00:27Department is just doing this at its own pace regardless of what the law says.
00:31They're just expecting that look you know this is a huge undertaking you're just
00:36gonna have to take what we give you and then we'll give you some more later.
00:38Tonight former Attorney General Eric Holder will be here on Trump DOJ's
00:43blatant flouting of the law plus the political fallout for an already
00:48flailing White House. I think we ought to bring Pam Bondi before the Senate
00:54Judiciary Committee demand answers as to why the department has violated the law.
01:00And Epstein survivor Jess Michaels on her reaction to today's news.
01:04But all in starts right now.
01:11Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. Well today was the day as you may know
01:14December 19th that of course the deadline mandated by law for Donald Trump's
01:19Department of Justice to release the Epstein files. All of them. Basically
01:24unredacted. And we got a release with an enormous asterisk which is that they are
01:29very clearly violating that law. Which is not surprising. It is a law that they
01:33fought at every single opportunity. From shutting the entire House of
01:37Representatives down for months to not swearing in a duly elected member so she
01:41couldn't sign the discharge petition. To at the last minute browbeating their own
01:45allies like Congresswoman Lauren Boebert who was brought into the situation room.
01:50And ultimately none of that worked. The law passed both houses. Donald Trump was
01:54forced into signing it clearly against his will. And so today on the day of the
01:58deadline they have released some and only some of the documents that they were
02:03required by that law to release. Thousands of documents including scores of
02:08photographs of Epstein's properties including massage rooms along with photos of
02:12young women and vacation locales. And notably former President Bill Clinton. Now
02:17we should note here these are all just photos. We don't know the context in which
02:21any of them are taken. But President Clinton appears in several photos alongside
02:26Epstein, Glenn Maxwell and redacted persons. In one image Clinton appears with a
02:31redacted woman sitting on his lap. You just saw that. In another he is with a
02:35redacted person in a jacuzzi. In response President Clinton's spokesperson
02:39released a statement reading in part, quote, the White House hasn't been hiding
02:42these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill
02:46Clinton. This is about shielding themselves from what comes next or from what
02:50they'll try and hide forever. Certainly does appear that photos of many other men
02:55have been blacked out. There are a ton of redactions, entire documents like the one
02:59you see here, completely blacked out. And not just documents. Faces are blacked out but
03:05not always consistently. DOJ said they blacked out the faces of victims and
03:10minors, which I think everyone agrees and the law requires them to do. They
03:14also appear to be some grown men whose identities are obscured. And get this.
03:18Sources tell Fox News that more than a dozen politically exposed people and
03:22government officials' names appear in the hundreds of thousands of pages of
03:25Jeffrey Epstein files made public Friday. And in addition to protecting the
03:29victims' identities, Fox reported that the same redaction standards were applied to
03:33politically exposed individuals and government officials. If that is true, it
03:38is illegal, flatly. The federal law at issue, the one that has brought us to this
03:43point, is clear. The Department of Justice cannot redact information solely
03:49because its release might harm an individual's reputation. And if they did
03:54redact politically exposed individuals, why did they release more than a dozen
03:58photos and documents relating to Bill Clinton? I think we know, right? We're not
04:03idiots. In fact, he seems to appear more than any other public figure, including
04:08in this social media post by a White House spokeswoman suggesting the media
04:11investigate Clinton's well-documented encounters with Epstein. Now, Donald Trump's
04:15relationship with Epstein is well-documented. We have all seen the pictures of the
04:19two men together. We all remember the quote that he gave the reporter who wrote a
04:23profile Epstein about how much he loves women and how they're on the younger
04:27side. And we all know about the birthday card. Donald Trump denies writing it and sued
04:32about it, but the one where he talks about them having secrets and age being nothing but
04:38a number. Why does Donald Trump hardly appear in this trove of documents except in one photo
04:43we've all seen in a desk of Epstein's? Do you think that's an accident when it was his
04:47Justice Department who was going through them? I mean, we don't know. We do know this isn't
04:53all the Epstein files. In fact, today the DOJ admitted that they are, again, flatly violating
04:58the law, violating tonight's deadline, releasing files willy-nilly in the coming weeks. But is it
05:03willy-nilly? How did they select these files for today's release? Remember, earlier this year,
05:08the DOJ ordered an internal review that had FBI workers working around the clock, flagging Donald
05:14Trump's name, telling Donald Trump he's in the files, according to the Wall Street Journal,
05:18and then deciding back in July, after they had worked around the clock, after they had flagged
05:23Donald Trump in the files, after they had told Donald Trump he's in the files, issuing a memo
05:27saying, we're not going to release any of them, case closed. That's the same DOJ and those same
05:33very people who have now selectively dribbled out redacted files in what appears to be an obvious
05:41attempt to protect Donald Trump and cast aspersions on his political enemies. Harry Lipman served as
05:46Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Department of Justice. Lisa Rubin is MSNOW's senior legal
05:50reporter, and they joined me now. One thing I want to say here is the law also requires
05:55the files to be searchable. That's in the law, obvious, for obvious reasons. So we should just
06:02start by saying, for much of today, the search function has either been entirely not functional
06:07or barely functional. I think that's a good way of putting it. I will also say, in fairness,
06:11that there is a big caveat, almost in bold letters, on the Department of Justice's website,
06:17saying that there may be technical problems with the searchability function.
06:20Nonetheless, you're absolutely right that the plain text of the Epstein Files Transparency Act
06:24says the files have to be publicly accessible and searchable for the same reasons that we're all
06:30discussing, because there are certain things that people want to know, right? And you want to be
06:34able to know them without looking through each and every image. That's also probably for the protection
06:39of the survivors themselves, who shouldn't have to look through each and every image or document in
06:45order to see the things they're looking for, including notes of interviews, for example,
06:49people that they may have given to the FBI or the Department of Justice.
06:52So on the redactions, I mean, the law is very clear about this reputational harm. I think it's
06:59very clear that you don't want the names of victims in there and their faces, obviously. And certainly,
07:04you don't want anything like images of them in compromised positions, right?
07:08Right. But what are the other legal grounds that one would redact here, Harry?
07:14Well, first, the law is the law. It's not a grand jury anymore.
07:19Right. It's the law. It's not a recommendation.
07:21It's the Epstein Transparency Act. So the victims' names, confidentiality, not, not, not reputational
07:28harm. And I just want to go to your upfront point about this could not be willy-nilly. It must be a
07:35cover-up. Just my, you know, 12-year-old could do just the stats. You have one or two pictures or
07:43searches of Trump over 100 of Clinton. So it's, in theory, everything they say is to try to excuse
07:51the violation of law, no doubt about it. But it makes it seem like, oh, we did our best,
07:57et cetera. What they plainly did was try to control the narrative. I'm reminded a little
08:02bit of the Mueller report. They think the first, the fronting of stuff involving Clinton and other
08:08people may obscure the stuff about Trump. But it's very, very far from what they're required to do.
08:15And on the redactions in particular, Chris, you must explain why. And in writing, of course. Yeah.
08:21And in a typical court process, that really is telling. You go through it, a court will determine
08:26here, is there the wherewithal to actually push back? Probably not. So one really difficult thing
08:33to ascertain here is just like, what scope are we dealing with? Are we looking at, I saw Robert
08:37Garcia, of course, the House Oversight Committee saying his estimate was 10% of the files. I mean,
08:42I don't know what, it's very hard for us to get the denominator here, but what is your sense of
08:46what the scope of what we have compared to what there is? Or are there things you looked for that
08:51aren't there? I mean, there's tons of things that I look for that aren't there. So for example,
08:54I was looking for the FBI 302s, which as Harry knows well, are the memorialization of interviews
09:00with witnesses or people who may themselves have been participants in crimes, but nonetheless
09:05would be useful as cooperators to the Department of Justice. I saw very, very few of those things.
09:11I saw some handwritten notes of interviews with witnesses, but I didn't see any of those 302s.
09:17And in particular, I didn't see 302s where survivors would have mentioned other adults who may have
09:22been, may have understood that Jeffrey Epstein was trafficking or abusing them. That was something
09:29that Thomas Massey said that he fully expected to see. We don't see anything approximating that.
09:35And to Harry's point about sort of strategic redactions, there was one document that I looked
09:39at today, which is a message pad. And it shows that Sandy Berger, for example, who was Clinton's
09:44national security advisor, called for Epstein. Also shows the name of a man named John Brockman,
09:48who used to host these billionaire conferences at which Jeffrey Epstein attended dinners. That may have
09:52been the context, for example, in which he attended a dinner alongside David Brooks of the New York Times,
09:56who has since denied that he had any other contact with Epstein whatsoever. But in that
10:02same document, there is a redaction of another man's name. Why is it kosher for Sandy Berger's
10:09name to be out there and John Brockman's name to be out there? But what is clearly a man's name,
10:14because it refers to a him, you may call him back at X time, for example, but that person's name is
10:19redacted. Is that for national security reasons? Is that because there's an ongoing investigation that
10:24would be jeopardized? I don't know. And I won't speculate. But I would like to know the reason why
10:31it's OK to name some and not others. And similarly, with faces, there are some men whose faces we
10:36clearly see. They include Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger and Bill Clinton. And then there are other
10:40places where there are men we can't see and we know that they are men. Why? I also feel the need,
10:44just before I go back to you, Harry, with all of this, right, just to say, like, for instance,
10:47in the case of Bill Clinton, that he denies any wrongdoing. He also denies having known anything
10:52about Epstein. And also, when we're talking about these sort of time contexts, I do think it's
10:56important. You know, people that are meeting with every Epstein in 2011, 2012, 2013, at that point,
11:01he had already pleaded guilty to the crime he had. There had been stories about it. Maybe they knew
11:07and maybe they didn't, but it was entered into public evidence. You know, in 1995, 1997, it's just
11:13very unclear if anyone knows what's happening, right? So we should just put that forward just to,
11:18like, you end up in the situation where there's a certain guilt by association that's inevitable.
11:23Yes. But no one knows, like, time stamps or context or any of this.
11:27And to your point, like, that's why I think the emails with Larry Summers were as damaging to him
11:30as they were. Because well into 2019, they are having those conversations when everybody
11:36understands who Jeffrey Epstein was alleged to have been. So, Harry, the other, the, one of the big
11:41things that Julie Kay Brown has talked about, um, of course, one of the sort of the reporter who's
11:45broken a lot of this is there's still a ton of mystery around the original federal case,
11:49right? The kind of original sin of the Jeffrey Epstein story is that people came forward
11:54and he was kind of caught. And instead of being prosecuted and facing the kind of penalty one
12:02would think was commensurate with what he appears to have done, he got a sweetheart deal cut by the
12:08U.S. attorney in very highly unusual terms, right? It seems like we've got very little to nothing on
12:15that that should be in the Department of Justice's files. It was their case in this dump.
12:20So it's certainly true that 2006 was a total powderpuff deal, but there are many things that
12:25are buried here and that doesn't have anything to do with Trump. And we don't know, but I will
12:31speculate because you just do the numbers and the stats. We have really a small fraction of what
12:37they promised to deliver. No redactions explained at all. And it's just impossible statistically that
12:45we, that everything is winnowed out involving Trump. That's what everyone wanted to see. You're
12:49certainly right. The 2006 deal that actually cost, uh, the U S attorney there, his job way back when
12:56when he was in the Trump cabinet this first time around. Yeah. Is, uh, you know, there's more to,
13:00there's a lot to unearth here, but the initial thing to unearth is where was the president,
13:05uh, that the current president, and it has to be a cover up. If you just think of the numbers
13:12in, uh, that, that we do not have any information. You can't search it, et cetera.
13:18Can I say one thing about the president though? There are some documents here that are not
13:21particularly helpful for the president. And I want to point out one of them. One of them is a civil
13:25complaint in a case called Doe versus Indyke, where the Doe plaintiff there also was one of four
13:31victims who testified in Glenn Maxwell's criminal trial. And at that trial, she told a version of
13:36the story that Jeffrey Epstein brought her to a party at Mar-a-Lago when she was 14 years old to
13:40introduce her to Donald Trump in the civil complaint that her lawyers file. That story is
13:45told again. I'm just going to read from it during one of those encounters with Epstein. He took her
13:49to Mar-a-Lago where he introduced her to its owner, Donald J. Trump, introducing 14 year old
13:53Doe to Donald J. Trump. Epstein elbowed Trump playfully asking him referring to Doe. This is a good
13:58one, right? Trump smiled and nodded in agreement. They both chuckled and Doe felt uncomfortable,
14:03but at the time was too young to understand why. So it's not the case that every mention of Donald
14:09Trump here is innocuous. I don't think that that's particularly innocuous. It doesn't mean
14:12that Trump is a criminal. It doesn't mean that he even knew that Doe was 14 years old at the time,
14:17but certainly there's a suggestion that Donald Trump understood that Jeffrey Epstein was hanging
14:22out with girls who were too young to be his girlfriend and maybe didn't inquire as to why.
14:27And just very quickly, that kind of document, the 302s with victims and survivors actually
14:33coming to the FBI, we have precious few of them. And we know there are a lot of them because a lot
14:38of people did come forward. Harry Litman, Lisa Rubin, thank you both. Coming up, Eric Holder joins
14:42me to break down everything we know about these files in the DOJ. That's next.
14:48I think we ought to bring Pam Bondi before the Senate Judiciary Committee, demand answers as to why
14:56the department has violated the law. In their extensive redactions to portions of the Epstein
15:01files released today, which themselves are partial, and their choice of which material to release,
15:06the DOJ appears to be doing what it has been doing all year, protecting Donald Trump while going after
15:10his political enemies and also trampling the law. Eric Holder served as Attorney General of the United
15:15States under President Obama, and he joins me now. Mr. Holder, you had that position at the
15:22Department of Justice, of course, as Attorney General, and I never had a project quite like
15:25this, I would imagine, and granting that there are genuine difficult logistical issues with managing
15:32this number of files. Your reaction to what we've seen tonight in terms of whether it complies with
15:38the law and whether it's above board and can be trusted?
15:43Well, it clearly does not comply with the law. The law is very clear. The material that is in the
15:49possession of the United States Department of Justice, all of the material is supposed to be
15:53disclosed. And it's not as if they were starting from ground zero. There was a review of this material
16:00in the middle part of the year, so there was a familiarity with the materials. There are redactions
16:05that perhaps had to be made, as I understand it. We've seen wholesale redactions that are not
16:10necessarily consistent, again, with what the law said. There's a lack of investigative material,
16:16302s, investigation reports from the FBI. But I don't think we should be surprised by this.
16:23After all, this is a Justice Department and an administration that ignores the law, you know,
16:28when it wants to. Supposed to sell TikTok? Ignore that law. You're going to rename the Kennedy Center?
16:35Ignore that law. You know, the guy who used to be a leader at the Justice Department, now a judge
16:40told lawyers in the Justice Department, you might have to go into court, and if a judge orders you to do
16:45something, you just tell them, F you. So they're acting in a way that is consistent with the way
16:50in which they have conducted themselves throughout the course of this year. And they're violating
16:54a very clear law that the Congress passed.
16:57You know, it's also the case, and I'd love for you to shed a little light on this, because
17:01I don't want to overly romanticize the before times in the Department of Justice. But one thing I think
17:06it's quite clear, and across administrations, is there really was, post-Watergate, a kind of
17:11firewall. The Attorney General saw themselves as a somewhat independent figure, even true of Jeff
17:16Sessions under Donald Trump in the first Trump administration, and not just as the President's
17:21lawyer and not just, you know, calling up the boss, what do you want us to do here? And in those
17:26cases, it would also allow the President to talk about the Department of Justice arm's length and
17:30say, well, don't ask me about what they're doing and releasing or not releasing, and I had nothing to
17:34do with it. All of that's completely broken down here, right? I mean, as you think about how you would
17:40have handled this as Attorney General under President Obama and how it's being handled
17:44now, it's got to feel like a night and day, right?
17:49It's total night and day, but I don't think it's only the Obama administration. I have to think that
17:54other administrations led by Democratic or Republican attorneys general, Democratic or Republican
18:00presidents, would have handled this in a fundamentally different way post-Watergate. You know, if this
18:07material had been before me, it had been before the Justice Department, I would have been making the
18:11determinations. I would have made sure that we had adequate resources to look at these materials, to
18:17scour through these things, get us, get all the information out in the time that we were allowed,
18:21especially given the fact that I would have been familiar with this material from the middle part of the
18:27year. And if I did not have the capacity to turn over all of the material by this date,
18:33I would have gone back to Congress and said, you know, we're going to have to ask for some more
18:38time, send a letter, ask for some emergency legislation, indicate in some way, ask in a good
18:44faith way, indicate that we simply don't have the physical capacity to comply. That's not what's going
18:49on here. These folks are thumbing their nose at Congress.
18:53Do you, yeah, that's a really excellent point. I mean, there is, you mentioned that the president
18:58renaming the Kennedy Center today by fiat, essentially, they put the letters up, and it's
19:04a small example of their approach to law. Of course, the center has been named by statute.
19:10Is there a way of forcing compliance here as someone who knows the Department of Justice well,
19:14right? I mean, you know, what are you going to do to stop us is kind of their perspective. And as you
19:20see, they have now renamed the Donald J. Trump and the JFK Memorial Center, I believe, which is a
19:29mouthful. Are there ways to make them comply?
19:35Well, I mean, I think you have to be creative. Are there lawsuits that can be brought by Congress to
19:40try to enforce the statute? Contempt is certainly a possibility. And then, you know, I think Congress
19:47needs to, given the margins that we saw in the passage of this law, think about, do you want to
19:52start talking about impeachment? You know, the people who at the Justice Department are responsible for
19:57the dissemination of this information, not complying with a law, that's a basis for impeachment. And so,
20:04you know, the Deputy Attorney General, whoever else is involved in this, I don't know, the Attorney
20:08General, whoever is involved in this process, that's a nuclear option that Congress has. But given
20:16the overwhelming majorities that voted for this, given the overwhelming need for the dissemination
20:22of this material, the public interest in this, given the interests of the victims, I think
20:28considering nuclear options is totally appropriate. Yeah, of the 535 members of Congress, one voted
20:34against it, if I'm recalling that correctly. Final question on this is just, we talked about those
20:40302s. I mean, it does seem to me that there must be files in there that are both witness statements,
20:47also internal files about that Justice Department case, again, prior to the time that you were
20:51Attorney General in 2006, up to 2008, that really, like I said, is kind of the original sin, I think,
20:57of this story that we're not seeing. Do you feel that those are important to get in the public eyes,
21:02too? Absolutely. I mean, all of the story needs to be told. We need to understand what the
21:09considerations were that made that sweetheart deal that Epstein got. Why did that happen? What
21:14information did the Justice Department possess at that time? And then really kind of look through
21:19the history of this case as it existed within the Justice Department. Now, this story needs to be
21:25told from the beginning all the way up to the present, including what has the Justice Department
21:30done this year with regard to these materials? What kinds of communications has the Justice Department
21:36had with regard to the White House concerning what materials would be turned over? If, in fact,
21:43there is some kind of collusion between the White House and the Justice Department, that is something
21:47that needs to be surfaced as well. That's a great point. While I have you here, I do want to ask you,
21:53you have spent a lot of time and focus and energy on the attempts now blatant by the President to sort of
22:00get Republican-controlled state houses to gerrymander their maps to essentially artificially pad the margins
22:08of Republicans and essentially attempt to voter-proof the Republican majority so that the people drawing the
22:17maps and the lines get to decide who represents the country as opposed to the voters. Where do you think that
22:24effort stands, given what's happened, given that huge success in California, given noises happening in other
22:30states as well? Where do you see things standing right now? Well, I think the effort is not going as
22:36they expected. I think, first off, they thought the Democrats would simply kind of roll over, maybe
22:41write an op-ed, you know, appear on television and bemoan their fate. And Democrats got tough. And it started
22:48in California with, you know, with Prop 50, a robust response to what happened in Texas. But I also think
22:54we've seen Republicans who in the states were not really in the same place as Republicans in this
23:00White House are. They see that if they do these kinds of things, they run the risk of losing their
23:05own seats. And we saw what happened in Indiana, where much pressure was placed on Republican
23:11representatives there. And they courageously, given the fact that they were looking at physical threats,
23:17looking at political threats, decided that they were not going to do that, which the White House wanted
23:22them to do. And so I think it's not going nearly as well. And I think an important point here is that,
23:28you know, they look at those five seats they think they want to try to get in Texas. That's on the basis
23:33of the 24 presidential election. If you look at the 20 election, the 2022 election, that five seats
23:40probably converts to maybe two, possibly three seats. And so I think it's not going nearly as well
23:47as they expected. And they've raised the consciousness of the American people to this
23:52whole problem of gerrymandering. And everybody, everybody is against it.
23:58Eric Holder, former Attorney General and Director of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee,
24:02which spends a lot of time working on this. Thank you so much for coming on tonight. I really
24:05appreciate it.
24:06Thanks for having me.
24:09Coming up, Congressman Jim Hines joins me right here on a very, very busy news day. That's next.
24:13Don't go anywhere.
24:16As we continue to sift through pages and pages of the heavily redacted Epstein files,
24:20the Justice Department released today. Most Democrats on Capitol Hill tonight
24:23are saying the release is far from sufficient. Congressman Jim Hines is a Democrat of Connecticut.
24:28He's also the ranking member of the Intelligence Committee. He joins me now. It's good to have you here.
24:32Thanks for having me.
24:32Um, your colleagues, you were one of the, I guess, you know, all but one members of Congress to vote
24:37for this law. Um, it does seem a very clear law and it seems very clearly written to avoid mischief.
24:44And it sort of seems like the DOJ is doing exactly what the law was written to stop them from doing.
24:50It does. And, you know, to me, since I spend a lot of my time in the national security, uh, world,
24:55it, uh, feels a lot like the double tap video. Hegseth releases a video every single day when they blow up a
25:02boat. But, oh, this video we can't release because the classification, the same with the Epstein files,
25:07right? They've had a year to think about this. They've had months after which Donald Trump said,
25:12yeah, we should do this. You know, they knew this was coming, but all of a sudden it's an immense
25:16administrative burden to produce these things. So, you know, I mean, you said it earlier in the show,
25:21right? You know, when they feel it's not convenient to abide by the law on Twitter or on 15 other things,
25:26they don't abide by the law. And that's what they're doing right here.
25:28Um, you're, you're on the intelligence committee and you've been, uh, in the intelligence committee
25:32for a while. You know, there's been a lot of reporting about Epstein and his possible links
25:36to intelligence services, our intelligence services, foreign intelligence services.
25:40And in a lot of the emails, uh, that have surfaced, he's clearly like doing a lot of
25:45international deal-making, right? He's got some guy wants to sell someone on some peace plan.
25:50He's talking to the Russians. He's talking to Israelis. He's talking to a bunch of people.
25:53Do you know if he was involved as an intelligence asset?
25:57I don't think so. I don't think so. I mean, if you, if you sort of, if you're willing to go through
26:02the soul crushing erosion of actually understanding this guy, here's a guy who made a lot of money in
26:08ways I don't fully understand, but he made a ton of money. And now like so many people who make a
26:11ton of money, he's looking for legitimacy. So he devotes his life to, you know, approaching very
26:16famous people, many of whom are going to be embarrassed and already are embarrassed by the
26:20disclosures that have been made. And so, you know, the aura of international man, a mystery
26:24is a helpful thing for a guy who made a bunch of money and otherwise has no sort of particularly
26:29compelling, uh, characteristics. So no, I don't sitting where I do in the Congress, I don't have
26:33any reason to believe that he was in any way involved with us intelligence or quite frankly,
26:37any other sort of national security related stuff.
26:40You just mentioned that, uh, double tack video and, and, and the sort of selective transparency.
26:44You're one of the people that has seen, uh, the video of the shipwrecked individuals
26:49on the hull of a boat. Um, I've talked to some of your colleagues. I haven't gotten a chance to
26:53talk to you since you've seen it about what your determination is of what you saw and whether the
26:57public should see them. Yeah, yeah, no. And I mean, uh, I was a little shaken when I came out of the
27:01meeting in which I watched this thing. And I've over the years watched a lot of, uh, videos of lethal
27:07activities that we've taken against terrorists. This one was really hard. You know, most of the videos
27:12I get to see of our counter-terrorist activities, which, you know, happen in places like Yemen,
27:16et cetera. Um, you know, guys with AK-47s and grenades and bombs, and they're on their way to
27:21do something really horrible. And, you know, the, here you have, I mean, if I just can summarize
27:26this very quickly, you have two individuals who have just had a huge bomb go off above their heads.
27:32They're probably wounded in ways that, you know, aren't immediately visible. They have no radios.
27:36They have no guns. They're about to slip under the waves. And yet the administration would have
27:40you believe that they are maybe in a position to continue hostilities. These guys are 30 minutes
27:46from death. And what we did was we just accelerated that death by 30 minutes through a, you know,
27:51a summary execution. And that is really, if you believe in the ideas and values of the United
27:55States, and even if you stipulate that these are bad guys, cause they're running cocaine,
27:58that is a very, very hard video to watch. And the administration is not releasing it because
28:04they know that when the American people see that video, 10, 15% of Americans are going to say,
28:08this is not my country.
28:11We have seen an expansion of these operations. I think there's, there were, there's two boat
28:18strikes yesterday that killed five people. The death toll is now up to a hundred. This doesn't
28:24seem to me to be going in the right direction. It seems like it's growing. Is that a fair assessment?
28:30It's absolutely growing. And I mean, one question that those of us who do oversight need to think
28:36about is not only is it growing in its intensity, number of strikes a day, but what happens when
28:42they decide to do something on land? You know, by the way, and this is one of the critical issues.
28:47What, if we're going to sort of execute criminals, cause these guys are criminals without a trial,
28:54without an arrest, without alleged criminals. That's right. That's exactly right. You know,
29:00where does that stop? You know, are we a year away from endowing the federal police forces to
29:06simply walk up to drug dealers on the 42nd and Broadway and shoot them in the head? I mean,
29:10this is one of the many questions that Congress should be considering, right? The constitution
29:14says, you know, any war, any hostilities, we get to debate the many, many issues associated with this,
29:22including the ones you've raised, which is how big does this get? What's the probability of a mistake?
29:25The Venezuelan Navy is apparently now escorting these tankers out of Venezuela.
29:31Venezuela. When a Venezuelan naval ship is, you know, 200 meters from a U.S. Navy frigate and,
29:38you know, things, munitions start getting exchanged, we're in a hot war without a peep from
29:44the people's representatives in the United States Congress. I mean, it seems very clear if you
29:47listen to what Susie Wiles said in that Vanity Fair interview, where she said, this is a,
29:51we're trying to squeeze Maduro until he cries out, essentially. And if you listen to the new,
29:56you know, the new rationale, first it was fentanyl, and then everyone pointed out,
29:58these aren't fentanyl routes, it's not fentanyl, there's no fentanyl. Which is twice the lethality
30:02of cocaine, right? Two times or more, a number of Americans die from fentanyl than from cocaine.
30:07So it was first it was fentanyl, and then it was cocaine, and then there's your narco-terrorists,
30:10and now it's, they kicked American oil companies out of the country in 2006, 2007, and we want it
30:16back, which I guess points for honesty about what we're up to. But it also seems that the rationale
30:21here is clearly, essentially a regime change war for oil. Now it seems, and I'm not, that's not my,
30:28like, I'm not sloganeering here. That seems to be the stated rationale of the government.
30:32Yeah, yeah. Look, I think these boat strikes are two things. Number one, they are a Hollywood-esque
30:36reality show, performative demonstration of President Trump's determination to stop drug
30:43flows. Now, you and I both know, in fact, anybody who thinks about it knows that if wild success on
30:48these boats simply means that they're going to start putting cocaine on airplanes. They're going
30:51to start putting cocaine on the back of donkeys and crossing Panama. So that's wild success. So
30:55it's performative. And then, number two, yes, they believe, I think this is a little crazy,
31:01but they believe that this is somehow pressure on Maduro. Because, look, I think our Secretary
31:05of State, Marco Rubio, you know, Latino heritage, you know, Cuban-American, Miami, he knows Latin
31:12America. So he thinks two things. Number one, he would love to see this regime go down. And look,
31:17this is a bad regime. This is a very, very bad, illegitimate regime. He would love to see that
31:21regime go down. And this is sort of my unpopular opinion. But I think he's too smart to just say
31:26what we ought to do is land the Marines on the shores of Madokaibo, because he knows the history
31:31of Marines climbing Latin American beaches.
31:34Congressman Jim Hines, always good to have you here.
31:36Thanks. Still to come, Epstein survivor Jess Michaels joins me on her reaction to
31:41today's developments. That's next.
31:47One of the reasons the Epstein files are finally being released is thanks to the tireless work
31:51from the survivors of the disgraced late sex trafficker, the people who came forward to
31:55demand justice for what was done to them. In a letter to Congress explaining the document
32:00review process, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche says they found 1,200 names of individuals
32:05who are identified as either victims or their relatives. Blanche says those names have been
32:09redacted. Jess Michaels is an Epstein survivor, and she joins me now. Jess, we had you into the
32:15program a few weeks ago talking about your efforts to get to this point and your anticipation.
32:21What is your reaction to what we have seen so far?
32:26It's clearly a Justice Department that doesn't follow through with justice. So it's very disappointing.
32:34It's frustrating. And at the same time, it's also really validating that this is exactly why we
32:41needed to advocate for an actual act of Congress to try to get any transparency or accountability.
32:49You know, one of the one of the documents we do have is the first ever law enforcement complaint,
32:56as far as we know, about Jeffrey Epstein from a woman named Maria Farmer.
33:00And she was talking about Epstein. And it's categorized as child pornography is the complaint.
33:08She basically saying that I think I think she's basically saying I don't have actually that
33:12document in front of me and I can't read it off the screen there, but essentially says
33:15that Epstein and that Maxwell had stolen pictures of her younger sister in bathing suits and had asked to
33:25take more pictures. And she had been really creeped out and upset by this and said she was going to go
33:31to the authorities and he threatened to burn her house down. This is in 1996. Nothing would happen
33:36again for another 10 years. And I just your reaction to seeing that there in black and white. We now have
33:42a documented record of the first time someone said someone needs to take a look at this guy.
33:47Yes. Maria is the original whistleblower on Jeffrey Epstein, putting Jeffrey Epstein on the FBI's radar and
33:59they did nothing. And that went on for now. Now we're going on almost 30 years.
34:07Maria Farmer actually said this. She said, I waited 30 years. I can't believe it. They can't call me a liar
34:13anymore because some people said, well, she, she said that she went to the FBI and people said she
34:17didn't. She said she was grateful to be vindicated or heartbroken. The FBI did not take steps to stop
34:22Mr. Epstein until years after her report. Are there aspects of this you particularly want to see? I was
34:27talking earlier about for myself, I'm really interested in understanding what happened with
34:31that sweetheart deal with Alex Acosta and the U S attorney's office or the things that you're looking for
34:35here. Yes, the, exactly. The sweetheart deal, the financial records, I think are going to be the
34:43most telling of the crimes that were committed, but there are very specific things that as a survivor
34:47I'm looking for, you know, we we've discussed it together. You know, we're, we want to hear, uh,
34:53the tip line, how many survivors actually came forward when that 2019 tip line went public and stayed
35:00public for many months. So they were, they were collecting names and stories for a very long time.
35:04I want to see my own victim statements that I made, uh, that was supposed to be used in
35:10Ghislaine Maxwell's prosecution. And it never was. I was never entered into the victim notification
35:16system and I never heard anything ever again. That's interesting. So your, yes, your own statement
35:24you would like to see. What is your message to the justice department or to the administration
35:31if they think they could kind of do this today and melt into the holiday week and everyone's going
35:40to forget about it? This was the deadline. There was not, uh, an extension of that deadline. There was
35:50no communication from the DOJ what this day was even going to look like for survivors. They never
35:56reached out to our attorneys. There was no public statement made by the department of justice to say,
36:02this is what, how it's going to roll out, uh, on that day. And so I think actions speak louder than
36:08words and they have disobeyed the law, the law that was signed by the president. And I don't think
36:18there's any more, there's no more leeway. This was it. This was your chance and you failed.
36:26Have you been in contact with other survivors? I know a lot of you have become quite close,
36:30uh, through this process, um, and have been organizing in a, in a really remarkable, uh,
36:34way. Have you been in contact with any of them today?
36:37Yeah. Yes. Yeah. It's been a, it's been a rough day, Chris. I got to tell you, we're exhausted.
36:47We're frustrated and we're also really supporting each other to keep going. And, um, I'm very inspired
36:56by all of these women and, uh, stand with Maria Farmer as that very first whistleblower who, who
37:03started this so long ago, who actually has a case right now against the government for negligence.
37:10Uh, so we're, it's a rough day. It's, it's, it's a rough day and we're still standing.
37:19Yeah. My next question was, can you foresee, I mean, your advocacy, you and, and, and so many
37:25survivors advocacy has been the reason that we have arrived at this point, um, against the will of
37:32this administration, which clearly did not want to get here. Um, can you foresee a situation in which
37:38you're back on Capitol Hill or you're back in Washington, you know, in a few weeks, in the next
37:42year to, to, to, to make them comply with this law that you so successfully advocated for?
37:50Definitely because it's not just about us anymore. This is about the American people who
37:56showed up in unprecedented amount of support to get Congress to vote for this, this bill to become a
38:05law. And no, we are, we are nowhere near done. This is just the beginning. We, we know we're just at
38:11the bottom of the next mountain. Uh, my expectations were really low for today anyway. So they were,
38:20my expectations were clearly met. Uh, and we definitely expect that this was not going to
38:28end today. Um, Jess Michaels, your own victim statement, that's such a, uh, that's going to
38:34stick with me. And I'm, I'm going to, we're going to look for that, um, in these disclosures. I think
38:38it's fair that you want to see that out in the public and you have the most right of anyone to
38:44want to see it, uh, outside in the public. Jess Michaels, thank you so much for your, for your time
38:48and I really, really appreciate it. We'll be right back last night. Authorities found the
38:56suspect in the Brown university shooting dead in a new Hampshire storage facility with what
39:02officials described as a self inflicted gunshot wound. It appears he had been dead for two days
39:07when they found him authorities identified him as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 40 year old
39:12former graduate student at Brown who studied physics for about a year and a half. And then in
39:18the midst of this resolution, which is a huge sigh of relief for so many people around my alma mater
39:22who had been freaked out, uh, understandably after a five day manhunt, I don't want to lose sight of
39:29something else that happened, which is this very strange and incredibly upsetting. And in fact,
39:33enraging story about how opportunists on the internet from the right tried to sow rumors and
39:40innuendo that targeted a very real person who was victimized through no fall of their own.
39:45Earlier this week, a torrent of social media posts from far right accounts falsely claimed with zero
39:50actual evidence that the gunman was a Palestinian student at Brown university. And this was a vicious
39:55and baseless accusation born of ideological animus and bigotry. But it didn't just stop with like
40:02random online trolls. Trump's U S assistant attorney general, Harmeet Dillon elevated it. And that prompted
40:10the conspiracy mongers to accuse Brown of covering up when they had to pull down the pages connecting to
40:18the student to obviously protect that student. And then Congresswoman Elise Stefanik amplified the
40:24dangerous hysteria promising on social media to haul the president of Brown into Congress to testify under
40:31oath as if she was in on it somehow, all because what they were trying to do was protect a student who
40:37was being libeled. And then when they did that, even now authorities have identified the shooting
40:44suspect, Dylan and Stefanik have not deleted their posts. This is a student who did nothing wrong on
40:50a campus that is already in mourning today that wrongly accused student released this statement
40:56about the pain and nightmare. Those posts cause quote, the past few days have been an unimaginable nightmare.
41:03I woke up on Tuesday morning to unfounded vile Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian accusations
41:08being directed toward me online. Instead of grieving with my community in the aftermath of the horrible
41:13shooting, which of course led to students dead, I received nonstop death threats and hate speech.
41:19The student's lawyer added, quote, these baseless attacks not only smeared this student, they also
41:24likely distracted law enforcement from pursuing legitimate leads. Bad faith actors moved to pin the
41:29shooting on my client on the mere basis of his being Palestinian. These claims about my client
41:34are not just attacks on his character, but also attempts to vilify Arab and Muslim members of our
41:38communities and to bolster anti-Palestinian racism in this country. Today, Elise Stefanik announced that
41:44she is dropping out of her race to run for New York governor, and she's leaving Congress. And I have to say,
41:50someone who engaged in the kind of things she did in the wake of something this horrible doesn't really
41:54deserve to be in public life. That is all for this week. The briefing with Jen Psaki starts right now.
41:59Good evening, Jen.
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