00:00were sort of allegations that you could have and long-running allegations that obviously
00:05would turn the attention back to the president. What is the reaction inside of the White House?
00:12What are you picking up? I mean, there's been frustration all along with how this has been
00:18handled. And that's sort of counterintuitive because so much of what DOJ is doing is at the
00:23direction, at least the unspoken direction, perhaps, of the White House. But the president
00:27has said to people close to him in the last few months that he's been soured on how Attorney
00:33General Bondi has handled this. And then we see Bondi try to do a course correction to protect him.
00:37And that only seems to make it worse. But there's no doubt that they were upset with the timing of
00:42these revelations. It drowned out a State of the Union, which we talked about yesterday, probably
00:45wasn't going to move the needle much anyway. And as an aside, when was the last time a president
00:50delivered a State of the Union and then didn't go toward the country or to support those ideas or
00:55even appear in public? We never saw President Trump at all yesterday. Truly strange on the
01:00heels of a speech like that meant to reignite some momentum for his presidency. But they understand.
01:06They understand that this Epstein matter is much the president's frustration. He, since last summer,
01:12has urged it to go away. Remember when at first it was percolating on the right, Willie, with the
01:17podcasts and stuff? And he's like, no, stop talking about it. Stop talking about it. A few did.
01:20Most didn't. And the story just simply won't get to his great frustration. He can't shake this. And I
01:26don't I haven't picked up any sense that there's like a legal concern here from the White House,
01:30but they know it's bad political. And we've been asking for many months why he's so desperate for
01:35this to go away, why he's so desperate to turn the page. It's not going to be turned because of
01:39stories like the one that came out yesterday. We'll have much more on this coming up later in the
01:43show. Also ahead, we'll talk with David Ignatius about what to expect from the high stakes meeting
01:48between U.S. and Iran.
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