00:02So, on Friday, the Department of Justice released a new set of emails, which, while the exact
00:09names and email addresses were redacted, implicate that Melania and Jillian Maxwell had had some
00:15correspondence in 2002.
00:18So, I think that this is Melania Trump trying to get ahead of what she thinks is going to
00:24be a news cycle, and everything in her speech seems preemptory.
00:30Now, some of this is because she's trying to get ahead of this in the moment, but I think
00:36the broader political mood is that if Democrats retake Congress in November, as seems fairly
00:41likely, she wants to at least have some deniability or some way to position herself if and when
00:49Democrats take control of these committees that are investigating these Epstein files
00:53and would do so in a much more fulsome way than Republicans are doing right now.
00:57I mean, this is the most we've heard from Melania Trump since she wore that trench coat
01:03that says, I don't really care, do you?
01:06She's not a very public first lady.
01:08When I worked for First Lady Biden, we were on the road 24-7 giving speeches and engaging
01:13around the world.
01:14Melania Trump is not that first lady.
01:16She is consistently pretty quiet, and so this is, I think, a play for her to try to get ahead
01:27of this story.
01:29I think we always have, we want to assume that she's not a part of the worst excesses of this
01:37administration, but she was the person that convinced Donald Trump to run in 2016.
01:41She's been there in lockstep for every part of the administration's worst excesses.
01:46So we have to at least understand that she's somewhat in that inner circle, but traditionally
01:52the First Lady's office sits in the East Wing.
01:55We call it the East Wing.
01:56The East Wing physically no longer exists.
01:59Many of the people who staff the First Lady now sit alongside the President's staff.
02:06So we have to imagine that Donald Trump was at least aware that she was going to give a
02:11talk from the same room where Donald Trump announced the war on Iran just a few weeks ago.
02:17The Republicans now face a really tricky political question of, do they present themselves as trying
02:24to find accountability for the folks implicated in these files, or do they risk reminding the
02:31American public of their party's involvement?
02:34You saw the Republicans just a few weeks ago try to drag the Clintons, former President Bill
02:40Clinton and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, into this scandal through one of these hearings
02:46that had no real domestic effect.
02:48So I think what the Republicans are trying to do right now is balance that as they head into this
02:54midterm cycle where voters are starting to pay attention and very much could, and the Republicans
03:00very much could risk simply reminding voters of how closely implicated the Trumps are in any of this
03:08as Donald Trump positions this midterm election to be a referendum on his leadership.
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