Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
Speaker 1: where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
Speaker 1: today's best minds, and a California bill says ice agents
Speaker 1: can't wear masks in California. We have such a great
Speaker 1: show for you today. CNN's own David oxel Rod stops
Speaker 1: by two parts the Aftermath of political violence. Then we'll
Speaker 1: talk to The New York Times is David Enrich about
Speaker 1: his blockbuster reporting on JP Morgan Chase's ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
Speaker 1: But first the news, So.
Speaker 2: Molly, in the aftermath of the killing of Charlie Kirk,
Speaker 2: there has been lots of very very bad responses, particularly
Speaker 2: some on the writer are really trying to use this
Speaker 2: to throw i'd say, a gasoline truck on the flames
Speaker 2: that are being brewed.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so there have been a lot of people on
Speaker 1: the right saying things like this is war and that
Speaker 1: is terrible, not helpful, very destructive and also not relevant
Speaker 1: to the case. We don't know there's a suspect now,
Speaker 1: but we don't really know much because this is a
Speaker 1: developing story. But when they started saying these things this
Speaker 1: is war, they didn't have a suspect so they didn't
Speaker 1: have any sense of what the motivation for any of
Speaker 1: this was. And I think it's really important again we
Speaker 1: all know because of the Internet is so filled with information,
Speaker 1: much of which cannot be necessarily accounted or backed up
Speaker 1: or confirmed, that we all have to be really, really
Speaker 1: careful before we say things and before we make the
Speaker 1: leap between something like an allegation to a statement. And
Speaker 1: this guy who is now in custody is accused of
Speaker 1: being the murderer, but again, we still don't know really
Speaker 1: what his motivations were, and we had people on the
Speaker 1: right really pouring gasoline on that. What was actually, if
Speaker 1: we're going to say, shockingly good, was that there is
Speaker 1: a Republican called Tom Taylors who is conveniently not running
Speaker 1: for reelection and comes from a purple state. We've seen
Speaker 1: this kind of bravery from people like Jeff Flake, people
Speaker 1: from purple states who aren't running for reelection, but I'll
Speaker 1: take it where I can get it. Tom Taylors said
Speaker 1: he was disgusted by conservatives declaring war after Kirk was killed.
Speaker 1: That is the I think the appropriate way to feel,
Speaker 1: because it's highly inflammatory to declare war on anyone, especially
Speaker 1: a large percentage of the country for any reason, and
Speaker 1: especially when you don't know any of the facts of the.
Speaker 3: Case, especially when some of these people who are taking
Speaker 3: the opportunity to do this were literally tried to kick
Speaker 3: Charlie Kirk out of MAGA like days before this.
Speaker 1: And that is another part of those stories. We don't know.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of internal tension between Charlie Kirk
Speaker 1: and a part of MEGA called the groy We don't
Speaker 1: know really what happened, but we certainly know one thing,
Speaker 1: which is the man in custody is not trans and
Speaker 1: he is not LGBTQ. So I think that we know
Speaker 1: for sure, and I think that is really important since
Speaker 1: there were early reports that the bullet casing had pro
Speaker 1: trans writing on it, which in fact was just normal
Speaker 1: bullet marking. So great job team, Great great job team.
Speaker 1: Wall Street Journal known for very good reporting, so that
Speaker 1: was not great. But the suspected shooter not trans, not LGBTQ, Somalia.
Speaker 3: You and I we like good news in this section,
Speaker 3: but it's not always easy for me to find it
Speaker 3: when I'm working on this. I know we try, though,
Speaker 3: But I think what's really interesting is a lot of
Speaker 3: people are saying that Chicago's pushback against Trump is why
Speaker 3: he hasn't really invaded yet. What we saw yesterday was
Speaker 3: kind of silly with RFK and Pam Bondi going in
Speaker 3: and just invading a vape shop.
Speaker 1: Oh, I didn't see that. Wait, Jesse, I miss this news.
Speaker 1: Tell me what happened, because this this is the good
Speaker 1: news I'm looking for.
Speaker 3: Can we play a clip, Well, there's not really a clip,
Speaker 3: but let me set a seed for you. There's illegal vapes.
Speaker 3: They got Amali America. It's saved.
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you something, and you're I don't
Speaker 1: think you're going to be happy here. This is like
Speaker 1: you and I are going to fight now because I'm
Speaker 1: more baby brained than you are. Vaping is bad.
Speaker 4: Oh, I hate vaping, and we have.
Speaker 1: A lot of illegal vape shops and like closing down
Speaker 1: vape shops. If RFK Junior would just do that, then Dianu,
Speaker 1: I would not be so upset.
Speaker 3: If I never smell a bubblegum flavored smoke again for
Speaker 3: the rest of my life, I will be much much,
Speaker 3: much happier.
Speaker 1: I've never smelled bubble gum flavored a babe.
Speaker 3: Anyway, go on I think one of the things that
Speaker 3: this shows though, is that pushing back against Trump makes
Speaker 3: them chicken out.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Taco baby, be tako. Yeah, this is really important
Speaker 1: if you push back against Trump, and I mean push
Speaker 1: back in the way like Pritzker did, which was he said,
Speaker 1: this is illegal, we have lawyers, we will fight this
Speaker 1: in the courts, we will not participate in this, we
Speaker 1: will not allow this, we will not roll over. Then
Speaker 1: that works, And I think these people who made deals
Speaker 1: with Trump, these lawyers, these universities, you have no one
Speaker 1: to protect you now because you are in the extra
Speaker 1: legal right. You have no one who can say there's
Speaker 1: no law that can protect you because you are making
Speaker 1: these kind of deals that aren't technically legal. Whereas if
Speaker 1: you are smart and you act in a smart way
Speaker 1: and you push back in a legal way, you can win.
Speaker 1: They will back down. And that should be the lesson here.
Speaker 3: And also credit where it's due. Brandon Johnson is showing
Speaker 3: the way that mayors can react to Trump too, unlike
Speaker 3: our mayor Eric Adams.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would like to take a minute to say
Speaker 1: that having a captured mayor who is basically serving at
Speaker 1: the behest of Donald Trump not great, bad, said, I
Speaker 1: think you have to give it to Pritzker here too,
Speaker 1: because Pritzker created the infrastructure for Brandon Johnson. I wonder
Speaker 1: if our governor again, it's not on her yet, but
Speaker 1: she could definitely take a lot of sort of this
Speaker 1: is how we need our governors to behave.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but Trump is sitting in the National Guard to
Speaker 3: a city which is Memphis, and he says it's over
Speaker 3: the crime rate.
Speaker 1: I want to also talk about this piece about how
Speaker 1: National guardsmen find being dispatched to do things that are
Speaker 1: not their jobs, and how these National guardsmen are like
Speaker 1: actually pretty traumatized by policing civilians because that was never
Speaker 1: their job, or picking up trash, crushing it, candy crushing it.
Speaker 1: That this crew they're not having fun, but more importantly,
Speaker 1: they're like being actually traumatized. A lot of these people
Speaker 1: are young guys. They signed up to, you know, save
Speaker 1: drowning people in a flood or protect their country. They
Speaker 1: did not sign up for the kind of deeply political
Speaker 1: assignment they're being put on. And so there was a
Speaker 1: reporting about this. There was a sort of they talked
Speaker 1: to a lot of these National guardsmen. They compile the
Speaker 1: report the National Guard and then they accidentally sent it
Speaker 1: to a bunch of different journalists because this is the
Speaker 1: well oiled government that we live in. But it did
Speaker 1: show just the trauma that these guardsmen are having from
Speaker 1: just being put in a political situation. Really good example
Speaker 1: of how these sort of second order effects of trump Ism,
Speaker 1: where Trump thinks he's doing one thing, but he's actually
Speaker 1: traumatizing a whole other group of people that he has
Speaker 1: no intention of traumatizing. And I think it's worth thinking
Speaker 1: whenever you're reading these stories about Trump, is we're thinking
Speaker 1: about the second order of facts one hundred percent.
Speaker 3: Speaking of second order effects, one of the things that
Speaker 3: chaos is not good for is the economy.
Speaker 4: Trump's ice just wrecked a whole bunch of.
Speaker 3: Our relations with South Korea after this high end a
Speaker 3: plant incident, and South Area has paused work on at
Speaker 3: least twenty two different projects.
Speaker 1: Yeah, by the way, as a country, that's just sort
Speaker 1: of waddling into stagflation, which is this thing. If you
Speaker 1: listen to this podcast, you know all about stagflation because
Speaker 1: I have very specific nightmares. But stagflation is an economy
Speaker 1: and recession that is plagued by inflation. And I think
Speaker 1: that once the FED cuts interest rates, we're going to
Speaker 1: start to see that because, as we all know, cutting
Speaker 1: interest rates will mean that it will be inflationary. Dollars
Speaker 1: will not be that it will not be worth as
Speaker 1: much as they were before, and we're going to have
Speaker 1: some big problems. But what we really need is a country.
Speaker 1: Is the money from South Korea, because South Korea there
Speaker 1: is a really good economy, and they were building lots
Speaker 1: of stuff in our country in order to increase manufacturing.
Speaker 1: And those South Koreans who were arrested and sent home
Speaker 1: but first kept on a jet for hours and hours,
Speaker 1: those guys were actually building a huge, multi billion dollar
Speaker 1: factory in Georgia that was touted by Brian Kemp. And
Speaker 1: now they've gone home and they're taking all their money
Speaker 1: with them. Talk about a second order effect. David Axelrod
Speaker 1: is the chief political analyst for CNN and the author
Speaker 1: of Believer, My Forty Years in Politics. Welcome David Axelrod
Speaker 1: to FAT Politics.
Speaker 4: Thanks.
Speaker 1: I wonder if we could start by talking about Spencer
Speaker 1: Cox's really I thought excellent Sea. So they caught the Charlie.
Speaker 5: The suspect aspect.
Speaker 1: Yes, they've arrested suspect and Governor Cox, the governor of Utah,
Speaker 1: was making a speech.
Speaker 5: Governor Cox, after delivering all the details of the arrest
Speaker 5: about this young man who was arrested, gave just an
Speaker 5: incredibly heartfelt, passionate hobbily at about what this moment in
Speaker 5: history is. He said, I thought, very movingly that he
Speaker 5: had prayed that this wasn't going to be a Utah
Speaker 5: and who was involved in this, maybe because he didn't
Speaker 5: think of Utah as a place where people acted in
Speaker 5: anger like that, but it turned out it was. But
Speaker 5: he was, you know, his plea basically was to the
Speaker 5: better angels of our nature and to recognize that we
Speaker 5: are doomed if we are trapped in an ever increasing
Speaker 5: spiral of hate and division and violence. It was so
Speaker 5: important that he said it because there were people, you know,
Speaker 5: there were voices out there, Steve Bannon and others who
Speaker 5: were saying, this is war, Alex Jones, the inference being
Speaker 5: go pick up your guns and now we don't need
Speaker 5: that on the left or the right right. So that
Speaker 5: was why that was so important.
Speaker 1: And I thought what was really also important about this
Speaker 1: was that he talked about the nineteen sixties, which are
Speaker 1: you know, we are the United States of Amnesia, and
Speaker 1: so the nineteen sixties are not that long ago.
Speaker 5: If I forget it, it's less about amnesia more about sinility.
Speaker 5: But I lived here. I was a kid. I was
Speaker 5: a kid in the sixties. I lived that Martin Luther King,
Speaker 5: Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy when I was a little boy.
Speaker 5: These were heroes of my youth. And I can tell
Speaker 5: you that at that time. And remember we had National
Speaker 5: guardsmen on Kent State Campus in Ohio in nineteen seventy
Speaker 5: who killed four unarmed student protesters. It felt as if
Speaker 5: things were coming apart. It felt like that. And remember
Speaker 5: we were involved in a war then in which five
Speaker 5: hundred thousand Americans were engaged, fifty thousand lost their lives.
Speaker 5: So it really did feel that way.
Speaker 4: We did.
Speaker 5: We were able to write the ship then, but we
Speaker 5: didn't have social media then, which I think the role
Speaker 5: that social media has played in and the fraying of
Speaker 5: our social fabric, I think can't be under estimate. You know,
Speaker 5: it was presented to us as a tool to create community,
Speaker 5: but what it really is is a tool to divide
Speaker 5: the community into deeply divided camps. Because the thing and
Speaker 5: you know this, you're student of all this, Molly. The
Speaker 5: thing that keeps people online is their great inspiration is
Speaker 5: hate and division and fear and anger and resentment and
Speaker 5: conspiracy theories. And the more you evidence responsiveness to that,
Speaker 5: the deeper you get shoved into a silo. And then
Speaker 5: we are where we are now. Politics has come to
Speaker 5: reflect that same that same culture, and we're gonna have
Speaker 5: to push back with tremendous force to stop the momentum
Speaker 5: of the divisiveness and the hate and the violence.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I wonder if we could talk for a minute
Speaker 1: about kind of where democrats are right now in the
Speaker 1: wilderness and what that looks like. I have been. You know,
Speaker 1: I was just interviewed by someone and he was like,
Speaker 1: say something that you think is positive, and I was like,
Speaker 1: I could think of like fifteen things like I think
Speaker 1: like Pritzger has been incredible and has broken through Newsom
Speaker 1: has cracked the Internet, even if you don't agree with
Speaker 1: him or ideologically like him. My man has out Trump
Speaker 1: Trump on Twitter. Like, you know, run for something is
Speaker 1: being swamped with thousands upon thousands of people who want
Speaker 1: to run for office. Robert Garcia got the birthday book
Speaker 1: subpoena from the Epstein Estate, and we now, I mean,
Speaker 1: I just have seen a lot of really impressive movement
Speaker 1: from Democrats over the last couple of weeks. So I'm
Speaker 1: wondering what you think about that.
Speaker 5: I think that there has been a stouter resistance to Trump.
Speaker 5: But I would just say to you, not one thing
Speaker 5: that you said just now actually speaks to the day
Speaker 5: to day lives of people. And one of the problems
Speaker 5: that I think, I think that there are things that
Speaker 5: Trump is doing that warrant that resistance. I think as
Speaker 5: a tactical matter, you can get a lot of clicks
Speaker 5: and raise a lot of money by trying to match
Speaker 5: him control for troll. But ultimately there are two things
Speaker 5: that are required for Democrats to succeed. One is to
Speaker 5: be steadfast in standing up for principles. Yes, that's extraordinarily important.
Speaker 5: The other is to ask the question how did we
Speaker 5: get here? How did we get here? And why do
Speaker 5: so many people? How did so many working people in
Speaker 5: this country come to view the Democratic Party, the party
Speaker 5: of the self styled party of working people, as a
Speaker 5: party of elites, of failed institutions and a status quo
Speaker 5: that is rigged against them. How did that happen? And
Speaker 5: so you know, and I think it's pretty obvious that
Speaker 5: the system hasn't really worked for large numbers of people,
Speaker 5: and the Democratic Party ought to be in the forefront
Speaker 5: of that fact. Donald Trump's not the answer. Donald Trump
Speaker 5: is a symptom of alienation, but he's not the answer.
Speaker 5: I mean, the only American family who he's making more
Speaker 5: prosperous is his own and perhaps some of his friends,
Speaker 5: not the people who elected him. But the Democrat Party
Speaker 5: has to be an authentic alternative. And the answer can't
Speaker 5: be We're going to restore everything Donald Trump has destroyed.
Speaker 5: There's a lot that Donald Trump has destroyed that should
Speaker 5: be resurrected. There are values that he's trampled that are
Speaker 5: fundamental to who we are as a country. But it's
Speaker 5: also true that I was in Washington for a couple
Speaker 5: of years. I served in the White House. I got
Speaker 5: a bird's eye view of it. There are a lot
Speaker 5: of things that didn't make sense. There are a lot
Speaker 5: of ways in which we run the government that reflects
Speaker 5: the twentieth century and not the twenty first century, and
Speaker 5: where it's not an agile, responsive place. There is way
Speaker 5: too much influence of big money, and it's just gotten
Speaker 5: worse with Trump. So the question is for Democrats to succeed,
Speaker 5: they have to be stout in resistance to the trespasses
Speaker 5: of Trump, but they also have to project a vision
Speaker 5: of how you're actually going to build something that is
Speaker 5: responsive to the day to day problems of people, that
Speaker 5: is resistant to the influence of big money. And until
Speaker 5: the party is speaking to that in a way that
Speaker 5: is convincing and compelling and authentic, it's still going to
Speaker 5: be a struggle.
Speaker 1: You want my hottest take, I'm going to push back,
Speaker 1: even though what you're saying is not necessarily controversial, I'm
Speaker 1: going to say I don't think that any of that
Speaker 1: matters if Democrats aren't willing to sell and like, for example,
Speaker 1: if we look at Biden World, and there's certainly more
Speaker 1: than a lot of room to criticize Biden World, but
Speaker 1: legislatively they were able to transfer I mean things like
Speaker 1: the child tax credit. They were able to transfer wealth
Speaker 1: from the rich to the poor in a way that
Speaker 1: you know, in my lifetime, there were a number of
Speaker 1: legislative wins. But their staunch refusal to sell nothing ever
Speaker 1: to anyone meant that. But you know by year three
Speaker 1: when they were like, why is no one covering us?
Speaker 1: It didn't matter. People didn't believe it. So I just wonder,
Speaker 1: if I think you're absolutely right, big money number one,
Speaker 1: biggest problem citizens United. I mean everyone look at TikTok.
Speaker 1: You know they were going to get banned and then
Speaker 1: they got lobbyists and now they're not. But I just
Speaker 1: wonder how much of this is, like, how much of
Speaker 1: this is a legislative problem, which is a real problem,
Speaker 1: and how much of this is like in like, there's.
Speaker 5: A communicacious problem. But I think it's more than what
Speaker 5: you suggest. And look, I applaud a lot of what
Speaker 5: they did. I disagreed with some of the things that
Speaker 5: they did, and there's no doubt that they were piss
Speaker 5: poor salesman and Biden was a piss poor salesman. But
Speaker 5: you know what, you can't job oom people molly into
Speaker 5: thinking that their lives are what their lives aren't. So
Speaker 5: you know, the fact is that these things were helpful
Speaker 5: and they should have been pitched in the context of
Speaker 5: the larger struggle. The problem that as the Democratic Party
Speaker 5: has become more of a metropolitan, college educated party, it's
Speaker 5: still the party of working people. But it approaches working
Speaker 5: people more like missionaries and anthropologists. And we show up
Speaker 5: and we say we're here to help you become more
Speaker 5: like us, and we know what you need and we're
Speaker 5: fighting for what you need. We don't show up with respect.
Speaker 5: We don't ask what is it that you need? What
Speaker 5: is going on? How do you know? We don't do that.
Speaker 5: And you know, in the pandemic, we go out on
Speaker 5: our balcony and we bang our pots and hail the
Speaker 5: essential workers, and as soon as the pandemic's over, they
Speaker 5: become invisible again. So I think there needs to be
Speaker 5: a genuine connection to the people who Democrats purport to represent.
Speaker 5: And so it is a there's no doubt that there
Speaker 5: was a failure to sell and and and you know,
Speaker 5: in a way, Biden did a little bit of what
Speaker 5: Trump has done in that there was so much talk
Speaker 5: about you know, we haven't seen anything like this since Roosevelt,
Speaker 5: and it was about his accomplishment, not about the task
Speaker 5: at hand. And I think that was a communications problem.
Speaker 5: Uh so uh And and look, one of the insidious
Speaker 5: things about Donald Trump is that he whatever else he
Speaker 5: is or isn't, And you can we can have robust
Speaker 5: debates about about it, I guess. But one thing is
Speaker 5: undebatable is he is the greatest salesman. Maybe maybe Roosevelt
Speaker 5: was up there, but he was the He is the
Speaker 5: greatest salesman. And you know, he is the P. T.
Speaker 5: Barnum of American political and politics. And he you know,
Speaker 5: I think he's going to run into a problem as well,
Speaker 5: because now he's doing what Biden did, and he's telling people, Hey,
Speaker 5: the economy has never been better, right, you know, forget
Speaker 5: about what you see at the cash register. Forget about
Speaker 5: what you see in your rent check, forget about your
Speaker 5: health bill, which is about to shoot up, forget about
Speaker 5: all that stuff. You're doing great. I think that's an
Speaker 5: opportunity for Democrats, and I think but I think that's
Speaker 5: where the focus should be. The question is who gets
Speaker 5: your lives and who's going to fight for that. And
Speaker 5: by the way, yes, I think that these side trips.
Speaker 5: I mean, you know, I do think like it was
Speaker 5: insane to spend three years before you did something serious
Speaker 5: about the border. Insane, And you know it was wrong
Speaker 5: not to be much more active and trying to reopen schools.
Speaker 5: It was you know, there are things that are I
Speaker 5: have great solicitude for vulnerable populations. But Democrats allowed themselves
Speaker 5: to be portray trade as caring more about vulnerable populations
Speaker 5: than understanding the vulnerabilities of large numbers of Americans. So
Speaker 5: I think that the party itself has work to do,
Speaker 5: and it's not just enough to be clever in response
Speaker 5: to Trump or to get a lot of clicks or
Speaker 5: raise a lot of small donations.
Speaker 4: It's more.
Speaker 5: It's deeper and more intense for the party to become
Speaker 5: the party it needs to be.
Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe I agree that you can't run people who
Speaker 1: feel elitist. I agree that, but I just wonder, like,
Speaker 1: so my next question is really elitist, but or elitist.
Speaker 1: But so let's talk about like a Grand Platiner from
Speaker 1: Maine who's an oyster shucker and is the harbor master
Speaker 1: of his small town. I mean, is that, like, there
Speaker 1: is no one in Maine who thinks Graham Platiner is
Speaker 1: an elitist? Right, he did like four tours of duty.
Speaker 1: He you know, he's got like as egalitarian a story.
Speaker 4: So you think that's appealing.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm asking you, is that what you're talking about?
Speaker 5: I mean, I think it may be. I think it
Speaker 5: may be. I'm not sure. I know that the folks
Speaker 5: in Washington have decided that it isn't and that they
Speaker 5: want the governor to run who's a very popular politician there,
Speaker 5: but who's seventy seven years old.
Speaker 1: Fact check Jesse Cannon says he is an oyster farmer
Speaker 1: and not a shucker. I assume that if he's farming
Speaker 1: the oysters, eventually, if he's eating them, he's shocking them.
Speaker 5: But yes, well maybe someone else is shocking them and
Speaker 5: he's farming.
Speaker 1: Them, and then he would be an elitist. But I mean,
Speaker 1: is that the answer to that question.
Speaker 5: I think the answer is to have I think that
Speaker 5: I believe very much that the answers bubble up from
Speaker 5: the bottom and not the top. You know, there are
Speaker 5: people in Congress. Marie Glusen camp Perez is a good
Speaker 5: example who's won in a Trump district twice. And Marie
Speaker 5: is someone who authentically speaks for her community and doesn't
Speaker 5: speak She's not Washington's representative to her community. She's her
Speaker 5: community's representative to Washington. And I think more candidates like
Speaker 5: her who are indigenous and home grown and really speak
Speaker 5: for the community are going to help the Democratic party,
Speaker 5: and there are plenty of examples of that around. It
Speaker 5: may not be at the highest level, but you see
Speaker 5: more and more of that now, whether he and you
Speaker 5: know Plantner in Maine is one of those people that's
Speaker 5: you know, that's to be proven, but I you know,
Speaker 5: more and more I see these candidacies emerging, and that
Speaker 5: to me is a hopeful sign. I'll tell you something.
Speaker 5: Democrats lost ninety percent of the counties in this country
Speaker 5: in twenty twenty four. Ninety percent, and I'll tell you
Speaker 5: that is not a prescription for being a a sustained
Speaker 5: majority party in this country. It makes governing almost impossible.
Speaker 5: You can't be simply a metropolitan party. And so yes,
Speaker 5: these homegrown candidates I think are very important.
Speaker 1: And I'm thinking about Jared Golden as another example for sure,
Speaker 1: right in Main he has a completely rural, very trumpy district. Now,
Speaker 1: I agree, and I also want to push back. Just again,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry.
Speaker 4: I'm sure.
Speaker 5: Well, I didn't come here to be I didn't think
Speaker 5: to say I didn't think the name of the podcast
Speaker 5: was the Amen Corners.
Speaker 1: Well, I agree with everything you're saying, but it's this
Speaker 1: is not really like a pushback as much as a
Speaker 1: sort of and we're not supposed to talk about this
Speaker 1: when we talk about Harris, but I do think you
Speaker 1: cannot discount racism and misogyny because when you would talk
Speaker 1: to non college educated women voters, that is the one
Speaker 1: that I think is where it all falls apart. You know,
Speaker 1: they would say, we like her, but we don't know her.
Speaker 1: And I think what they meant was, you know, they
Speaker 1: would say things like, we don't think she's up for it,
Speaker 1: we don't think she has the strength for it, And
Speaker 1: I think those were very polite ways to say that
Speaker 1: they didn't feel comfortable voting for a woman.
Speaker 5: Well, if you're asking me, is there racism and sexism
Speaker 5: in this country? I think that's self evident. I was
Speaker 5: involved in helping elect the first African American president, and
Speaker 5: we faced some of those barriers, but he did not
Speaker 5: run to be the first African American president. That was
Speaker 5: never central to our messaging. He spoke to people's lives
Speaker 5: in a way that people felt was authentic. He challenged
Speaker 5: the incumbent politics of both parties in the White House,
Speaker 5: he did in Washington. He did not represent those politics,
Speaker 5: and part of the problem for the Vice president. I mean,
Speaker 5: look those who were burdens for her, and maybe they
Speaker 5: were decisive given the closeness of the race. I'm willing
Speaker 5: to acknowledge that. But the biggest burden for her is
Speaker 5: that she was the number two person in the operation
Speaker 5: that folks wanted to replace, and that was an insuperable
Speaker 5: barrier for her. I'm telling you that you want to
Speaker 5: win an election, then you really need to understand fundamentally
Speaker 5: what's going on, you know, in the lives of people.
Speaker 5: And I'd like to think that, you know, in breaking
Speaker 5: a barrier, Obama opened up possibilities for the future. I'd
Speaker 5: like to believe that we can elect a woman. Maybe
Speaker 5: we will into twenty twenty eight despite those barriers. But
Speaker 5: the person who's going to do it is the person
Speaker 5: who authentically is connected to the people they're trying to represent.
Speaker 5: And I think that she never built that relationship, and
Speaker 5: she had a very difficult burden to carry, and she
Speaker 5: probably exacerbated it by failing in any way to differentiate
Speaker 5: herself from Biden at a time when, as I said,
Speaker 5: people their vote, this wasn't a great affirmation of love
Speaker 5: for Donald Trump. It was a no vote on the
Speaker 5: status quo. And you can't say, well, I wouldn't. I
Speaker 5: would have done everything the same way and expect to
Speaker 5: come out on top in that kind of a race.
Speaker 1: How much do you think that Obama being a sort
Speaker 1: of singular like I have never seen an orator like Obama.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you have to be an incredible talent to get
Speaker 5: elected president of the United States. I was blessed to
Speaker 5: work with him. You know, people sometimes say are kind
Speaker 5: of say, well, you you elected Barack Obama. I always
Speaker 5: say the same thing. You always look at driving a maserati. Okay,
Speaker 5: Barack Obama was a great generational talent, but that doesn't
Speaker 5: mean that there aren't great generational talents out there. You know,
Speaker 5: nobody knew who Barack Obama was. I remember sitting down
Speaker 5: with Dan Baltz, who was a fantastic.
Speaker 1: From the Washington Post.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you know, just retired as their lead political writer,
Speaker 5: the best, you know, the gold standard. I remember sitting
Speaker 5: down with him in Wisconsin during the primary in twenty
Speaker 5: twenty four for president, and I told him I was
Speaker 5: working on this primary campaign for a guy named for
Speaker 5: a guy and who he needs to watch because I
Speaker 5: think he'll be a big thing nationally. And he said,
Speaker 5: who is it. And I said, his name is Barack Obama.
Speaker 5: It's a Barack Obama. I never heard of him. That
Speaker 5: was four years before he became the presidential nominee. What
Speaker 5: you need this aspiring strategists out there, all you aspiring
Speaker 5: strategists out there. The moral of this story is what
Speaker 5: you really need to succeed is good taste. Keep your
Speaker 5: eyes open.
Speaker 1: But it's true because he was an Illinois state senator.
Speaker 5: That yes, exactly, he was in the Illinois State Senate
Speaker 5: at the time that I said that. But people need
Speaker 5: to understand, Yes, his talent was enormous, it was, but
Speaker 5: his message was very much of a anti establishment, anti
Speaker 5: incumbent politics of Washington message, and that you know, and
Speaker 5: obviously havn't been against the war was helpful. But that
Speaker 5: was a big part of this. What you say, how
Speaker 5: you say it is really important. And this is I
Speaker 5: guess where we began. How you say it is not
Speaker 5: at all inconsequential. What you say is paramount. And so
Speaker 5: you could be a great messenger, but the message. If
Speaker 5: the message is wrong or inauthentic, you're not going to win.
Speaker 5: You can be you can, you can have the right message,
Speaker 5: but if you don't deliver it, well, then you're not
Speaker 5: going to win. You need to have both.
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, I agree, and I think that is one
Speaker 1: hundred percent the most important issue. Thank you, thank you,
Speaker 1: thank you, David for joining us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1: David Enrich is a reporter for The New York Times
Speaker 1: and the author of Murder the Truth and Servants of
Speaker 1: the Damned. Welcome to Past.
Speaker 6: Politics, David, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: This is such an interesting story, and it's like the
Speaker 1: kind of reporting that only a big institutional newspaper like
Speaker 1: the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or
Speaker 1: the Washington Post could do. I want you to talk
Speaker 1: about how you got to this idea and then how
Speaker 1: you started writing this piece, because like, this is the
Speaker 1: kind of stuff that we desperately need to have in
Speaker 1: our discourse and is expensive and important.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it takes a long time to do this kind
Speaker 7: of reporting. I mean we, I am, my colleagues Matt
Speaker 7: Biltze and Tesca Silver Greenberg and I have been focusing
Speaker 7: on Epstein and his money basically since twenty nineteen, and
Speaker 7: there are all these unanswered questions.
Speaker 6: But one of the things that kept coming.
Speaker 7: Up over and over again was Jake Morgan, which had
Speaker 7: been his bank for something like fifteen years, and we
Speaker 7: just hadn't really found a very good weight into that story.
Speaker 7: And partbees are so many unanswered questions and there's so
Speaker 7: few people willing to speak candidly for obvious reasons. I
Speaker 7: guess my colleague Matt ended up getting some just through
Speaker 7: sources that he had cultivated over a period of years.
Speaker 7: I got some deposition transcripts that had been sealed, were
Speaker 7: never in court, we're never public, and we started looking
Speaker 7: at that, and then we started going back through the
Speaker 7: public court dock in both the US and the UK,
Speaker 7: and we realized there's just tons and tons of stuff
Speaker 7: that's in the public domain, but it has not been
Speaker 7: mined very thoroughly and parties. It's extremely time consuming. It's
Speaker 7: also expensive, like just I don't know if you ever
Speaker 7: use pacer to get federal court records, but it's like
Speaker 7: you download something that's one hundred pages long, and it
Speaker 7: like sets you back ten dollars. And if you are downloading,
Speaker 7: you know, tens of thousands of pages of stuff, it
Speaker 7: becomes very expensive, very equivocally into like normal you know,
Speaker 7: it's usually big corporate law firms that are footing that bill.
Speaker 7: But when it's a news organization, it's really hard to
Speaker 7: do that. He you're an independent journalist.
Speaker 1: And then what you do is when you get all
Speaker 1: of these pacer thousands and thousands of hours of depositions
Speaker 1: and emails, you have to then read to them and
Speaker 1: figure out this sort of nuances. I'd love you to
Speaker 1: talk about how so that one of the key parts
Speaker 1: of this story is who knew what when?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 1: Who knew that Jeffrey Epstein was pulling one hundred and
Speaker 1: seventy thousand dollars out of you know, his checking account.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of cash. And so I'd love you
Speaker 1: to talk us through sort of who knew what when
Speaker 1: and how you started to sort of get clues.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, well let me answer that in reverse order.
Speaker 7: I mean, we started getting clues because we built a
Speaker 7: spreadsheet as we went and we just arranged the spreadsheeting
Speaker 7: chronological order. And as we read these tens of thousands
Speaker 7: of pages of court documents and financial records, you know,
Speaker 7: you just are putting in chronological order, and you start
Speaker 7: to notice patterns and they're not really short that's there.
Speaker 7: This is not something it just takes a really, really
Speaker 7: long time, and we had three of us working on
Speaker 7: it full time for quite a while. But what we
Speaker 7: started to see was that there was a clear connection
Speaker 7: between first of all, Epstein withdrawing huge sums of cash
Speaker 7: from JP Morgan, sometimes from the branch in its headquarters
Speaker 7: building ironically, and then and the.
Speaker 1: Paying That means he like went to the bank and
Speaker 1: was like, I'm going to need one hundred and seventy
Speaker 1: thousand dollars in hundreds.
Speaker 7: Right, Yeah, I mean, I think the more precise mechanical
Speaker 7: way worked is that he would write checks from his
Speaker 7: account to himself for cash, and if you would go
Speaker 7: with deposit the checks and get cash out.
Speaker 1: But it's very crazy.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's crazy. It's a huge amount of money.
Speaker 1: Can you just explain to us, like, isn't there a
Speaker 1: number that you can't take out more than before they
Speaker 1: notify the police.
Speaker 7: Yeah, the number is ten thousand dollars a day, and
Speaker 7: they're clever people can figure out ways to work around that.
Speaker 7: And the weird thing here is that I think JP
Speaker 7: Morgan actually saw those cash withdrawals and recognize that under
Speaker 7: the law, those needed to be reported, and I think
Speaker 7: they reported some of those or maybe even all of those,
Speaker 7: but they weren't taking it seriously internally, and so and
Speaker 7: then there's a whole other set of things called suspicious
Speaker 7: activity reports that they just weren't filing at all, which
Speaker 7: related to the wire transfers that Epstein was sending all
Speaker 7: over the world, including to countries and banks and individuals
Speaker 7: that appeared to be part of his sex trafficking network.
Speaker 1: Are there any people with those wires or countries that
Speaker 1: stand out to you?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean not people individually, at least not that
Speaker 7: we should name here, because a lot of these people are.
Speaker 7: And one of the things with Epstein's network, as I'm
Speaker 7: sure you know, is that there are his victims to
Speaker 7: then become kind of his enablers in some cases and
Speaker 7: help recruit more women and girls and so the individuals
Speaker 7: let's not focus on that. But he was making wire
Speaker 7: transfers to banks in Russia, Belarus, places like that.
Speaker 1: You would think that would ring some bells.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and frankly it did ring bells within JP Morgan.
Speaker 7: The problem is that people were ringing the bells, and
Speaker 7: the top executives at the bank were constantly disregarding those
Speaker 7: bells or muting those bells to torture that metaphor. And
Speaker 7: so this is a repeat pattern within the bank, over
Speaker 7: and over and over again. Over a period of many years,
Speaker 7: we saw that executives and compliance officers and anti money
Speaker 7: laundering specialists were getting extremely worried about Epstein. They were
Speaker 7: expressing those concerns and sending them up the food chain,
Speaker 7: and they were getting overruled or disregarded at a very
Speaker 7: high level.
Speaker 6: Within the bank.
Speaker 7: And then concluded when Epstein was originally indicted and arrested
Speaker 7: in Florida in two thousand and six, when he pleaded
Speaker 7: guilty in two thousand and eight, when he was in
Speaker 7: jail in two thousand and nine, So this is an
Speaker 7: obvious concern within the bank. You know, it does not
Speaker 7: take a rocket scientist to realize that when you have
Speaker 7: a convicted sexual predator among your clients, that's something you
Speaker 7: want to be thinking about. And the bank thought about
Speaker 7: it and made the decision to keep doing business with them.
Speaker 1: So at that point in two thousand and six, he
Speaker 1: was on the sex offender registrary because I remember, because
Speaker 1: I had the sex offender app on my phone as
Speaker 1: a mother of small children, I was looking at it
Speaker 1: and I saw that in Central Park there was the
Speaker 1: sex offender registered and it was Jeffrey Epstein, and I thought,
Speaker 1: oh my god, that guy is still not in jail.
Speaker 1: How is that guy still not in jail. So at
Speaker 1: that time JP Morgan was still treating him like a
Speaker 1: normal client.
Speaker 7: They kept treating him like a normal client until twenty thirteen,
Speaker 7: and this is years after he goes to jail, gets
Speaker 7: out of jail, registers as the highest level sex offender
Speaker 7: in New York and is engaged in a criminal a
Speaker 7: pretty vast criminal enterprise, and he's bringing women and girls
Speaker 7: into the United States to participate in coer sex. And
Speaker 7: it's not just with him, right, he is farming some
Speaker 7: of these women and girls out to his associates, and
Speaker 7: he is engaged in it has all the hallmarks of
Speaker 7: a big money laundering operation to at least in part,
Speaker 7: to conduct that sex traffity network.
Speaker 1: The money laundering, I think is a really important point
Speaker 1: of this story. A lot of people wonder if there
Speaker 1: are people, famous people who are wrapped up in this,
Speaker 1: famous powerful people who are famous, powerful political people who
Speaker 1: are wrapped up in this, and maybe more on the
Speaker 1: money side than the sex side. Shockingly, what are you
Speaker 1: seeing in the money side that you think might be
Speaker 1: interesting in that vein?
Speaker 7: Well, you know, look, there's at least two or three
Speaker 7: people out there whose names are already out there, that
Speaker 7: have had longstanding personal but also financial relationships with Epstein
Speaker 7: that have never been fully explained. And I don't have
Speaker 7: answer to this people are It's people like Glenn Dubin,
Speaker 7: who is a big headshot manager, Leon Black, who's a
Speaker 7: private equity billionaire, Les Wexner, who was the founder of
Speaker 7: Victoria's Secret among other brands, And all of these people
Speaker 7: were close with Epstein for a period of years, and
Speaker 7: you know, the facilitated or directly gave him tens, if
Speaker 7: not hundreds of millions of dollars.
Speaker 6: And the public.
Speaker 7: Explanations that all of those men have given for the
Speaker 7: relationships with Epstein, I mean, it's hard to disprove things,
Speaker 7: but I'm quite skeptical that we have the full story
Speaker 7: in put it that way, And you know, I do
Speaker 7: think one of the interesting things right now, at this
Speaker 7: particular moment, is that all of a sudden, after years
Speaker 7: and years of complete inaction and apparent apathy, we have
Speaker 7: members of Congress from both parties who are actually starting
Speaker 7: to pay some attention to this, and so we have
Speaker 7: subpoenas that are being issued to Epstein's estate and to
Speaker 7: various government agencies that have a lot of records. So
Speaker 7: I'm kind of cautiously optimistic that we're going to learn
Speaker 7: a lot more about this stuff in the months ahead.
Speaker 7: But I'm always kind of optimistic, and often my optimism
Speaker 7: leads me astray.
Speaker 6: So we will see.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny because like the thing when I
Speaker 1: sort of did my own kind of soul sarcing about
Speaker 1: my recent sort of where I messed up as a pundit,
Speaker 1: the thing that I kept seeing was that I was
Speaker 1: always overly optimistic. You know, I'd always feel like, but
Speaker 1: this is the right thing, and so it will happen
Speaker 1: totally right, like an idiot. But I do think that
Speaker 1: this point about the money and the transfers. So then
Speaker 1: we get to the question of who knew what what,
Speaker 1: and it is very important for Jamie Diamond to not
Speaker 1: have known, so explain to us sort of that tension.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So Diamond is obviously the longtime CEO of Jping Morgan.
Speaker 7: He's probably the most respected and admired man on Wall Street.
Speaker 7: He is almost certainly a billionaire as a result of
Speaker 7: the many years he has spent at Jping Morgan, and
Speaker 7: he is someone who is famously obsessed with details. He's
Speaker 7: known for micromanaging his deputies. He gets really into the
Speaker 7: weeds and stuff, and that is kind of one of
Speaker 7: his hallmarks as a CEO. And yet in this case
Speaker 7: he claims complete ignorance about what was going on inside
Speaker 7: his bank with one of the bank's most important clients.
Speaker 7: He says that he has said under oath and to
Speaker 7: us that he did not realize that Jeffrey Epstein was
Speaker 7: a client of the banks until twenty nineteen, when Epstein
Speaker 7: was arrested finally and then committed suicide. Diamond says that
Speaker 7: he just did not realize it until then. I mean,
Speaker 7: he said it under oath, so you've got to give
Speaker 7: that some credibility. On the other hand, there are other
Speaker 7: people who said under oath that they talked to Diamond
Speaker 7: about this many years earlier, and there are some email
Speaker 7: records that strongly suggest that Diamond was in the loop
Speaker 7: on this. Now it's a little bit they're not dis positive,
Speaker 7: and it's.
Speaker 6: A little hard to figure out who's telling the truth here.
Speaker 7: But I mean, it's kind of binary, and either Diamond
Speaker 7: knew about it and has been lying, or he didn't
Speaker 7: know about it, in which case this is a real
Speaker 7: sign that he was kind of out to lunch on
Speaker 7: something that even in the moment, was a really serious issue.
Speaker 7: I mean, there are senior executives at the bank, including
Speaker 7: the banks general counsel and head of Compliance, that were
Speaker 7: fighting to get Epstein out because they are really concerned
Speaker 7: about him, and some of the other executives were fighting
Speaker 7: to keep him. And the fact that Diamond, this allegedly
Speaker 7: detail obsessed CEO, would somehow not have been in the
Speaker 7: loopernet is either.
Speaker 6: Very hard to believe or very damning about his leadership.
Speaker 1: I would say, imagine being the chief of compliance and
Speaker 1: having that guy in your bed, like being like, can
Speaker 1: you imagine like what I mean, just a nightmare. The
Speaker 1: people who were trying to keep him in are they
Speaker 1: still there?
Speaker 6: Well?
Speaker 7: One of them is Mary Aerdos, who was not the
Speaker 7: kind of main cheerleader and defender of Epstein. That was
Speaker 7: a guy named Jess Staley who left the bank in
Speaker 7: twenty thirteen and has kind of since fallen into disrepute
Speaker 7: in large part as a result of his connections to Epstein.
Speaker 7: But an Aerdos was at various points relying or turning
Speaker 7: to Epstein for advice, was very much aware of how
Speaker 7: much money he was bringing in, and I think that
Speaker 7: made her very eager to keep this lucrative client in
Speaker 7: good standing. And one of the things that really became
Speaker 7: clear to us over and over as we reported this
Speaker 7: story and read all these documents is that the biggest
Speaker 7: problem here was simply read and the bank knew that
Speaker 7: they were raking in millions and millions of dollars as
Speaker 7: a direct and indirect result of their affiliation with Epstein.
Speaker 7: And you know, that is hard. It's hard to turn
Speaker 7: down that amount of money, even when you're a bank
Speaker 7: with billions of dollars in assets.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, So talk to us about
Speaker 1: There's like an email which sort of is a smoking
Speaker 1: gun on who knew what when? Right?
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, there are a couple of emails where
Speaker 7: Diamond's name gets mentioned. In one case, people within the
Speaker 7: bank are debating whether to keep his account open or not,
Speaker 7: and they mentioned that the matter is pending diamond review.
Speaker 7: There's another email around that same time where it mentions
Speaker 7: that the general counsel of the bank is reviewing documents
Speaker 7: about epstein'sccount for Jamie. And you know, Jess Staley, who
Speaker 7: is the guy who was most closely associated with Epstein
Speaker 7: and was his primary defender in the Bank, has said
Speaker 7: under oath under penalty of perjury that he on multiple
Speaker 7: occasions talked with Jamie Diamond about Epstein in the context
Speaker 7: of Epstein being accused and then pleading guilty to sex crimes.
Speaker 6: So again Diamond denies that also under oath. So I
Speaker 6: don't know. I mean, there is certainly.
Speaker 7: An awareness at a high level within the Bank of
Speaker 7: what was happening, and there was certainly a number of
Speaker 7: people that seemed to have been under the impression that
Speaker 7: Jamie Diamond was in the loop, and that would certainly
Speaker 7: fit with Diamond's self professed and self proclaimed mo as
Speaker 7: a very detail oriented executive.
Speaker 1: I would love you just like have another bite on
Speaker 1: how you do this reporting and just because I think
Speaker 1: it's so fundamental and a lot of us who are
Speaker 1: media consumers maybe don't quite understand how this works.
Speaker 7: Yeah, No, really appreciate that question, and you're interest in
Speaker 7: this because I do think this is one of the
Speaker 7: things that is sometimes this is the media's fault that
Speaker 7: we are not as transparent as we could be about
Speaker 7: how the sausage gets made here. But a story like
Speaker 7: this is it's just extremely complicated, time consuming, labor and
Speaker 7: resource intensive. And so you know, we were going through
Speaker 7: these huge volumes of transcripts and emails and financial records
Speaker 7: things like that from many different sources in many places,
Speaker 7: which itself is like it's hard to figure out where
Speaker 7: to get this stuff. We spend a lot of time
Speaker 7: compiling the stuff and then even more time reading it.
Speaker 7: We're entering things line by line into a spreadsheet that
Speaker 7: explains to it for our own purposes, what happened, when
Speaker 7: it happened, how we know it happened, things like that.
Speaker 7: And this is a gigantic spreadsheet. I mean, I don't
Speaker 7: know how many roads it has, but like thousands for sure.
Speaker 7: And then we start identifying all the people involved with this,
Speaker 7: and we try to call and we do not succeed
Speaker 7: with all of them, but we do succeed with some
Speaker 7: of them. That then compliments our understanding of everything in
Speaker 7: the spreadsheet. And then we have to go through and
Speaker 7: start looking for patterns and figuring out what is known when,
Speaker 7: why it matters, and then trying to kind of assemble
Speaker 7: this into a coherent narrative that actually explains how this
Speaker 7: all worked and how these different pieces interacted, and you know,
Speaker 7: and then you have to go to the people who
Speaker 7: are implicated in the story, whether it's the bank or
Speaker 7: Jamie Diamond or Jess Staley or Mary Airdus and seek
Speaker 7: to understand things from their perspective and trying to get
Speaker 7: their input and also understanding that a story like this
Speaker 7: that's a you know, it's a big story that The
Speaker 7: New York Times is going to promote.
Speaker 6: Very heavily, is going to be held up to a microscope.
Speaker 7: And these are a lot of these people that we write
Speaker 7: about an a regular basis, not even in this story necessarily,
Speaker 7: but just in general, are people who tend to be
Speaker 7: lutigitious and have the resources and sometimes the appetite to
Speaker 7: either threaten us or in fact sue us. And so
Speaker 7: things have to get bulletproofed from like fifteen different angles.
Speaker 7: And that also is very hard, and it's just not
Speaker 7: the kind of thing that you can It would be
Speaker 7: very hard for like a normal person on their own
Speaker 7: to do this kind of reporting because it requires an
Speaker 7: entire institution. It's like a privilege to be able to
Speaker 7: work at the New York Times with awesome colleagues who
Speaker 7: are so good at this and it it certainly it
Speaker 7: like frustrates me sometimes, not in this context, but just
Speaker 7: in general, where you know, there are people all over
Speaker 7: the New York Times and other big news organizations as well,
Speaker 7: who do this kind of reporting day in and day out,
Speaker 7: and then you know, it's easy to kind of take
Speaker 7: that for granted.
Speaker 6: As a consumer of the news.
Speaker 7: I think we in the media need to be like
Speaker 7: a lot more proactive in explaining what goes into this stuff,
Speaker 7: because otherwise it's just easy to be like, well, this
Speaker 7: is the story and they told the story that they knew,
Speaker 7: and it's like, well, we know it because we spent
Speaker 7: just I mean so so wrong working on this.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would love to know, like when you were
Speaker 1: talking to these people at JP Morgan about this data,
Speaker 1: I mean, was there any sense like that this was
Speaker 1: coming that someday people would be able to put it
Speaker 1: together like these A lot of this stuff is public,
Speaker 1: your big public bank. Like, I just am curious of
Speaker 1: this psychology of it. Now when you call them, I mean, like,
Speaker 1: are people I'm just curious.
Speaker 6: Yeah, they are.
Speaker 7: I think inside the bank and among the kind of
Speaker 7: alumni of the bank, there are two or three types
Speaker 7: of reactions. One is people are indignant that we are
Speaker 7: still writing about this. I think they have a lot
Speaker 7: of these people convinced themselves that they were trying to
Speaker 7: do the right thing. And yes, it's hard when you're
Speaker 7: at a big institution to get them to pay attention,
Speaker 7: and we make mistakes sometimes, but this was not a
Speaker 7: big deal. And look, to be clear, I don't think
Speaker 7: JP Morgan understood the full scope of what Epstein was
Speaker 7: doing at.
Speaker 6: The time that they were turning a blind eye.
Speaker 7: They had every reason to know that he was doing
Speaker 7: really suspicious stuff, and he had admitted doing really bad stuff.
Speaker 6: But I don't think that picture right now. They're not psychic.
Speaker 7: But I also think that even within the bank now
Speaker 7: where they are, you know, they gave it, ultimately, gave
Speaker 7: us a statement that expressed regret for ever having had
Speaker 7: him as a client and denying responsibility for the crimes
Speaker 7: he committed. But even you know, we sent ultimately JB.
Speaker 7: Morgan a list of I don't know, it must have
Speaker 7: been like one hundred or one hundred and fifty questions.
Speaker 7: I would guess about every specific point we're mentioning in
Speaker 7: the story. And they sent back a very long, kind
Speaker 7: of point by point rebuttal to most of this and
Speaker 7: acknowledged some of it. But they fought in a very
Speaker 7: kind of minute level of detail about things and denied
Speaker 7: some things. And what struck me at least as kind
Speaker 7: of a semantic dissembly way very corporate lawyer. Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 7: And it does not suggest an institution that is really
Speaker 7: ready or willing to own up to the fact that
Speaker 7: they made a terrible mistake here. They're trying to mitigate
Speaker 7: and minimize every bit of the story at every turn.
Speaker 7: And to be clear, that's not that didn't particularly surprise me.
Speaker 7: That is the way big companies and big institutions generally work.
Speaker 7: I always, as an eternal naive optimist, I'm always kind
Speaker 7: of half expecting that maybe this will be the time
Speaker 7: that the right thing to do is is, like, you
Speaker 7: screwed up badly, just apologize, rather then try to keep
Speaker 7: kind of thrunk stand in the gears.
Speaker 1: But yeah, no, and I think that's a really good
Speaker 1: salient point. Thank you, thank you, thank you, David. I
Speaker 1: am looking forward to having you back for your next
Speaker 1: great big piece of reporting in three years.
Speaker 6: Thanks Molly, I appreciate it.
Speaker 4: No more perfectly.
Speaker 3: Jesse Kennon Somali in the Never Ending Flood the Zone
Speaker 3: with shit Bannon approach to politics, the Senate has evoked
Speaker 3: a nuclear option to speed through Trump's appointees.
Speaker 4: What are you seeing here.
Speaker 1: John Thune, head of the Senate, most hand man in America.
Speaker 4: Seven eleven, hot dog of a look.
Speaker 1: Beef jerky baby. He is, when not sunning himself, very
Speaker 1: mad that basically Democrats are coming up the works with
Speaker 1: GOP nominees, and so we're seeing they're going to do
Speaker 1: these noes in block. Then they won't have to worry
Speaker 1: about Democrats. Look, I mean, there's so many things that
Speaker 1: they're doing that are problematic, but this will ultimately Democrats
Speaker 1: will be able to do it when they get in power,
Speaker 1: and they'll be able to do these nominees for ambassadorships.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think it's fine when it's ambassadorships. God
Speaker 1: knows what they'll cook up next. But this is not
Speaker 1: the thing that keeps me up at night, and there
Speaker 1: are a lot of other things that do keep me
Speaker 1: up at night. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics.
Speaker 1: Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear
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