Transcription
No idea. Then again, maybe he does. We just don't know.
One way to find out. Thanks, Lawrence.
Thanks, Rachel.
Thank you. Well, as I just said, this hour will not be what Donald Trump wants it to be. It will not be a discussion of Donald Trump's pathological lie that liberals are to blame for the murder of Charlie Cook.
Donald Trump knows that's a lie, and he is pushing that lie in the hope that programs like this will be filled with anguished complaint about this Trump mass libel of half of America. Donald Trump is the only president of the United States who has ever blamed a murder on millions of voters who did not vote for him.
Donald Trump knows that the 22-year-old Utah man accused of the murder grew up in a family of registered Republican parents who Donald Trump has now praised repeatedly. Today, Donald Trump said that the accused murderer's parents did everything right. Parents who can think, of course, that they've done everything right are not parents. I've met parents whose kids end up facing murder charges. Surely can wonder from time to time what they might have gotten wrong.
And so Donald Trump insults the intelligence of the entire country, including his own supporters, when he launches this mass libel of half the country. The 20-year-old man in Pennsylvania who shot at Donald Trump was a registered Republican, and the 22-year-old Utah man accused of murdering Charlie Cook has never voted.
The single most murderous American political assassin was a registered Republican, and he is the only American political assassin who murdered more than one person. Timothy McVeigh was a veteran of the United States Army who, at 26 years old, in an instant, murdered 168 people in the federal building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.
In 1995, registered Republican Timothy McVeigh attacked the federal building specifically to assassinate federal workers for his twisted right-wing political reasons. Registered Republican Timothy McVeigh came to hate the government, in whose army he served. Timothy McVeigh murdered 19 children in the daycare center of that federal building in an instant by blowing up that building with a truck bomb. Registered Republican Timothy McVeigh's assassination target that day was all the federal workers in that building, and he didn't care who else would have to die in the process. That's how far Timothy McVeigh's insane right-wing ideology drove him.
And Donald Trump had nothing to say about that. In 1995, Donald Trump could pick up the phone and get himself quoted in the New York tabloid newspapers whenever he wanted to. He could get himself booked on TV chat shows and say whatever he wanted to say. He could take out full-page ads in the New York Times and condemn people, as he had already done at that time, demanding the death penalty. In one case for people who he wrongly believed were guilty of raping a woman in Central Park, there was no full-page ad by Donald Trump about Timothy McVeigh.
Donald Trump didn't blame the Republican Party for what Timothy McVeigh did. No one blamed Republicans for what Timothy McVeigh did. There was no internet to blame yet, no social media to blame for poisoning Timothy McVeigh's mind. And it never crossed any politician's mind to blame millions of people who never met Timothy McVeigh. That is Donald Trump's uniquely perverse contribution to the aftermath of a public murder.
What Donald Trump wants is agreement from his supporters and outrage from the millions of people he is libeling, accusing of inciting murder, because that means that we will not be covering the very bad news that continues to mount for Donald Trump, including headlines like this one in today's Wall Street Journal: "Putin, Netanyahu, March On With Trump on the Sidelines." That is a very, very important headline for the world in a very bad headline for Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu, proving every day how irrelevant Donald Trump is to their calculations about what they will do next.
Remember Donald Trump's pointless trip to Alaska to welcome Vladimir Putin into the United States? Donald Trump said he would give Vladimir Putin two weeks after that to reach a peace agreement with Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin has continued his savage attacks on Ukraine and humiliated Donald Trump even more than he was before by sending Russian drones into NATO territory in Poland. And Donald Trump says nothing.
Donald Trump just says libelous things about other people being to blame for the murder of Charlie Kirk. Donald Trump just wants to get half the country outraged at the other half of this country. And Donald Trump doesn't want anyone in this country to be outraged at Vladimir Putin.
The other bad news for Donald Trump includes a federal court tonight finding his attempt to fire a member of the Federal Reserve Board to be completely and obviously illegal. And so Lisa Cook will show up for tomorrow's meeting at the Federal Reserve, because she's still a member and she knows that. And Donald Trump knows that. And Donald Trump really doesn't want you to know what's in the emails in the Epstein files.
Our first guest tonight has been studying the emails in the Epstein files. Jason Leopold and Bloomberg reports the emails, part of a cache of more than 18,000 obtained by Bloomberg News, show that Maxwell and Epstein were closer in many respects than either publicly admitted. Maxwell opened at least one foreign bank account, using one of his addresses, was a name director on one of Epstein's main revenue-generating companies, and traded stock in a company they were both invested in, details that haven't been previously reported.
The details in these emails show Ghislaine Maxwell lied to federal agents, which is the criminal equivalent of perjury. When Donald Trump's former criminal defense lawyer, now Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, went to Florida last month to have a friendly chat with Ghislaine Maxwell on the recorded portion of their conversation. And we don't know how much was said when the recording wasn't on, but on the recorded portion of the conversation, which has been made public, Todd Blanche warned Glenn Maxwell that it would be a crime for her to lie to them in that conversation, but she did lie to them anyway.
And Donald Trump doesn't want you to know that Donald Trump did her the immediate favor of moving her to an easy, relaxed camp from the federal prison camp that she was in. And so Donald Trump doesn't want you to see the evidence of her perjury in these emails tonight that Bloomberg has obtained. Donald Trump wants to think about the possibility of releasing her from prison someday. And so he doesn't want any of this information out there. And Donald Trump is not going to prosecute her for the perjury that she committed in her conversation with Todd Blanche. And it is Donald Trump who decides who gets prosecuted by the Trump Justice Department.
Bloomberg reports that Jeffrey Epstein and Glenn Maxwell, "discussed undergoing a shared fertility procedure," long after Maxwell claims she largely disassociated from him. They corresponded about discrediting women who raised allegations against them, including in one exchange where Maxwell said she planned to circulate compromising information on one of Epstein's sexual abuse victims. Maxwell has maintained she was kept in the dark about details of Epstein's initial sexual abuse case in the mid-2000s, yet the emails demonstrate her deep knowledge of the legal jeopardy he faced and show how she helped him strategize over even the most consequential details.
Ghislaine Maxwell advised Jeffrey Epstein on the plea deal that he made in 2008 that instead of imprisoning Jeffrey Epstein as a sex trafficker and raper of children, allowed Jeffrey Epstein to continue to roam free and rape more children, Bloomberg reports. Epstein wrote to Maxwell on May 23rd, 2008. "Which one do you prefer? Lewd and lascivious conduct or procuring minors for prostitution?" At the time, he and his star-studded team of defense lawyers were closing in on a generous plea deal with federal and state officials in Florida, and Epstein was trying to negotiate the state charges to which he'd plead guilty. Maxwell's response was matter-of-fact, "I suppose, lewd and lascivious conduct. I would prefer lewd and lascivious conduct with a prostitute, if possible."
That is the sex trafficking convicted criminal Ghislaine Maxwell advising Jeffrey Epstein about how to deal with his first round of criminal charges before she herself was convicted of sex trafficking and sentenced to 20 years in prison, which Donald Trump has now made a much lighter sentence by moving her to a much more pleasant surrounding and no doubt planning to release her from prison as a reward after the next presidential election, when Donald Trump's pardon spree will surely be something to behold.
The federal prosecutor who knows more about Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell than any other prosecutor in history, was fired by Donald Trump and his Justice Department today. That fired prosecutor, Maurene Comey, sued Donald Trump for the illegal firing, saying in her lawsuits against Donald Trump, "Defendants have not provided any explanation whatsoever for terminating Mr. Comey. In truth, there is no legitimate explanation. Rather, defendants fired Comey solely or substantially because her father is former FBI Director James Comey or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both. The politically motivated termination of Comey, ostensibly under Article Two of the Constitution, upends bedrock principles of our democracy and justice system."
In her lawsuit, Maurene Comey said she was asked to join the prosecution team of a major public corruption case on July 15th. So obviously she was a prosecutor in good standing in the Justice Department on July 15th. But the next day, July 16th, she was fired, and the next day after that, July 17th, the Wall Street Journal broke the story about the Epstein birthday book that includes a birthday letter from Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein with Donald Trump's signature on the letter. And it appears to be exactly the same one-word Donald signature that I got on the one note that I ever received from Donald Trump in 2016.
Today, more than 20 Epstein and Maxwell survivors, including many who spoke publicly at the Capitol two weeks ago, are urging members of the Republican Women's Caucus to, "stand up against abuse of power and to take action to end the silence and speculation." In a letter obtained by ABC News to the caucus chairs, Republican Congresswoman Kat Cammack and Senator Katie Britt, the survivors requested a meeting with the Republican Women's Caucus.
Their letter to the Republican women says, "We are mothers, daughters, sisters, friends and wives. We have sought justice for decades, to no avail. We have been denied the basic rights that should be afforded to every American citizen time and time again. The fact that it took this long for anyone to care about us is a true American tragedy. We stand together in pain and resilience and we are asking for your help. We have a right to feel safe in this country. We have a right to know why a serial sexual predator was treated with more humanity than we have ever experienced from our own government." Remind us that America is a country that we thought it was when we were