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