Did Peter Mandelson betray Britain to impress Jeffrey Epstein?

This is a Global Player original podcast. Less than 48 hours after Peter Mandelson resigned from the Labour Party, we are now hearing the breaking news. that the Cabinet Office has referred new evidence about Mandelson directly to the police. We've now learned that Peter Mandelson is to step down from his position in the House of Lords. But that won't change the fact. The constant flow of information between Mandelson and Epstein concerning government secrets.

15 years ago. Could this yet prove to be the biggest corruption scandal in Britain for over 50 years? Welcome to the newsagents. The news agents.

It's Emily. It's Lewis. And the latest news as we were saying there is that Keir Starmer has handed police a dossier about Lord Mandelson allegedly leaking highly sensitive information on the economy. to Geoffrey Epstein. This follows the news yesterday that the police, the Metropolitan Police were looking into this.

The Cabinet Office has apparently found unredacted versions of emails from the then business secretary, Lord Mandelson was business secretary in the late two thousands, under Gordon Brown, to Geoffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier, and passed them to the police this morning. Keir Starmer apparently telling his cabinet that the leaks were, quote, gobsmacking

and has asked officials, as Emily was saying, to draw up legislation to remove Mandelson's peerage as soon as possible. This following on from the emails as we were reporting yesterday, an almost stream of consciousness From Mandelson to Epstein when he was the de facto deputy prime minister, among other things. Sending Epstein a confidential UK government document outlining twenty billion of asset sales?

Mandelson claiming he was trying hard, partly at Epstein's instigation, to change government policy on bankers' bonuses. And telling him about an imminent bailout package for the Euro the day before it was announced in 2010. And it is obvious. that this could have been extremely commercially useful information to Epstein for his corporate client.

What is extraordinary in the Is what we are now understanding about the speed at which Mandelson received highly confidential information and literally pressed the forward button on the email, which went straight into Jeffrey Epstein's inbox.

And just to put this in context, we are talking about the man who was the business secretary and de facto deputy prime minister right in the middle. of the global financial crash. Stunning. The economy was on its knees at that time. We were all trying to work out what the hell was going on Bankers were the pariah of the entire country. Do you remember this was the time we were we were trying to strip Fred Goodwin of his peerage because of his part he played

in the collapse and the scandal. He was the chief executive of RBS. He was the chief executive of RBS, which then became nationalised. Alistair Darling at the time Sort of joked, I mean black comedy, that he was not just the Chancellor, but he was a bank manager. He was literally running the country's banks. And in the middle of this Crisis. It was a genuine economic crisis where we did not know for how long the world's financial systems were gonna sort of rumble on.

Peter Mandelson, we now understand, was passing this highly sensitive. economically sensitive, financially sensitive information to a billionaire who had given him money. And there were two things that occurred to me, Lewis. One is we always called Mandelson the master of the dark arts, you know this Prince of Darkness, the arch manipulator. He wasn't very smart, actually, was he? He really was not that smart about this stuff when you could trace it all onto an email. And the other thing is

How cheap was he? I mean, he's already denied Or he said he can't recall receiving the money. But actually when you think of what he is potentially gifting Epstein, you know, billions of dollars worth of assets and land deals.

and he seems to have got about seventy thousand dollars or pounds in exchange. His husband got another ten, maybe a little bit more than that. It doesn't seem like he had a very good deal, unless he was after something even more craven than the money itself, which was the proximity to power. So I do think we have to sort of just

Breathe for a moment. Well I think it has the potential to shake down that way. Obviously we've we've got to be careful because obviously nothing has been proven yet and Mandelson

as we'll discuss, um, denies that any propriety has taken place. But look, as you say, Emily, I think put it very well that at that time and younger listeners won't necessarily remember this, but you know, Mandelson was Pretty much the second most important person in that government, in the Gordon Brown government, at a time, as you say, of historic significance, global economic tumult.

And You would think that the de facto deputy PM, the business secretary, might have better things to be doing with his time than leaking a stream of government secrets. To a foreign financier who, even by that time, certainly by two thousand and nine, ten, had already received his conviction for soliciting sex from a minor.

I think we can see with this story that this has moved on quite profoundly and and I think there is a genuine sense Of shock. even at the heart of politics and the heart of Westminster and number ten about this story. Look before, the reason Mandelson resigned was because it became clear that his connection with, his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein was even closer

than had previously been known. It had been known that they had been friends, that they had had a relationship, but with the documents coming out, the first tranche of documents, From the DOJ, we could see that number ten felt that even they had been misled about the nature of that relationship. You can argue whether that's true or not.

What we're seeing here is of a different order of magnitude. It's not just about that relationship being close, it's not just about it being humiliating or embarrassing or about his judgment and about the kind of taste, frankly, of continuing a friendship with someone like that. And it is a really close friendship. We see from these emails, you know, he's calling him PT and Mandelson is calling him my favourite person and all of this.

this kind of stuff. This takes it to the level of potential serious sustained government corruption. Because as I say, what you cannot do, or I think what's shocked people, is the extent to which

Serious government secrets, serious government plans and government policies were being fed to Epstein, which as I say could clearly be commercially valuable to him. And atop of that Mandelson having previously apparently received money and even at that time contemporaneously receiving money for his partner for this osteopathy cause and as we know from the emails later and Mandelson is is very clear about this.

in his interview which we'll come on to with with the Times that he's done perhaps extraordinarily, where he says, you know, one of the things that Epstein did was help guide him from the world of politics to the world of finance and business after Labour left office. And indeed there is an email which shows

Epstein advising Mandelson about potential board appointments, an appointment at Deutsche Bank where the remuneration was in the millions. So clearly this was a mutual beneficial relationship where at the very least I agree. There are no charges, there are no convictions. So obviously we're we're going carefully here, but the allegations seem to point to something that

If it was an ordinary business we'd call insider trading, but it's a government. You're at the heart of government. You have government secrets on your desk every single day. You are trusted with them. And so it actually starts to look more like something akin to treason. I mean that sounds a ridiculous word to use in this day and age, but the sense you get is of a s almost pantomime villain at this point. Somebody who

Who is working against the best interests of their country and who would have got away with it if it hadn't been for those pesky kids, right? I mean, you know, not to go too Scooby Doo, but that is sort of

the place that we're ending up at this point. Well I mean just just to expand on that, again,'cause I think younger listeners of viewers won't remember, this was a time when, as you say, Emily, the government, the Brown government, was trying to exact some form of political retribution on the bank.

For whom there was enormous, righteous public anger at how they behaved in the run-up to the two thousand eight financial crisis. One of the ways in which the government tried to claw some of the money back that that us, we the taxpayers had put in and for which we are still to this day paying for those massive government bailouts, about seventy five billion pounds, was a bankers bonus tax, a bankers' bonus tax

Levy because despite all of that, they were still, for many people, incredibly getting paid bankers' bonuses. And we now know from these emails. that Mandelson was advising Epstein, who in turn appears to have be have been advising the US banking giant JP Morgan, to put pressure on his own Chancellor, Alistair Darling

To in Mandelson's words threaten him. And we've even overnight, you know, people have gone back, Alistair Darling is is no longer with us. He died in twenty twenty three. But in his memoir. He wrote to me. about how Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of the US banking giant JP Morgan, rang him, which is clearly partly at least what Mandelson is is suggesting.

And raised with him, this is a quote from Darling's book, he said, Mr. Diamond was very, very angry. He said that his bank bought a lot of UK debt. And he wondered if that was now. Such a good idea. So he did threaten him. I pointed out that they bought our debts because it was a good business deal for them. He went on to say that they were thinking of building a new office in London, but they had to reconsider that now. Now in the end

JP Morgan continued to buy government debt and they still built their new office. But literally we have from Alistair Darling the Horse's Mouth. JP Morgan went through on Mandelson's advice, albeit apparently vicariously expressed, you know, through Epstein, presumably, possibly. Epstein was changing the wording. in the advice that Mandelson was going to give to Obama. So in other words, he was trying to change what the British government said to the US government

about bankers' bonuses at a time of heightened sensitivity. But just to build on your your point about treachery, Emily, I mean let's imagine it didn't happen but Let's imagine for a moment that that JP Morgan had stopped buying UK government debt. I mean, this was at a time when the UK government was even the deficit was even bigger than it is now, partly because we had had to fund the bailouts for the bank. And here we have a situation where We've got the de facto deputy prime minister

advising, albeit through an intermediary, apparently reportedly, this particular bank to threaten the UK government to stop buying his own government's debt which could have caused a financial crisis. Honestly, like sometimes you know, we as journalists sort of try to

assure people not to be too conspiratorial. How can you but th this would make this would make, right, even a sort of Marxist a financier, sort of New York based financier who also happens to be a paedophile, ringing up the British Deputy Prime Minister, who in turn is advising him to phone his banker mates to advise him that unless the British government doesn't take away the bankers' bonus tax, we're gonna stop

buying debt. It would make never mind a Marxist conspiratorial, it would make QAnon blush. Yeah. I mean it it's got all the kind of ingredients of QAnon. Yeah. But it is actually centered

right in the middle of Ten Downing Street, which I don't think we had in the script. Peter Mandelson gave an interview about ten days ago, we think, to Katie Balls of The Times and they had clearly sort of paused before running it and on Sunday night when he resigned from the Labour Party, one assumes she must have called him up and sort of updated her copy. And some of the stuff that he's told her that's come out of this interview.

Again just shows this extraordinary dislocation between where he thinks we are at and where potentially we are at. he tried to explain, for example, the money that was given to his husband Renardo da Silva as a bursary, not realizing perhaps that most bursaries don't just go Sort of directly through email into somebody's bank account. They're not usually wired directly. I mean there's usually some criteria and process. Yeah, I'm not sure we saw that.

The idea that you'd then go back and go, Oh, this bursary, just call it alone. The Jeffrey Epstein Osteopathy Bursary Scholarship. We've Googled that one. Yeah, yeah, well I just kinda can't find the application process funnily enough. Yeah, I mean and this this interview, I mean, look, we actually said didn't we yesterday? Um I think I said that we wouldn't be hearing from Mandelson for a while. Well, I suppose it was a good twelve hour.

And uh already the reset, as he calls it, the rehabilitation tour has begun in earnest. As you say, Emily, most of the interview done on January the twenty-fifth, but with an update on Sunday. And what's very clear from this interview is there is and continues to be, as we have seen, a profound disconnect

Between how Mandelson sees this story and how the rest of the world, and certainly Westminster, is seeing this story. You might say a disconnect between reality and how Peter Mandelson is seeing this story. He says that there would be no point in his just crawling under a rock and going away because it wouldn't be proportionate. To try and get I think, you know, we're sat here like yesterday and today trying to understand the psychology of the man.

One of our number perhaps has a greater understanding of that psychology than either you or I, our own John Sopol, who is still uh in the Asia Pacific Bureau, manning that gamefully. Yeah. And he sent us his thoughts. So I've spoken to some of the people that have been closest to Peter Mandelson for years decades even. I've got to say the reaction is sadness, shock, fury, disgust. At the position that Peter Mandelson has got himself into.

And got others into. You know, one person said to me, I feel really sorry for Morgan McSweeney. I barely know the man. But look at where he is now, that he put his trust in Peter Mandelson, was assured there was nothing more to come out.

in terms of his relationship with Geoffrey Epstein, pushes for him to become the ambassador. And this person said to me, How did Peter Mandelson ever think he could become Britain's ambassador To Washington, when there was that sort of baggage that was about to explode, which has done so now, which has damaged the reputation of the Starmer government, let aside what it's done to Peter Mandelson himself.

He also says that the issue of the email that was sent to Gordon Brown that Mandelson is alleged to have forwarded to Epstein, that frankly, Mandelson wasn't doing that to make money. that Peter Mandelson was seeking the approval of look how well connected I am, look what I've just given you. I know everybody who matters and here's an email that shows what the government is thinking of doing. And of course it is that. which could now get Peter Mandelson into serious legal jeopardy.

But he's not listening to anybody and apparently all the people that used to be a sounding board for advice are either being ignored or cast aside. and Peter Mandelson is doing all of this by himself. Without really realizing that at just how powerless his position has become. Not in terms of reputation alone, but now in terms of legal exposure. There is something to be said about this whole rehabilitation attempt.

Which is a kind of mission creep that I noticed at the beginning of the year where he was popping up on broadcast interviews and he might do a few minutes on the Epstein relationship and sort of, yeah, I'm gonna confront that

And then the conversation would just swiftly turn and it would be, Well, w what do you think about Trump's plans in Greenland? What do you think about foreign policy? What do you think about the man himself? What about Trump and I think it is a big mistake to try and elide things when you've got somebody at the centre that seems still actually not to have answered.

The questions. And I remember being asked years ago by a sort of junior journalist who just secured an interview that she really wanted to do well and it was with a French political figure in the arts world and she said, But the trouble is, Emily, there are these kind of rape allegations. Should I

Should I do the rape allegations first and then it's meant to be about the arts stuff? Or should I do the art stuff first and and then talk about the rape allegations? Or how how would you do it? And I went away and I literally just had to sort of sit in a dark room and think. And I came back and I said You can't Pivot from talking about rape allegations to

to talking about like their philosophy or their art or the book they've just written. You can't do it before, you can't do it after. It doesn't work. And I think obviously we're not talking about rape allegations, so I should make that very clear. But in the Peter Madelson case either you're doing an accountability interview because you're trying to get to the bottom of what was happening or else frankly you're just ignoring it and asking him about Greenland. But the two

the two do not sit well together. It doesn't work and I think that is on us as the media, you know, to take the issue of the Epstein Files seriously enough, not to slip into that slightly lazy

Oh well, let's have your commentary on the Labour Party now. And and yeah, and I look um I think Mandelson as we're saying it from that interview clearly um i it feels very magazine y, which is a sort of slightly old thing because um, you know, there's sort of pictures of him in his kitchen and everything like that and

and so on. And clearly it's a very interesting, perhaps revealing sense of where he is at the moment. I'm not sure it's done him many favours, once again, which is perhaps a bit of a pattern of his recent interventions. But but there's there's so many threads to this that are unravelling almost minute by minute. I noticed some reporting just in the last few minutes from Steve Swimford, the political editor of the Times.

saying that he's been told that Lord Mandelson, when he was a government minister, used his private B T internet email address to correspond directly With the most senior people in government, including Gordon Brown. Everyone had initially thought he forwarded government emails to his BT account and then passed them on to Epstein. In fact, Two senior government sources have told him that

He was corresponding with ministers and officials using his BT internet account. The messages went directly to his BlackBerry and he sent them straight on to Epstein. The email address is now defunct. The Cabinet Office has no way of retrieving the messages on it. And that sounds like an absolute extraordinary Security buttons. Something that was serious enough for the head of the FBI, James Comey.

stop as it were an election in its tracks in twenty sixteen to talk about Hillary Clinton's email usage. And the point about that now is it it will inherent this this investigation the Cabinet Office had launched, that inherently limits the investigation

Extent of the investigations they can do. For example, the Cabinet Office has told today told police the emails in the Epstein cache show evidence that market sensitive information was being passed to Epstein. But without the Epstein files, and this is the crucial point, the Cabinet Office itself The UK government would have no record of it as a result of the way that Mandelson conducted

his email communications. So we are and again, yet another layer of weirdness to this story. We are finding out about what could be our own government, our own Prime Minister, you know, finding out about what could be One of the most remarkable corruption scandals As we say in the last fifty years, but we are only finding out about it. Indeed, we could only ever have found out about it as a result of the DOJ investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. Department of Justice.

In a moment we will be going further afield and looking at some of the other people that are mentioned in the Epstein Files and also answering some of your questions as to why there hasn't, there isn't more focus on Donald Trump at this point. Prime Minister. App or the LBC app. Leading Britain's conversation.

The news agents. So this might be a week where we keep bringing you sort of bombshell updates. And one came last night, courtesy of the Clintons, both Hillary and Bill. who have now agreed to testify before Congress. And why this is important is because there was quite a lot of pressure Put on particularly Bill Clinton, who appears many times, thousands of times, in these newly released Epstein files.

and is documented in many of the pictures at Epstein's side and who invited Epstein, we understand at least seventeen times when he was president to the White House. And as far as we understand, was a regular passenger on the private jet that Epstein owed, although didn't. There is no evidence he was actually on the island itself. But there has been a lot of pressure. from all parts of Congress in the US actually, on getting Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton to testify to Congress.

And for a long time the Clintons resisted because they said this is weaponization, this is Trump trying to change the story. This is just a sort of law fair where he's trying to put Democrats in the frame rather than

you know, answer the questions that come directly to his door. And actually I think there has been a growing chorus of Democrats who've said, you know what? It's really important that we have the moral high ground here that we don't say because they're our own, because they're Democrats

We don't want to hear from them. We do. And one of them was Jamie Raskin, friend of the news agents who's been on the podcast before, saying, Yeah, you know what, I really want to, I will subpoena them if they don't agree to testify.

And I think there was a growing chorus from Democrats saying this is the right thing to do. If we're going to ask Trump to testify, if we're going to ask Republicans to testify, then yes, we want the Clintons to be on that stand too. Yeah, although I mean it's worth saying I can well understand why they might want to talk to Bill Clinton. The Hillary Clinton. I think she doesn't have to do it in person.

politicization of it clearly does come in to some extent, which is that I mean politics always there in Washington, of course, but you know, apparently Hillary Clinton says that she's never she's never met even spoken at any point to Epstein, which perhaps also begs some interesting questions. But nonetheless, one of the questions that we've got from a a few

Listeners, viewers, is where Trump kind of sits in all of this and some puzzlement as to why it is, given that Trump does appear so many times in the Epstein Files, although we should just sort of caveat And preface everything by saying, of course, just appearing in the files certainly does not

imply or prove certainly it doesn't prove any guilt or impropriety. But it is true to say New York Times has identified more than fifty three hundred files containing more than thirty eight thousand references to President Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida,

and other related words and phases. That's just in the latest batch that we've seen, the few millions that we've seen released by the Justice Department. Obviously there has been a great deal of attention on Trump, not least because he initially appeared so reluctant to see these files published, and because it is certainly true that he had a close relationship with Epstein, certainly before the early two thousands.

I think it is really interesting to consider why it is that he's not a more prominent figure. Some of it is I think You mean more probably in the coverage. But you mean the coverage, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think, you know, it's a fair question. And I think there's loads of things going on with that. Some of that I think is kind of like boringly logistical. One of the reasons clearly someone like Mandelson is coming under such intense pressure is because there is this

lengthy extensive email chain between him and Epstein, even though Mandelson actually appears in far fewer overall files and references. Just easier to read. It's a paper trail. A pay per trail between him extraordinary kind of connection in terms of as we've said, like a stream of consciousness almost between the two men on occasion.

And Trump there isn't. There's no emails. He doesn't seem to email. There isn't a single file which includes a direct communication between Trump and Epstein. And indeed Few of the files even date back to the early two thousands, which is when they had their closest relationship. Most of the files contain

are are about a period where it appears that the relationship between Trump and Epstein no longer existed, or certainly no longer existed in the in the way that it did. It is true to say that Trump is one of about half a dozen prominent men about whom the FBI files in the documents include, quotes, salacious information. That's according to an email one FBI official wrote to a colleague last year.

Some of that information, some of the more stuff that's particularly sort of lurid online, contains tips submitted through the FBI's National Threat Operations Centre in West Virginia. Some of those tips do include accusations about Trump, very serious accusations. about Trump, but it's also true to say that that information has not been verified and basically

Not least because of the fact that Trump is highly litigious, as we know. It's true to say I think it's fair to say that uh a lot of media organisations will be more reluctant to air those accusations and air those things, partly because

The information itself is pretty unverifiable, but also because of Trump's own behaviour. Yeah. I mean what I'd say is this stuff takes time. There are three million different files. But Within some of the real stuff there is gonna be a lot of Stuff that is unprovable, that is unknown, that is kind of, you know, green ink if you like. What I would say is if you're kind of

Curious or you know, presumably some of you have started looking already, but if you want to just look at this stuff yourself, it's open to everyone. It is absolutely public. You just type in D O J and then you will find the Epstein Library comes up and you have to sign an age verification thing, which is not too complicated.

and everything is there for you. And then you will see how sort of bamboozling some of this stuff is because you will find articles you will find pictures, you will find whole pages with just black squares of redaction, you will find repetition, but you can start searching very, very specifically about dates, about people, about places.

about key words. So you can do all that search yourself and around the world there will be millions of reporters who are doing this and who are, I think, building up pictures about people, but they are not prepared to go out without having done the sort of background checks. And why have we talked about Mandelson so quickly?

Well, for a very good reason that the F T actually started their work on this six months ago. They had actually taken these allegations to Mandelson back in September when he stepped down, when he was fired.

as the UK ambassador and he denied them at the time and said it was absolute rubbish, unprovable, all the rest of it. And the Epstein Files has given them the backup, the email evidence to clearly publish. So I think that's where we are at the moment. We're in a space where There are quite a few characters and I you know, I was up, full disclosure, until about two, two thirty, and we were just reading through all this stuff. And as you say, the fact that you appear in the files does not

implicate you does not mean guilt. A lot of the files are really boring. I mean there's a little salacious if it's there are but there are a lot of witness testaments that have been given to the FBI by victims, one of whom is clearly Virginia Dufrey. The story that she tells them tallies with the memoir that she published in the book and what we've known about her since an interviews.

But there are other people whose names have been redacted and there are other names mentioned and there are people who are highly litigious who have already firmly denied that they were involved in any

sexual activity. And I guess one of the questions is, does anything happen as a result? of these files, of these of these names now being written down and publicly available and you can actually read documents, read testaments, read court orders. Yeah and just on the Trump stuff as well, I mean there is also a political angle to all this which we should uh remember. It doesn't necessarily

apply causality, but it is important context, which is that Look, what's one of the reasons you've already alluded to it, Emily, what's one of the reasons that the Clintons have have given in to this pressure is because, you know, they've been under this relentless, relentless Pressure initially from the Oversight Committee, which is Republican controlled, because Congress is or the House is just about. Yes, the Democrats have also added to that.

clamour as well. But ultimately there is it is worth noting, of course, the DOJ is controlled by Trump. It's the Trump administration, and they're the ones who are in control of which documents have been released and what documents. Again, I'm not saying that they are withholding anything, but it is important context. And it is also true to say, I think, that it seems unlikely

that the Republicans on that committee would ever exert the sort of pressure on Donald Trump. Let's imagine that they would like to hear from him about his relationship with Epstein. They're not gonna do that. And the Democrats I think have a Lower threshold for political embarrassment on this stuff. than I think the Republicans do. And it's worth noting as well that when the Democrats were

pursuing a similar line of inquiry back in twenty twenty two and they wanted to talk to Trump about some of these things. What did Trump do? He threatened to even though they put him under subpoena, they thre he threatened to sue the committee and they dropped it. So, you know, I think that the way that you interact with this stuff and the politics of Washington is also important if you want to think about exactly why it is that Trump is

being treated a little differently by comparison to others. I mean look, Todd Blanche, who we discussed yesterday, the deputy uh attorney general was on Fox News and he was asked very clearly if he was going to actually pursue any further investigations. That's just Hear his response.

I'll never say no. And we will always investigate any evidence of misconduct. But as you know, it is not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein. And and so as horrible as it's not a crime to email with Mr. Epstein and and Some of these men may have done horrible things and and if we have evidence that allows us to prosecute them, you better believe we will. But it's also the kind of thing that that the American people that need to

Understood. On the face of it, obviously he's right, it's not a crime to party or send an email. But does that sound like a man who has just uncovered a huge amount of testimony of wrongdoing and is forensically going after people in it. I it I have to say it doesn't to me. It doesn't to me at all. And To bring in another character who is actually in Trump's cabinet right now, who just last October talked about

How gross he found Epstein. How he had walked away in 2005 because he realized what kind of a man Epstein was. This is Howard Lutnick. saying he saw the light and he and his wife just left. He told a podcast this just six months ago. Now my wife is standing here. So she looks at me and I look at her and we say. I'm sorry. We have to go. And we left. And in the six or eight steps it takes to get from his house to my house, my wife and I decided that I will never.

Be in the room with that disgusting person ever again. So I was never in the room with him socially. For business. Or f even philanthropy. If that guy was there, I wasn't going. So that was Howard Lutnick, Trump's commerce secretary, a key senior member of his cabinet now. Telling a podcast last autumn that he never ever wanted to see Epstein again and that once he'd left his house in two thousand and five he and his wife would never be back.

But the Epstein files suggest something slightly different because there is an email written by his wife, Friday the twenty first of december twenty twelve. This is Alison Lutnick. We're looking forward to visiting you. We'll be coming from Canille Bay in the morning. We're a crowd, two families each with four kids. Please advise on timing. We'd love to join you for lunch. We're travelling on a yacht called Excellence.

So clearly, less than a decade after they decided that Epstein was so gross they never wanted to step foot in his house or in his company, they were back having lunch. Right, we will be back in just a moment.

The news agents. It might be tempting to think that there is nothing else going on in world politics apart from the concepts of the Epstein files. But you might recall last week we did an episode about just a little thing, how Donald Trump might be considering overturning American democracy. Well the good news is is that President Trump has called for American elections

to quote be nationalized. Just listen to this. And they vote illegally. And the you know amazing that the Republicans aren't tougher on it. The Republicans should say we want to take over we should take over the voting the voting and at least Many, fifteen places. The Republicans ought to nationalize the voting. With the fluidity of an angel delight, Dan Bongino has just gone from being former director of the FBI to being a podcast host. Hey, don't knock it.

Maybe it will be the new head of the FBI. I've put in my resume. So Trump has appeared on Dan Bongino's podcast to call for the nationalisation of elections by the Republican Party. And It's just good, isn't it? When you think that you're sitting there losing the plot. As we did for a moment last week going Not for the first time. Yeah, but he's not really gonna make the election. No, he's not really gonna no, he's not I mean just because he's

Taking ballots away from Georgia just because he's actually taking American votes away from Georgia. He's not really thinking of bringing the elections. Well, sometimes he just says. Things out loud, and it's good to know what's on his mind. That old chestnut. Which of course would be completely unconstitutional, but it almost seems trite to make that point. We've just had a lot of grief and grimness.

So we'll leave it on that note. Bye for now. Bye bye. This has been a Global Player original production.