September 12, 2025 • 51 mins
CNN’s David Axelrod parses the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The New York Times' David Enrich examines his blockbuster report about JPMorgan Chase Co.'s ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
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
(01:17):
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
(01:37):
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
(01:58):
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
(02:19):
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
(02:41):
especially when you don't know any of the facts of the.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
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
(03:12):
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
(03:35):
was not great. But the suspected shooter not trans, not LGBTQ, Somalia.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
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
(04:01):
and just invading a vape shop.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Oh, I hate vaping, and we have.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
If I never smell a bubblegum flavored smoke again for
the rest of my life, I will be much much,
much happier.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
I've never smelled bubble gum flavored a babe.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Anyway, go on I think one of the things that
this shows though, is that pushing back against Trump makes
them chicken out.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
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
(06:26):
she could definitely take a lot of sort of this
is how we need our governors to behave.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Yeah, but Trump is sitting in the National Guard to
a city which is Memphis, and he says it's over
the crime rate.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
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.
(07:02):
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
(07:23):
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
(07:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Speaking of second order effects, one of the things that
chaos is not good for is the economy.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Trump's ice just wrecked a whole bunch of.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
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
(08:47):
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.
(09:08):
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
(09:33):
is the chief political analyst for CNN and the author
of Believer, My Forty Years in Politics. Welcome David Axelrod
to FAT Politics.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
I wonder if we could start by talking about Spencer
Cox's really I thought excellent Sea. So they caught the Charlie.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
The suspect aspect.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yes, they've arrested suspect and Governor Cox, the governor of Utah,
was making a speech.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
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
(10:24):
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
(10:47):
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
(11:08):
was why that was so important.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:25):
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
(11:46):
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.
(12:10):
So it really did feel that way.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
We did.
Speaker 5 (12:13):
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,
(12:36):
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,
(12:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
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,
(13:41):
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
(14:01):
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.
Speaker 5 (14:22):
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
(14:43):
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.
(15:06):
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
(15:29):
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.
(15:51):
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
(16:12):
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
(16:33):
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
(16:54):
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
(17:15):
be a struggle.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
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
(17:38):
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
(17:58):
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.
(18:20):
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.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
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
(18:54):
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
(19:19):
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.
(19:41):
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
(20:04):
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.
(20:28):
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
(20:49):
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
(21:10):
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.
(21:33):
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
(21:59):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:21):
It's more.
Speaker 5 (22:22):
It's deeper and more intense for the party to become
the party it needs to be.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
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
(22:47):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
So you think that's appealing.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Well, I'm asking you, is that what you're talking about?
Speaker 5 (23:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
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.
Speaker 5 (23:31):
But yes, well maybe someone else is shocking them and
he's farming.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Them, and then he would be an elitist. But I mean,
is that the answer to that question.
Speaker 5 (23:39):
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
(23:59):
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,
(24:22):
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
(24:42):
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
(25:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
I'm sure.
Speaker 5 (25:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
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,
(26:04):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:25):
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
(26:47):
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
(27:10):
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
(27:30):
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
(27:52):
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,
(28:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
How much do you think that Obama being a sort
of singular like I have never seen an orator like Obama.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
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
(29:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
From the Washington Post.
Speaker 5 (29:14):
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.
(29:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
But it's true because he was an Illinois state senator.
Speaker 5 (29:59):
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
(30:20):
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
(30:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
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.
Speaker 5 (31:03):
Yeah, thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
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.
Speaker 6 (31:15):
Politics, David, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
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
(31:40):
our discourse and is expensive and important.
Speaker 7 (31:43):
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.
Speaker 6 (31:56):
But one of the things that kept coming.
Speaker 7 (31:58):
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.
(32:19):
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
(32:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
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?
Speaker 6 (33:23):
Right?
Speaker 1 (33:24):
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.
Speaker 7 (33:40):
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
(34:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
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.
Speaker 7 (34:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
But it's very crazy.
Speaker 6 (34:41):
Yeah, it's crazy. It's a huge amount of money.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
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.
Speaker 7 (34:49):
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
(35:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Are there any people with those wires or countries that
stand out to you?
Speaker 7 (35:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
You would think that would ring some bells.
Speaker 6 (35:57):
Yeah, and frankly it did ring bells within JP Morgan.
Speaker 7 (36:00):
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
(36:20):
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.
Speaker 6 (36:30):
Within the bank.
Speaker 7 (36:31):
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
(36:53):
want to be thinking about. And the bank thought about
it and made the decision to keep doing business with them.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
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,
(37:19):
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.
Speaker 7 (37:29):
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
(37:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
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
(38:30):
seeing in the money side that you think might be
interesting in that vein?
Speaker 7 (38:36):
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
(38:58):
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.
Speaker 6 (39:11):
And the public.
Speaker 7 (39:12):
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
(39:34):
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.
Speaker 6 (39:54):
So we will see.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
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
(40:18):
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.
Speaker 7 (40:32):
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
(40:54):
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
(41:15):
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
(41:36):
on this. Now it's a little bit they're not dis positive,
and it's.
Speaker 6 (41:41):
A little hard to figure out who's telling the truth here.
Speaker 7 (41:43):
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
(42:05):
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.
Speaker 6 (42:16):
Very hard to believe or very damning about his leadership.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
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?
Speaker 6 (42:34):
Well?
Speaker 7 (42:34):
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
(42:55):
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
(43:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
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?
Speaker 7 (43:42):
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
(44:05):
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.
Speaker 6 (44:22):
So again Diamond denies that also under oath. So I
don't know. I mean, there is certainly.
Speaker 7 (44:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
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.
Speaker 7 (44:59):
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
(45:22):
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
(45:43):
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,
(46:05):
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
(46:26):
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.
Speaker 6 (46:35):
Very heavily, is going to be held up to a microscope.
Speaker 7 (46:38):
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
(47:00):
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
(47:20):
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.
Speaker 6 (47:28):
As a consumer of the news.
Speaker 7 (47:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
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,
(48:11):
are people I'm just curious.
Speaker 6 (48:13):
Yeah, they are.
Speaker 7 (48:14):
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
(48:35):
big deal. And look, to be clear, I don't think
JP Morgan understood the full scope of what Epstein was
doing at.
Speaker 6 (48:40):
The time that they were turning a blind eye.
Speaker 7 (48:42):
They had every reason to know that he was doing
really suspicious stuff, and he had admitted doing really bad stuff.
Speaker 6 (48:47):
But I don't think that picture right now. They're not psychic.
Speaker 7 (48:50):
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
(49:12):
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
(49:33):
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
(49:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
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.
Speaker 6 (50:17):
Thanks Molly, I appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (50:22):
No more perfectly.
Speaker 3 (50:26):
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.
Speaker 4 (50:37):
What are you seeing here.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
John Thune, head of the Senate, most hand man in America.
Speaker 4 (50:43):
Seven eleven, hot dog of a look.
Speaker 1 (50:44):
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
(51:06):
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.
(51:30):
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.
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
(00:26):
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.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:55):
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
(01:17):
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
(01:37):
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
(01:58):
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
(02:19):
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
(02:41):
especially when you don't know any of the facts of the.
Speaker 3 (02:43):
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.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
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
(03:12):
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
(03:35):
was not great. But the suspected shooter not trans, not LGBTQ, Somalia.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
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
(04:01):
and just invading a vape shop.
Speaker 1 (04:05):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:12):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:29):
Oh, I hate vaping, and we have.
Speaker 1 (04:31):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
If I never smell a bubblegum flavored smoke again for
the rest of my life, I will be much much,
much happier.
Speaker 1 (04:48):
I've never smelled bubble gum flavored a babe.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Anyway, go on I think one of the things that
this shows though, is that pushing back against Trump makes
them chicken out.
Speaker 1 (04:58):
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
(05:19):
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
(05:41):
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.
Speaker 3 (05:56):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
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
(06:26):
she could definitely take a lot of sort of this
is how we need our governors to behave.
Speaker 3 (06:32):
Yeah, but Trump is sitting in the National Guard to
a city which is Memphis, and he says it's over
the crime rate.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
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.
(07:02):
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
(07:23):
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
(07:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Speaking of second order effects, one of the things that
chaos is not good for is the economy.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
Trump's ice just wrecked a whole bunch of.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
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.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
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
(08:47):
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.
(09:08):
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
(09:33):
is the chief political analyst for CNN and the author
of Believer, My Forty Years in Politics. Welcome David Axelrod
to FAT Politics.
Speaker 4 (09:43):
Thanks.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
I wonder if we could start by talking about Spencer
Cox's really I thought excellent Sea. So they caught the Charlie.
Speaker 5 (09:53):
The suspect aspect.
Speaker 1 (09:57):
Yes, they've arrested suspect and Governor Cox, the governor of Utah,
was making a speech.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
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
(10:24):
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
(10:47):
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
(11:08):
was why that was so important.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
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.
Speaker 5 (11:25):
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
(11:46):
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.
(12:10):
So it really did feel that way.
Speaker 4 (12:12):
We did.
Speaker 5 (12:13):
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,
(12:36):
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,
(12:59):
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.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
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,
(13:41):
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
(14:01):
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.
Speaker 5 (14:22):
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
(14:43):
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.
(15:06):
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
(15:29):
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.
(15:51):
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
(16:12):
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
(16:33):
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
(16:54):
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
(17:15):
be a struggle.
Speaker 1 (17:16):
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
(17:38):
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
(17:58):
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.
(18:20):
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.
Speaker 5 (18:33):
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
(18:54):
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
(19:19):
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.
(19:41):
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
(20:04):
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.
(20:28):
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
(20:49):
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
(21:10):
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.
(21:33):
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
(21:59):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:21):
It's more.
Speaker 5 (22:22):
It's deeper and more intense for the party to become
the party it needs to be.
Speaker 1 (22:27):
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
(22:47):
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.
Speaker 4 (23:02):
So you think that's appealing.
Speaker 1 (23:04):
Well, I'm asking you, is that what you're talking about?
Speaker 5 (23:06):
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.
Speaker 1 (23:21):
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.
Speaker 5 (23:31):
But yes, well maybe someone else is shocking them and
he's farming.
Speaker 1 (23:34):
Them, and then he would be an elitist. But I mean,
is that the answer to that question.
Speaker 5 (23:39):
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
(23:59):
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,
(24:22):
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
(24:42):
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
(25:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:18):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:32):
I'm sure.
Speaker 5 (25:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (25:39):
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,
(26:04):
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.
Speaker 5 (26:25):
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
(26:47):
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
(27:10):
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
(27:30):
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
(27:52):
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,
(28:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
How much do you think that Obama being a sort
of singular like I have never seen an orator like Obama.
Speaker 5 (28:38):
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
(29:02):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:12):
From the Washington Post.
Speaker 5 (29:14):
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.
(29:36):
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.
Speaker 1 (29:55):
But it's true because he was an Illinois state senator.
Speaker 5 (29:59):
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
(30:20):
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
(30:42):
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.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
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.
Speaker 5 (31:03):
Yeah, thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 1 (31:07):
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.
Speaker 6 (31:15):
Politics, David, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (31:18):
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
(31:40):
our discourse and is expensive and important.
Speaker 7 (31:43):
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.
Speaker 6 (31:56):
But one of the things that kept coming.
Speaker 7 (31:58):
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.
(32:19):
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
(32:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
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?
Speaker 6 (33:23):
Right?
Speaker 1 (33:24):
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.
Speaker 7 (33:40):
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
(34:03):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:20):
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.
Speaker 7 (34:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:39):
But it's very crazy.
Speaker 6 (34:41):
Yeah, it's crazy. It's a huge amount of money.
Speaker 1 (34:43):
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.
Speaker 7 (34:49):
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
(35:11):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:27):
Are there any people with those wires or countries that
stand out to you?
Speaker 7 (35:32):
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.
Speaker 1 (35:55):
You would think that would ring some bells.
Speaker 6 (35:57):
Yeah, and frankly it did ring bells within JP Morgan.
Speaker 7 (36:00):
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
(36:20):
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.
Speaker 6 (36:30):
Within the bank.
Speaker 7 (36:31):
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
(36:53):
want to be thinking about. And the bank thought about
it and made the decision to keep doing business with them.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
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,
(37:19):
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.
Speaker 7 (37:29):
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
(37:51):
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.
Speaker 1 (38:06):
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
(38:30):
seeing in the money side that you think might be
interesting in that vein?
Speaker 7 (38:36):
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
(38:58):
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.
Speaker 6 (39:11):
And the public.
Speaker 7 (39:12):
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
(39:34):
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.
Speaker 6 (39:54):
So we will see.
Speaker 1 (39:55):
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
(40:18):
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.
Speaker 7 (40:32):
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
(40:54):
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
(41:15):
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
(41:36):
on this. Now it's a little bit they're not dis positive,
and it's.
Speaker 6 (41:41):
A little hard to figure out who's telling the truth here.
Speaker 7 (41:43):
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
(42:05):
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.
Speaker 6 (42:16):
Very hard to believe or very damning about his leadership.
Speaker 1 (42:20):
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?
Speaker 6 (42:34):
Well?
Speaker 7 (42:34):
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
(42:55):
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
(43:18):
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.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
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?
Speaker 7 (43:42):
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
(44:05):
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.
Speaker 6 (44:22):
So again Diamond denies that also under oath. So I
don't know. I mean, there is certainly.
Speaker 7 (44:27):
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.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
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.
Speaker 7 (44:59):
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
(45:22):
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
(45:43):
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,
(46:05):
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
(46:26):
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.
Speaker 6 (46:35):
Very heavily, is going to be held up to a microscope.
Speaker 7 (46:38):
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
(47:00):
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
(47:20):
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.
Speaker 6 (47:28):
As a consumer of the news.
Speaker 7 (47:29):
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.
Speaker 1 (47:48):
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,
(48:11):
are people I'm just curious.
Speaker 6 (48:13):
Yeah, they are.
Speaker 7 (48:14):
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
(48:35):
big deal. And look, to be clear, I don't think
JP Morgan understood the full scope of what Epstein was
doing at.
Speaker 6 (48:40):
The time that they were turning a blind eye.
Speaker 7 (48:42):
They had every reason to know that he was doing
really suspicious stuff, and he had admitted doing really bad stuff.
Speaker 6 (48:47):
But I don't think that picture right now. They're not psychic.
Speaker 7 (48:50):
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
(49:12):
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
(49:33):
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
(49:55):
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.
Speaker 1 (50:03):
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.
Speaker 6 (50:17):
Thanks Molly, I appreciate it.
Speaker 4 (50:22):
No more perfectly.
Speaker 3 (50:26):
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.
Speaker 4 (50:37):
What are you seeing here.
Speaker 1 (50:38):
John Thune, head of the Senate, most hand man in America.
Speaker 4 (50:43):
Seven eleven, hot dog of a look.
Speaker 1 (50:44):
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
(51:06):
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.
(51:30):
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.
Host
Molly Jong-Fast
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