So, uh, tell us about why Blanche wound up meeting with the survivors in the first place.

Well, he didn't want to.

He was forced to.

This is part of confirmation politics.

He has no, he has no regard for them.

He has no interest in hearing from them or speaking to him.

His interest was, according to reporting in Regime Change, The New York Times, um, a book by New York Times reporters, he suggested that they offer a pardon to Glenn Maxwell in exchange for clearing President Trump.

And, uh, so you talked to the survivors, uh, that met with him and, and so tell me, uh, their sense of frustration, if that's what they felt, and then we'll talk about what's gonna happen after that.

Did you get the sense in any of the speeches you heard or any of the either speakers or regular people you spoke to that there is any lingering interest whatsoever in looking into this? Or are the people that would attend an event like this as ready to move on from it as like Donald Trump?

Well, that is exactly why I showed up there and I was with Epstein survivors, was because I wanted to understand if the Republican base had moved on from this story.

I wanted to understand the cognitive dissonance between supporting President Trump and also wanting the Epstein files to be, uh, revealed.

I wanted to understand where they stood, and if that's still an issue and a platform for someone like JD Vance, who at one time actually cared about this, if he really is gonna run in the future.

This is something I personally can't get my head around.

I mean, I just had Nancy Mace on my show and I asked her the same thing, "You're a sexual assault survivor.

You voted for the Epstein files.

I'd really, really n- wanna know what happened." So do you get that sense from anyone in the Republican Party outside of the Trump administration, and then also for the Democratic Party?

Yeah

... and you're probably not just super happy right now.

I, I, my family is, they're very conservative.

And I went home and, um, after, around Easter, after the, obviously we, we, we went into I- Iran, I saw my brother, who's younger than me, he's about 10 years younger than me.

He's got a family.

He's got kids.

He's got a job.

... is bad in terms of things that we can hold our breath for.

Yeah

... and you're probably not just super happy right now.

I, I, my family is, they're very conservative.

And I went home and, um, after, around Easter, after the, obviously we, we, we went into I- Iran, I saw my brother, who's younger than me, he's about 10 years younger than me.

He's got a family, he's got kids, he's got a job.

He lives, you know, I don't want to say where he lives because he'll kill me.

But, um, you know, then they live in a, in a red state.

[laughs]

Yeah

...

the ballroom.

He shows them all the things he's working on.

So he's clearly just thinking about his legacy, and he's, you know, a real estate developer.

What can he leave behind? And it just shows you how checked out he is.

And, and according to Mark, Mark has told me this for months, and which I didn't wanna believe him, but now I am actually starting to believe him, is that he's just having a great time.

Yes.

Tara, as someone who regularly covers the president, I'm wondering what, if anything, stands out to you about this interview?

interview?Well, they seem to be back to exactly where they were before.

You s- heard the last word, he said, "Boss." He's already working for him, and he's got h- another platform, WABC, in addition to his Substack following.

He has a podcast.

Um, he has a...

He has media, and that's always been important to President Trump.

But yeah, like you mentioned, 14 months ago in June, Michael Cohen reached out to me because he saw that I called the president, um, doing reporting, and he asked me for his number.

Yeah, I mean-

I don't know about you guys, but I just hate having to go to the dry cleaner.

It's expensive.

It's annoying.

You have to remember to pick up your stuff, and I just wish you could easily wash your silk.

I w- love wearing silk and linen in the heat in the summer, and that is why I bought another 100% washable silk slip dress from Quint.

This time, the Mocha Midi Dot.

Right

... about, about this man.

[laughs]

[laughs] He's...

Yeah, he's running to the right of Trump.

He's essentially doing the things that Trump promised.

I mean, that's what he's offering in this 10-point plan, that Trump is not doing.

And I just think that, I know your former guest JD Vance said-

Yes

... he's gonna be, it's, he's gonna be dragged down by Trump.

He wants to do it with the AI companies.

The free market is dead.

They have decided that the government wants to control 30 different companies.

And Intel alone, which was a loser because of Nvidia, they have, they basically own 9.9% of that company, and that's a lot.

And President Trump, after they invested in this company, he then went on to buy stocks in Nvidia, which shot up 200%.

Okay? So he actually made a ton of money on this.

His government created a floor on a stock that he owns.

He says he's not, and he says, "I'm a capitalist."

So you talked to the survivors after they, they met with Todd Blanche.

Yeah, and, and this is long overdue.

It's decades overdue, frankly.

They've been wanting to meet with someone at the highest levels of government because for so long they've been dismissed, and what they got came up very short.

It was a 90-minute meeting deep inside the Department of Justice.

There were about seven, uh, survivors there, including Virginia Giuffre's, uh, brother and sister-in-law, and they wanted to know what would happen next, and Todd Blanche gave them very little.

In fact, he sort of said, "Go back to square one Go back to the FBI.

What does he want?

Mm

...

he, he's never been that type of person.

But, you know, it's interesting that President Trump would follow the lead of Israel, that they said to Trump, "This is easy.

The Shah is, is weakened right now.

He just had an uprising." But if anything, they misinterpreted it.

First of all, this is a country of 90 million people.

Hmm.

No way around that

... very prominent Democrats, and not all of it has been revealed yet by the way.

So I do think Democrats need to be careful, um, when they try to pin this.

President Trump was a Democrat.

That is partially why he was friends [laughs] with Epstein, and the fact that they both loved women, as Trump said in his own wor- in his own words, but he had said Epstein liked them on the younger side.

Um, so this is, uh, uh, I, I...

You know, the Epstein class, I, I s- was saying back in 2019 when I started reporting on Jeffrey Epstein alongside Virginia Giuffre and with Julie K.

Mm.

Oh, please.

Um, and he's going before the house, uh, I mean, he's going before the House Oversight Committee to talk about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, a guy who he paid I believe it was like $300 million.

Yeah, $300 million for state and tax planning.

But then the New York Times did an incredible deep dive to figure out like he was actually just paying off women that he, he had met through Epstein, and multiple women have accused him of sexual abuse in civil suits that were dropped or settled.

Who knows what happened? Um, he denies all of it.

But like this is a man who the FBI has identified in the Epstein files as a potential co-conspirator-

Thanks for tuning in.

[laughs] Bye.

... a muscular vision of presidential power, but what do you make of this claim in this moment?

Uh, clearly he doesn't understand his role as a civil servant, right? And I think if anything, we saw the extent of his power with the war on Iran, and the fact that he was not able to get the outcome that he would've wanted.

I mean, 2 of the 14 points in that deal are actually in favor of the United States, and they barely are.

Um, he's clearly in legacy mode right now.

He's not concerned about his own party.

He doesn't really care what happens in the midterms, even though there will- there's a threat of impeachment, I guess another impeachment.

So to him, he probably just thinks it's, um, not a real, uh, exercise in holding his power to account because the last few have been unsuccessful.

Should we be worried about the president comparing himself to these figures and asserting this very muscular vision of executive power?

Right

... hopefully those, uh, survivors are able to actually testify and get that in the record and be, and have, be safe with immunity and actually speak about what happened to them.

But again, there has to be the pl- political will for that, and so far there really isn't much of it.

And, you know, you see the assistants come in, like Leslie Groff and Sarah Kellen.

You see Bill Gates, who's obviously a boogeyman for the left, uh, for the right.

Um, and honestly, I mean, his, his testimony was interesting.

I mean, Leslie Groff also said she saw nothing after two decades of working for Trump as a woman in her 30s and 40s, and literally emails of her booking women.

Yeah.

And of course what we don't know is whether there's more drip, drip, drip on the way.

Yeah.

And Charlie, I was...

I don't wanna use the word amused, but there's this, this Facebook group called Are We Dating the Same Guy, okay? My cousin told me about this.

She's about a year older than me, and she loves this site.

She's single in New York City, and this and that.

So, um, she-We'll go on it.

This week, he lashed out at Kaitlan Collins of CNN, who asked him about the slush fund, and I know you have some thoughts about that.

Yeah

... because they are willing to show their faces.

They have been victims of crimes, like really painful crimes.

Sex crimes are very, very, very difficult to process, and most people don't wanna bear testimony to it.

But these women have been so incredibly brave.

They've been so incredibly willing to speak about their stories.

They are the witnesses to these crimes.

Yeah

Yeah

... because they are willing to show their faces.

They have been victims of crimes, like really painful crimes.

Sex crimes are very, very, very difficult to process, and most people don't wanna bear testimony to it, but these women have been so incredibly brave.

They've been so incredibly willing to speak about their stories.

They are the witnesses to these crimes.

They are the evidence.

Yeah

Yeah.

In fact, um, and I wasn't being, like, aggressive at all.

I think I just, you know, I introduced myself as a journalist.

I started with a simple conflict of interest question about how Jay Clayton, who is the US attorney in the Southern District of New York in charge of handing over much of the Epstein files and in future prosecutions, 'cause remember President Trump said you have to go after Democrats in this, uh, Em- Epstein investigation, how he could be seen as someone who could reliably lead an independent investigation when Leon Black, who in an FBI presentation was named as a potential co-conspirator and was accused by three women of assault in connection to Jeffrey Epstein, um, although, you know, those cases, some of them were settled or dropped, uh, how this man who, you know, lost his job at the firm he founded, Apollo, for giving Jeffrey Epstein $150 million for estate planning.

Yeah

... um, so with this story about John Kerry, I first came across John Kerry and the fact that he was in Epstein's orbit before he ran for president through Virginia Giuffre, who I knew very well.

We worked on a podcast together.

We traveled around the country together looking for vic- uh, witnesses to her crimes.

You gotta read this.

You can see it for yourself.

You can read it.

You can see the documents.

You can see the emails.

There's a lot.

I- it was not, I've looked through thousands of pages.

It w- the report was holding hands with another man in a hotel room when this happened.

So, uh, tell us about John Kerry and Jeffrey Epstein's connections.

Well, it's something that I learned about actually in 2019 through Virginia Giuffre.

She is one of the most prominent survivors of Jeffrey Epstein.

Uh, as you may know, she has accused Prince Andrew of sexual abuse, Senator George Mitchell, Governor Bill Richardson, Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel.

Um, a, a whole number of men.

Um, the list is shocking, frankly.

And she told me that while she was basically enslaved by Jeffrey Epstein, she was a, a, m- a minor and she was in his sex trafficking operation, that she encountered...

Like, that's not interesting? Like-

What is the reporting on this? What's going on?

Yeah, so I spent about 10 months looking into all of the files.

Obviously, we got more files when they released, um, the Epstein, the full...

Well, not the full, but some of the Epstein files.

And what you can see is, you know, a relationship between Jeffrey Epstein and John Kerry.

I remember back in 2019 when I was working with Virginia Giuffre, trying to find witnesses, uh, to corroborate her story.

We traveled all around the country.

Mm

What, what do you, uh, feel about this? Would it have been a good thing for them to have spoken out, or should they take legal advice and just honor that?

You know, I've heard mixed things.

I think, you know, the Epstein survivors are not being advised by the same lawyers, obviously, and some of them would have liked to have met with the King, even if it was, like, a simple handshake to observe, to observe them, because many of them were in, on the Capitol.

Um, they were in the Capitol when he was giving his address to Congress.

But I think what this entire spectacle that we saw in Washington was about when King Charles came to town, um, without obviously stating the elephant in the room, that his brother is under investigation right now, that he's been accused by middle-class American girls of sexual abuse.

You know, it's created a sort of sense that there is elite normalization going on right now around the Epstein files and the Epstein case, and that's what we've seen all along.

Um, you know, you haveAn attendance at a state dinner, you have this garden party where you're having members of both sides, um, just fetting him, elite media, you know, enjoying s- being around the King.

Why is that?

Yeah

... it's...

And so, you know, he's been saying that for a while, that the Epstein files prove that he's exonerated.

I think the Epstein files have just raised more questions rather than anything else because you see that so much of this has not really been followed up with.

We know that 2.5 million files are still in the hands of the FBI, and we know that they spent m- a whole month trying to scrub his name from the files back in the spring to comply with a, a Bloomberg, uh, freedom of information request.

And apparently he still had this-

... you will never forget that.

You will ne- for- forget that line.

Yeah

... it's...

And so, you know, he's been saying that for a while, that the Epstein files prove that he's exonerated.

I think the Epstein files have just raised more questions rather than anything else because you see that so much of this has not really been followed up with.

We know that 2.5 million files are still in the hands of the FBI, and we know that they spent m- a whole month trying to scrub his name from the files back in the spring to comply with a, a Bloomberg, uh, Freedom of Information request.

Right.

She wasn't in there trying to get into a confrontation with anyone.

He was just targeting her, um, clearly from what you've told me because Julie's just, she's not like that.