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--:-- Georgia Howe: Good morning, I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Sunday, January 7th, and this is Morning Wire.
--:-- John Bickley: Joining us now is Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham. So Megan, one of the most noteworthy things about the release of these latest documents is not necessarily the new names, but what many experts say is missing and exactly why some of the information that we'd hope to see has not been released.
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, I think that's very fair to say, and it's something that I did hear from a number of people who have been following the Epstein case very closely for years.
--:-- John Bickley: The documents do provide more details about people we already knew were associated with Epstein. One victim, for instance, told investigators that Epstein told her Bill Clinton, and I'm quoting, liked them young.
--:-- Megan Basham: And in another email released on Thursday, a victim alleges that Clinton threatened the magazine Vanity Fair not to write any articles about his, quote, good friend Epstein that might deal with those illegal activities.
--:-- John Bickley: And as you said, there were a few new names like magician David Copperfield, the late Stephen Hawking and Thomas Pritzker, who is the billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune and, in fact, cousin to Illinois' Democratic governor.
--:-- Megan Basham: But I'd say there were few new avenues of information. So Lisa Bryant is a filmmaker who produced two different documentary series on Epstein for Netflix. She told me that she's not surprised and that these documents were not the bombshell that she was hoping for.
--:-- Georgia Howe: Lisa Bryant told you that she's not surprised and that these documents were not the bombshell that she was hoping for.
--:-- Megan Basham: Yeah, I don't think there's going to be any big smoking gun that's going to put, you know, somebody famous behind bars. You know, sadly, I don't think it's going to lead to prosecutions.
--:-- John Bickley: And a number of experts told me that they don't believe this lack of information is an accident. They said that there is explosive information to be had about Epstein, including just who his clients were. But the case has been carefully handled so that powerful people won't face charges.
--:-- Megan Basham: So Mike Cernovich is the political pundit and attorney who fought to bring Epstein's crimes to light in the first place. In 2015, Virginia Giuffre sued Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, for helping him traffic her as a minor. But those court records were under seal.
--:-- John Bickley: So what he did was to file a motion to unseal that evidence and those depositions. And he told me that he was shocked when he saw the first records and just how much had been redacted from them.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: The way that this case should have went down was the law is very clear. If you file a lawsuit in federal court, everything other than social security numbers, credit card information, and other personally identifying information has to be filed publicly. You're using the public courts. This is not controversial.
--:-- John Bickley: But it took years and hundreds of thousands of dollars by me personally. And then the Miami Herald had joined in later on as well. And I anticipate that they spent at least a million dollars, and they may have spent millions of dollars to obtain these records because they're a bunch of John Does, and they were all rich, as we saw from the names that were being let out yesterday.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: They would all file, again, anonymously, John Doe amicus briefs saying everything has to remain private because this could be embarrassing information about me. When a year later, the Miami Herald took an interest and filed for those same records, other outlets at last begin to pick up the story.
--:-- John Bickley: So a lot of this information came from Jufri's civil suit against Maxwell. Why isn't there more information about the actual crimes in the charges against Epstein?
--:-- Mike Cernovich: Well, you know, a big part of that is because of who arrested Epstein and just what he was charged with. So the case that he was awaiting trial on when he died in prison in 2019 was brought by the Southern District of New York.
--:-- John Bickley: And Cernovich believes that Epstein was arrested quietly and specifically undercharged so that the powerful people who might be implicated in his crimes would be protected?
--:-- Mike Cernovich: Yeah, a great question about the Epstein criminal case filed in 2019 was, when does anyone notice the SDNY being low profile or low key? The SDNY, they hold huge press conferences, they do perp walks, they make a spectacle out of all their arrests, and they also have a reputation for being extremely aggressive.
--:-- John Bickley: And they charged Epstein not for running an international sex trafficking operation. They charged him for paying underage girls for massages. That's a crime. If he paid underage girls for massages that were erotic in nature, then he should have been charged for that.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: But the question is, why did they limit the charges to the massages, and they didn't bring the heat, which is what SDNY does. They didn't say this was a worldwide sex trafficking ring involving, at the very least, Ghislaine Maxwell, as we all know.
--:-- John Bickley: You would charge him with felony conspiracy. You charge him with Mann Act violations. The Mann Act, for example, makes it illegal to bring underage girls across state lines for illicit purposes.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: So what you would have done if you wanted to treat the Epstein matter seriously and you want to get the truth is you would have charged Epstein under the federal conspiracy statute. You'd have charged him under the Mann Act and similar statutes. You would have named Ghislaine Maxwell in the original indictment as a co-conspirator.
--:-- John Bickley: Cernovich argues that because the SDNY did not file aggressive sex trafficking charges, Epstein's island in the Virgin Islands was left unattended for weeks, as were his homes in Paris, New Mexico, and Palm Beach.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: So we can't know what might have been removed during those periods. And in addition to that, because SDNY lacked jurisdiction to search beyond his Manhattan mansion, a lot of evidence was likely lost and may never be made public.
--:-- John Bickley: What we do know is that in 2019, after the FBI raided that property, several agents testified that some evidence did go missing. They had used a saw to open a safe that had hard drives, jewels, and passports.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: And the agent said that they didn't have a warrant to remove those items, so they took photos instead. And when they returned to collect them, they say those items were gone.
--:-- John Bickley: So speaking of those other properties, we also know that Epstein was worth hundreds of millions of dollars when he died, but it was never really made clear how he made that money.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: Yeah, he did. He has speculated, along with a lot of other people, I might add, that Epstein might have been a government asset and that would have allowed him to build vast wealth via blackmail.
--:-- John Bickley: So let's start from a hypothetical scenario that Jeffrey Epstein was an asset of the intelligence community and that his role was to blackmail powerful people.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: In the world where Epstein is an intelligence community asset, he would make hundreds of millions of dollars that nobody could explain. He would be let free to commit whatever crimes he wanted.
--:-- John Bickley: He would be able to fly around the world in a private jet and he would get away with everything and nobody would care.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: Lo and behold, though, there will always be unforeseen circumstances of, for example, me filing to obtain records involving Epstein. And then ultimately, the Miami Herald wanted those records.
--:-- John Bickley: And that's what gave the case a really big second wind, because now you can't dismiss the Miami Herald. If you're the FBI, if you're SDNY, you can say, oh, Cernovich, he's that kook, conspiracy theory guy. Let him yap.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: But when the Miami Herald says, we're on the case, now there's an element of legitimacy. So what do you do? You think, okay, the Miami Herald wants these documents. They're being aggressive. They're going to report on how Epstein got away with all of this for over 10 years, maybe 20 years.
--:-- John Bickley: What do we do? Okay, we got to charge Epstein with something. What can we charge him with? Well, we'll charge him with the minimal bad acts that we can charge him with.
--:-- Mike Cernovich: And then the intelligence community can send a cleanup crew down there to obtain the information and seal it and make sure that no one who isn't supposed to see it sees it.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, Sarnovich joked there about a conspiracy theory. So I think it's important to point out that he is far from the only person who is seriously discussing that hypothesis.
--:-- Megan Basham: Vicki Ward is an investigative journalist and bestselling author who has covered Epstein for everyone from CNN to Vanity Fair.
--:-- John Bickley: And she was on Piers Morgan Thursday night pointing out that the details that we do have about Epstein's life easily lend themselves to this notion that he was working with some government, if not multiple governments.
--:-- Megan Basham: The question, who was Jeffrey Epstein? Here's what we do know that is not speculative. He did know the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. He did know Mohammed bin Zayed, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates.
--:-- John Bickley: He did know very well Ehud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel. And we know that even after he got out of jail in 2010, he was clever enough to use the connections he had with the academics, with the former president of Harvard, with these other world leaders to draw in other billionaires like Bill Gates.
--:-- Megan Basham: He understood how very rich, powerful people around the world connect with each other. He understood what very rich, powerful people want from each other. He understood how to connect the plutocracy and the elite.
--:-- John Bickley: Does that mean he was an asset? There is speculation, but he certainly was a manipulator of the 0.001 percent.
--:-- Megan Basham: And in that same broadcast, hedge fund director and former MIT physicist Eric Weinstein were called meeting Epstein who he said had been described to him as a financial traitor.
--:-- Eric Weinstein: I knew that he wasn't who he said he was almost from the instant I started speaking to him. If I had to make a guess and you're calling for speculation, I would say that he really belonged to what is almost certainly the covert operations community and that he did not appear to have a prime broker.
--:-- John Bickley: Nobody seemed to have traded with him. Nobody seems to ask questions around him. So it's very suspicious that we don't, for example, ask for Form 13F. If he was a major hedge fund trader, it's almost impossible to move through the markets without leaving a wake.
--:-- Megan Basham: If you have to speculate, I would say that he probably belonged to covert operations for one or more nations.
--:-- John Bickley: So again, that's just to highlight Cernovich's point there that there is a lot of evidence pointing to the idea that not only powerful people, but powerful agencies may have an interest in preventing the full records regarding Epstein's crimes from being known.
--:-- Megan Basham: Well, that brings us to another area of speculation. That would be his death. It was officially, of course, ruled as a suicide, but you know.
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah, you know, and I did see quite a number of reports this week that took that ruling at face value. But of course, those who have tracked this case closely have serious doubts about that.
--:-- Megan Basham: So investigative reporter Alana Goodman wrote a book about who might have benefited from Epstein's death. And she told Morning Wire, there's certainly a number of powerful people who would not have wanted a trial with Epstein to go forward because they might be implicated.
--:-- John Bickley: There are a lot of people around Epstein who had reason to potentially want him dead and not to sit through a trial. He had a lot of powerful friends, people like Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, many billionaires who he knew, political figures, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump.
--:-- Megan Basham: He was surrounded by a lot of very powerful people. There were allegations that he may have been blackmailing people. He certainly had cameras around his house. And there are other indications that he was recording people in his life.
--:-- John Bickley: And certainly you can think of a lot of reasons why people might not have wanted him to go to a trial.
--:-- Megan Basham: Cernovich told me that after tracking this case for six years, he simply does not believe that Epstein killed himself.
--:-- John Bickley: They want to call it Jeffrey Epstein's suicide is fact because that ties the story up in a nice little bow.
--:-- Megan Basham: So if you're the regime, you're feeling pretty happy about how the Epstein case was sealed up. The safe from the island, who knows where that is? The other bad actors in the Epstein case, who know where they are?
--:-- John Bickley: They prosecuted Ghislaine. She's been put away and she's been quiet. Clearly, she feels like people close to her could be threatened.
--:-- Megan Basham: Lisa Bryant told me that she's been speaking with Epstein's victims this week. And while they're glad to see new details coming out, they are still holding out hope that somehow there will be consequences for the crimes that were committed against them.
--:-- John Bickley: They do feel relief. On one hand, it is a form of justice and they do feel vindicated that the conversation is still going and they feel like they're being believed.
--:-- Megan Basham: But they also they don't feel like it's enough. You know, will these people be prosecuted? Probably not.
--:-- John Bickley: And so they're still demanding accountability. So hopefully for the victim's sakes, the media and the public will keep up this pressure and demand that more information come out.
--:-- Megan Basham: Right. And hopefully more of these documents will come out this month.
--:-- John Bickley: Megan, thanks for reporting.
--:-- Megan Basham: Anytime.
--:-- Georgia Howe: That was Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.
