The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 18 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
FBI Director Kash Patel testified before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, and he fell apart under tough questioning from Democrats. His implosion wrecks what’s left of the scam that President Trump has been pushing on the Jeffrey Epstein files. In particular, Patel filibustered when asked questions about whether Trump’s name is in the files. He seemed to accidentally reveal that he does know how many times Trump’s name appears in them. And he agreed to open an investigation into whether Trump’s birthday note to Epstein is a forgery, as Trump claimed, which seems particularly ill-advised. Patel really gave away the game here. How much longer can MAGA keep the lid on this scandal, and why are MAGA figures going along with this after spending years demanding transparency on it? We’re pondering these questions today with Nicole Hemmer, a historian who has written numerous books about the right and its media apparatus. Nicole, nice to have you back on.
Nicole Hemmer: Great to be back with you, Greg.
Greg Sargent: So MAGA spent years demanding to know what’s in the files collected during the criminal investigation into Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. And then when Trump put his people in charge of the Justice Department and they saw the files, they clammed right up. So with that in mind, listen to this exchange between Democratic Congressman Eric Swalwell and Kash Patel.
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Did you ever tell the attorney general that Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files?
Kash Patel (voiceover): The Attorney General and I have had numerous discussions about the entirety of the Epstein files and the reviews conducted by our teams.
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Did you tell the Attorney General that Donald Trump’s name is in the Epstein files? And we have released where President Trump’s is in the simple question. Did you tell the Attorney General that the President’s name is in the Epstein files?
Kash Patel (voiceover): During many conversations that the Attorney General and I have had on the matter of Epstein, we have reviewed, in…
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): The question is simple. Who- You can tell the Attorney General that Donald Trump’s name is in the files. Yes or no?
Kash Patel (voiceover): Why don’t you try spelling it out? Use the alphabet.
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Yes or no? No?
Kash Patel (voiceover): A, B, E, F?
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): It sounds like you don’t want to tell us. Did you tell the Attorney General that Donald Trump’s name was in the Epstein files?
Kash Patel (voiceover): Why don’t you try serving your constituency by focusing on reducing violent crime in this country?
Greg Sargent: So Patel would not answer when repeatedly asked whether he told the Attorney General that Trump’s name is in the files. Nicole, clearly if the answer to that question were no, Patel, who was under oath, would have said so. Your reaction to this?
Hemmer: Well, he would have said so. And instead, not only did he do the kind of evasion I think we’re used to in confirmation trials and in Senate and House hearings where somebody just clearly will not answer the question, but he also then pivots and starts to make it about crime in California. And it’s such a transparent attempt to change the subject so that he doesn’t have to answer the question in this way that, I mean, Kash Patel is becoming this figure who is not very deft, is not very media savvy despite his podcasting background. And I think we saw that on display today.
Sargent: Well, Fox News had this unbelievable report about how Patel’s really on thin ice with Trump allies leaking stuff. When they start to leak from the inside about the FBI director being in trouble, he’s really in trouble. You know how this works. Is that right, Nicole?
Hemmer: That’s right. Both he and Attorney General Pam Bondi are in some trouble right now, both because of their mishandling of the Epstein case. You’ll remember Bondi was the one who had issued all of those folders to conservative influencers at the beginning of the second Trump administration and has otherwise not handled it particularly savvily. But both of them also seem to have fumbled some aspects of the Charlie Kirk investigation and that one-two punch has really left conservatives asking why are these two people in charge? They’re not good at their jobs. They may be loyal to Trump, but they’re not doing a very good job of defending him. And that’s why think you’re seeing so many leaks from inside the administration saying Patel’s days are numbered.
Sargent: And it’s interesting because Patel is really kind of one of MAGA’s own in a way that Pam Bondi isn’t quite, but we can get into that. The exchanges got even better. Congressmen Swalwell grilled Patel on the number of times Trump is in the Epstein files and Patel said he didn’t know. Then this happened.
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Sounds like if you don’t know the number, it could at least be a thousand times.
Kash Patel (voiceover): It’s not. It’s not.
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Is it at least 500 times?
Kash Patel (voiceover): No.
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Is it at least 100 times?
Kash Patel (voiceover): No.
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Then what’s the number?
Kash Patel (voiceover): I don’t know the number, but it’s not that.
Eric Swalwell (voiceover): Do you think it might be your job to know the number?
Kash Patel (voiceover): My job is to provide for the safety and security of this country. My job is not to engage in political innuendo.
Sargent: So here Patel clearly doesn’t want to answer. He’s very ticked as he says no to each specific number. But here again, he accidentally admits Trump’s name is in the files, at least somewhat extensively. Nicole, what do you make of that?
Hemmer: It’s such an obvious trap that Swalwell is laying for him. Patel indicates at first that he has no idea if there’s any information about Trump and the files and then gives a very decisive and conclusive answers about, “I know it’s definitely not a thousand. I know it’s definitely not 500. I know it’s definitely not 100.” And now you’ve narrowed it down so much that you must have a rough idea how many times it appears in there. And that’s the sort of trap Swalwell caught him in. He clearly has some knowledge on both of his answers to Swalwell that make it clear that he is familiar enough with these files to know that Trump is mentioned in them and likely knows at least roughly how many times he’s mentioned.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s a good point. In fact, Patel was being very decisive in saying no to each number. The actual number or at least something close to it of times Trump appears in the files is very much at the top of Patel’s mind. And you can see that in this exchange.
Hemmer: And there’s real righteous indignation there, too. It’s like as soon as Swalwell says a thousand, Patel is just like, No, just like the idea that it was a thousand is unfathomable, that it’s 500 is unfathomable, that it’s 100 is unfathomable, and then suddenly you’re in the realm of the fathomable. And that’s where his kind of both reflexive defense of Trump and his decisiveness with those earlier answers, just, doesn’t work as a convincing answer.
Sargent: It sure doesn’t. And here’s where this all breaks down for me. The MAGA ecosystem spent literally years demanding to know what’s in the Epstein files and they screamed again for years that an elite cover-up was happening that the deep state was behind it yet here on video is Kash Patel, who is the FBI director, visibly covering up what he knows about what’s in them in real time. How can MAGA possibly overlook this?
Hemmer: Well, the truth is that they’re not entirely overlooking it. This is a new schism in the MAGA movement and it has become one of those testing points for loyalty and fealty to Trump. So this is something that Charlie Kirk, before his death, had become very adamant that Trump had no relationship to Epstein. Patel and Bondi have been demonstrating their loyalty by providing cover for Trump. And there are other members and people in the MAGA world who are going along with this. But then there are other parts of MAGA who are furious that they’re not able to see the Epstein files because they really have believed for years that this is part of a global pedophile ring as you’ve mentioned that the elites across America have been involved in across the world have been involved in and they want answers. They’ve been promised answers and they’re not getting them. And so there is a division between like do you want the Epstein files or do you want to show your loyalty to Trump? And that’s where the dividing line is right now.
Sargent: Well, you know, it occurs to me that what MAGA said all along about the Epstein files is in some perverse sense actually turning out to be true. They are getting covered up by elites. That’s what’s happening right in front of our eyes. Now we know what’s happening and we know that Donald Trump’s in them. There are some MAGA figures who do seem to still want to know. But a lot of the really prominent MAGA influencers flipped on a dime when Donald Trump put out a tweet essentially saying, guys, game over. We’re not talking about this anymore. They all stopped talking about it, or at least many of them did. I have not seen quite as glaring an example of them shilling for Trump as this one.
Hemmer: What I find so fascinating about it too, Greg, is that the problem for them is if you see, even what we’ve seen so far from the Epstein files, take the birthday book that was released over the past week or so, that has all of these letters and drawings from high profile people, including Donald Trump, including Bill Clinton, who are celebrating their ties to Epstein. And also in a way sort of winkingly acknowledging his connections to young women, his pedophilia, and they don’t seem to care about it. And so here is a case where you actually do have elites who are seeing themselves as above the law, who see themselves in this rarefied world where it doesn’t matter if they hang out with pedophiles because they’re special. And that should be reinforcing of MAGA politics, but the problem is they turn Donald Trump into the avatar of their movement and he is implicated in the Epstein files. And there’s such a cognitive dissonance there that I think for many of them, they just can’t square it.
Sargent: It’s an actual deep state coverup.
Hemmer: It’s an actual deep state coverup and it is an actual example of elite corruption. Like this is the kind of thing that populist movements arise in response to. And if MAGA is a genuine populist movement, then it should be leading the way on this.
Sargent: You would think. Well, here’s some more audio. This exchange is about the lewd drawing that Trump apparently contributed to Epstein’s birthday book, which had all that cryptic suggestive language in it from Trump apparently. We just learned the other day that the drawing is real. It came out of Epstein’s estate and it has what looks exactly like Trump’s signature on it. Now here’s Congressman Jared Moskowitz grilling Patel about this.
Jared Moskowitz (voiceover): The president has, you’ve seen the picture of the woman’s body with the writing and the president’s signature. The president says that’s not his. President says it’s not his. The Republican colleagues say it’s not his. The administration say it’s not his. Will you be opening up an investigation into the Epstein estate for putting out a fake document with the president’s signature linking him to the world’s largest pedophile ring? Will you be opening that investigation into that?
Kash Patel (voiceover): On what basis? On what basis?
Jared Moskowitz (voiceover): They literally put out a fake document according to the president with a fake signature. It’s a forgery of the President of the United States signature. That’s the basis.
Kash Patel (voiceover): Sure, I’ll do it.
Jared Moskowitz (voiceover): OK. I look forward to that investigation.
Sargent: So there you have it, Nicole.
Hemmer: It’s it’s fascinating because Patel commits himself to this investigation, which he is clearly not going to undertake. It’s like that hot dog meme. Like, who did this? When you’re the one who obviously is responsible for it. This is this is a pledge that he is making in the moment to try to get himself out of a no-win situation for him. Like he can’t honestly answer the question. He’s under oath and doesn’t want to be prosecuted later for perjury. So he makes this pledge. A, I don’t think that there’s going to be any meaningful investigation into the reality of Donald Trump’s signatures. I think they know it’s real. But also who knows that if Patel is going to be in that position long enough to even launch an investigation.
Sargent: Well, that’s a good point. Maybe he knows he’s not going to be around to make good on his pledge. Well, yeah, and also I think we should probably underscore how absurd the whole forgery story really is. I’m hardly the first person to point this out, but for Trump’s signature to have been forged, this would have had to have been done by somebody who was able to get the book from the Epstein estate or maybe by somebody who was at the Epstein estate. This would have had to have been done many, many years ago because the birthday book goes back to 2003 or something. It’s simply implausible on its face. And now that Patel has sort of pledged himself to investigating this, he’s really put a trap out there for himself and Trump, a booby trap, as it were, that he can’t avoid stepping on later. Either he admits that the thing is real or he doesn’t follow through with the investigation.
Hemmer: Right. And it creates a context for follow-up questions from members of Congress and from journalists, right? If listeners haven’t seen this clip yet either, there was real back and forth about, you’re the head of the FBI. If the Epstein estate has all of these other files and the DOJ and FBI have all of these files, why don’t you just release them or why don’t you subpoena them and get them from the estate? And in both instances, Patel acted like he had no power at all. He in fact said that the DOJ couldn’t release its files because they were prevented to by a court order. But in fact, that’s a misleading answer. They certainly could release more of the files if they wanted to.
Sargent: Absolutely. Well, in your great book, Messengers of the Right, which was a history of right-wing media in modern times, I guess, you kind of chronicled how important conspiracy theories and lying is to this whole information ecosystem. I think we’re seeing something on other orders of magnitude here. Tell me if I’m wrong about that. And, you know, how do you place this in this broader context? Have there been times kind of over the decades when the rights conspiracy theorizing and lying just runs so smack into reality that that something actually shifts and they end up either dropping something entirely or admitting to it. And how do you see this playing out? How does this compare to those previous episodes?
Hemmer: Conspiracy theories have certainly had a long history on the right. They’re pretty popular in American politics more generally, but they have been a key part of the rights’ ideology over the past hundred years or so. And this is things like the John Birch Society and conspiracy theories about fluoride in the water, which are coming home to roost these days as states begin to take fluoride out of the water. So they can be long living like that.
Or even during the Clinton administration in the 1990s, there were all sorts of conspiracy theories about the Clintons, including one that one of their close friends, Vince Foster, who had committed suicide in a real tragic moment, had actually been killed by the Clintons. And this is one of those conspiracy theories that not only found legs in conservative media, but through conservative media, then made its way into the Kenneth Starr investigation, the special counsel investigation to Clinton. I think it was Brett Kavanaugh who was the one who was in charge of investigating that part of the Clinton administration. There was a member of Congress who went into his backyard and shot a melon to show that it wasn’t possible that Vince Foster could have shot himself. Like there was this real theater around it. And the conspiracy theory, even though it was continuously debunked, it helped to make the Clintons seem icky, right, evil in this way that, you know, the conspiracy theory itself, even though people don’t talk a lot about Vince Foster these days, even when it was 2008 and Hillary Clinton was running or 2016 and Hillary Clinton was running, that conspiracy theory continued to dog her and it had real legs and right wing circles. So actually it’s not that these conspiracy theories have tended to blow up in conservative spaces, but they’ve actually been put to pretty effective political use.
I think what’s different about this one is this has been a pretty extensive deep conspiracy theory on the right. Not that Epstein was a pedophile. Epstein was a pedophile and running a pedophile ring from everything that we know. But this idea that the Democratic Party is run by pedophiles and that QAnon is based on these pedophile conspiracies. There are these conspiracies that have been really enervating the right in really important ways. And now the problem is their main champion is caught up in the conspiracy theory. And so you either have to create a very ornate extra conspiracy to explain why that is. And QAnon is one of those that helps. Or you have to accept that he is one of the evil people who you are fighting against. And again, that’s difficult for the right to do.
Sargent: Yeah, just to close this out. The way the right wing ecosystem and its info world has always operated is that they just sort of create this low level din that never ever abates. And little by little, it sort of seeps into the mainstream discourse in some form or other. The specifics aren’t even that important. It’s the noise level that’s important, right? The right wing media ecosystem is all about creating just a sense that something is amiss, that something is awry, that the people in power are hiding dark secrets. And as you say, they have been effective at that. They were really good at just sort of tainting high-level liberals and Democrats with that sort of, I guess, aura or odor, that mal-odor or whatever you want to call it. And here, though, it just really has broken down because it started as exactly that, an effort to create a miasma of scandal around elite liberals and Democrats, but now it is Trump that’s right at the center of it.
Hemmer: Yes, it’s one of those Frankenstein monsters stories, right? You create the monster and then you can’t control it after. And that’s certainly what the right is experiencing in this case. And what’s going to be fascinating to see is not only how they navigate this for the rest of the Trump administration. And I actually do think that right wing noise machine that is responsible for creating that miasma is going to try to kick up enough dust to protect Trump throughout his presidency. But in some future, when Trump is no longer president, there’s every chance that he then gets consumed by that miasma and they say, see, we really can’t trust anyone. And it feeds into that broader project of nihilism and that broader project of you can’t trust anyone. You can’t trust any institution. You can only trust us, the right wing that’s talking to you.
Sargent: Right. And so how does this play out within the kind of timeframe of the Trump presidency though? Can they actually keep a lid on it all through the Trump years or not?
Hemmer: They’re proving very ineffective at keeping a lid on it. I was really struck by this over the past week or so, because when Charlie Kirk was assassinated, suddenly the Epstein story was no longer on the front page and it seemed unlikely to be reappearing anytime soon. And yet, you have these hearings in the House that suddenly bring it back into the news. You just had the UK ambassador to the US forced to resign because his deep connections with Epstein have just been revealed in a series of emails. And so Donald Trump heading over to the UK for the state visit this week is facing an environment in which a picture of Trump and Epstein is being projected onto Windsor Castle. Like, he can’t escape Epstein, because so many people want to understand this story and want to understand his role in it. And it has become one of those stories that—as much as the Trump noise machine, the Trump ability to throw so much out there so you can’t focus on any one thing—they’ve tried that with the Epstein story, and it just doesn’t seem to work. It’s a story that keeps coming up and, even though they try to whack-a-mole back down, they’re just not successful in getting people’s attention off of the story.
Sargent: Such a critical point. There’s just too much curiosity out there, both among elite institutions, journalists, and so forth, but also among the American people at this point. Nicole Hemmer, it’s always such a great pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for coming on.
Hemmer: Thanks for having me back. Good to speak to you, Greg.
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