➡ The article discusses concerns about the handling of the Epstein case by the Trump administration and the FBI. The author suggests that the administration’s decision to release certain documents without proper explanation or context has led to public mistrust. The author also criticizes the FBI’s lack of transparency and suggests that the institution is corrupt. The article ends with a call for a special prosecutor to handle the case, separate from the Department of Justice and the FBI.

➡ The text discusses the need for an investigation into Bill Clinton’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, questioning why the Justice Department hasn’t pursued this. It criticizes the lack of transparency and accountability in previous administrations, and suggests that Clinton, as a potential witness, should be questioned. The text also mentions the need for full disclosure and transparency in such investigations, using the release of JFK assassination documents as an example of good practice. It ends by suggesting that the CIA should also be subject to a Freedom of Information Act request regarding these records.

➡ The CIA is being investigated for possible connections with Epstein, with suggestions that they may have undisclosed documents. This follows previous disclosures of CIA communications and meetings between Epstein and a former Obama lawyer. The investigation is ongoing and aims to gain access to any relevant material.

Ladies and gentlemen, joining us, Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, who has been just such an absolute force of nature on this topic, and I cannot wait to hear what he has to say. Here we go. Tom, the floor is yours. I just want to preview by a little bit of reporting that we did yesterday. We called nonstop. I spoke to what must have been 50 people inside of the Trump administration yesterday, and what I got is that the vast majority of the Epstein evidence is currently under seal in the Southern District of New York, awaiting an appeal from Ghislaine Maxwell.

And that is the excuse that they’re giving for not giving any of that evidence out. But we think this is a calamity and a crisis for the Trump administration and an insult to the MAGA base. The floor is yours, Tom. Yeah, I mean, we’ve sued for the documents. They haven’t told the court anything like that. What they’ve said is that they’re reviewing documents, they’ve done a preliminary search, and they don’t know when they’re going to give us the records. We haven’t gotten one document under foia. We haven’t even gotten these videos which are responsive. We didn’t even get the binders.

I don’t. Were you. Did you get the binder? No, thank God. I get down on my knees and I thank the Lord, actually. Well, every. Every day for many things, Tom. For my children, for the happy life that I lead, a fulfilled life. And then I thank them that I didn’t get an Epstein binder. On camera. Well, we didn’t get the binder either. And, you know, I don’t blame others for getting the binder. That’s fine. You know, it was government records. But on the other hand, why hasn’t that been released under the FOIA process yet? And it was released, right? It wasn’t released under foia.

And so we don’t know what they’re withholding and why, what category of records it includes, where did they look for them. This is the process that’s in place under law in terms of producing records like that. But they chose to do a public leak, which, as you say in detail, highlighted the controversial nature of what they were up to, which was a modified limited hangout of the Epstein records. And I’m not quite sure what is going on with the leadership of the Justice Department, the FBI, that they thought a memo signed by no one, really attacking people who have raised questions about these issues, essentially says, we’ve looked at the evidence, we’ve concluded X, Y and Z, but you can’t see the evidence, so you’re just going to have to trust us on it.

And so contemporaneous with that, they said, well, in the memo, they also said, we’re not going to give you any more information, but we just filed a court report yesterday, the Justice Department included. They reported the Justice Department to the court that the FBI, Justice Department were still searching and reviewing records for possible release. So what is the game that’s going on here? I don’t know. It’s confusing, but it doesn’t reassure people that this case is being handled appropriately. They eve or they even understand what transparency means in the general scheme of things. So the whole thing has been such a bungled mess, and it’s created now a unnecessary crisis for the Trump administration.

I guess I’ll just begin with this, Tom, since you’ve been doing this work in order to hold accountable the DOJ for the better part of two or three decades at Judicial Watch, the era of trust me, bro, we looked into it. Move along. That’s done. That’s over. In fact, saying that is an insult. Yeah. And not showing your work is so disrespectful to the base that has been told that by Biden and Obama regimes and by insurrectionist regimes under Trump term one to just shut up and move along. Right. Gretchen Whitmer was kidnapped, okay? She was totally kidnapped.

Shut up. Don’t ask questions. January 6th was an insurrection. Don’t ask questions. There is no such thing as a hundred Biden laptop. Don’t ask questions. Shut up. Like, we’ve been told that for. So, and this is the same tactic, which is. It’s just. It’s just insulting and it’s not going to fly. I mean, I guess that’s my. My ultimate point, Tom, is that, like, it’s not like this is going to. Was this meant to, like, get us all to go away? No. Who wrote the memo? Why was it leaked to Axios? Why wasn’t it just produced in the ordinary? Course, I haven’t seen anyone from the Justice Department or FBI kind of provide any details beyond what’s in the memo.

And as you point out with the video, and it was readily apparent from the memo itself, we’re going to release video that doesn’t show you what happened at Epstein’s cell. And that should be convincing and persuasive to you. It doesn’t resolve the issue that you’ve got two competing forensic analyses of what happened to Epstein. You have the government version, which is that he committed suicide. You have a version Created by the family of Epstein, who hired A separate pathologist, Dr. Baden, I believe, who concluded it was a homicide. And so if there’s serious evidence it was a homicide, that tape doesn’t tell you one way or the other what happened.

And I’m sorry, they may be right in the conclusions, but until we get the underlying information and what they looked at, what evidence there is, I’m sorry, it’s not going to be convincing. And even in the text of the memo, there’s no, quote, incriminating client list. What does that mean? Is there a non incriminating client list? Is there a list of contacts? Are we getting hung up on the word client list? As opposed to some other list of communications and people he was in communication with concerning his terrible activities? There’s no credible evidence he blackmailed anyone.

Well, was there less than credible evidence? And how did you determine it? And, you know, Dan and Cash, I know, would be asking the same questions if they were in our shoes, right? Yeah. And we haven’t gotten the answers yet, and I think we have a right to demand them. I didn’t promise to release the Epstein files. I didn’t make these promises. The administration made the promises. I didn’t go on TV and said, the Epstein client list is on my desk and everything’s going to be released. And I understand there are reasons that you can’t release everything, but to play this shell game of we’re going to release everything.

Well, we’re not going to release everything because it’s all pornography. Well, you know, come on. No one wants to see pornography. That’s not the issue here. Don’t insult me. It’s very frustrating. But we’re in court. The memo is going to stop our FOIA case. Like I said, we just filed a brief yesterday, joint status report, updating the court. The records are under review. So this decision by the Trump administration, are they going to hide the records that are under review? Here’s an image from the FBI. This image was taken and explained during. In a trial in a deposition by the special agent in charge who raided Epstein’s $61 million Upper west side mansion that he was leasing from the State Department.

Very interesting story, Tom. Do you lease from the State Department, Tom? That’s strange. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, inside of that manila envelope was a stack of foreign passports where Jeffrey Epstein used different names and aliases. That’s odd. That’s not something normal. You wouldn’t find that in your grandfather’s attic. Or if you did, maybe you’d had some Real questions. Those boxes, Tom. According to the FBI Special agent in charge, it contained bags of diamonds. None of that is. None of that is predatory material. All of that is quite interesting and might put together a constellation of who Jeffrey Epstein was and what he was doing.

Or not doing. Why not just release that? Yeah. Whose privacy interest is being protected by withholding that information. Epstein is dead, you know. Are there third parties whose names might need to be redacted? That’s fine. Redact their names, justify the redactions in court, and give us the rest of the documents. They’ve taken this transparency no more approach. We’re shutting the door to any document release. And that is really. It’s one thing to have a conclusion about what you’ve investigated. Okay, that’s fine. But then to say we’re not releasing anything else for no reason that I could see legally or politically, would be justified, especially in light of their promises.

And you know why they’re not releasing it? Because of kooks like you, Benny. They are not going to feed the so called conspiracy theories that have no basis. And they’re gonna punish us by refusing to release documents that we have a right to under the law. I mean, there’s the foia, but the FOIA is a statutory. A statutory codification of our inherent rights as American citizens to find out what our government’s been up to. And not only what Epstein did, but how he died. Why is the Justice Department investigating the Justice Department? Does anyone over there see a conflict of interest? An agency whose number one detainee prisoner at the time died in their custody? Maybe there should be a third party investigation.

Just maybe. Or how about just disclosing everything that you possibly can under law to the American people as opposed to. We’ve looked at the records. You can’t see them. And you have to trust us that our conclusions are valid or persuasive. Quite the contrary, Tom. I’m trying to do the Trump administration a favor. Because what happens with a memo like this, which, for the life of me, Tom, I can’t figure out why the hell they would release. I mean, if anything, if. If you had come to this predetermined conclusion, drag it out, bring it out as far as you possibly can.

Sit down with Brett Bear for a straight hour, do a press conference, right? Explain your findings, show your work. If you really are going to come to that conclusion, at least do it in a dignified way. Uh, there’s literally zero reason, as far as I can tell, to drop it. On July 4th weekend after some Huge wins from the Trump administration. As such a self own. I don’t get it. But, but beside all that, we’re, you and I are trying to help. Because the worst thing you can possibly be seen as is a pederist protector. Which is what happens when you release documents like this unsigned, in the dark of night to left wing media.

It looks like it’s not even dated. It looks like you’re part of the COVID up. Tom, am I wrong? I don’t think AI wrote it though. Yeah. Okay, so tell me Tom, what can you give me? Like I know that you’ve given it in part. Can you give it, can you tell. Explain to me the status report of your FOIAs, what you are going after. Have you learned anything about the evidence that the government is keeping from the American people? So it’s crazy town. So they had the public leak of information of the Epstein records. And so we saw there was an issue there.

You had the Attorney General and the FBI director complained about FBI obstruction of their efforts to review information. Right. You had the Attorney General say the records were on her desk, including the list. And then they released this one group of records and everyone was upset because it seemed to be a selective leak. It wasn’t clear what else was out there and what next was happening. So we asked for the records under the Freedom of Information act and we got the runaround. So we sued back in April. We said give us all, basically we said, give us all the Epstein records and give us records that Cash Patel and Attorney General Bondi have about this issue.

So he filed the lawsuit that got some attention, as you know, and it’s interesting, almost immediately we got a note from the Justice Department. Bondi’s office has no records about Epstein. Wait, she just said she had all of the records on her desk. She was complaining vociferously about the FBI obstruction in New York of the release of the records. Remember, they were getting a truckload of documents or something. No records. And not one record has been released to us since then. And two weeks ago they told the court there are, except I think they used exceptional circumstances.

And then yesterday in the joint status report with our federal FOIA lawsuit here in dc, they told the court that they’re still reviewing the records. What records? When they’re gonna look at. They’ve gotten, they’ve searched for and are reviewing FBI records and Justice Department records. But I heard there were, there was no records. We were told yesterday they weren’t going to be released to any of us. Well, that’s not what they’re telling the court. So it’s one thing to send out a memo with no signature. It’s another thing for a Justice Department lawyer. I mean, we know what FOIA is.

As you point out, we’ve been doing it for 30 plus years. So they’re not going to be able to put this memo before the court. No court’s going to take this memo seriously. And, and they’re going to have to provide in the ordinary course, we’ll see how this case goes, a timeframe for releasing the records. And then they have to explain to us and the court why they’re withholding any records and there’s going to be a legal fight about it. All the excuses they use don’t necessarily impact the FOIA disclosure. And, you know, when they say, oh, some of these names are intertwined with the documents that we don’t want to release, well, then just, that’s no reason not to release the documents in whole.

It means you take out the material that you think would be protected from disclosure. They don’t want to. This is not. There’s nothing normal about the way this case has been handled. And it’s disturbing. It’s disturbing. I tell you, I told Bannon this yesterday. I don’t think the Biden people would have done this sort of gamesmanship with this type of issue. I mean, they would have just said, you can’t have the records or, you know, they would have handled it through FOIA here. It’s kind of a, I don’t know, gaslighting 101. Right. And it’s, it’s really kind of juvenile in some respects to think that we’re, I don’t know if juvenile is the right word, naive to think that this might pass for scrutiny.

And, you know, I understand President Trump wants to support his appointees over there. You know, I would just, I would just tell President Trump, the FBI and the Justice Department are letting you down. The FBI can’t be trusted to prosecute or investigate a jaywalking offense. He should set up his own investigative unit. And all these politically sensitive issues, he got it. He’s got to handle directly. They’re just, they’ve proven themselves, in my view. Well, first of all, the institutions are corrupted and can’t be trusted. And I don’t think the leadership has the kind of the full understanding of just how serious the issue is and the willingness to take the hard.

The hard, make the hard choices. I mean, to me, it means Cash Patel tells President Trump or President Trump tells Kash Patel, we have to have the FBI go the way of the USAID or Pam Bondi, say we can’t trust this Justice Department to investigate anything that you’re concerned about. I agree with Fitton. We got to have a special prosecutor that reports to you, keep the DOJ and FBI out of it. Heck, they got to be the targets of the investigation. Yes. Tom, you’ve seen so much corruption in D.C. in your career, and you’ve exposed so much of it.

There are too many wins to really enumerate for Judicial Watch. So I just want to ask, based on all of your experience, what do you think is happening here? I think, to be fair, I think what they’re. They are trying, right? I think they’re making mistakes in how they’re handling the issue. I think they think they know more because they’re in these positions and they should recognize they don’t know as much as they think they know. And they don’t have all of a sudden insights into the way the agencies work and the way these investigations are run.

After being on the job for four or five months, I would have brought the attitude they had coming in saying, I can’t trust anyone around me. These agencies are a mess. They. They tried to destroy the Republic just a few months ago and were pretending that the best thing to do is just let them do their jobs. Well, their version of doing their job was raiding Trump’s home and going through his wife’s closet. And do you think that these agencies, if they are left largely structurally the same, meaning full funding, no curtailing of powers, you name it, that the Democrats or even another Republican administration is going to come in and they won’t do what they did again? Of course not.

You’ve got to remove the threat to the Republic. And the FBI, in my view, needs to go the way of USAID or the Department of Education. We need to talk about ending the FBI as we know it. I had an honest question that I posited yesterday, and I’m not sure that I know the full and comprehensive answer, but given your expertise on the subject matter, Tom, I gotta ask you. You know, Bill Clinton hosted Jeffrey Epstein dozens of times at the White House. This famous photo of him and Ghislaine Maxwell. And clearly Epstein and Maxwell were just eating Clinton alive.

And then Bill Clinton, as soon as he left the White House, was like, buddies with. I mean, like the moment he left the White House, he was best friends. They were flying all around the world. In the depositions for some of the abused women, they say that you know, Jeffrey Epstein said Clinton likes him young and that they. They say that Clinton was on the island. Right. They say they saw him there. On top of that, of course, Epstein had oil paintings commissioned of Bill Clinton in a blue dress at his house. All of this seems like plenty of evidence to at the very least ask Bill Clinton some questions about this relationship and about what he knows was going on.

Why doesn’t the Justice Department start there? Has Bill Clinton ever been federally questioned about his relationship with Epstein? Well, they’ve told you there’s no information as that would justify or be a predicate for engaging the type of inquiry you’ve asked about. So perfectly reasonable and logical thought process you’re going through. What did you see? You know, and it doesn’t mean that Clinton is the target. He’s a witness in the least. Right, of course. What did you see? Of course, I was called. You know, I had the FBI knocking on my door to ask me eventually about tweets I wrote.

So don’t tell me what the FBI isn’t allowed to do or not do. I am so tired of the unwillingness to deal with the corruption of the prior administrations. Corruption, as I keep on saying, which could destroy the country if it’s left unchecked and people aren’t held accountable for it. You end a republic by jailing your political opponents, and that’s what they spent 10 years trying to do. And they don’t seem interested in it over at the Justice Department and FBI. And if they are, it’s like some. Maybe we’ll read about it in Axios in two weeks with some unsigned memo.

But I’ve been doing it too long just to kind of just pretend everything’s okay. And it doesn’t mean that the issues can’t be handled in an appropriate way. And maybe we’ll get to the place where I hope we are, but we’re running out of time. Some might say we’re already out of time in terms of the political calendar and just administratively getting these types of investigations and prosecutions, if appropriate, going. You end up forgetting stuff like this. Here’s a photo. Ghislaine Maxwell eyeing Bill Clinton at his daughter’s wedding. He only has one daughter. It’s like the wedding of the century.

And Ghislaine Maxwell’s nearly in the front row. She. She’s got an aisle seat that’s pretty high position. And of course, here’s Bill on the plane. Yeah. You know, we had asked many years ago for Secret Service records about his plane rides. Yeah. And I don’t. I think they told us they didn’t have anything. Here’s. Here’s the White House. Here’s the White House photos. I mean, I don’t think people understand how far back this is when Clinton was president. This is inside of the White House. What does he know? Right. Again, like, wouldn’t it just be basic prosecutorial due diligence to say to, like, bring.

Like, to. To maybe voluntarily, but either way, to. To. To effort a line of query for Bill Clinton about what the hell was going on here. He seems to be witness to one of the more mysterious and stranger crimes. Right. This was. Jeffrey Epstein has been. What’s insane about the memo, Tom, is that people, they act as though Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t convicted of child prostitution, which he was, and he wasn’t convicted of sex trafficking, which he was. And that Julian Maxwell wasn’t convicted federally of sex trafficking, which she was. Like, it’s. It’s so insulting. And given the fact that Jeffrey Epstein was doing all that at this time, and there’s other photos of.

We know that what happened. We know this because of Virginia Roberts. It was the. There’s all these massage tables, right? And the massage tables were massages given by these women that were being trafficked. There’s photos of Bill Clinton getting massages. Okay. Like in an airport. Like, they’re real. They’re authentic. None of it’s even debatable. Nothing of what I just said is debatable. I haven’t seen those, thankfully. I mean, it’s not, like, inappropriate. Everyone has clothes on, but he’s sitting there waiting in the airport, in the Bahamas, he’s getting massage. And so it boggles the mind. I guess I’m trying to be helpful here in saying that’s a way that you could restore trust.

Like, say, not only are we not gonna dismiss this, we’re gonna, like, start bringing in people and, like, asking them questions about it. We’re going to get to the bottom of this, along with full disclosure. Yeah. I’m not quite sure what this review entailed, but obviously they don’t want to tell us, right? So if they question Bill Clinton, if there’s an FBI 302 that might be responsive to this FOIA lawsuit, if they actually question any of the individuals we’re concerned about, there would be records of it, or at least there ought to be. And as Pam Bondi and Cash Patel, their agencies don’t want to disclose any of that to us now.

That’s their position. Well, I don’t know if it’s their position who wrote the memo, who’s going to take ownership for this memo. It’s something that, as I was thinking through this, I was trying to find an example of this being done right. And it was very easy what Tulsi did with jfk. And I want to get your thoughts on this, but my take is that Tulsi, it wasn’t exactly perfect, but man, damn, did we ever get tens of thousands of new documents, some of them quite embarrassing for the intel agencies, frankly. And a lot of names, a lot of addresses, a lot of very interesting constellation of everything that was going on inside of the intel committee around the JFK assassination.

Everything from connections to Mossad to connections to the mob and operations like Operation Mongoose and some black ops stuff that was going on in South America and across the world. It’s fascinating and, and nobody, Tom, nobody really asked a ton of questions about JFK anymore because they’re like, okay, you know, you gave us everything you got. What was destroyed has already been destroyed. And there was like an act of good faith. And I view that as the gold standard for D class. And I wanted to get your thoughts on that, is that, that would be good.

I don’t wanna be against transparency in terms of the general release of information, it’s always good. And President Trump personally is the most transparent president we’ve ever had. Yes, but all I know is foia, right. And so when documents are released publicly, my question is, well, what hasn’t been released? It goes back. Where was the search? What’s being withheld? If it’s being withheld, can we challenge the withholding? Is there a way to challenge it? Under law and we’re in court right now, there are 6 million records that are yet to be reviewed. As best I can tell, for jfk, it’s a good start.

And they’re focused. Yes, for on jfk. And I agree that the, the willingness to declassify information as good. Does it necessarily say, suggest what people think about jfk? I tend to be pretty conservative on the JFK assassination. I’m old fashioned. I think a commie murdered him and maybe our government could have stopped it, but it wouldn’t be surprising if it was one of many things they were running and they didn’t understand what the heck was about to happen. Who knows? But the point being now we have more information about that and it’s, you know, when a president gets killed, the American people want to know everything the government knew about what happened.

So it’s good, it is Good. The failure to release the information about Epstein, though, it’s typical Justice Department and FBI arrogance. It really is. And I wonder who’s running the show? Hmm. Can you please unpack that? I know we’re on the last question here, but can you unpack that? What do you mean, who’s running the show? Well, when a political appointee in my experience sometimes wants to do something, that’s the right thing, you can count on a thousand voices in an agency saying you can’t do that. And there are all sorts of reasons and excuses. Well, they’ll do it to you.

Or if you release this, you’ll have to release that. Or they come up with all sorts of consequences that are fanciful in nature that will happen if you release the information. Like in the case of Epstein, they start screaming about child pornography as a way to distract from the other issues that we have questions about. What does child pornography have to do with how Epstein died? Was there child pornography in his jail cell? Of course not. Come on. And so that’s what’s happening, is that we’ve got to have some aggressive leadership in both agencies to release this information.

And again, releasing information is. No, it’s only one part of what they have to do. In the case of the Justice Department and FBI, as you point out, we want actual investigations. And if there’s evidence of a crime, prosecutions. Yes, it’s only the first step, but it’s why I viewed it as what they did with jfk, as imperfect, but a pressure release valve. It’s a start. Right? Like it begins the restoration of trust, which. Which I’ve seen, certainly in our audience at the beginning steps of that. Which is good is what they promised to do. So.

Good. Good. Final question for you, Tom. Have you FOIA the CIA for these records? I’m sure we have. I mean, knowing Judicial Watch, we’ve foiaed it. I don’t think we’ve sued about it yet, but I’m gonna. That was on my list to kind of look into what does the CIA have on Epstein. Yeah. My joke is, Benny, is we’re investigating everything. We’re investigating everything about everything. So you can be sure that we’re on it. Okay. I’m willing to bet we’ve got a FOIA about ripe for a lawsuit, if my past experience is correct with the CIA, because we’ve had some experts.

We’ve had some experts on. And yesterday there was a CIA agent on saying, you’re looking in the wrong place. The CIA is where all these documents actually are. I mean, the CIA might have records. You know, you had some CIA communications previously disclosed. You had an Obama lawyer after she was in the White House meeting repeatedly with Epstein after she left the White House. There’s all sorts of interesting material we’ll want to get access to. Speaking of access, here we have the President live inside of the White House for his Cabinet meeting. Tom, we’re going to let you go.

Everybody follow Tom Fitton and Judicial Watch. Tom has millions of followers on X. You can find him at tomfitton. And here is the President of the United States. Thank you, Tom. Thanks. Cheers.
[tr:tra].

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