Transcript: Kash Patel Self-Destructs under Harsh Dem Epstein Grilling
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?
