The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 29 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.

Speaking to reporters from abroad, President Trump rambled at his greatest length yet about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. But his argument actually undermined itself. He claimed to know about elite Democrats and liberals who had gone to visit Epstein. But all that does is raise the question that won’t go away: If this is what the Epstein files would actually reveal, then why isn’t Donald Trump ordering their release? What makes this all worse for Trump right now is that Elon Musk just came out and attacked Trump on a real point of vulnerability in this whole scandal. All of which confirms that none of this is sustainable for Trump. Jennifer Rubin, editor in chief of The Contrarian, recently wrote a good piece laying out why Trump should be panicking over this scandal. And everything we’ve been seeing underscores that point, so we’re talking to Jen about all this today. Good to have you on, Jen.

Jennifer Rubin: Nice to be here.

Sargent: So a quick reminder on the latest, Trump’s Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has now twice interviewed Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, who’s doing time for sex trafficking. This raises the possibility that Blanche, who was Trump’s personal attorney, is trying to get Maxwell to exonerate Trump. Maxwell would then possibly get a pardon from Trump in return. We don’t know if that’s the game, but it’s possible. OK, with that in mind, listen to Trump talking to reporters about this whole mess.

Donald Trump (audio voiceover): And by the way, I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly 28 times. I never went to the island, but [former Treasury Secretary] Larry Summers, I hear, went there. He was the head of Harvard. And many other people that are very big people, nobody ever talks about them. I never had the privilege of going to his island, and I did turn it down, but a lot of people in Palm Beach were invited to his island. In one of my very good moments, I turned it down. I didn’t want to go to his island.

Sargent: Epstein Island is, of course, his compound. Jen, what do you make of what Trump said there?

Rubin: It’s really unbelievable. I want to go back to something that we shouldn’t lose sight of. The number two man in the Justice Department, Trump’s personal lawyer, went to go see Maxwell in prison. There is no universe in which that is acceptable. There’s no purpose for it. If they wanted to get more information or they wanted to discuss some aspect of her case, the line prosecutor would be the person to do it. The only purpose of sending Todd Blanche there would be something nefarious, which is exactly why I believe he was sent there. So we say it and we know it’s wrong, but we just want to never forget how utterly corrupt, how utterly inappropriate this entire thing is.

So you’re right in that it’s not just Trump. Sometimes we in the media shorthand this. And of course we want to know what’s in there about Trump. But we want to know who’s in it, whoever is in it. We want to know what powerful people, what famous people, and [what] other people knew about this, profited from it, contributed to it, enabled it, or were themselves participants. And of course, Maxwell herself was a participant. And all of this hullabaloo about how she is just convicted of the trafficking—she was an abuser herself. That’s what the witness is. That’s what the victims tell us. So the notion that number one, we should have this high-ranking person in the Justice Department chitchatting with her in prison. Number two, that we should be quiet and take Trump’s word for it that he is not in it. And even if he’s not in it, we should be content. And third of all, that somehow she is a victim in all this just blows my mind.

Sargent: Well, it’s just so unbelievably absurd that Trump is trying this. I really think it’s sometimes worth stepping back and stating the obvious about the Epstein files, which, to clarify, are the bulk of material that law enforcement gathered in the process of investigating Epstein’s sex trafficking, Trump is saying two things about this whole scandal. First, that the Epstein files are a dem hoax, that they’re actually filled with dirt on........

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