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TRANSCRIPT

Jane Coaston: It’s Friday, February 27th. I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that wants to congratulate Rümeysa Öztürk. You might remember her as the Tufts PhD student detained by ICE for co-writing an op-ed in her student newspaper. But now, you can call her Dr. Öztürk. She earned her PhD from the Tufts Department of Child Study and Human Development last Friday. [music break] On today’s show, the US and Iran hold more indirect talks over Tehran’s nuclear program. And a federal judge rules that the Internal Revenue Service broke the law nearly 43,000 times by sharing confidential taxpayer data with the Department of Homeland Security. Overachievers. But let’s start with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The fallout from the so-called Epstein files has been global in scale. In January, the Department of Justice released more than three million pages of documents related to its investigation into Epstein. Since then, dozens of people with ties to Epstein have faced both legal and professional repercussions, from the man formerly known as Prince Andrew, to the chief of the World Economic Forum, who resigned Thursday. But in the United States, it feels like the impact has been muted. Sure, there’s been lots of sound and fury, but not much else. Especially since we haven’t even gotten all of the files yet from the DOJ. That reportedly includes files related to allegations made against President Donald Trump. To be clear, these allegations have not been corroborated. The DOJ also said in January that the Epstein files included, quote, “untrue and sensationalist claims about Trump.” There have been some efforts by Congress to investigate who knew what and when about Epstein’s crimes, but they’ve been bogged down by DOJ slow walking and political showmanship. For example, last week House Republicans skipped a deposition in Ohio by Les Wexner, the billionaire businessman who helped Epstein build his wealth. But they sure were there in New York on Thursday when former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sat down for a deposition by the House Oversight Committee. It was a deposition Secretary Clinton said in her opening statement was, quote, “partisan political theater.” And that’s what it sounds like it was. At one point, the closed-door deposition ground to a halt after Colorado Republican Representative Lauren Boebert violated the committee’s rules and leaked a picture of Secretary Clinton to conservative troll, Benny Johnson. Because what’s a little investigation into a convicted sex offender’s web of lies and destruction when there’s right-wing content to make? That could also explain why the secretary was allegedly asked about UFOs and right-wind conspiracy theories. Here she is speaking to reporters outside of the Chappaqua Performing Arts Center where she was questioned. 

[clip of Hillary Clinton] It then got, at the end, quite unusual because I started being asked about UFOs and a series of questions about Pizzagate, one of the most vile, bogus conspiracy theories that was propagated on the internet. 

Jane Coaston: Laser focused on the real issues. That’s the story of the House Republicans. So for more on the newest developments in the Epstein case, I spoke with Bart Jansen, White House correspondent for USA Today. Bart Jansen, welcome to What a Day. 

Bart Jansen: Thanks for having me! 

Jane Coaston: Bart, we wanted you to clarify and highlight some of the more recent developments around the Epstein files and get some perspective on what actually matters here. Let’s start with the latest. In former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s opening statement to the House Oversight Committee, she wrote, quote, “this institutional failure is designed to protect one political party and one public official,” meaning the GOP and Donald Trump. What specific aspects of the Epsteen investigation did Secretary Clinton take issue with? 

Bart Jansen: Well, she just thinks Trump appears thousands of times in the files and that there’s much more to question about him than her, for example, who claims to have never even met the guy, never ridden on his plane. And she accused Republicans on the committee of conducting a phishing expedition by calling her in for questions rather than interviewing people who were more familiar or had closer relationships with Epstein. 

Jane Coaston: I wanted to actually ask about that. Why did Republicans on the Oversight Committee say they wanted to talk to Secretary Clinton? 

Bart Jansen: The chairman, Representative James Comer, a Republican of Kentucky, said that they’re trying to piece together better knowledge about how Epstein built his wealth and his network of political and business leaders around the world. And he says that interviewing the Clintons will help do that. He noted that Epstein did some fundraising for the Clinton Foundation and also that Ghislaine Maxwell, his associate who is serving a 20-year prison term, attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. So, basically, the argument is that they were part of this powerful network of people that Epstein at least socialized with, and so they’re trying to learn more about that. 

Jane Coaston: Where were House Democrats on Secretary Clinton’s deposition? What did they have to say about it? 

Bart Jansen: Uh, they said no new information was provided. They called it a clown show, political theater, and they demanded other information that we can talk about, they, Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the committee from California demanded that Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump release, uh, 50 or so missing pages of interview notes with a woman who accused Trump of abuse while she was a minor. One summary is included in the records, but details about how the records are numbered revealed that three other summaries of interviews have not yet been released. And so several of the Democrats said that that’s one of the major things they want to go after now. They also raised questions about Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick acknowledging in a recent Senate testimony that he had lunch on Epstein’s island. Now, he says he was there with his family, he saw no wrongdoing, but they say, hey, Lutnick seems to know more about Epstein than Hillary Clinton especially. 

Jane Coaston: Former President Bill Clinton is scheduled to testify today. We know that there are photographs of Clinton um in the Epstein files, uh like kind of around Epstein. What aspects of Clinton’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein do you expect the committee to focus on? 

Bart Jansen: Um again, I think it’ll be at least about fundraising and what kind of relationship they had. Comer said that Clinton had Epstein at the White House 16 times while he was president and then after leaving office that he flew on the plane more than two dozen times. So they want to get a better idea about that relationship. Perhaps it was as little to do as socializing or fundraising for Clinton initiatives. But, um some of the pictures look a little more informal than others. 

Jane Coaston: Yeah, it’s interesting also, because on the one hand, Congress has now pulled in a former Secretary of State and a former president to talk about Epstein. On the other hand, it’s Secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and former President Bill Clinton who have been you know kind of at the eye of Republican ire my entire life. It does feel like we’re in unprecedented territory, though. It’s interesting to me that the Clintons testified at all. What should we take from this? 

Bart Jansen: There was a back and forth about that, and they initially resisted these subpoenas. They said they didn’t know anything about his criminal activity. They didn’t know much about him at all, and so they said they didn’t need to testify. As their reluctance became more concrete, the House Committee was moving to hold them in contempt. That would have been at least provocative and maybe unprecedented. Um. This will be the first time that a former president has been compelled to testify before Congress. Presidents have occasionally testified in the past, dating all the way to George Washington, but it was always voluntarily. And so this is at least unprecedented today, but they clearly thought that they didn’t have anything to hide. And so they say they will go in, answer the questions, but the Clintons say basically they have nothing else to add. 

Jane Coaston: What have Democrats said about the precedent this could set for forcing, say, Donald Trump to testify in the future? 

Bart Jansen: Yeah, Democrats are licking their chops over this, and so they say if they regain control of the House, perhaps as early as November, that they intend to subpoena President Trump to ask him about his relationship with Epstein and perhaps many other things. 

Jane Coaston: As you mentioned a little bit earlier, earlier this week, NPR and the New York Times reported that the Justice Department did not release several documents from the Epstein files, which included allegations that President Trump, quote, “sexually abused a minor.” In response to this reporting, a White House spokesperson said that Trump has, quote, “been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.” How have congressional Republicans been responding to this recording? 

Bart Jansen: Well, they haven’t moved to subpoena Trump. They say that he is asked questions nearly every day by reporters around him and so he has answered the questions. He claims that while he was friends with Epstein during the ’90s and the early 2000s that they had a falling out and that he basically wasn’t in contact with him from the time that there was the state level conviction in Florida and then on to the federal indictment in 2019. And of course, that indictment occurred during Trump’s first administration. But uh Democrats think there might be more to ask Trump about his history with Epstein. 

Jane Coaston: It’s been weird because we’ve seen that figures like Trump or Howard Lutnick have been asked a lot of questions about Epstein, but there hasn’t really been much fallout on the public side, but in the private sector, there has been a lot of fallout with regard to people’s relationships with Jeffrey Epstein. And one of the most prominent is Microsoft founder Bill Gates. What did he reportedly say about his connection to Epstein this week? 

Bart Jansen: Yes, he was asked about it during a Gates Foundation town hall, he holds them twice a year, and he was asked about his relationship. He said that it was a mistake to hang around with Epstein, that he regrets it now. He acknowledged two affairs with Russian women and there were emails suggesting that he was trying to get antibiotics to treat sexually transmitted diseases that may have been passed along to his wife. Of course, they have since become divorced, and so it wound up being a humiliating dilemma for Gates as one of the most rich and powerful men on earth. 

Jane Coaston: And former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers announced this week that he’s resigning from his teaching position at Harvard at the end of the academic year. There’s been a lot of back and forth on that subject. And, you know, he had a lot ties to Epstein. Are we at a tipping point in your view when it comes to prominent figures in the U.S. facing some accountability for their ties to Epstein? Because we’ve seen numerous people, you know, across parties having to leave positions or like losing positions because of their ties to Epstein. 

Bart Jansen: It does seem to be growing. Uh. There’s Summers, he had previously resigned a board position on OpenAI and given up other public engagements and this resignation as a Harvard instructor is also just one more log on the fire. Uh. Separately, there was a resignation of a Columbia Nobel Prize winning professor at Columbia stepped down from an institute that he led. And the head of the World Economic Forum, the group that holds the Davos meeting once a year, stepped down as CEO on Thursday. So the ripple effects from the release of these documents seems to be growing and none of those people has yet been accused of sexual wrongdoing, but that’s why they, Democrats and women who have accused Epstein of abuse, continue to press for the release of more documents. We’ve, you know, about three million have been made public so far, but millions more remain confidential. 

Jane Coaston: Bart, thank you so much for joining me. 

Bart Jansen: Thanks for having me. 

Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Bart Jansen, White House correspondent for USA Today. More news is on the way, but it would be so cool if you let us know if you like the show, made sure to subscribe, left a 5-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, watched us on YouTube, and shared with your friends. Whew, that was a lot, but, it would like, so cool. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: Here’s what else we’re following today. 

[sung] Headlines. 

[clip of Abbas Araghchi] There would be no victory for anybody. It would be a devastating war. 

Jane Coaston: Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, spoke to India today in an interview ahead of this week’s talks between Iran and the US. The two countries held indirect negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear program in Geneva on Thursday, all while the US has gathered a massive fleet of aircraft and warships in the region. But there was no deal, so there is still the danger of another Mideast war on the table. Oman mediated the talks, and in a statement on Twitter, its foreign minister said there was quote, “significant progress.” He said talks would continue next week in Vienna, the home of the International Atomic Energy Agency. A federal judge ruled Thursday that the Internal Revenue Service broke the law, quote, “approximately 42,695 times when it shared confidential taxpayer information with the Department of Homeland Security.” Maybe it’s just me, but doesn’t that make the country’s two least favorite agencies somehow look even worse? Last April, the agencies made an agreement that allowed DHS to submit names and addresses of undocumented immigrants to the IRS to verify against tax records. Because again, contrary to what the Trump administration wants you to think, undocumented immigrants pay taxes. But it turns out that last August, the IRS handed over information without following proper protocol, which is a pretty big mistake. The agreement has already been the source of a lot of controversy and many legal challenges. And if I had to guess, this isn’t going to help. 

[clip of Marco Rubio] Suffice it to say it is highly unusual to see shootouts in open sea like that. It’s not it something that happens every day it’s something frankly that hasn’t happened with Cuba uh in a very long time uh and uh but um but we’re gonna find out. 

Jane Coaston: Secretary of State Marco Rubio responded to reports from the Cuban government that a group of its soldiers was attacked by 10 men on a speedboat earlier this week. Cuban officials said that after the men on the boat opened fire, the Cuban soldiers shot back, killing four and injuring the rest. One of the men killed has been identified as U.S. Citizen Michel Ortega Casanova. His brother told the Associated Press that Ortega Casanova was on a, quote, “obsessive and diabolical mission against Cuba’s government.” Rubio told reporters that the U.S. was not involved in the attack. Since January, the Trump administration has targeted the Cuban government by enforcing an oil embargo. Kansas has invalidated driver’s licenses and birth certificates held by transgender residents under a new law that took effect Thursday. It prohibits documents from listing any sex other than the one assigned at birth and invalidates any document that reflects a conflicting gender identity. The state’s democratic governor, Laura Kelly, had vetoed the measure, but the legislature’s GOP supermajorities overrode her veto. According to the Kansas City Star, the state sent letters to some trans residents informing them that, quote, “Once the law is officially enacted, your current credentials will be invalid immediately.” That would mean they could face additional penalties. Florida, Tennessee, and Texas also don’t allow driver’s licenses to reflect a trans person’s gender identity. And at least eight states besides Kansas have policies that bar trans residents from changing their birth certificates. And that’s the news. [music break]

[AD BREAK]

Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, celebrate Chicago’s newest snowplow, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about how the city held its fourth annual snowplow naming contest and the winning entry was Abolish Ice, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston and Abolish Ice was actually the runaway favorite, garnering 70% of votes. Which makes sense. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Caitlin Plummer. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters and Matt Berg. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.