Matthew Chapman

Iran will almost certainly be out for blood now that U.S. and Israeli forces took out Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, MS NOW's Rachel Maddow said on Monday — but the very group of U.S. counterintelligence officials tasked with keeping Americans safe from their retribution is out of a job because of a longstanding Donald Trump grudge.

"They're really good at this," Maddow said of Iran. "They can reach all around the globe to kill people when they want to, and they have done it ... They've killed or tried to kill their own dissidents and whistleblowers and political opponents, not over not only just over, you know, all over the Middle East, but throughout Europe. They have killed people. They've even tried to kill people here in the United States before."

"Their security services have reached all around the world to kill people, and they have done it sometimes by finding turncoats ... They've done it sometimes by just sending out their own agents into the world," said Maddow. "They have done it even by partnering with just straight-up criminals, by partnering with mobsters and drug gangs in order to carry out targeted killings for the Iranian regime. And they have done it for decades. I mean, you think Russia is good at flinging people out of windows and dosing people with exotic poisons all over the world? The Russians are pikers at this sort of thing compared to the Iranians, who have not only been doing it for decades, they have been very good at it for decades."

After the Trump administration took out Revolutionary Guard leader Qassem Suleimani, for instance, Iran made serious plots to assassinate National Security Adviser John Bolton, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and diplomatic adviser Brian Hook — all of whom needed constant security detail to keep them safe.

"Iran is a big country, more than 90 million people, and they are a powerful country with a sophisticated, intensively resourced, world-class, ruthless set of intelligence and security services, which, of course, target their own people at home to disastrous, murderous effect, particularly recently," said Maddow. "But those security services and intelligence services also have tentacles all around the world, and they have used them to target the regime's perceived enemies all over the world, including in the United States of America."

Thankfully, Maddow continued, the U.S. has for years had a top-notch team of counterintelligence officials at the FBI, known as CI-12, tasked with thwarting Iranian assassination plots. There's just one problem: Trump's FBI Director, Kash Patel, just gutted that unit, firing numerous agents because of their involvement in the investigation of Trump's classified document stash at Mar-a-Lago.

"But, you know, if you're Trump, who cares?" added Maddow. "I mean, the Iranians targeted Trump, too, but he has Secret Service protection. What does he care if they knock off anybody else? He'll be fine."

- YouTube youtu.be

President Donald Trump was seen with an alarming skin rash on his neck Monday, with many initially suspecting he may be having a flare-up of shingles — but the cagey response from the White House has led some medical experts to fear a cover-up of something potentially worse.

“President Trump is using a very common cream on the right side of his neck, which is a preventative skin treatment, prescribed by the White House Doctor," White House physician Sean Patrick Barbabella wrote in a statement flagged by The Daily Beast. "The President is using this treatment for one week, and the redness is expected to last for a few weeks.”

However, the Beast continued, doctors are pointing to another potential thing the rash could be.

“The White House medical team didn’t know [Trump] got a CT scan. They claimed it was a MRI for weeks,” wrote Dr. Vin Gupta, a frequent commentator on MS NOW, in a post to X. “Now instead of acknowledging he might have a pre-cancerous skin condition, they dance around the issue. “Trying to fool the public just makes it worse.”

CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner agreed, writing, “Preventative skin treatments (such as topical 5 flurouracil) are commonly used to prevent overt skin cancer in people with precancerous skin lesions. We don’t know what specific treatment the president is receiving, but why all the secrecy for something that is potentially easy to treat and very common in older people?”

This comes after a number of other medical oddities surrounding the 79-year-old president, including unexplained bruising on his hand and ankle swelling that can be associated with heart problems.

President Donald Trump's Justice Department backed down on Monday on a huge monthslong legal battle, no longer defending a series of executive orders that attacked prominent law firms that represented anti-Trump clients in the past.

It's a huge victory for the rule of law, voting rights attorney Marc Elias told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace — but also a huge black eye for the law firms that made deals with Trump to avoid similar regulatory action against them.

"Donald Trump will do whatever he can get away with doing, and a lot of it isn't legal," said Wallace. "An alarming amount of it is unconstitutional, and he will move on and bully someone else if people stand up to him. Well, why isn't that lesson sort of internalized writ large on the pro-democracy side?"

"I think today is going to be remembered as one of the most important days for the opposition movement against Donald Trump," said Elias, who runs both the Elias Law Group and the media outlet Democracy Docket. "Today was the day that the law firms that stood up tall and said to Donald Trump, we will not bow down to you. We will not obey. We will not bend the knee. Today is the day that the Department of Justice ... [stopped fighting] the victory that the law firms had against the Department of Justice. And what that means for everyone listening is that the four law firms that stood their ground, they can proceed on and have government contracts and enter buildings and do all of the things that Donald Trump tried to deny them."

At the same time, he said, "For the 9 or 10 law firms that capitulated and collaborated, they still have to provide free legal services to Donald Trump."

"They still have to look at themselves in the mirror and explain why they settled a case that wound up getting dismissed, and that the Department of Justice then dropped," said Elias. "They have to explain to their clients why anyone would hire them when they were so cowardly, when they lacked even the basic spine expected of any lawyer, no less one who charges thousands of dollars an hour, and they settled a claim and groveled in the Oval Office rather than standing up to fight."

"And most importantly, they're going to have to explain to their children and their grandchildren and future generations that will remember them by name, when democracy was under attack, when large institutions were asked to do the bare minimum to stand up, not to show the courage that the people of Minneapolis showed. Not to show the activism of millions of people, that No Kings rallies, but to show the basic minimum amount of decency and backbone they'll have to explain to their children, grandchildren and future generations why they couldn't muster that. History will remember them as the great villains and great cowards of this era."

"And so I hope we celebrate today as a victory for everyone who stands up and tall and does not bow down to Donald Trump," Elias concluded. "But I also hope we we redouble our efforts to remember who the villains were, who the cowards were, who had every advantage in life and yet refused to bear any burden to do the right thing."

- YouTube youtu.be

President Donald Trump's invasion of Iran might actually do more damage to his electoral coalition than his mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case, former Republican strategist Tim Miller told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on Monday's edition of "Deadline: White House."

Miller claimed the president has a "megalomaniacal belief in himself."

"He believes that he's the tough guy, the bully on the playground, and that he can go around and do this stuff and not suffer any consequences. And there's this machismo that goes along with it that is, you know, been part of the fascist impulse forever. This is what Umberto Eco wrote about Mussolini, right? Was that there's just this machismo. It's like, I can do this, this bravado. And he, I think, has found himself a situation that he can't spin or demagogue his way out of with his own base."

"I mean, he could leave right now, and you would still only have the six deaths, which would be tragic, of Americans," said Miller. "Obviously, they've been Iranian deaths and others in the region. And so I guess maybe that people would just forget about it and move on. But I think this is just a fundamental betrayal ... I think it's totally a different category than Epstein. I mean, like, it was essential to the rise of Trump."

Miller added that he saw this himself, working for the Jeb Bush campaign in 2016 before Trump defeated them to take command of the GOP — and one way Trump did that, he noted, is calling the Bush family warmongers.

"I was wrong. He was correct," said Miller. "People were sick of it and they were willing to turn to somebody as vulgar and unserious as him, because what they were being offered otherwise was Clinton, Bush and a similar foreign policy that the American people had decided had failed and that they didn't want anymore. And so it was the central item, maybe in addition to immigration, to his rise." Now, he is pushing "a regime change war in the Middle East that has no rationale at all, like he can't even give his people a fig leaf about what this is for."

"You know, look, I think that some of them will stick with him for a little bit because, you know, people don't like to admit that they're wrong and it's a team jersey and all of that," added Miller. "But if this continues to get worse and he gets into a quagmire, like this could really be the issue that doesn't — you know, we spent a lot of time on here talking about issues where it's like, well, could could he go from 85 percent down to 80 with his base? You know, could he go from 92 down to 80 like, this is the issue that could that could split the base in half. It could split his party in half."

"It is the central thing that he promised to his voters," said Miller. "And he is just doing exactly the opposite in a way that is kind — that is hard for me to really even understand what how he could have, how he could have judged this to be something that his own base would accept."

- YouTube www.youtube.com

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan tore into her right-wing colleagues in a dissent to a Monday "shadow docket" ruling that grants an appeal to religious parents challenging California policies that protect schoolchildren's confidentiality about gender identity.

In that dissent, she accused the majority of deploying a doctrine they themselves disparaged multiple times to undermine liberal legal rights.

"This Court, to affirm the relief given ... explains that the State’s policy 'excludes parents' from 'participation in decisions regarding their children’s mental health,'" wrote Kagan. "But the very phrasing the Court uses betrays the delicateness of the operation: Even in recognizing that parental right, the Court cannot quite bring itself to name the legal doctrine — it is, again, substantive due process — that provides the right’s only basis."

"Anyone remotely familiar with recent debates in constitutional law will understand why: Substantive due process has not been of late in the good graces of this Court — and especially of the Members of today’s majority," wrote Kagan. "The Due Process Clause, needless to say, does not expressly grant parental rights of any kind. The relevant text bars a State only from depriving a person of 'liberty' 'without due process of law.' Members of the majority often have expressed skepticism — sometimes outright hostility — to understanding the 'capacious' term 'liberty' to enshrine specific rights" — citing Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade abortion rights.

Kagan didn't stop there — bringing up specific examples of justices in the majority here who attacked the entire concept of substantive due process.

"Substantive due process, one has stated, is a 'particularly dangerous' 'legal fiction' because it 'invites judges' to 'roa[m] at large in the constitutional field guided only by their personal views'" — quotes from Justice Clarence Thomas. "Another has pointed to the 'judicial misuse of the so-called ‘substantive component’ of due process to dictate policy on matters that belonged to the people to decide'" — quotes from Justice Neil Gorsuch. "And yet a third, when defending the Court’s elimination of a 50-year-old right grounded in substantive due process, explained that the 'Constitution does not grant the nine unelected Members of this Court the unilateral authority to rewrite the Constitution'" — quotes from Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

In response to this, Justice Amy Coney Barrett attempted to respond in her own concurrence, denying that the court has argued that substantive due process is never a thing in any circumstances.

"Dobbs calls into question neither the doctrine of substantive due process nor the other unexpressed rights that the doctrine protects," wrote Barrett. "It does not follow from Dobbs that all our substantive due process cases conflict with Glucksberg, much less that stare decisis would counsel overruling any that do."

The Supreme Court handed down two significant and consequential emergency orders on Monday through the so-called "shadow docket," issuing a pair of rulings that largely handed victories to Republicans and conservative activists.

In one ruling, they granted an emergency appeal to religious parents suing California to force schools to disclose gender identity information their children chose to keep confidential.

Justice Elena Kagan issued a blistering dissent, calling out her conservative colleagues.

The other decision, reported by Punchbowl News' Ally Mutnick, pauses a decision by state courts in New York to require a redraw of the only Republican-leaning congressional district in New York City.

This decision ensures the redraw won't take place, or at least cannot be used, until after the 2026 midterms, and throws a lifeline to Rep. Nicole Malliotakis, who would have been all but doomed had the redraw moved forward this year.

President Donald Trump's bombing of Iran was one of the biggest betrayals of his own voting base yet, MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace said on Monday — and she compared Trump's past words to his actions now in a devastating sequence of clips.

"Our current strategy of nation-building and regime change is a proven absolute failure," said Trump in one clip. "We have created the vacuums that allow terrorism to grow and thrive. These globalists want to squander all of America's strength, blood, and treasure chasing phantoms overseas while keeping us distracted from the havoc they're creating right here at home."

"That was then," said Wallace. "This afternoon, with all the force of a rock-splitting crack of lightning, Donald Trump's rank betrayal of more than a decade of foreign policy promises is leaving a first-of-its-kind fissure inside the MAGA movement. Not that his supporters are strangers to betrayal by any means. He's broken his word with them and to them before, and he'll undoubtedly do it again. But the military action Donald Trump took in the early hours Saturday morning in Iran, the war he started, is a sort of reversal, fundamentally different on an atomic level than anything we've seen him do since he's been in our politics over the last 10 years."

"The best way to fully understand the depth and scope of that betrayal today might be to hold our noses and submerge ourselves in the now-broken promises of Donald Trump's 'no new wars' mantra," said Wallace. "It starts with his 2016 campaign for president."

She then played another clip.

"You can't fight two wars at one time," said Trump in the clip. "If you listen to him and you listen to some of the folks that I've been listening to, that's why we've been in the Middle East for 15 years, and we haven't won anything. We've spent $5 trillion in the Middle East because of thinking like that. In a Trump administration, our actions in the Middle East will be tempered by realism. The current strategy of toppling regimes with no plan for what to do the day after only produces power vacuums that are filled simply by terrorists. Gradual reform, not sudden and radical change, should be our guiding objective in that region."

"You don't say?" said Wallace. But it wasn't just Trump saying these things, she noted — it's many of the people now in high-ranking positions in his administration.

"President Trump campaigned against regime change wars when he ran for president, but now he bows to the wishes of the neocons who surround him, clamoring for regime change wars that he claimed to oppose, this time in Venezuela and in Iran," said Tulsi Gabbard, now Trump's Director of National Intelligence, in a clip from her time in the Democratic 2020 primary. "These powerful politicians dishonor the sacrifices made by every one of my brothers and sisters in uniform."

"Sometimes we're going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we're going to have distinct interests," said now-Vice President JD Vance in another clip. "And our interests, I think very much, is in not going to war with Iran, right? It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country."

"Just let that sink in," said Wallace. "JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard worked for Donald Trump. Now they just work for him. They subverted everything they've ever said publicly that they believed, and they serve a commander-in-chief who made the decision to do precisely what they publicly built their political identities around and warned against. It is an epic generational stabbing in the back, not just for those officials who have been made to look like fools."

- YouTube youtu.be

The Hennepin County, Minnesota, district attorney is investigating Trump Border Patrol enforcer Greg Bovino and 16 other federal agents for "unlawful conduct."

According to The Minnesota Star Tribune, "The decision to create the project also rose from an alleged lack of investigative effort from local law enforcement into the actions of federal agents."

Per an email obtained by the Tribune, District Attorney Mary Moriarty, whose county includes Minneapolis, "alerted the Hennepin County Chiefs of Police Association shortly before announcing the project’s formation. The email said Moriarty met with the chiefs a month ago to discuss 'how to respond to federal law enforcement actions in our community' and that Moriarty had 'grown concerned about the lack of investigation into some of the more high-profile incidents' involving federal agents."

The Trump administration made clear it had no interest in investigating the incidents that led to the shooting deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, other than to possibly investigate the victims' ties to radical groups.

After weeks of crackdowns and protests that led to a national outcry, the Trump administration reassigned Bovino back to his original position in California, allowing White House border czar Tom Homan to take control of the situation.

Ultimately, the administration backed down and ended the surge.

President Donald Trump spent much of his first year in office in an all-out war against solar power, even going so far as to change regulations so that renewable energy faces vastly more permitting. But now, many prominent MAGA voices are beginning to enthusiastically promote solar development.

The reason for the shift is simple, The Washington Post reported on Monday: artificial intelligence.

One of the most notable figures in Trump's orbit to be touting the benefits of solar power is Katie Miller, the wife of Trump's infamous anti-immigrant strategist Stephen Miller.

"'Solar energy is the energy of the future,' Katie Miller posted recently. 'Giant fusion reactor up there in the sky — we must rapidly expand solar to compete with China.' Another of her posts suggested solar is more vital to the U.S. than coal power, contradicting White House messaging and policy."

Nor is Miller alone, noted the report, as "a growing number of prominent Trump allies — including former House speaker Newt Gingrich, veteran strategist Kellyanne Conway and GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio — are promoting solar as electricity demand surges and energy affordability climbs the list of voter concerns."

Perhaps nowhere is this starker than Energy Secretary Chris Wright, who previously called solar power a "parasite" on the power grid, but last week, while speaking with reporters, said, “Is there a commercial role for solar power that can add to the grid affordable, reliable energy? Certainly there is.”

It isn't a newfound attention to climate change driving the shift, the report said — rather, the big change that has happened over the last year is "a realization taking hold more broadly among Republicans that solar power — long embraced by liberals — is increasingly indispensable to America’s bid to dominate AI, close a yawning 'electron gap' with China and contain runaway residential electricity costs. These conservatives describe it as crucial to U.S. competitiveness, the grid’s reliability and their own movement’s political survival."

It also comes as communities all over America that voted for Trump begin to rise up against the construction of AI data centers near them, driven by a fear that these facilities will consume all the local energy and drive up people's power bills. Trump himself responded to these concerns in his State of the Union Address, promising he would push technology companies to generate all their power onsite — a plan experts have said is just not that simple.

In a seismic admission of defeat, the Trump administration's Justice Department is abandoning its legal defense of an executive order that would have punished law firms that had represented clients against his prior policies or legal woes.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the DOJ is expected to "drop its appeals of four trial-court rulings that struck down President Trump’s actions against law firms Jenner & Block, WilmerHale, Perkins Coie, and Susman Godfrey."

Trump's orders had blocked these law firms from doing business with the federal government or from obtaining security clearances. Experts widely criticized it as undermining the centuries-old principle that everyone has a right to legal counsel and that lawyers should not be punished solely for disagreements with their clients.

Several other law firms cut deals with the Trump administration to avoid similar orders punishing them, which included commitments to provide pro bono aid to various causes Trump agrees with and eliminate diversity policies in their offices.

After cutting those deals, however, many of those law firms realized the terms of the agreements were either unenforceable or not what they had believed they were agreeing to, and quietly abandoned them.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's latest legal argument for blocking Democratic members of Congress from unscheduled inspections of immigration detention facilities just got rejected by a federal court.

In a new order released on Monday, U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb ruled in favor of 13 representatives who sued Immigration and Customs Enforcement after they were denied access to detention facilities.

Rules put in place by congressional appropriations bills have mandated that members have the right to inspect any facility at any time. However, last year, DHS repeatedly attempted to roll this back by fiat and required a week's notice to inspect facilities, which, if it became the standard, would give DHS time to conceal any wrongdoing.

During last year's federal government shutdown, Noem argued that the congressional requirement no longer applied because they were not receiving funding. More recently, she has attempted the same tactic after Democrats refused to sign onto continuing DHS funding without reforms to federal immigration enforcement — which has caused a DHS-localized shutdown that is still ongoing — and argued that the policy will be enforced specifically with money from Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill Act" from last year.

In Cobb's ruling, this isn't allowed.

"Given the restrictions on OBBBA funding and the fact that the Office of the Secretary is funded through the annual appropriations process, the Court finds on this record that the logical conclusion is not that the Office of the Secretary was using OBBBA funds, but that it was acting in an excepted status while the February 2 memorandum was issued and working pursuant to the lapsed appropriation," wrote Cobb. "But as Defendants previously acknowledged in this litigation, an agency that continues work on excepted functions during a lapse in appropriations is not simply working with a blank check, legally or financially."

The ruling ultimately suspended changes to the inspection regulation, as a violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.

President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have repeatedly bragged that the Trump administration is allowing "zero" unauthorized immigrants to cross the border into the United States. But a new scoop from the conservative Washington Examiner reveals that's not true — and some immigrants are indeed being released into the country after being apprehended.

"Although the number of border crossers let into the interior of the country is significantly smaller than it was during the Biden administration, that some illegal immigrants have been released into the U.S. at all appears to contradict President Donald Trump’s claim during the State of the Union address, as well as numerous statements by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, that no one had been let in since early last summer," reported Anna Giaritelli.

Under federal law, Border Patrol can only hold detainees for up to 72 hours, after which they must be handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for further action. The issue is that ICE is, in fact, then releasing an unspecified number of people that Border Patrol turns over to them, according to the report.

According to one person who texted the Examiner, “Dirty little secret that the [Trump administration] does not want getting out for obvious reasons. There are in fact folks who are being released who recently crossed the border. … [Border Patrol] is not releasing anyone, but ICE is.”

For years prior to the Trump administration, ICE has placed low-risk detainees in "Alternatives to Detention," where they essentially are released into the local community with a court date and must check in with authorities. It has been proven to work, but Trump has long attacked the idea. Despite this, per the report, Alternatives to Detention continue to be used.

This revelation comes amid other damning reporting about Noem, including that she buried an inspector general report on a security flaw in her highly-touted airport security reforms.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board sharply condemned President Donald Trump on Friday for ordering the federal government to blackball Anthropic, an artificial intelligence firm that had refused to relax its safety rules to let the Defense Department deploy automated surveillance and military strikes.

Trump proclaimed in a Truth Social rant earlier in the day that the "Leftwing nut job" firm, which operates the Claude AI model, was forcing the Pentagon to "obey their Terms of Service instead of our Constitution" and vowed that all federal contracts with the company would be phased out.

"The Pentagon is within its rights to stop working with the company," wrote the board. "The missions of the U.S. military are the responsibility of elected and politically accountable officials. It’s an imperfect analogy, but a company can’t sell the U.S. military a missile and then haggle about acceptable targets."

Nonetheless, the board continued, Trump's flat-out attack on the company is a "needless display of brute government punishment" that goes way too far — and could chill the entire American AI industry.

"Anthropic doesn’t lack for patriotism. The company says it has left revenue on the table by cutting off firms linked to the Chinese Communist Party. It’s no small matter that a technology company has been willing to help the U.S. military in combat, a change from a decade ago when most of Silicon Valley viewed Pentagon contracts as complicity in imperialism," wrote the board. Indeed, "the bigger picture before the meltdown was that an AI company with a progressive reputation and the Trump Pentagon largely agreed that America has to be defended with premiere technology."

The bottom line, wrote the board, is that "The Pentagon needs all the AI help it can get as the technology races ahead and China isn’t far behind. The People’s Liberation Army is the winner of the Anthropic ban."

A federal judge in Minnesota has blocked President Donald Trump's plan to arrest thousands of legal refugees for questioning and re-evaluation, calling the plan a "dystopian nightmare."

The order was first reported by Chris Geidner, who runs the Law Dork blog.

"In a pair of memos issued in December 2025 and February 2026 — which Law Dork has covered extensively — the Department of Homeland Security has purported to change that policy by rescinding and re-rescinding the 2010 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy that most recently enunciated that policy for applying the relevant provision — 8 U.S.C. 1159 — of the Refugee Act of 1980," wrote Geidner. The policy, known as Operation PARRIS (Post-Admission Refugee Reverification and Integrity Strengthening), seeks to throw out the longstanding rule that legal refugees cannot be detained solely on the basis of their status.

The plaintiffs, noted the court order, identified one case of a refugee “arrested on January 11, 2026, without a warrant, transported to a detention center in Minnesota, then flown in shackles to Texas, where he was questioned about his refugee status.”

This change of policy is not supported by federal statute, wrote U.S. District Judge John Tunheim, an appointee of former President Bill Clinton.

“The Government’s startling theory — that the statute silently grants DHS the power to seize a refugee the moment the clock strikes midnight on the 366th day after admission — is wrong,“ concluded Tunheim. “This theory finds no support in the text, the history, or the purpose of § 1159(a)(1) and marks a sharp break from more than four decades of agency practice.”

Operation PARRIS is part of a massive change of policies designed to curtail the freedom of people born outside the United States to come and live there; the Trump administration has also ramped up mass deportation proceedings and huge surges of federal immigration agents to cities that protest him. A long string of courts have found the administration in violation of several laws.

President Donald Trump has an easy scapegoat to throw under the bus if he continues to feel the heat from the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal, New York Times reporter Michelle Goldberg told MS NOW's Ari Melber on Friday: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Lutnick, a billionaire who has been at the forefront of defending Trump's tariff policies, has been caught lying about the extent of his relationship with the deceased financier pedophile, and even top GOP lawmakers are suggesting he could be brought in for questioning.

"I think the fact that they did them behind closed doors goes to the fact that they wanted to use them to either divert attention from Donald Trump and his allies, but didn't actually expect there to be any moments that were going to help them advance their side of the story," said Goldberg. "If they did, they would have wanted this to happen in public. They would have wanted to make a circus out of it."

"I also, I think — I also think we have to say that Bill Clinton's statement about how he never, never knew, I believe him, maybe that he never saw anything going on," said Goldberg. "But he said, you know, it's testament, something to the effect of it's testament to how well Epstein hid his crimes. He didn't hide them that well. You know, there was a reason that back when Bill Clinton was jetting around with Epstein, they called the plane the Lolita Express. And so, you know, even though I'm sure some of your viewers are Bill Clinton fans, I don't think that we should take everything he said here at face value."

"I think that's a good point," said Goldberg. "And so with the under a minute I have left, where does this go? The pressure is clearly building, including the details I mentioned."

"Well, yeah, I mean, I think the Lutnick, the pressure is going to continue to build on Lutnick again because he was caught red-handed in a lie, whatever his relationship was or wasn't with Epstein," said Goldberg. "He told this elaborate lie about cutting ties with him that we now know was blatantly untrue. And I think, you know, there's people on the right who see him as a clown or a distraction. So I imagine that he's one of the more vulnerable people in the Trump administration."

- YouTube youtu.be