#1386 - Matt Taibbi

Yeah, I think it's didn't. He did. How do you do the apostrophe you.

Should have gone with did not.

Starting here with that evidence of a link.

Rep. Paul Gosser. What are the ods that this guy did this accidentally. Really small.

Right. That's kind of like one of those monkeys typing Shakespeare things. Yeah, I don't think it could work.

And the thing is, he did it backwards. Right. So you didn't see what the puzzle was until the last tweet. Because the last tweet is an e.

I got a tweet from someone about 35 minutes ago that I don't know if there's a bunch of people online paying attention to it or what, but.

Someone alerted me and a few other people of it. Does he have an image of that fucking. That crazy mask? Is that in his shit too? Okay. He's a weird.

He's got the I was November 1. The V mask.

Yes. What is that mask again?

V for vendetta.

What is it representative of something?

It's the guy.

Fox mask. Yes, that's right. Yeah. So this guy is. He's thinking along alternative lines of thought, but that is really an interesting way of saying it.

Alphabetry, that's called. Yeah.

Just making a bunch of tweets. Don't ever address it. Just leave it there. Walk away.

Yeah. Lewis Carroll was famous for that.

Was he?

Yeah, that was one of. He did a lot of sort of tricks with words. Did you read the book? Go to Lesher Bach?

No.

Yeah. There's a whole bunch of stuff in there about people who used. Who put puzzles in text. It's kind of a thing that people did, I guess, back more in the 18th century and before.

Well, this Epstein case is probably the most blatant example of a public murder of a crucial witness I've ever seen in my entire life or anybody's ever seen. And the minimal amount of outrage about this, the minimal amount of COVID it's fucking fascinating.

What's amazing to me, just as somebody who works in the media, is that this was shaping up to be the biggest news story in history. And the instant he died or was died, or however you want to call it, the story just fell off the face. Of the earth. It's like nobody's doing anything about it. And I don't 100% understand that. I mean, I get it, why that's happening, but it's just amazing.

Well, when the woman from ABC, what was her name? Amy, that lady, the one who.

Robot.

Robot. Who had the frustrated moment that she called it, a frustrating private moment, right. When she was talking about having the coupe and having that story and them squashing it, right. This is all stuff that everybody used to think was conspiracy. Everybody think this was stoner talk. You know what I mean? This is stuff where people just are delusional. They believe all kinds of wacky conspiracies, sure. But the reality is much less complicated. Well, this is not possible. This is one of those things that's so obvious. It's so in everyone's face.

Well, there's a couple of things going on, because there are many different ways than this can play out. I mean, you could have a news director who just sort of instinctively decides, well, we can't do that story, because I might want to have will and Kate on later, or I might want to have this politician on later. And it's not like anybody tells them necessarily that we can't do this, but it's too hot. If you grow up in this system and you've been in the business for a long time, you have all these things that are drilled into you at almost like the cellular level about what you can and cannot get into. But there were some explicit things that happened with Epstein, too. There were a lot of news agencies that killed stories about him, and we're hearing about some of them. Vanity fair, this thing. It's bad.

It's terrible.

Yeah.

When I found out that Clinton flew no less than 26 times on a plane with Epstein, I was like, dude, I haven't flown that many times with my mom. How long did he know Epstein?

Yeah, I don't know, but I mean, to have that many flights, to have the secret service people involved, I mean, that's incredibly bold.

What was he doing? Was just girls. Is Clinton that much of a hound that he would go that deep into the well that many times? 26 times?

Well, that's the thing about the Epstein story that makes no sense to me. I thought that the percentage of people who were out and out, like perverts, who had a serious problem, like with pedophilia or whatever, was pretty small, but they had a lot of people coming in and out of this compound, and it just seems like it's a very strange story. What were they really up to? I have no idea. And was it all a blackmail scheme? It's just so strange.

Well, it seems like the pedophilia aspect of it might be directly connected to Epstein himself. Like, he might be the one that has a problem with girls that are, like, 16, and he likes them very young, or he did like them, but with the other guys, it could just be girls.

It could be, yeah.

I mean, that's why it's so crazy. How could it be that these. But maybe it's not.

But they knew who he was.

Yeah, but they probably didn't know the extent of it.

Probably not. Yeah. Up until a point.

Up until he was arrested.

Right.

And then they're like, oh, well, then that's when everybody backed off of him. Right?

Yes. I mean, I'm not 100%. Yeah. I haven't covered this story in depth. I only really got into it a little bit.

We need you. We need you on this one.

You're the guy. This is a tough one because it mixes a lot of things that are very tough to cover.

Yes.

The intelligence world is very tough to cover. It's hard to get stories out of there that they don't want you to have. And this is like the mother of all stories in terms of that. And they're just little breadcrumbs here and there. That whole thing about Acosta, the vanity Fair quote from him, is that when he said that when he looked at the case, he didn't do it, because I was told he belonged to intelligence.

Yes.

What does that mean? Who's intelligence? You know what I mean? Like, what agency? What for? And then you pair that with things like, I have friends on Wall street who tell me, I've never heard a single instance of this guy actually having a trade.

Right.

So what was his hedge fund doing? I mean, if you think about it, a hedge fund is a perfect way to do know, because you can just have people putting money in and out all the time, and it would look like know. So. Very strange story.

Well, Eric Weinstein had a conversation with Eric Weinstein with Peter Thiel capital.

Right.

He's like, this guy doesn't know what.

The fuck he's talking about. Oh, yeah.

Financially, he's an actor.

Right?

This is nonsense.

Right?

That was his initial, almost instantaneous response.

Yeah. And what real clients did he ever have? What did he trade in?

How's he got a billion dollars or whatever he had.

Yeah.

Half a billion under management.

Yeah. That's ridiculous.

Why did the guy who owns Victoria's Secrets give him a $70 million home, right, in New York City. Like what?

I mean, these are all things that would have been really interesting to get. Didn't. If he didn't try to kill himself, the suicide didn't happen to him. Like in the wire.

Poor fella.

Yeah.

So unfortunate. So, unfortunately, the cameras died. So, unfortunately, he sustained an injury that.

You usually only get through strangulation. Right?

Someone murders you.

He fell on the ground and accidentally broke his highoid bone. Happens all the time.

Whatever. No big deal.

I mean, it's so bizarre. I can't stand conspiracy theories. I'm one of these people who doesn't like reading, but I can't make this story work in a way that isn't conspiratorial.

Well, that's the thing. It's like, it gets to a point where you're like, okay, even Michael Shermer, who runs skeptic magazine, it's like, wait a minute, the cameras were not. This seems like a conspiracy fucking. When Michael Shermer says, that guy doesn't believe in anything, right? He's down the line on virtually every single thing that's ever happened. He doesn't believe in any conspiracies.

Well, what's the innocent explanation for any. None. It doesn't make any sense. You can't spin it in any way to make it not a crazy conspiracy.

Especially when the brother hires a doctor to do an autopsy. Oh, yeah, this guy was fucking murdered, right?

Yeah.

Michael Baden, the famous guy from the HBO autopsy show.

Right? Yep. Absolutely. Craziness. Complete craziness. And, you know, it's an example. Know, the Epstein star is interesting because it's about villains on both sides of the aisle. Right? This is a classic. This is something I've written about before, is that the press does not like to do stories where the problem is bipartisan. Right. So when you have an institutional problem, when Democrats and Republicans both share responsibility for it, or if it's an institution that kind of exists in perpetuity, no matter what the administration is, we don't really like to do those stories. Fox likes to do stories about Democrats. MSNBC likes to do stories about Republicans. But the thing that's kind of all over the place, they don't like to do that. You know, he's friends with Trump and with Clinton. I mean, it looks like he has more friends on the Clinton side, but still. And I think this is one of the reasons why this story doesn't have a lot of traction in the media, because neither side really likes the idea of going