Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday, July

the 21st, and I'm here with Bill Crystal, as is our habit. How you doing, Bill?

I'm doing fine. How are you? I'm doing pretty good. I binged the Epstein documentary over the weekend.

So we'll get to that in a minute, but that's where I am. You thought you were obsessed with the

Epstein case. I was staying up after the husband and child were in bed, you know, binging the

documentary. I actually had a fairly Epstein free 48 hours at a wedding, a family wedding,

and then seeing kids and so forth. But though I did take it 45 minutes off to do the podcast

with Sarah yesterday where we obsessed about Epstein and lamented the fact that more people

weren't obsessed about it, but we can discuss that. We can.

That's good that you're in the obsessed camp, in the internal, subtle internal bulwark split.

It's you and me and Sarah, you know.

Yeah, and obsessed is maybe an understatement for me. So we will discuss. I want to do, though, first,

start with the news. It came out late Friday. So after we take the podcast of this, what they're

calling a prisoner swap, but it was really a hostage exchange between the United States and Venezuela,

the 250-some-od Venezuelans that we had kidnapped and disappeared to El Salvador,

got sent back to Venezuela, the country they had fled in exchange for some Americans that were

being held hostage in Venezuela. The government was trying to claim that this was just a

prisoner deal between El Salvador and Venezuela, which doesn't even like pass the laugh test.

Obviously, the United States that had claimed that they had no ability to effectuate, you know, return for any of these men, obviously were the key factor in this swap. And on the good news and we did if you want to

see it on Friday night kind of an emotional live stream with Andrei Hernandez-Ramero the makeup

artist we've been covering a lot his lawyer and she's the lawyer for seven or eight of the other

folks that were detained as well as some other immigration experts and Sam got on with me. If you want to catch that live stream that we did on Friday night, you can get the audio on the Bullwork Takes feed. If you haven't been checking that out, that's where we're kind of putting our rapid response video audio products. So go check out Bullwark Takes on your podcast player of choice. You know, at the top level, it's kind of like, I wrote on the newsletter about this

...