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The Briefing with Jen Psaki

Loose lips Trump blabs about covert Venezuela mission; appears to be making it up as he goes

The Briefing with Jen Psaki

MS NOW, Jen Psaki

Politics, News, Ms Now, Versant Media, Versant

4.4975 Ratings

🗓️ 31 December 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As the U.S. military remains mostly opaque on the details of ongoing aggression against Venezuelan targets, Donald Trump lack of filter and braggadocious inclinations mean there is little holding him back from blurting about a recent U.S. attack. Margaret Donovan, former federal prosecutor and former Judge Advocate General officer, and MS NOW senior national security reporter David Rohde discuss what is known about what the U.S. is doing in Venezuela and whether the Trump administration is reverse engineering legal justifications for its actions.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I'm Antonia Hilton in tonight for Jen Saki.

0:03.0

We are now 11 days past the deadline Congress gave the Justice Department for releasing all of the Epstein files.

0:10.0

And not only has the Justice Department not released all the files, the Department has only released around 130,000 pages of information so far.

0:19.0

But the Department is now saying that they have uncovered

0:21.1

more than a million new files related to Epstein that they did not know existed. Now, that is

0:28.1

quite an incredible revelation. And by incredible, I mean, potentially not credible, because it is not

0:35.3

like the Justice Department just started looking at these files.

0:38.7

Let's roll back the clock a little bit. Because it was 10 months ago in February that Trump's

0:45.2

Attorney General directed the FBI to provide her with all files related to Epstein. Then, back in

0:52.3

March, FBI agents pulled all-nighters, reviewing and redacting

0:57.0

those files in the event they may be released. According to Bloomberg News, over the course of just five days from March 17th to March 22nd,

1:07.0

934 FBI employees clocked more than 14,000 hours of overtime, costing the department more than

1:14.7

$850,000 in overtime pay to complete that review.

1:20.3

Sources familiar with the matter told Bloomberg that one of the tasks given to some of those

1:24.6

nearly 1,000 FBI employees was specifically to redact the name Donald Trump.

1:31.3

Multiple outlets then reported that in May, Attorney General Pam Bondi told President Trump that his name was in the files.

1:39.3

Then in July, the Justice Department released a memo saying that they had conducted an exhaustive

1:45.6

review of investigative holdings related to Jeffrey Epstein. The department said that to ensure

1:51.4

that the review was thorough, the FBI conducted digital searches of its databases, hard drives

1:57.6

and network drives, as well as physical searches of squad areas, locked cabinets,

2:03.1

desks, closets, and other areas where responsive material may have been stored.

2:08.6

DOJ said it looked through all of it and determined that no further disclosure of any Epstein

...

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