This is the Daily Blast from the New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network.

I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

Speaking to reporters from abroad, President Trump rambled at his greatest length yet about the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.

But his argument actually undermined itself.

He claimed to know about elite Democrats and liberals who had gone to visit Epstein, but all that does is raise the question that won't go away. If this is what

the Epstein files would actually reveal, then why isn't Donald Trump ordering their release?

What makes this all worse for Trump right now is that Elon Musk just came out and attacked Trump on a real point of vulnerability in this whole scandal,

all of which confirms that none of this is sustainable for Trump.

Jennifer Rubin, editor-in chief of the contrarian, recently wrote a good piece laying out why Trump should be panicking over this scandal.

And everything we've been seeing underscores that point.

So we're talking to Jen about all this today.

Good to have you on, Jen.

Nice to be here.

So a quick reminder on the latest, Trump's deputy attorney general Todd Blanche has now twice

interviewed Epstein's accomplice Galane Maxwell, who's doing time for sex trafficking. This raises

the possibility that Blanche, who was Trump's personal attorney, is trying to get Maxwell to

exonerate Trump. Maxwell would then possibly get a pardon from Trump in return.

We don't know if that's the game, but it's possible.

Okay, with that in mind, listen to Trump talking to reporters about this whole mess.

And by the way, I never went to the island, and Bill Clinton went there supposedly,

uh, 28 times. Uh, I never went to the island, but Larry

Summers, I hear, went there. He was the head of Harvard. And many

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