The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.
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We want to cover multiple stories in a more rapid-fire style than we normally do, beginning with comments that Vice President JD Vance made today in an interview with the NYT's Ross Douthat. When asked about rulings that courts have been issuing against the Trump administration, placing limits on the administration's actions regarding immigration, Vance accused courts of seeking to impede what most Americans said they favored during the election.
In our second story, the current FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, surprised many people, in a recent interview on Fox stating in the most matter of fact and I would say awkward way that they are 100% certain that Jeffrey Epstein did in fact commit suicide in prison, that nobody killed him. Okay, that's possible. However, the far bigger and still unanswered question about this entire Epstein matter remains oddly unanswered, namely, did Jeffrey Epstein work for or with any foreign intelligence agencies? Why can't we know the answers to that, given the administration has promised full transparency on the Epstein files?
Then, Jake Tapper continues his humiliation tour, trying to justify how he and others like him in the media can still possibly pretend that they did not know about Biden's cognitive decline, even while most Americans do. We also have several short items regarding Brazil, including the testimony that Mark Rubio gave today in Congress, which are as hilarious and pathetic as they are consequential. We wanted to share those with you.
All right, so there's been, of course, a series of judicial rulings which have been adverse to the administration almost from the very beginning, after Donald Trump was inaugurated, first coming from federal district courts, then appellate courts, and after that, from even the Supreme Court. While the narrative has been that these are all leftist activists, judges trying to commandeer American policy independent of the election, the reality is that a lot of the judges who have ruled against the Trump administration aren't just conservative judges, but Trump-appointed judges in many cases.
The Supreme Court twice ruled 9-0 against the Trump Administration: one in the question of whether people being deported under the Alien Enemies Act have the right of habeas corpus – all nine justices in the Supreme Court said they did – and then also on the Abrego Garcia case where the government admitted that they accidentally or mistakenly deported him given the immigration hold that had been placed on him and the Supreme Court said, the government must do everything it can to facilitate his release and that's going back to the court, based on the apparent decision by the Trump administration to do nothing to try to facilitate it.
It's not true that these are left-wing judges. Many of them are the most beloved conservative judges and the most beloved Trump-appointed justices throughout the federal system. A Trump-appointed district court judge ruled that Trump can't even invoke the Alien Enemies Act, to begin with, because we're not at war, as the statute envisioned it. That has been upheld by an appellate court, too.
Vice President JD Vance gave an interview, published today, to the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. They talk about a lot of things, including the new Pope, Catholicism. I always think JD Vance is a very smart and interesting figure. We'll see that even more, I think, once he is no longer the Vice President but will presumably run for president on his own, and then he's not as bound by the Trump administration and their policies. Obviously, no vice president can come out and contradict the president; it's really not their job to do that, but still, he does speak openly and often expresses his ideas very coherently.
He said something today with Ross Douthat about these court rulings, including from the Supreme Court, that I think is very notable because it's a very tendentious argument, if not a false argument, about how our American founding, how the system of government was created. JD Vance went to Yale Law School. He understands the law extremely well. So, let's just take a look at this part of the conversation:
