BUCK: We’ve got Dinesh D’Souza with us now. He is the host of the Dinesh D’Souza podcast. He is a filmmaker, a best-selling author, and friend of mine. Dinesh, thanks so much for being here.

D’SOUZA: Hey, it’s a pleasure. Great to join you guys.

BUCK: Dinesh, we’ve been talking about a lot of major cases in the last couple of months, right? Rittenhouse trial, Ahmaud Arbery, Jussie Smollett. One case, though, that you would think would be right alongside it in terms of media interest, the amount of coverage that it would get, the amount of time people would spend on panels talking about it is the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, the associate of and right-hand woman, so to speak, of Jeffrey Epstein. What do we know? Give us the backstory here, just to put this in context for everybody about why this is such a big deal.

D’SOUZA: Well, by contrast with the other cases you mentioned, which basically involved people in the ordinary walk of life — Kyle Rittenhouse, of course, just a kid, you know, in his teens defending himself in the middle of a riot; or the Arbery case where you’ve got thee three guys who chased down one guy, the guy was probably up to no good, but nevertheless he gratuitously killed him without legitimate authority.

Now, this is all different than the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. Ghislaine Maxwell was sort of the madam — the pimp, if you will — for Jeffrey Epstein. And over a long career Epstein, you know, kind of navigated that he had access to some of the most powerful people in the world. I mean, there is he is sitting, you know, with the queen. There he is at Buckingham Palace.

So, he’s got European royalty, he’s got influential figures from all walks of American life. You’ve got Bill Clinton, for example, having Epstein over to the White House on multiple occasions, not to mention taking multiple trips on his jet. So what’s interesting about this story is, you’ve got this socialite, Ghislaine Maxwell — the daughter of a billionaire, Robert Maxwell, the famous publisher in Europe — and she agrees for reasons unknown to become the procurer of young women for these apparently willing older men.

And so the obvious question is, “Who are these older men? What was their exact role?” and remarkably a lot of it has been left out of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial. So, the real news of the trial is the dog that didn’t bark. It’s the names that have not been introduced. It’s the narrowing of the scope of the trial merely to say, “Hey, here’s Ghislaine Maxwell. She’s sex trafficking. Let’s get her but let’s protect everybody else,” and sort of, you may say, let’s redact their names so that they don’t face embarrassment, let alone public accountability.

CLAY: Dinesh, appreciate you coming on. My understanding of this case — and I’ve tried to read about it, obviously, because it’s not being broadcast, which is an interesting angle in and of itself — is that effectively there are four women that are testifying that, as you said, Maxwell was effectively the madam that was trying to procure these women in order to have sexual interactions with Jeffrey Epstein.

Those four women, based on my reading — and I don’t know how closely you have followed it — it doesn’t sound like the government has even put on that good of a case, given these four women. They have a variety of different ages. Some of them were not even minors at the time that this incident was occurring based on the definition of where they were located. She may not even be convicted here, right? What are the chances that she is not even found guilty?

D’SOUZA: Well, this is a very odd turn of events because normally in these cases, they have got the goods on you —

CLAY: Right.

D’SOUZA: — and there’s very little way to wriggle out of it. It also seems like in this case the guilt — the guilt of Epstein and the participation of Maxwell — is sort of like an sustained public fact. And so all you would want is the government to show enormous evidence that’s already there. But they appear to have sort of taken a very lighthearted approach to this, used a second or third tier prosecutors.

Obviously Ghislaine Maxwell has very good lawyers, and so I don’t know what the outcome of this is going to be. It looks like once again you’ve got — I mean, going right back to Jeffrey Epstein’s own suicide — an incredible botching of the operation on the government’s part so that what should have been a slam dunk is now turning out to be an open question.

BUCK: We’re speaking to Dinesh D’Souza. He is the host of Dinesh D’Souza podcast, also best-selling author and filmmaker. Dinesh, from what we did know of Jeffrey Epstein there was something along the lines of a massive surveillance and likely blackmail operation that he was running for a lot of these often-illegal sexual interactions with young women, right?

Somehow none of that information, none of that surveillance tape footage or just the information that we would get from all of it has come out in trial. Ghislaine Maxwell, as far as I know — and you’ve been following the case very closely; so I might be missing a detail — hasn’t been told to name names, hasn’t been bringing people into this at all. How are we — given that we know that it was surveillance and blackmail operation Epstein was running — supposed to find that credible?

D’SOUZA: Well, the strangeness of this case is that normally… Maxwell is kind of like the person who knows where all the bodies are buried and knows all the people whose names are in the various Epstein books and logs, and yet you would think that the prosecutorial approach would be to offer Maxwell some sort of a deal to spill the beans so that all these people far more important than Maxwell, would be drawn into this web of pedophilia and corruption.

But evidently the government has decided not to do that, and obviously in going after Maxwell, Maxwell herself is going to clam up. She’s not going to be cooperative because, after all, the government has made her the target. So you can see right here that there almost appears to have been a deliberate decision up front not to bring in Prince Philip and not to bring in Larry Summers and not to bring in Bill Clinton. Let’s leave all those guys out of it and choreograph this as nothing more than we couldn’t get Jeffrey Epstein on let’s go after Ghislaine Maxwell and then quickly close the book on the whole matter.

CLAY: Who makes that choice, Dinesh? It’s a prosecutorial decision. They found four women that they are trying to tie to Ghislaine Maxwell and bring her down. But as you said, there are a lot of bigger names that are not involved. You can think… Usually this is the opposite of what happens in a case. And let me give you an example that I’m sure you followed somewhat when they had the massage parlor case in, I believe it was, Jupiter, Florida.

Almost all of the attention was put on Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, who had paid $20 for a massage and ultimately that case gets dismissed. But they were trying to get as big a fish on the line as they possibly could to draw attention to what was going on. It seems that the exact opposite is occurring here. Who makes that decision? How high up does this go from a prosecutorial perspective?

D’SOUZA: In theory, the person who makes that decision is the head, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. These are the people who are the prosecutorial wing. But they are going to be working in conjunction with the Biden Justice Department. So it’s naive to think that Merrick Garland and the attorney general are removed from this kind of high-profile prosecution. So my guess is that it’s the U.S. attorney making the decisions — that’s the SDNY, the Southern District of New York, but — in coordination with the Biden DOJ.

CLAY: Would it look any different in your mind if Donald Trump is president right now in what is happening to Maxwell?

D’SOUZA: Without a doubt. The left loves to sort of… When you bring up Bill Clinton they go, “What about Donald Trump?” Because there are some photos of Trump. Trump did meet and know Jeffrey Epstein and apparently on one occasion took a flight on his plane from New York to Florida on his way to Mar-a-Lago. But this is a whole different matter from taking multiple trips to the so-called Lolita island where the little massage girls were all waiting in tow.

So I think under Trump you would have… Trump was, by the way, one of the guys who turned Epstein in. And I think you would have seen a much more neutral prosecution of following the evidence where it leads rather than what was seen now which is some sort of a cover up.

BUCK: Check out the Dinesh D’Souza podcast, and Dinesh, thank you so much for being with us, my friend. We appreciate it.

D’SOUZA: My pleasure.