Author Michael Wolff has addressed bombshell emails between him and Jeffrey Epstein, saying they showed him in pursuit of a vital story about the character of Donald Trump.
Epstein’s emails with Wolff were released first in part by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee and then in full in a 26,000-page cache of correspondence obtained from the late pedophile’s estate by Congress.
The emails suggested that Trump may have known more about Epstein’s conduct than the president has acknowledged. They also prompted new questions about Wolff’s involvement with the infamous sex offender, showing him offering advice to Epstein at the same time as asking the financier for journalistic information.
Wolff, the co-host of the Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head podcast with Joanna Coles, told an emergency edition of the podcast that he corresponded with Epstein to better understand Trump—and to persuade Epstein to “come forward” with what he knew about his one-time friend. He said he was in pursuit of a vital story—the truth about Trump—and that the emails could be “embarrassing” in hindsight, but were part of his journalistic mission.
He disclosed that Epstein was too “afraid” to speak publicly about Trump, calling him “fearful” even before Trump’s first presidential victory in 2016.
The explosive emails have reopened the Epstein files controversy for Trump.
In one email, written to Wolff on Jan. 31, 2019, Epstein explicitly stated that Trump “knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop”—a reference to Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Trump, who was a friend of Epstein’s from the 1980s into the 2000s, has repeatedly said he did not know anything about Epstein’s crimes.
In another email exchange, Wolff wrote to Epstein on Dec. 15, 2015—the day of a debate in the Republican presidential primaries—telling him, “I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you—either on air or in scrum afterwards.”
Epstein wrote back: “if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”
“I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency,” replied Wolff.
“You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”
On the emergency episode of the Inside Trump’s Head Podcast, Coles confronted Wolff, saying she was “shocked” by the emails, and saying that he appeared to be “advising a convicted pedophile.”
“What emails sound like—would one have rewritten in hindsight? Yeah, of course. Emails always are—that’s embarrassing,“ said Wolff.
Wolff said that for his 2008 biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, which he wrote based on conversations he had with the media mogul over months, he had employed the same approach.
“If you saw the emails that I shared with Rupert Murdoch, I would be embarrassed about them,” he said. “But I was able to write the book that no one has been able to write, and a book also that he profoundly hated.”
The author’s conversations with Epstein began in 2014 when the pedophile financier approached him to become his biographer.
But Wolff, who wrote his first tell-all book on Trump, Fire and Fury, after spending months behind the scenes of the White House in 2017, said that he was “nice” to Epstein so he could get the true story of Trump, one which would “offer an entirely different view” to readers. Pursuing that story comes at the cost of having to be “nice” to people like Epstein, he said.
“I’m the person who sees this, this elemental story, Donald Trump,” he said. “I’ve gone through this with Epstein deep into the background. Donald Trump is the best friend of, you know, evil. He is the best friend of of a deeply, deeply diabolical person.”
Getting to that story, he said, involved “play-acting,” telling Coles that what he wrote in the 2015 email to Epstein was “obviously what Epstein wanted to hear.”
“I’m a writer who manages to make relationships that let me tell a story in the ways that The New York Times or other, very reputable, journalistic organizations are unable to tell,” said Wolff.
The story, he said, was vital: to shed light on Trump himself, and to try to persuade Epstein to make public what he knew about his one-time best friend, a man Epstein labeled in the email cache as “dirty,” and a “maniac.”
Wolff said, “One of the things that I was focused on is trying to get Epstein to come forward. ‘Why don’t you go public with these pictures? Why don’t you go public? Let me help you go public in telling your story about Donald Trump.’”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had dismissed the emails as “selectively leaked” by Democrats to the “liberal media,” to distract from Trump’s “historic accomplishments.” White House communications director Steven Cheung has previously derided Wolff as “a lying sack of s---” and accused him of having “Trump derangement syndrome.”
Wolff said Epstein’s fear of Trump was central to the story. “The point was how afraid Epstein was of Donald Trump,” Wolff noted. “Epstein was fearful about what would happen to him if Donald Trump became the president of the United States.”
Wolff has previously recounted how Epstein once dug into his safe to take out photos of Trump posing with topless young women, whose ages Wolff did not know, on his lap at Epstein’s estate in Palm Beach.
Discussing his attempts to convince Epstein to speak out against Trump, the author said, “I saw then, as I have continued to see and see every day now, that Donald Trump was unfit to be the president of the United States.”
In another email that was released Wednesday, dated April 2, 2011, Epstein tells Maxwell: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. (REDACTED) spent hours at my house with him „ he has never once been mentioned. police chief. etc. im 75 % there.” Republicans name the “redacted” as Virginia Giuffre, who died by suicide earlier this year.
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial for his crimes, while Maxwell was subsequently sentenced to 20 years in jail for her role in helping him recruit and abuse young girls.
The emails were unveiled as the House of Representatives returned on Wednesday to officially end the government shutdown. Arizona Representative Adelita Grijalva was sworn in soon after, then provided the final 218th signature necessary to force a vote to release the files in the House despite the wishes of the president and GOP leadership.
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