I Know Why Epstein Refused to Expose Trump: Michael Wolff | Inside Trump's Head

I'm the person who sees this elemental story. Donald Trump, and I've gone through this with Epstein deep into the background, Donald Trump is the best friend of, you know, evil. I mean, he is the best friend of a deeply, deeply diabolical person.

Well, I'm going to say I've known you for a long time, as we've often mentioned, we've known each other 25 years, and I was shocked by some of these emails. And I want to read one in particular that I was like wow. And this is based on you sending Jeffrey Epstein an email in December 15, 2015 on the eve of a primary debate, Republican primary debate, and it's CNN's holding the debate and you sent an email to him saying I hear CNN is planning to ask Trump tonight

about his relationship with you, either on air or in scrum afterwards. He writes back, if we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it would be? And then you say, 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. 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 when asked, he'll say Jeffrey is a great guy and he's gotten a wrong deal and he's a victim of political correctness, which

is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.

Let's remember the entire context here.

OK, but what I want to say is in this particular email, it sounds like you're advising a convicted pedophile about what to do and you're colluding with him against a potential candidate.

Well, you know, I don't know. You know, you know, what emails sound like would one have rewritten them in hindsight? Yeah, of course, you know, emails always are. That's that's that's embarrassing. But remember what's going on here. I am in this, I am where no one else is.

I am in proximity to a story which actually most people don't see at this point.

So in these emails what strikes me is that you're frequently giving advice to Jeffrey Epstein about how to handle the media, how to use the media. Were you his media advisor?

No. He had, I mean, given the fact of how badly he has managed the media over the course of his long difficulties, I would not want credit for that in any way. But this was always a major thing and this was actually part of the reason, part of my entree here that I knew about the media. That gave me the kind of cachet that got me a place at the table, which has gotten me the Epstein story,

if anyone wanted to pay attention. Right, so this is 2015. I'm the person who sees this elemental story. Donald Trump, and I've gone through this with Epstein deep into the background, Donald Trump is the best friend of evil. He is the best friend of a deeply, deeply diabolical person, a person who is involved in – well, we now know what he's involved in.

A thousand women trafficking a thousand girls. And – is involved in, well, we now know what he's involved in.

1,000 women trafficking 1,000 girls. Ferried back and forth from school. What I understand at this point is that Donald Trump may become the president of the United States. And this is still in 2015, an iffy proposition. But nevertheless, a possible president of the United States has been involved for well

more than 10 years, has been joined at the hip with this person, has been involved in every, both of these men, in every aspect of each other's lives, sharing girlfriends in their financial lives. Now this is to me and this is a moment which I think we ought to pause because I think we're very close to the smoking gun. This is what is not only in implied in my emails but in other emails that Epstein has sent. And by the smoking gun what do you mean? Well the relationship and remember Donald Trump has denied this

relationship. Oh Epstein you know passed him in the hall.

Well he's calling it a democratic hoax again. He just drew the social doubt this is all a democratic hoax.

Of course he will. He's called it again and again. Everything is a hoax. Everything in his life he doesn't like is a hoax. But the smoking gun is obviously, has Donald Trump been involved with Jeffrey Epstein

and underage girls? Did Donald Trump know about Jeffrey Epstein's, that the underage girls in and out of Epstein's house? Now I have spoken here and in many other places about the photographs that I have seen and Epstein at one of these emails confirms or says Trump knew about the girls and he damn well did. I have seen the pictures of the girls of you know

again a dozen snapshots three of which I vividly remember two with topless girls

sitting on Donald Trump's lap. Okay there's another one I wanted to read to you here which was, came out in October of 2016, so just before he was being elected. There's an opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in such a way that

could garner you great sympathy and help finish him interested? You know 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 with about Donald Trump. mean, 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.

So Blue Sky and X and social media is full of journalists just saying this is completely unacceptable, this is not how you speak to a source, this is not what journalism is. Well, these are not

people who have written the kind of books that I have written and you know and I often make the distinction between journalists who do what they do, daily reporters, working for organizations, working within a very prescribed set of rules. And what I do, I mean, 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. I mean, I was, you know, I am the one, I am the journalist who got into the Trump White House in those first months, for seven months actually,

I sat there and was able to write a book, that's my book, Fire and Fury, which was, you know, I, made a substantial contribution to understanding what was going on and the utter uniqueness and out of controlness of the first Trump White House. You know, I did the same, my biography of Rupert Murdoch, somehow I was the only journalist not in his employ who has ever spent an enormous amount of time with him,

basically a year.

And what do you do?

And the emails, but Nola, I just wanna make the point that if you saw the emails that I shared with Rupert Murdoch I would be embarrassed about them. But I was able to write the book that no one has been able to write and a book also that he profoundly hated.

Alright, so I was going to ask you about that because you go in and certainly Rupert Murdoch is a perfect example. You go in, you spend an inordinate Murdoch is a perfect example, you go in you spend an inordinate amount of time with them and they believe that you are on their side. Do you basically go in and sort of suck up to them and...

Well, let me ask the question in a friendlier way. Am I acting? Am I play acting? Am I playing a role? And the answer is yes. I mean that's what a journalist, a writer in that situation does. If you want to stay, if you want to be invited back the next day and the next day and the next day. Yes. So the the point is not what you say but what you write, the story you tell. And you know and that's always the thing that I'm that I'm I'm constantly focused on. Tell me tell me

what you would not tell other people. I mean, you said that. And in order to do that, you know, you got to, I think, as my mother would say, get more with a little honey.

Right. Some of the honey feels a lot when it's a convicted pedophile.

We have- Yeah, but that's not, the point is to get the story of the convicted pedophile. I could have easily not gotten the story and could have said you're a fucking pedophile and I can't see you anymore. But we're – in order to get the story and let's – this is a story that I have told as often as I can in as many places that I can. The story of Donald Trump's relationship with this pedophile, a story that virtually and

certainly many of the journalists that I'm sure are now criticizing me have chosen not to pick up. I've had a very, very hard time telling this story.

So you used the phrase twice in the email we started off with about let him

hang himself, which turns out to have a particular resonance. Well, the hanging here was referred to not Epstein, but Trump. Trump was pretending he was someone other than who he actually is, which is, you know, I think by wide agreement, one might say certainly the sleazeball of our time. But also I think, you know, we could argue a criminal in his sleazeballness.

All right. So let's talk a bit more about your methodology in terms of when you came home from spending you know a day with Jeffrey Epstein or an evening at Jeffrey Epstein's house what did you do did you write notes did you speak into

a... Of course. So you came out of the persona that you adopted when you were there. Yes, and also most of these conversations with Jeffrey Epstein are on tape. So as we've discussed before, I've discussed many, many places. There are hours and hours, upwards of 100 hours of Jeffrey Epstein talking about many things but many hours of him talking about Donald Trump and his relationship to Donald Trump.

So what else is in the tapes? What else do we need to know? What other emails are going to come out with explosive revelations?

Well I think that there's, again to go back to this and this is where the focus should be, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein had this deep relationship. They knew everything about each other and then they fell out with enormous acrimony. But for more than a decade, that's what they were doing. And their obsession was women, girls, models. You know, again, you know, I can't make that point clear enough.

It was models, models, models, supermodels, runway models, fashion models, catalog models, girls who just wanted to be models. The Trump model agency.

Well, they all had a modeling agency, right?

Jeffrey Epstein had a modeling agency, Trump had a model, yes, everyone. I didn't have a modeling agency.

So you've talked about going after Trump, but how is Donald Trump, who was elected president not once but twice, worse than a convicted pedophile who it turns out had trafficked a thousand girls. I mean he was sending

cars to pick up girls from school. Okay but that's it, Joanna, that's clear the answer because he's the president in the United States because he is the model of what a leader should be, of what success looks like. And so it is important, important, it's vital, it's required at some level that we understand the truth of who this man is. This charade, we all live in a charade. And you are also lying to

Jeffrey Epstein by trying to seduce him into telling you everything.

Joanna, Joanna, there are lies and there are lies. I am not a pedophile, I am a writer. So you know and I guess, I guess what you might be saying is, does the means justify the ends? And I would point out that the means in this instance are a kind of set of white lies. They harm no one. they they produce the end. I got this story. I am the only one and I have been going and and together actually

before the before the election we released with the Daily Beast we released a set of a set of tapes that are much more explicit than these emails that directly connect Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein in a way that is, you know, that I think is completely revealing of Donald Trump's character and makes the point. He is, he was, is, and continues to be unfit to be the President of the United States, to say the very least.

So we've been inundated, as have you, with questions from journalists trying to get to the bottom of this story and to understand your methodology. We've put them together and there's some questions here from a guy called Eric Wimple at the New York Times.

I'm going to read out his questions. Just wanted to ask you if you could add any context to the emails that were released. Some seem to conclude that you are essentially outlining a strategy for blackmailing Donald Trump. This was when he was a candidate before he was president, do you have any response to that?

Well, there's a curious thing and that's a reference to and I say in one of those emails you can get leverage or...

Well, it's where you say you could save him generating a debt.

You know, and the interesting thing was, I mean, this was obviously what Epstein wanted to hear, but the point was how afraid Epstein was of Donald Trump. That really was a kind of going forward thing that Epstein was fearful about what would happen to him if Donald Trump became the president of the United States. Okay so Eric has another question. It seems as though these emails are news. Did you ever disclose them in any of your pieces or

podcasts or hint at them? Well as I've said I haven't talked about almost nothing for the past year except my relationship to Jeffrey Epstein and have disclosed things that I thought were much more incriminating than these emails. Are there any other

emails with Epstein that you could share? No, but there are, well more important, more

importantly there are a 100 hours of tape. And then Eric Wimple, the next question he will ask is, have I...

You mentioned that you tried to interest news outlets in the story of the Epstein tapes. How many did you pitch and how many said no?

Do you have any correspondence from those interactions? I certainly do. And everybody has been pitched. There is almost no outlet, streamers, networks, cable stations, and book publishers who has not been pitched on this story. Everyone saying no.

So you spent four or five years on and off with Epstein at the centre of Epstein's sort of table with all the people that came to and from his house. The book never appeared. He wanted you to write a book about him after your Murdoch books.

Yes, no, but several other books did appear, which is, you know, he became a very...

Do you mean several other books by you?

Yes, by me. So he became a very significant source for me in my four books about Donald Trump. I understand Donald Trump as well as I do, partly because of Jeffrey Epstein. I mean there are many other people and many other sources in these books but Epstein's

I have always found probably the two people who have been most insightful about Donald Trump are Jeffrey Epstein and Steve Bannon who actually actually, curiously, then became friends.

So is one of the reasons that the networks and streaming services or whatever have turned you down on this is because Jeffrey Epstein is thought to be an unreliable narrator?

You know, I don't think so. I think the reason is that they are scared. They're scared of being sued by the Trump administration. They're uncomfortable with how to talk about this story. They don't want to see Jeffrey Epstein in any more than that single lens

through which we view him. And these tapes go all over the place. They really show a life in full, I mean a really strange life and clearly a diabolical life. But he is something else in these tapes beyond just the man who victimized many, many girls. But I actually don't think that's the man.

I think they are afraid, afraid of what Donald Trump will do. And remember, Donald Trump has repeatedly and every instance turned to the media outlets and if he doesn't like what they do, he sues them. I know getting the story is important.

Are there any lines that you wouldn't cross?

You seem to downplay the importance of getting the story, which I would not do. Getting the story is the all-important thing. But of course,

you know, I'm not gonna be,

do I have to answer this? You know the answer to this. Of course, of course there are guidelines.

I mean, you remind me a little bit of an undercover cop.

Well, I suppose in a way that I am. And in the television show, the undercover cop always has to prove himself by shooting someone.

Right.

I wouldn't do that. Well, that's a relief. Yes. And let's remember what I did. I sat at a table and listened to Jeffrey Epstein and many of the other people who he invited to his table and I often said what he wanted to hear.

His table sounded a really intriguing place to be. There were all sorts of people from world leaders. We've talked on the podcast about how you ran into the head of the Nobel Prize Committee there. You said you saw Bill Gates there, Woody Allen there, Larry Summers there. Is there a way in which you were trying to seduce Jeffrey Epstein into confiding in you

and you were also seduced by Jeffrey Epstein?

Well, no, this is, I is, I mean I'm not the first journalist in this position and many journalists have have have talked about this and how to navigate such a situation and the times they have failed to entirely navigate this situation. And yeah, and I suppose that I, you know, that there were moments in which you have to stomach what you would, what you know you should not be stomaching,

but you do because. When you say that, what do you actually mean? You know I and again that's why you stomach because you're not you're not you're not seeing anything you're not participating in anything you're just hearing things so I mean that was I mean my relationship with with with Jeffrey Epstein did not go I mean actually I have never in all of the hours that I have

spent with him, I have never, never saw, saw any interaction with women, with girls.

Did you ever see the massage room?

I never saw the massage room. I do want to, want to say, and I think it's,, the kind of journalism I do or the kind of writing that I do is different from journalists who work at newspapers or broadcast outlets. I am trying to – I offer an entirely different view. The cost of that is you

know you you gotta you gotta be nice to these people. What I find is it's interesting is it's access journalism which normally results in something favorable to the person who's given you access. What I always found interesting about your columns at New York Magazine was that people

were clamoring to talk to you even when you'd written previously negative pieces about them. Yeah, well, even that sometimes they're not. I am willing to… I was going to say I'm willing to blow up people, but that's not really how I think. I have always been just, you know, what the story is. You got the story.

You're lucky enough to get the story. You've worked hard enough to get the story. Tell the fucking story. And, you know, usually that results in the people you're telling the story about really hating you. But, you know, what the hell.

So what more do you think the Oversight Committee is going to release?

Well, you know, I guess they're just releasing whatever they can get. And there's seem appears to be dueling releases from the Republicans, from the Democrats. But I think that this is all signs of an investigation that is closing in on its subject. And you know, and sometimes I'm not sure that they realize that the subject here is not so much Jeffrey Epstein, but Donald Trump.

Okay, so I want to ask you a question about Ghislaine Maxwell who we have talked about a lot on the podcast especially since she's been moved from jail in Tallahassee Florida after a two-day interview with Todd Blanche number two the Justice Department to a prison camp in Texas where we know she has her own puppy. She has a fitness instructor. And then there is an email from Jeffrey Epstein on Saturday, April the 2nd, doesn't have the year here actually saying, I want you to realize that that dog that hasn't barked is Trump. There is then a name redacted,

which has since been filled in because she's dead by the Republicans who say it was Virginia Dufry. Virginia Dufry spent hours at my house with him. He has never once been mentioned. Police chief etc. I'm 75% there. And then Glenn Maxwell sends him back an email later that day saying, I have been

thinking about that. Let me, before we go to that email per se, I think it's going to be interesting. I don't think, I mean Donald Trump has clearly been getting ready to pardon Ghislaine or commute her sentence or get her out of jail in some way. I think that's going to be very hard for him to do now, which probably has other complications for him

because if he breaks his deal with Ghislaine, Ghislaine gets to talk. But if he reneges on his deal, and her method of talking, as remember with the birthday letter, is a method of leaks and which could be, as the birthday letter was, pretty devastating to Donald Trump.

Because her family, who we think are behind the leak of the birthday letter, are determined to get her out of jail and feel that she is the only person in this entire Epstein saga to have gone to jail, that other men that we assume partook of the things that Jeffrey was offering, have some of them have lost their jobs, but none of them have gone to jail.

No, but they have, a lot of them have suffered terrifically, have been held to account in some ways. The one who has not been held to account in any way is the President of the United States.

Losing your job isn't the same as being sentenced 20 years

in jail.

But losing your job and facing disgrace is also a lot different than being the most powerful man in the world and being unstoppable in that, apparently in the power you hold.

And again, one's just struck by the remarkable difference in their journeys that these were two men that used to tool around Atlantic City together. One ended up dead in a Manhattan cell, still uncertainty around whether he killed himself or whether or not something else happened to him,

and the other ended up being the leader of the free world.

Yes, and I admire that line because it is my line which I have used again and again and again and again. And the this this and and people force years now have been people I mean, journalists, the media organization, media organizations have been over willing to overlook this story

until you know, smoking gun time. I think we may be closing in on it. Now the Republicans decided to unredact the name and put in Virginia Dufry because they say there's no mention of Donald Trump in her book Nobody's Girl and she never mentioned Donald Trump as one of the people she saw there, although she did mention other people, Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton and actually Al Gore.

She's a complicated witness. You know, she had to apologize to Dershowitz. Al Gore turns out never to have been in any proximity to Jeffrey Epstein. So she's, you know, I don't know. I mean, she's dead. So let's not pile on.

But I think there would be no reason for Epstein to write this email were it not to be true. This email was theoretically a private email and he's writing it to Galen who would know. So I think it speaks for itself.

So did you have any sense that this enormous stash of emails was coming?

Not in the least. I woke up to this like everybody else.

So I mean some of the names in here you've talked about, Woody Allen, Bill Gates, but some of the names I was surprised to read, Deepak Chopra.

I have discussed Deepak Chopra before as being there, yes. Not with, I don't think you have with me. It's an oversight then, because I have been there with Deepak Chopra.

Okay, and what was he doing?

You know, eating an omelette like? You know eating an omelet like everybody else. Eating an omelet. But I actually remember. What was Deepak Chopra doing? I suspect he was there trying to get money out of out of Epstein but I don't know. Kathy Rumler who was Obama's White House counsel, Tom Barak. No and Tom Barak is pivotal here in this the connection because it was and I talked about this in my first in Fire and Fury as them being the three musketeers Trump, Barak, Epstein.

And they were together the closest of friends. And when Tom Barak went into the White House – or actually, he did not go into the White House in the first administration, and that was partly because of Epstein's advice, don't take an official job but Barrack remained one of the key advisors still is one of Trump's key advisors. Right he's an ambassador now. Yeah but and you know on the phone with Trump constantly.

So there you have it straight from the man himself. If you have been thank you for joining. Don't forget to subscribe to this podcast. We are independent media and we appreciate your support. Leave a comment. Tell us the questions you would have asked Michael

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