Michael Wolff, chronicler of elites, provided Epstein with advice on Trump

Washington: Michael Wolff, a writer, reporter, columnist, author and would-be mogul, has spent his long career building his profile as an insider with gossip on New York luminaries, while sometimes drawing scrutiny from other journalists.

That profile expanded on Wednesday, Washington time: Wolff, it turns out, has been enough of an insider that he once provided advice to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced sex offender, on how to handle his dealings with Donald Trump, who was running for president at the time.

That revelation emerged from emails between Wolff and Epstein released by Washington lawmakers, shedding new light on the relationship between the two.

Author and journalist Michael Wolff once provided advice to Jeffrey Epstein.Credit: Getty

In one of the emails, from December 2015, Wolff said CNN planned to ask Trump about his relationship with Epstein, and then counselled Epstein on next steps.

“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff wrote. “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.”

In October 2016, Wolff sent Epstein an email saying there was 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”. The exchange came late in Trump’s first presidential campaign, and weeks after a recording of Trump making vulgar comments about women to an Access Hollywood host emerged.

Before the 2024 presidential election, Wolff disclosed that he had interviewed Epstein “periodically” for his 2018 book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, which rocketed to the top of bestseller lists with its depiction of a chaotic White House and key officials criticising the president.

In 2019, Epstein was charged in a federal indictment with sex trafficking of minors; he was subsequently found dead in a cell at a federal detention centre in Manhattan. The authorities concluded that he had died by suicide. The case against Epstein, and the circumstances of his death, fuelled years of speculation about his relations with top figures in American politics and business.

Given the public interest in Epstein, Wolff released tapes of his interviews with the convicted sex offender shortly before the 2024 presidential election.

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“I would say I had a dozen meetings, maybe a dozen and a half meetings, with various outlets, and everybody was interested – everybody was listening, there were a lot of executives in rooms or on Zoom calls – and then everybody passed,” Wolff said in an interview with James Surowiecki in The Yale Review.

The Daily Beast published an exclusive on the tapes.

Also included in the email release is correspondence between Epstein and Landon Thomas Jnr, a New York Times reporter who left the paper in early 2019. A spokesperson for the Times said Thomas had left the company “after editors discovered his failure to abide by our ethical standards”.

Thomas said in an interview on Wednesday, Washington time, that Epstein had been a “long-standing and very productive source” for him.

In Wolff’s case, the freshly released material suggests extraordinary coziness between journalist and source. “This is not his job,” said Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. “He’s becoming a participant, a player and a shaper of the news he’s going to report on.”

Before the 2024 presidential election, Wolff disclosed that he had interviewed Epstein “periodically” for his 2018 book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.Credit: AP

Wolff, 72, did not immediately respond to a request for comment for this article. In comments to ABC News, he said that he couldn’t remember the specifics of the email exchange but that he had been having discussions with Epstein about his relationship with Trump. The goal, he said, was to get Epstein to go public with his comments about Trump.

And in an Instagram post, Wolff acknowledged the emails between himself and Epstein and argued that the story of Trump’s relationship with Epstein was “central to our time”. The pre-election release of his Epstein tapes, Wolff lamented in the post, had “little effect”.

In October, Wolff sued Melania Trump, whose counsel had sent Wolff a letter accusing him of defaming her and threatening legal action for more than $US1 billion in damages.

“Mrs. Trump’s claims are made for the purpose of harassing, intimidating, punishing or otherwise maliciously inhibiting Mr. Wolff’s free exercise of speech,” Wolff’s complaint noted. In his Instagram post on Wednesday, he said he thought his lawsuit would enable him to press both Donald and Melania Trump about Epstein.

Wolff has written several books on Trump and published his shorter fare in Vanity Fair, The Hollywood Reporter, New York magazine and other outlets. The often eyebrow-raising details in his reporting have long drawn criticism for his tactics. In a 2004 piece in The New Republic, Michelle Cottle wrote that “the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created – springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events”.

His Fire and Fury book in 2018 found an enormous audience among Trump’s detractors and fact-checkers, who cited a number of errors in his reporting.

In a 2019 interview with the Times, Wolff said: “As a journalist – or as a writer – my obligation is to come as close to the truth as I possibly can. And that’s not as close to someone else’s truth, but the truth as I see it.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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