Who is Michael Wolff? Meet the journalist at the center of Epstein emails
On November 12, House Democrats released Epstein’s emails referencing Trump.
Two of the three e-mails released were correspondence between the deceased convicted s-trader and Wolff, who previously claimed he “probably” has “100 hours of Epstein talking about the inner workings of the Trump White House and his long, deep relationship with Donald Trump.”
In an unearthed exchange from December 2015, Wolff wrote to Epstein: “I hear CNN plans to ask Trump about his relationship with you tonight – on air or in a scrum afterwards.”
“If we were to come up with an answer for him, what do you think it should be?” Epstein responded, according to the released screenshots.
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff replied. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or at home, that gives you valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that might potentially benefit you, or, if it really looks like he might win, you can bail him out, creating debt. It is of course possible that, if asked, he will say that Jeffrey is a great guy, got a bad deal and is a victim of political correctness, which should be outlawed in a Trump administration.”
Wolff and Epstein discussed Trump again in January 2019, during his first term as president.
“Trump said he asked me to resign, never member,” Epstein wrote. “Of course he knew about the girls when he asked Ghislaine [Maxwell] fuses.”
In a telephone interview with ABC News After the emails were published, the author admitted that he could not remember “the specific emails or the context” but reiterated that he was “in deep conversation with Epstein at the time about his relationship with Donald Trump.”
Wolff added: “I was trying to get Epstein to talk about his relationship with Trump at the time, and in fact he turned out to be an enormously valuable resource for me. Part of the context of this is that at that point I was pressuring Epstein to go public with what he knew about Trump.”
Although Epstein knew Trump would become president, he was reportedly “horrified” by the idea, Wolff said.
“I mean, this is, this is with tremendous irony, that [Epstein] You’d say Trump is a man who has no scruples, right?’ he continued. “But these two guys were, I mean, there was an animosity between them because of this real estate deal that happened in 2004. But they had spent all that time together, you know, well, more than ten years together.”
Regarding the 2019 email, Wolff noted that Epstein had always maintained that he was never a member of Mar-a-Lago and that Donald “never kicked him out.”
“The basis of their argument was a real estate deal,” he explained.
