Transcript: I Know Why Epstein Refused to Expose Trump: Michael Wolff on Inside Trump’s Head

This is not how you speak to a source. This is not what journalism is.

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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, 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, I think, 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 employees who has ever spent an enormous amount of time with him. Basically, basically a year.

JOANNA COLES: And…

MICHAEL WOLFF: What do you mean? And the emails. But, no, I just want to 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.

The Methodology of Deception

JOANNA COLES: All right, 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 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 accrue…

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, let me ask the question in a friendlier way. Am I acting? Am I play acting?

JOANNA COLES: Right. Are you pretending?

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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 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.

JOANNA COLES: I mean, you…

MICHAEL WOLFF: In order to do that, you know, you got to… I think, as my mother would say, you get more with a little honey.

JOANNA COLES: Right? Some of the honey feels a lot when it’s a convicted pedophile.

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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 f*ing 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, 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.

The Phrase That Haunts

JOANNA COLES: So you use the phrase twice in the email we started off with about “let him hang himself,” which turns out to have a particular resonance.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, the hanging here was referred to not Epstein, but…

JOANNA COLES: No, it’s Trump.

MICHAEL WOLFF: But it was 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 sleaze ball of our time. But also, I think, you know, we could argue a criminal in his sleaze boldness.

JOANNA COLES: All right, so let’s talk a bit, 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…

MICHAEL WOLFF: Of course.

JOANNA COLES: So you came out and assumed that you, when you were there…

The Tapes

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yes. And also most of these conversations with Jeffrey Epstein are on tape. So, you know, as we’ve discussed before, as we 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.

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

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, I think that there’s these 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. You know, the Trump Model Agency.

JOANNA COLES: Well, they all had a modeling agency, right?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Jeffrey had a model… Jeffrey Epstein had a modeling agency. Trump had a model. Yes, everyone. I didn’t have a modeling agency.

The Greater Evil

JOANNA COLES: 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 1,000 girls? I mean, he was sending cars to pick up girls from…

MICHAEL WOLFF: Okay, but that’s… Joanna, that’s clear. The answer. Because he’s the President of 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.

JOANNA COLES: And you are also lying to Jeffrey Epstein by trying to seduce him into…

White Lies and Greater Truths

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, 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… does the means justify the ends?

And I would point out that the… that the means in this instance are… kind of set of white lies. They harm no one and they produce the end. I got this story. I am the only one.

And I have been going together, actually, before the election, we released, with the Daily Beast, we released 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.

The Methodology Under Scrutiny

JOANNA COLES: 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?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, there’s a curious thing, and that’s a reference to—and I say in one of those emails you can get—

JOANNA COLES: Well, it’s where you say you could save him generating a debt, you know.

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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.

JOANNA COLES: 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?

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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.

JOANNA COLES: Are there any other emails with Epstein that you could share about?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, more importantly, there are 100 hours of tape. And then Eric Wimple, the next question he will ask is, have I—

JOANNA COLES: 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?

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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 is saying no.

Epstein as a Source

JOANNA COLES: So you spent four or five years on and off with Epstein, at the center of Epstein’s 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 murder?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yes. No, but several other books did appear, which is, you know, he became a very—

JOANNA COLES: Do you mean several other books by you or others?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yes, by me. So he became a very significant source for me for 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 curiously then became friends.

JOANNA COLES: 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?

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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, many, many girls.

But I actually don’t think that’s the—I think they are afraid of what Donald Trump will do. And remember, Donald Trump has repeatedly at every instance, turn to the media outlets and if he doesn’t like what they do, he sues them.

The Ethics of Getting the Story

JOANNA COLES: I know getting the story is important. Are there any lines that you wouldn’t cross?

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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 going to be—do I have to answer this? You know, the answer to this. Of course there are, I mean, you—

JOANNA COLES: You remind me a little bit of an undercover cop.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, I suppose in a way that I am. And in the television show the other, the undercover cop always has to prove himself by shooting someone who is—I wouldn’t do that.

JOANNA COLES: Well, that’s—

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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.

JOANNA COLES: 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?

MICHAEL WOLFF: Well, no, this is—I mean, I’m not the first journalist in this position and many journalists 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—

JOANNA COLES: When you say that, what do you actually mean?

MICHAEL WOLFF: You know, and again, that’s why you stomach, because 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 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 saw any interaction with women, with girls.

JOANNA COLES: Did you ever see the massage room?

MICHAEL WOLFF: I never saw the massage room. I do want to say, and I think it’s important, 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 got to be nice to these people.

JOANNA COLES: What I find 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.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yeah, well, even that sometimes they 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 f*ing 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.

The Oversight Committee Investigation

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

MICHAEL WOLFF: You know, I guess they’re just releasing whatever they can get. And there 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, sometimes I’m not sure that they realize that the subject here is not so much Jeffrey Epstein, but Donald Trump.

Ghislaine Maxwell’s Situation

JOANNA COLES: 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 at the Justice Department to a prison camp in Texas where we know she has her own puppy. She has a puppy, she has a fitness instructor.

And then there is an email from Jeffrey Epstein on Saturday, April 2, it 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 Giuffre. Virginia Giuffre spent hours at my house with him. He has never once been mentioned. Police chief, etcetera. I’m 75% there.”

And then Ghislaine Maxwell sends him back an email later that day saying, “I have been thinking about that.”

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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, which could be as the birthday letter was pretty devastating to Donald Trump.

JOANNA COLES: 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.

MICHAEL WOLFF: No. But 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.

JOANNA COLES: Right. But losing your job isn’t the same as being sentenced 20 years.

MICHAEL WOLFF: It is not. But not 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.

JOANNA COLES: 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.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yes. And I admire that line because it is my line, which I have used again and again and again and again. And people for years now have been—people, I mean, journalists, the media organizations have been willing to overlook this story until, you know, smoking gun time. I think we may be closing in on it now.

Virginia Giuffre and the Unredacted Emails

JOANNA COLES: The Republicans decided to unredact the name and put in Virginia Giuffre 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.

MICHAEL WOLFF: 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, you know, 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 Ghislaine, who would know.

JOANNA COLES: So in 2011. I think it’s 2011.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yeah. I think it speaks for itself.

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

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

The Names in the Emails

JOANNA COLES: 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.

MICHAEL WOLFF: I have discussed Deepak Chopra before as being there. Yes.

JOANNA COLES: Not with—I don’t think you have with me.

MICHAEL WOLFF: It’s an oversight then, because I have been there with Deepak Chopra.

JOANNA COLES: Okay. And what was he doing?

MICHAEL WOLFF: You know, eating an omelette like everybody else.

JOANNA COLES: Eating an omelette.

MICHAEL WOLFF: I actually remember. What was Deepak trying to do? I suspect he was there trying to get money out of Epstein, but I don’t know.

JOANNA COLES: Kathy Rummler, who was Obama’s White House counsel? Tom Barrack.

The Three Musketeers: Trump, Barrack, and Epstein

MICHAEL WOLFF: No. And Tom Barrack is pivotal here in this, the connection, because it was, and I talk about this in Fire and Fury, as them being the three musketeers. Trump, Barrack, Epstein, and they were together, the closest of friends.

And when Tom Barrack 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 advisers, still is one of Trump’s key advisors.

JOANNA COLES: Right. He’s an ambassador now.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Yeah. But, you know, on the phone with Trump constantly.

Closing Remarks

JOANNA COLES: 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 in my role today. And don’t forget, as our first lady would have us all be beast.

And a special thanks to our beast tier of members. And don’t forget, you can join the Daily Beast community and get lots of extra, extra content. Herbie, Andrew Mellor, Fulvia Orlando Laz Conde, Sandra Clark, Bonzo Val Love, Francisco Bocock, D.C. Karen White, Heidi Riley, Connie Rutherford, Sharon Shipley.

And Andrea Hodel, who wrote in to say it’s pronounced, it’s a Swiss name. And it.

MICHAEL WOLFF: How did I pronounce it?

JOANNA COLES: I think you said it Hodel. And I think it’s Hodel, like Yodel. Swiss.

MICHAEL WOLFF: Andrea Hodel, like Yodel. And always Devin, Hannah, Jessie. Thank you.

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