President Donald Trump is struggling to manage the fallout from thousands of emails from Jeffrey Epstein that were released this week, the president’s biographer says.
Michael Wolff, whose history with Epstein has itself become a story due to the journalist giving the sex offender advice, claimed on the Daily Beast’s Inside Trump’s Head podcast that Trump is “completely freaking out” in light of the revelations.
In a 2018 message, for instance, Epstein wrote that he could “take Trump down.” The following January, Epstein wrote to Wolff that Trump “of course knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine [Maxwell] to stop.”
“This has been enormously, enormously frustrating to him for a very long time,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles. “The fact that this is now all coming home to roost, I think is completely freaking him out… We’re at a moment in time [where] he doesn’t know what to do. He has misplayed this every step of the way.”
Wolff said he doesn’t think Trump, 79, has any plan for how to address the topic.
“I think he has no strategy. I think he has no point of view. I think he feels cornered on this right now,” Wolff said. “My sense of the people in the White House is that they are kind of frantic. I mean, they don’t know what is true. So remember, the people in the White House are dealing with a situation in which they understand the political perils of this.”
Wolff went on to say that the White House isn’t marshaling its available resources to sift through the emails in part because no one wants to end up being “in the line of fire,” since Trump has been urging everyone to just move on from the Epstein scandal.
“In my experience, when you think that the government in the United States and the White House itself have unlimited resources to marshal—in reality, it’s all chickens with their heads cut off,” Wolff said.
“They don’t know whose responsibility it is. Also, people don’t want to take the responsibility, because you put yourself in the line of fire. You’re going to get blamed,” Wolff added. “I don’t know if they have finally put a process in place. I suspect that they don’t. I remember other crises in the White House, in Trump’s White House, in which everything, rather than coming together to deal with it, everything in fact fell apart.”
“The first time around that led to the Mueller investigation,” Wolff continued, referencing the scandal that loomed over most of Trump’s first term. “So I think it’s perfectly likely that nobody is doing anything.”
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast: “The only person freaking out is Michael Wolff for seemingly acting as the PR agent for his good friend Jeffrey Epstein. Also freaking out is the Daily Beast and Joanna Coles for employing the disgraced Michael Wolff.”
Wolff, who interviewed Epstein years ago, defended his tactic of acting as an adviser to the sex offender to extract valuable information.
“I have no regrets at all. I would do it exactly the same. This is the way it is done,” Wolff told Coles. ”Once more, I am the only one who has been shouting from the rooftops that the central issue here is Donald Trump’s relationship to this monster.”
“You have to have a certain kind of finesse and patience to be able to hold two contradictory truths in your head at the same time, which is to say that Jeffrey Epstein was a monster, but he had important things to say.”
Find and subscribe to Inside Trump’s Head with Michael Wolff and Joanna Coles on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of incomparable insight into the psyche of the world’s most talked-about man drop every Tuesday and Thursday evening on YouTube and Wednesday and Friday mornings on other podcast platforms.
The post Trump In Complete Crisis Over Epstein Email: Wolff appeared first on The Daily Beast.
