Michael Wolff, the best-selling author, has opened up about his “embarrassing” emails with Jeffrey Epstein—and said he ultimately has no regrets about them.
Wolff, who is co-host with Joanna Coles of the Daily Beast’s hit podcast Inside Trump’s Head, has faced questions over a string of emails published by Congress this week after the House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the dead sex offender’s estate and published 26,000 pages from his inbox.
The emails showed Wolff apparently offering advice to Epstein in 2015 on how to get Trump to “hang himself” with his own words if asked about the duo’s relationship, and how the pervert could engineer a situation to have the then-presidential candidate in “debt” to him. Wolff was also shown to have urged Epstein to “finish” the then-Republican nominee just before the 2016 election, and in 2019 to have had Epstein tell him, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”
Wolff has repeatedly discussed Trump and Epstein’s relationship and how the pedophile asked him to be his biographer. He did not write a biography but did use Epstein as a source for best-selling books about the president, including Fire and Fury, which revealed the first Trump administration’s chaotic opening months.
Last November, days before the election, the Daily Beast revealed Wolff’s recording of Epstein calling Trump his “best friend.” The bombshell was a tiny fraction of the more than 90 hours of tapes Wolff made of the sex offender, many of them recorded at the monster’s vast Manhattan townhouse.
The veteran author’s apparent coziness with a convicted sex offender were questioned this week by journalism professors and commentators, among them Columbia Journalism School’s Margaret Sullivan, who told the Wall Street Journal, “If what I read in the emails is an accurate depiction, what Michael Wolff did in coaching Jeffrey Epstein is way outside the bounds of traditional journalism ethics.”
However, in line with many who opined on Wolff this week, she added, “Reporter-source relationships can be tricky, of course, and many journalists would blanch to see their correspondence with sources made public.”
Brian Reed, host of NPR journalism podcast Question Everything, posted, “WTF is going on here with Michael Wolff giving PR strategy to Jeffrey Epstein?” while The Atlantic said the contents of the emails would worsen already low trust in the press.
The criticism is not new; Trump’s spokesman Steven Cheung has repeatedly called Wolff a “lying sack of s—” with “Trump derangement syndrome.”
Wolff himself answered questions from Coles on the controversy in successive episodes of the hit Inside Trump’s Head podcast on Thursday and Saturday, saying that his messages showed him getting to the story of Epstein and Trump’s relationship and comparing how he works to authors including Truman Capote.
Wolff said there were “two contradictory truths” in play: “Jeffrey Epstein was a monster, but he had important things to say.” And, he said, he had brought to light that Trump was “the best friend of, you know, evil.”
On Thursday’s podcast, Coles pressed Wolff repeatedly on providing Epstein with advice, saying that although they had known each other for 25 years, she was “shocked” by the emails. “It sounds like you’re advising a convict, a convicted pedophile, about what to do, and you’re colluding with him,” she said.
“Well, I, you know, I don’t, you know, you know, what emails sound like,” he said. “Would one have rewritten them in hindsight? Yeah. Of 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.”
Wolff compared his messages to Epstein with his year writing a highly critical biography of Rupert Murdoch, The Man Who Owns the News, saying, “If you saw the emails that I shared with, with, with Rupert Murdoch, I would, I would be embarrassed about them. But I was able to write the book that no one has been able to write in the book. Also that, that he profoundly hated.”
Coles asked him, “Do you basically go in and sort of suck up to them?”
Wolff responded, “Am I acting? Am I play-acting, right? … Am I playing a role? And the answer is yes. I mean, that’s what, 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… I’m constantly focused on: ‘Tell me, tell me what you would not tell other people.’”
He added, “I think as, as my mother would say, you get more with a little honey.”
Coles responded, “Some of the honey feels a lot when it’s a convicted pedophile.”
Wolff replied, “But that’s the, the, the—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.’ … This is a story that I have told as often as I can in as many places that I can.”
And he said, “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.”
Coles also challenged him, “I know getting the story is important. Are there any lines that you wouldn’t cross?” Wolff said, “Getting the story is is the all important thing…. Do I have to answer this? You know the answer to this. Of course. Of course there are.”
On Saturday’s edition, Coles confronted Wolff with his critics, saying, “We have the New York Times saying ‘Michael Wolff, Chronicler of Elites, Provided Epstein With advice on Trump.’ The Guardian, ‘Blurred lines: How Michael Wolff aspired to be part of elite circles.’“
Wolff replied, “You know, I have heard this all the way throughout my career. And that is partly because I’m the person who has managed to get close to some very difficult stories. Journalism is more often than not outsiders looking at insiders. I have managed to get in with the insiders and I have returned—again and again— accounts that no one else has been able to get.”
He added, “Without me doing it the way I do it, we would be absent key parts of key information about key stories. And let me say the other point which I’ve also tried over the years to make again and again and again is that there are journalists and journalists do their job. I am a writer. The way I see my job is to get inside a situation and to be able to write, to show people and let people into an experience that they would not otherwise have.
“And this is not new. Whether it’s whether it’s Tom Wolfe, whether it’s Truman Capote, you know, whether it’s Hunter Thompson, you know, there is, there are writers who seek to be as close to the experience as possible.”
Asked directly by Coles, “Would you do it all the same again? Do you have any regrets about this?” he said, “I have no regrets at all. I would do it exactly the same. This is the way it is done.
“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.”
Wolff was not the only journalist in Epstein’s inbox who appeared to offer him advice. Landon Thomas Jr., a New York Times reporter, was revealed to have sent a tip-off about another journalist working on a book on the pedophile. He also did not take up Epstein’s offer of publishing pictures of “Dirty Donald” posing with “girls in bikinis” in the pervert’s kitchen. Thomas was fired by the Times in 2019 after it turned out he had solicited a donation from Epstein to a charity he was involved in. The solicitation cast new light on Thomas minimizing the sex criminal’s evil, writing a tepid description of his perversion in The Times in 2008 as receiving “massages that ended with a sexual favor” and his victims as being “paid.”
Questions over journalistic ethics and the relationship between reporter and source have also been raised with the imminent publication of a memoir by Olivia Nuzzi, the New York Magazine reporter fired over her “digital affair” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in which she says he told her he took powerful psychedelics, something she did not tell her readers.
Reporters appearing to advice the powerful figures they cover has a long history: Ben Bradlee, the legendary Washington Post editor, sent John F. Kennedy advice when Bradlee was Newsweek’s reporter covering the then-candidate, the late president’s papers revealed.
And on Thursday, the day after Epstein’s emails were revealed, the MAGA-friendly New York Post called Wolff a “discredited” and “salacious gossip-fabricating ‘journalist.’” That same day it mourned the death of its beloved hockey reporter, Larry Brooks, who covered the New York Rangers. It called Brooks “one of the most respected people in the business.” The paper’s obituary contained a long tribute from the Rangers’ owner, James Dolan, who said, “What few people know is that he and I would meet on occasion and he would give me his unabashed opinion on how the franchise was doing and what we needed to do to win.
“This never appeared in any of his columns.”
The post This Is Why I Emailed Epstein—and Why I’d Do It Again: Wolff appeared first on The Daily Beast.
