The potential release of the FBI and Justice Department’s files on Jeffrey Epstein has Donald Trump obsessing about Richard Nixon’s Oval Office tapes, the president’s biographer says.
Michael Wolff, on his Daily Beast podcast Inside Trump’s Head, said Trump can’t understand why Nixon didn’t destroy the audio tapes that implicated him further in the Watergate scandal and contributed to his resignation. That, along with how top DOJ officials are former Trump lawyers, means it’s possible that files harmful to the president may never see the light of day, Wolff said.
“One of Trump’s obsessions, a weird obsession… is why didn’t Nixon burn the tapes? [He] dwells on it,“ Wolff told his co-host Joanna Coles. ”I mean, asking the question: ‘What was that dummy doing? What I would have done if I were there, I would have burned those tapes. They were his tapes. Why didn’t he burn them?’ The word ‘burn,’ he repeats it again and again and again.”
Wolff, noting that top Justice Department officials Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche had both been Trump’s personal attorneys in the past, argued that “of course” it would be possible for administration officials to destroy and cover up evidence implicating their current boss.
That could include Polaroids that Wolff said Epstein once showed him of Trump, 79, with topless women of an unknown age on his lap.
Whether anyone would attempt such a brazen cover-up, however, is a different question. But Wolff believes the odds are better now that the Justice Department is overseen by Trump loyalists, as opposed to during his first term.
“The nature of cover-ups. Do they unravel? I mean, I would say the only thing that is distinctly different at this moment in time is that the Justice Department has been remade. The FBI has been remade,” Wolff said. “The question is: Have they remade it enough?”
When reached for comment, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Daily Beast, “Why isn’t the Daily Beast concerned with their own employee—Michael Wolff—closely corresponding with and offering advice to Jeffrey Epstein?”
In a separate statement to the Daily Beast, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said: “The only person freaking out is Michael Wolff for seemingly acting as the PR agent and reported business partner for his good friend Jeffrey Epstein. Also freaking out is the Daily Beast and Joanna Coles for employing the disgraced Michael Wolff.”
“I have no regrets at all,” Wolff told Coles of his decision to act as an adviser to Epstein to extract information. “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.”
“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.”
Trump’s insistence on releasing the Epstein files—only after he knew he didn’t have the votes in the House to stop it—has led to questions about what may be happening behind the scenes. Epstein’s own brother, Mark, alleged that the GOP is “sabotaging” the files to protect themselves.
“I’ve been recently told the reason they’re going to be releasing the files and the reason for the flip is that they’re sabotaging these files,” he told NewsNation, adding that it’s happening at a “facility” in Winchester, Virginia. “They’re scrubbing the files to take Republican names out. That’s what I was told by a pretty good source.”
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The post Why Trump Is Obsessed With Burning Evidence: Wolff appeared first on The Daily Beast.
