Jeffrey Epstein once warned that Donald Trump would exploit a key presidential power if he should win the White House, according to author Michael Wolff.
Wolff argued on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that the convicted sex trafficker’s prediction about his former friend’s conduct in office has come unnervingly true.
“Jeffrey Epstein had a kind of riff about this,” Wolff told co-host Joanna Coles, explaining that even before Trump was elected, Epstein would talk about how the real estate mogul could wield the pardon power as president.
The Trump biographer, whose correspondence with Epstein raised eyebrows last month after some of their emails were released, said the disgraced financier believed Trump would misuse the presidential power because he revels in holding leverage over others.
According to Wolff, Epstein told him, “He loves having this kind of thing. He loves showing the power that he has.” Epstein, who died in jail in 2019, predicted that Trump would use his powers “in a childlike way,” Wolff said.
The 79-year-old president began his second term by pardoning more than 1,500 people convicted in the Jan 6. Capitol attack. He has since handed out what Coles called a “string of unfathomable pardons” to high-profile allies who back his agenda—and have the resources to lobby for clemency.
Trump has even left the door open to pardoning Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, leading to speculation that he had cut some kind of deal with her to protect himself.
On Monday, Trump granted clemency to former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernandez—marking what is perhaps his most controversial pardon to date.
Hernandez, 57, was sentenced to 45 years in prison last year after he was convicted of drug trafficking and firearms offenses.
The Justice Department, under former President Joe Biden, said Hernandez “abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world,” helping heavily armed traffickers smuggle as much as 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.
Wolff said Trump’s decision to pardon Hernandez stands out because “this is not a white collar crime.”
“This is a criminal who is not only an egregious drug smuggler, but it’s an administration that’s full of pride about its ability to stop drug smuggling,” he said.
Trump has justified letting Hernandez walk free by saying that “many people of Honduras” told him “it was a Biden setup.”
Presidents typically grant clemency to people who demonstrate some “anomaly” in the process of their conviction, Wolff noted.
But “in the case of Trump’s pardons,” he said, “that’s seldom the case.”
“These people have done the deed and Trump has decided for a variety of reasons—it was a political prosecution—some fig leaf rationale,” he said. “The real reason is that these people become part of his structural support base.”
Securing a pardon from the president involves “knowing people who know people who know Trump, with an amount of money that has been passed along the line,” Wolff said. “There are no free pardons here.”
In October, Trump pardoned money-laundering crypto billionaire Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, after his company, Binance, helped enrich the Trump family and hired at least two lobbying firms to push for Zhao’s pardon.
Coles noted that the “opportunity cost” of Trump’s approach to pardons is that those who lack access to the president’s circle, but are “in jail wrongly,” are passed over.
When reached for comment, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung told the Daily Beast in a statement, “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s–t and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson later followed up to add, “Why isn’t the Daily Beast concerned with their own employee—Michael Wolff—closely corresponding with, and even offering advice to Jeffrey Epstein?”
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