Copyright The New York Times
Michael Wolff, a writer, reporter, columnist, author and would-be mogul, has spent his long career building his profile as an insider with gossip on New York luminaries that sometimes draws scrutiny from his peers. That profile expanded on Wednesday: Mr. Wolff, it turns out, has been enough of an insider that he once provided advice to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced sex offender, on how to handle his dealings with Donald J. Trump, who was running for president at the time. That revelation emerged from emails between Mr. Wolff and Mr. Epstein released by Washington lawmakers. In one of the emails, from December 2015, Mr. Wolff says that CNN planned to ask Mr. Trump about his relationship with Mr. Epstein, and then counsels Mr. Epstein on next steps. “I think you should let him hang himself,” Mr. Wolff wrote of Mr. Trump. In another email, from October 2016, Mr. Wolff sent Mr. Epstein an email saying that there was an “opportunity to come forward this week and talk about Trump in such a way that could garner you great sympathy and help finish him.” The exchange came late in Mr. Trump’s first presidential campaign, and weeks after a recording emerged of Mr. Trump making vulgar comments about women to an “Access Hollywood” host. The emails shed new light on the author-source relationship between Mr. Wolff, 72, and Mr. Epstein, who died in 2019. Mr. Wolff did not immediately respond to a requests for comment for this article. Before the November 2024 presidential election, Mr. Wolff disclosed that he had interviewed Mr. Epstein “periodically” for his 2018 book “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” which rocketed to the top of best-seller lists with its depiction of a chaotic White House and key officials criticizing the president. In 2019, Mr. Epstein was charged in a federal indictment with sex trafficking of minors; he was subsequently found dead in a cell at a Manhattan federal detention facility. Authorities concluded that he had died by suicide. The case against Mr. Epstein, and the circumstances of his death, fueled years of speculation about his relations with top figures in American politics and business. Given the public interest in Mr. Epstein, Mr. Wolff released tapes of his interviews with the convicted sex offender shortly before the 2024 presidential election — though only after approaching numerous media outlets. “I would say I had a dozen meetings, maybe a dozen and a half meetings, with various outlets, and everybody was interested — everybody was listening, there were a lot of executives in rooms or on Zoom calls — and then everybody passed,” Mr. Wolff said in an interview with James Surowiecki in The Yale Review. The Daily Beast published an exclusive on the tapes. Mr. Wolff has written several books on Mr. Trump and published his shorter fare in Vanity Fair, the Hollywood Reporter, New York magazine and other outlets. The often eyebrow-raising details in his reporting have long drawn criticism for his reporting tactics. In a 2004 piece in the New Republic, Michelle Cottle wrote, “the scenes in his columns aren’t recreated so much as created — springing from Wolff’s imagination rather than from actual knowledge of events.” In a 2019 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Wolff said, “As a journalist — or as a writer — my obligation is to come as close to the truth as I possibly can. And that’s not as close to someone else’s truth, but the truth as I see it.”
