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Email correspondence involving sex offender Jeffrey Epstein that referenced President Donald Trump was released Wednesday by Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Of the three emails released, two included exchanges with author Michael Wolff, a longtime journalist and columnist who in recent years has been an avid chronicler of the Trump presidency. Wolff, 72, has worked at numerous publications in his decadeslong career in writing and publishing. During his tenure as a columnist for magazines like New York Magazine and Vanity Fair, he has covered a variety of topics, including politics, power players and the New York media scene. He won two National Magazine Awards in 2002 and 2004 for columns and commentary. In 2007, he co-founded the news curation site Newser. Trump coverage Wolff has written four books about the Trump presidency, most recently "All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America," published in February, on Trump's 2024 presidential campaign. His first book on the Trump presidency, 2018's "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," drew pushback from the White House over what it claimed was false and possibly defamatory information on Trump. The publisher defended the accuracy of the reporting. Wolff is also behind a Substack newsletter, Instagram account and podcast devoted to coverage of the president. He made headlines last year when he shared audio on his podcast, "Fire and Fury," from a conversation he said he recorded with Epstein in 2017. "I probably have 100 hours of Epstein talking about the inner workings of the Trump White House and about his long-standing, deep relationship with Donald Trump," Wolff said on the episode. Wolff said in the episode that Epstein was one of his sources when the journalist wrote his book "Fire and Fury" and claimed that while writing the book, he "became an outlet for Epstein to express his incredulity about someone whose sins he knew so well, and then this person actually being elected president. Epstein was utterly preoccupied with Trump and I think, frankly, afraid of him." Last month, Wolff said he sued first lady Melania Trump in response to what he categorized as threats from the Trumps' lawyers to sue him for $1 billion over statements he made about the Trumps based on his interviews with Epstein. In his Substack, Wolff wrote that his lawsuit against Melania Trump "means I can compel her and her husband's testimony -- that is, the full story of their relationship, especially in the 1990s, with a focus on the modeling world, in which both Trump and Epstein were so personally and financially invested." In response to the lawsuit, a spokesperson for Melania Trump said in a statement to The Associated Press that the first lady "is proud to continue standing up to those who spread malicious and defamatory falsehoods as they desperately try to get undeserved attention and money from their unlawful conduct." Released Epstein emails On Wednesday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released two email exchanges between Epstein and Wolff. They were among three newly released emails from a batch of more than 23,000 documents the committee recently received from the Epstein Estate in response to a subpoena. In one released exchange, Wolff wrote to Epstein in December 2015, six months after Trump had officially entered the race for the White House, "I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you--either on air or in scrum afterwards." "If we were to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?" Epstein replied. "I think you should let him hang himself," Wolff replied the next day. "If he says he hasn't been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he'll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime." The other released exchange between Epstein and Wolff -- made while Trump was well into his first presidential term in January 2019 -- appears to touch on the topic of whether Trump had banned Epstein from membership at Mar-a-Lago years earlier. "Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever," Epstein wrote, "Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop." The third email exchange released Wednesday was with Epstein's former companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence in Texas for child sex trafficking and other offenses in connection with Epstein. The full context of these email exchanges is not clear from the portions released by the committee Democrats. The names of alleged victims and other personally identifying information were redacted from the messages. Wolff recounts released emails In a phone interview with ABC News on Wednesday, Wolff said of the released exchange from 2015 that he couldn't remember "the specific emails or the context, but I was in an in-depth conversation with Epstein at that time about his relationship with Donald Trump. So I think this reflects that." "I was trying at that time to get Epstein to talk about his relationship with Trump, and actually, he proved to be an enormously valuable source to me," Wolff said. "Part of the context of this is that I was pushing Epstein at that point to go public with what he knew about Trump." Wolff said he didn't fully understand at that time what Epstein might say about his relationship with Trump "but I was trying to figure that out at the time. But I wanted him to go public with his relationship with Trump, which I thought would be disqualifying." "[Epstein] was actually one of the people I found, one of the early people to believe that Trump might well become the president. But he was also then appalled by the idea of Trump becoming president," Wolff said. “I mean, this is, this is with some enormous irony, that [Epstein] would say Trump is a man who has no scruples, right? But these two guys were, I mean, there was an enmity between them because of this real estate deal that happened in 2004. But they had spent all of this time together, you know, well, more than a decade together," Wolff said. Referring to the released email exchange from 2019 referencing Mar-a-Lago, Wolff said Epstein had told him he was never a member and the claim Trump kicked Epstein out of his club was not accurate. "I know that he always maintained that; that he was never a member of Mar-a-Lago, Trump never kicked him out; that that was not the basis of their falling out. The basis of their falling out was a real estate deal," Wolff said Epstein had told him. White House response None of the documents previously made public as part of civil lawsuits or Maxwell's trial contain allegations of wrongdoing by Trump. The White House accused Democrats on the House Oversight Committee of releasing "selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative" about Trump. "These stories are nothing more than bad-faith efforts to distract from President Trump’s historic accomplishments, and any American with common sense sees right through this hoax and clear distraction from the government opening back up again," press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to ABC News. Leavitt reiterated that Trump kicked Epstein out of his club "because he thought Jeffrey was a creep to his female employees." Trump has previously said Epstein was thrown out of the club because he was hiring away employees. Trump in July posted a lengthy social media post that in part blamed Democrats for creating a controversy about files related to Epstein, which he called a "scam" and "hoax." "Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this 'b--------,' hook, line, and sinker," he wrote at the time. Epstein died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking young girls and women.
