The Jeffrey Epstein Tapes and Donald Trump

They tell us much more about Epstein than Trump

Michael Wolff has got a new book on Trump coming out, and I am looking forward to it immensely.

I am sure that like his previous three Trump books, this new one will be the kind of fast-paced yarn you devour in one sitting.

I’m particularly looking forward to reading about the morning in August when I’m told Trump woke up and said to his startled campaign team: “I’ve decided I am pro-choice…deal with it…”

Wolff in 2018 on his press tour for Fire and Fury, his first book on Trump

Michael is a very shrewd marketer and one presumes that’s why Thursday, on his podcast Fire and Fury, he aired a snippet of a recording of Jeffrey Epstein in 2017 discussing the way Trump played his senior White House lieutenants against each other, and why today, he’s releasing more in which, according to the Daily Beast, Epstein talks about his friendship with Trump - he says that for ten years he was Trump’s closest friend - and he also meanderingly talks about Trump’s salesmanship, Trump setting up his friends with models and recording the conversations for their wives to hear, in order to seduce them himself, and Trump having a scalp reduction.

The Trump campaign has called the tapes “false smears” and “election interference,” and described Michael as “a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics.”

Ok, for my money, what’s interesting about these tapes, so far, is not what they tell us about Trump - which is not really anything new. It’s all variations on a theme.

I could have told you, for instance, that Epstein and Trump were often together when meeting beautiful women, and I could have told you that Trump was a good salesman and doesn’t spend his spare time reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I reported here and for Rolling Stone that Melanie Walker, one of Epstein’s proteges, who became a neuroscientist and close associate of Bill Gates, originally met both Trump and Epstein in New York’s Plaza Hotel, over tea in 1992…

No, what’s interesting about the tapes is what they reveal about Epstein: they show something that’s crucial to understanding why he was able to inveigle himself into the world of the plutocracy: they show what a consummate con-artist he was.

Here he is, for example, talking about the Trump White House personnel:

His people fight each other, right, and then have outsiders. He sort of poisons the well outside.

He [Trump] will tell 10 people ‘Bannon’s a scumbag’ and ‘Priebus is not doing a good job’ and ‘Kellyanne has a big mouth – what do you think?’

‘[JPMorgan Chase CEO] Jamie Dimon says that you’re a problem and I shouldn’t keep you. And I spoke to [financier] Carl Icahn. And Carl thinks I need a new spokesperson.’

‘So Kelly[anne] – even though I hired Kellyanne’s husband – Kellyanne is just too much of a wildcard.’ And then he tells Bannon: ‘You know I really want to keep you but Kellyanne hates you.’

So some of the media has suggested, that this shows that Epstein’s relationship with Trump ran deep even while Trump was president.

Epstein would have been thrilled, THRILLED they made such a link. It’s what he would have wanted people to think.

But it isn’t true. Epstein had no hot line into the Trump White House.

Epstein knew a couple of Trump’s billionaire friends, Tom Barrack and Peter Thiel, but that’s not the same thing.

What Epstein was supremely skilled at was assimilating information from people and then regurgitating it with so much authority that his listeners made assumptions about his influence and importance that were wrong.

I’m reminded of something the late journalist Edward J. Epstein (no relation), a dear friend whom I miss every day, once said to me about Jeffrey whom he knew well in the 1980s: Jeffrey was a small time hustler who realized that if you lied grandly enough, people wouldn't believe you entirely.,….. [for example] they might not think you are a nuclear physicist,… BUT They would assume, well, he must be a college graduate, he must be a smart person….”

Jeffrey’s con-artistry was next-level. Each January, he used to rent a chalet in Switzerland, for example, near the annual World Economic Forum in Davos. He wasn’t actually invited to the conference, but few people, if any, noticed. In the same vein, he also used to travel to the annual Ted Talk conference, again, not because he was invited to speak, but people assumed he was part of the conference when they spotted him in the foyer.

And I’m reminded of dear Ed’s cyncism about Jeffrey’s boast in the years before his death, that he and Vladimir Putin saw each other monthly.

“I just didn't believe…he was flying to Russia once a month to see Vladimir Putin. .., I doubt…he actually ever met or even went to Russia, but that's the way he would talk.

And then Ed opined about the photographs of luminaries like Bill Clinton and MBS displayed in Jeffrey’s living room.

“Jeffrey was a name dropper and he had pictures of them all over his house. And they might've been photoshopped, they might've been real, …”

Who knows.

You’ll note Ed doesn’t say that he saw a photograph of Epstein and Trump in Epstein’s living room.

So, back to Epstein’s “information” about Trump’s White House personnel; it’s not news now and it wasn’t then. Back in 2017 everybody knew that Trump bounced around like a yo-yo when it came to decision-making. He was influenced either by whichever person he spoke to last (which is why, I reported at the time, his daughter and son-in-law had such an advantage) or whichever person he’d seen most recently on TV.

Plus depending on the precise date of Michael’s interview with Epstein in 2017, post July that year, most of Epstein’s information came from Steve Bannon, who was introduced to Epstein by Michael after Bannon left the White House.

Despite my then warnings to Bannon — issued on the steps of his townhouse in DC in the summer of 2017 that “Jeffrey Epstein is a really, really bad guy,” the men became close.

But, why else do I believe that Trump and Epstein had no dealings with one another post roughly 2004? First off, in my many conversations back in 2002 with Epstein he never mentioned Trump. He name-dropped plenty of other people he wanted me to reach out to: Les Wexner, Prince Andrew, Alan Dershowitz, Murray Gellman and certainly Bill Clinton - but never Trump.

Saturday, I phoned up Sam Nunberg, who, as many of you know was Trump’s first political operative and therefore around him all the time, to ask if back in 2013/2014/2015 if he had any memory of Trump talking about Epstein.

Sam said that the only time Trump brought up Epstein to him was when, in around 2014, reports surfaced that Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a woman with long blonde hair, whose photograph had appeared in the Daily Mail standing with Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Prince Andrew, had named Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew among the men she’d alleged she’d been pimped out to by Epstein. Dershowitz denied it, ultimately causing Virginia to say she “was mistaken” and Prince Andrew would later settle a lawsuit with Giuffre with no admission of anything.

But Nunberg raised the topic with Trump because of the claims against Alan Dershowitz whom Trump knew. Trump told Sam that he hadn’t spoken to Epstein in years

“He told me that Epstein had tried to pick up a daughter of a member of Mar-a-Lago, and he kicked him out of the club, and he never spoke to him again” Sam said.

That actually makes sense. Mar-a-lago may be a club, but it’s a club molded in the personality of its owner. Members are personally known to Trump and he treats them like a family. For Epstein to behave like that, could be ruinous to Trump’s business.

“He never mentioned anything about a house,” Sam said.

That’s interesting because there have been many reports over the years, never confirmed or mentioned by Trump, that the two fell out over an ocean-front mansion in Florida both men wanted, and Michael gets into some of the nitty gritty on that, giving Epstein’s account of it:

In 2004 Epstein had the high bid on a house in Palm Beach. I think the bid was thirty six million dollars, and then he brought Trump along to give him some advice about moving the swimming pool…But then Trump went around Epstein's back and bid forty million dollars for the house…

Epstein was pissed, of course, and he began to threaten lawsuits, and he began to threaten press exposure….

OK. Let’s unpack this.

First off the idea that Epstein could or would have sued Trump for going around his back and outbidding him seems absurd because the house was part of a bankruptcy and was sold at a public auction. Trump was on the phone, and Epstein, who was in the room dropped out. So, sure it was irritating for Epstein to lose….but grounds for a lawsuit?

Next, the idea of Epstein threatening Trump with press exposure? Not impossible - In 2003 Epstein had been part of a consortium of billionaires (and Michael) who tried and failed to buy New York Magazine.

But in terms of who had the better press relationships, that would have been a David and Goliath situation: only one guy had the team at Page Six on speed-dial and it wasn’t Epstein.

Next Michael says:

And that was the point at which Epstein's own legal problems, the problems with the girls began. And certainly, in Epstein's telling, this all happened because it was Trump who first dropped the dime on him…

So, that is fascinating. Epstein believed that Trump “dropped the dime” on Epstein and thus the investigation into him was started. In other words, he believed Trump went to the cops and told them about Epstein’s proclivities for under-age girls.

Well, that is possible. And if true, would mean that, actually, Trump deserves a public service award.

But the record has always shown that a victim’s step-mother kicked it off when her step-daughter finally told her what had happened to her at Epstein’s house, and, it took a lot for the young girl to come forward. To me, that has the ring of plausibility. The whole reason Epstein walked unscathed for so long was because his victims were afraid to speak up against a man so rich and so connected, None of them felt: “well, I’ve got the protection of Donald Trump”.

And even here to me it seems as though Epstein’s revisionist history is robbing the victims of agency. He’s saying implicitly that the investigation wasn’t about girls complaining about sexual abuse - no - it was about a fight between two rich guys.

And now to the biggest reported “reveal” of all in the tapes. Michael says Epstein had photos of Trump with young women sitting topless around Epstein’s pool. Three was a “telltale stain” on Trump’s pants.

OK here’s the problem with leaping to the conclusion that these photographs show anything illegal: If they did the likelihood the FBI would have leaked them by now is almost 100 per cent.

Second, Trump himself leapt to attack Bill Clinton for his association with Epstein as early as Febrary 2015. Trump went to CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference) for the first time and was asked on the podium about: “Bill Clinton?

“Nice guy,” said Trump. “He’s got a lot of problems in my opinion coming up, with the famous island.Jeffrey Epstein”

Sam says the moment is important: “Trump would not have been so gung-ho about Bill Clinton, and Epstein, if Trump had done something wrong.”

I agree. It’s important to note that Trump never went to Epstein’s island.

So, again, we are back to the guy who is boasting about these photos, showing them off: Jeffrey Epstein.

What these tapes show, on the eve of the Election, is what Epstein WANTED Michael to believe about his relationship with Trump: exaggerating its depth, its length and importance and so on. Why? Because once Trump was president, it was good for Epstein.

So, don’t let his bullshit from the grave on Election Eve deceive you. There are many important decisions for us to make tomorrow in the voter’s booth but Jeffrey Epstein should not be a factor.

Donald, Melania, Jeffrey, and Ghislaine in Palm Beach, Florida in 2000