Michael Wolff claims to have around a hundred hours of audio recordings with Jeffrey Epstein sharing information on Donald Trump, revealing that Epstein was a secret source for his first book on Trump, “Fire and Fury.” The controversial journalist and chronicler of the Trump White House made the reveal and released a sneak peek at this purported trove of audio via his podcast, also titled “Fire and Fury.”
Wolff said in a podcast released Sunday that the first recording he shared of Epstein, the deceased financier and convicted sex offender, was recorded in 2017 at a Manhattan restaurant.
“His people fight each other,” Epstein is heard saying of Trump in the audio, “and then he poisons the well outside.”
“He will tell 10 people, ‘[Steve] Bannon’s a scumbag’ and ‘[Reince] Priebus is not doing a good job’ and ‘Kellyanne [Conway] has a big mouth’ — what do you think?” Epstein said, detailing Trump allegedly questioning the worth of his advisors both directly and to each other.
Epstein gave an example of what Trump would say, adding, “[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 [George Conway] — Kellyanne is just too much of a wildcard,” Epstein continued. “And then he tells Bannon, ‘You know, I really want to keep you, but Kellyanne hates you.’”
You can listen to the audio here in a clip shared by the Daily Beast:
Wolff previously released a trilogy of books about Trump’s time in the White House, including “Fire and Fury,” “Siege” and “Landslide.” The author’s accuracy has been questioned, with critics arguing that he doesn’t engage in rigorous fact-checking. A number of quotes and stories he’s reported have been publicly denied by the people involved.
“I probably have a hundred 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 his podcast. He has yet to release any more of the audio, though he notes that Trump and Epstein’s relationship hit the skids in 2004, meaning that much of the info discussed would have been about time periods before this.
The Trump campaign slammed Wolff in a statement to the Daily Beast.
“Michael Wolff is a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because he clearly has no morals or ethics,” the campaign’s national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said. “He waited until days before the election to make outlandish false smears all in an effort to engage in blatant election interference on behalf of Kamala Harris. He’s a failed journalist that is resorting to lying for attention.”
Wolff hasn’t detailed what the audio contains or if there is significant information beyond what Wolff has previously reported. Wolff also has yet to explain why he didn’t release this audio following Epstein’s death in 2019 or during the 2020 campaign, but has instead chosen to release the audio and tease more just days before Election Day 2024.
The author talked in the podcast about Epstein connecting Trump with models in the 1980s, as well as explaining that Epstein seemed to be detailing money laundering schemes that the pair engaged in. He described the pair’s competitive relationship, including that they had a bet at the time about which of them would be the first to sleep with Princess Diana.
According to Wolff, due to Trump being around Epstein during the period Epstein was connected with underage girls, Wolff believes Trump “knew something about that.”
Epstein also shared, according to Wolff, that Trump had “a fetish” for “trying to sleep with his friends’ wives.” Wolff noted that he included a related story in “Fire and Fury.”
Among other stories, Wolff said that Epstein had told him that Trump wasn’t a particularly good “real estate guy,” as he “could do deals” and “couldn’t read a balance sheet.” Wolff said that Epstein described Trump as “innumerate, which has to do with the exaggeration of Trump’s numbers all the time.”
Wolff also said that Epstein told him he believed that “it was Trump who first dropped the dime on him” when it came to underage girls, following a real estate dispute between the two. “And Trump would have known about the girls because he was in and out of Epstein’s house when Epstein and I were talking about this.”
The journalist also claimed that Epstein showed him photographs of Trump at his house in the late 1990s with young topless women. Wolff added that he believes these were likely seized by the FBI during Trump’s administration when they raided Epstein’s home in 2019. Wolff also took credit for introducing Epstein to Steve Bannon.
Wolff shared that he’s tried to tell these stories and bring attention to this relationship elsewhere, but has faced unease about whether outlets want to “go there.”
“I mean, I’ve actually spoken to the ’60 Minutes’ producer who was trying to do this, and I think that you get to the level of the allegations and the implications are so large unless you have the smoking gun,” Wolff said. “And so anecdotal evidence, even a pile of it — which yeah, I think we’re offering here — is something that large media
outlets stay away from.”
“I urged Epstein to go public with everything I’ve told you here,” Wolff said on the podcast. “But Epstein’s attitude was that I was clearly unaware of how the real world operated. So in the end, Epstein died in prison and we’ll probably never hear that story.”
The journalist contrasted the disparate fates of Epstein and Trump, saying, “Here are these two guys both driven by a need to do anything they wanted with women — dominance and submission and entertainment. And one of them ends up in the darkest prison in the country and the other in the White House.” Explaining what he saw as the significance of Epstein and Trump’s connection, Wolff said, “these two guys were friends for 15 years, the president of the United States and the most vilified sexual predator of the age, and yet somehow we know very little about this.”
Wolff and his co-host also discussed the theories around Epstein’s apparent suicide in prison. You can listen to the full episode of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” podcast at this link.
