The relationship between Donald Trump and the notorious late sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein has existed in the periphery of American politics ever since Trump began running in 2015.
It’s known that Trump and Epstein were friends in New York in the early 1990s, when Trump was a real estate baron and Epstein, a financier, and that Trump, in 2022, told New York magazine that “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy.”
Epstein’s arrest for sex trafficking, and subsequent death in a New York City jail, both happened while Trump was president, and Trump’s secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta, had to resign in 2019, under scrutiny over a sweetheart plea deal for Epstein he had supervised, as a federal prosecutor, in 2008.
There are over 100 hours of recordings of Epstein talking about his relationship with Trump and describing the inner workings of the Trump white house.
source: https://t.co/qD7rurmzVH video via DailyBeast https://t.co/4R54U8Dmp3 pic.twitter.com/ePt1xcveFJ
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Since then, tranches of documents have occasionally been released, concerning different legal cases related to Epstein, which have tended to name and implicate well-known people whose names are already known as part of the case. Meanwhile, it’s become an article of faith on the conspiratorial right that Epstein had ties to an extensive network of Democratic-aligned celebrities and politicians, and that there exists an “Epstein list” that, once uncovered, will expose every politician they don’t like. In this case, Trump’s extensive Epstein ties are forgotten.
But they’re now again at the forefront, as journalist Michael Wolff has released recordings of interviews he conducted with Epstein before his death. Per The Daily Beast, the audio was recorded in 2017, during Trump’s first year as president, and consists of Epstein talking about Trump’s style as president.
Michael Wolff, the explosive chronicler of Donald Trump’s four years in the White House, has released what he says is a recording of Jeffrey Epstein, who died in 2019, discussing Trump’s then White House team in detail.https://t.co/Uvt8g75KQY pic.twitter.com/VyM3GGWVFF
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) October 31, 2024
“His people fight each other,” Epstein says in the recording, “and then he [Trump] poisons the well outside… He will tell ten people ‘Bannon’s a scumbag’ and ‘Priebus is not doing a good job’ and ‘Kellyanne has a big mouth’—what do you think? Jamie Dimon [CEO of JPMorgan Chase] 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.”
The implication is that Epstein remained close enough to Trump, as late as 2017, that he knew all this. However, the idea that Trump pitted his advisers against one another was pretty much conventional wisdom in the early months that he was president- and part of the general knowledge of that came from Fire and Fury, the bestselling book Wolff published in early 2018, based on his inside access at the White House.
Also, Wolff states that Epstein showed him photos of “topless young women” sitting on Trump’s lap, which he said were taken at Epstein’s mansion in Palm Beach in the late 1990s. Wolff speculated that the photos ended up in Epstein’s safe, which the FBI is known to have seized when they raided Epstein’s home ahead of his arrest in 2019.
It’s unclear why Wolff, who has written multiple books about Trump in recent years, did not reveal this until now.
Photo courtesy of Political Tribune media library.
