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.
Wolff released the tape on his podcast, Fire and Fury. He says it was made in a restaurant in 2017, most probably in the SoHo branch of Ladurée, a patisserie in Manhattan. Epstein can be heard speaking over the din of diners.
“His people fight each other,” Epstein tells Wolff on the recording, “and then he [Trump] poisons the well outside.”
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“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.”
He continues: “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.”
Epstein is referring to former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus and former White House senior counselor Kellyanne Conway, whose then-husband, George Conway, was briefly considered for positions in Trump’s Department of Justice.
The recording seems to show that Epstein and Trump were close enough for the disgraced sex offender to know how Trump ruled his White House: by dividing and conquering his staff.
Wolff—whose journalistic accuracy has previously been challenged by critics—said he had around “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 has not provided anything more than this snippet of Epstein speaking in 2017.
Epstein had wanted Wolff to write his biography. (He also wanted the New York Times reporter James B. Stewart, the author of DisneyWar, to do so.)
Karoline Leavitt, the national press secretary for Trump’s 2024 election campaign, responded to Wolff’s claims, and the recording, 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. 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.”
Epstein has not previously been identified by Wolff as a source of his for Fire and Fury, the 2018 book on the Trump presidency, which is estimated to have made him more than $13m.
Wolff followed the book with two more—Siege: Trump under Fire (2019) and Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency (2021)—which proved less successful. The Daily Mail recently signed him up to cover Trump as a columnist, and he launched his podcast in June.
Trump and Epstein were filmed laughing together in a clip captured at Mar-a-Lago in 1992 by NBC. They were also photographed smiling beside each other at Trump’s Palm Beach estate in 1997 and 2000.
“Here are these two guys both driven by a need to do anything they wanted with women: dominance and submission and entertainment,” Wolff says of the duo on his podcast. “And one of them ends up in the darkest prison in the country and the other in the White House.”
A Trump campaign source claimed to the Beast that is it “widely known” that Trump severed ties with Epstein after allegations of sex trafficking were levied against his once-close friend.
