President Donald Trump seems to be rattled after realizing the Epstein scandal won’t go away that easily, author Michael Wolff told the Daily Beast Podcast on Monday.
The Trump biographer told Daily Beast Executive Editor Hugh Dougherty that the president was “happy to ignore” the long-running controversy surrounding disgraced financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein—until his own people began hyping up the release of the notorious “Epstein files.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News in February that she had a list of Epstein’s clients sitting on her desk. FBI Director Kash Patel also told Republican lawmakers in a 2023 interview to “put on your big boy pants, and let us know who the pedophiles are.” His deputy director, Dan Bongino, has similarly said “there’s a reason they’re hiding” the client list, which conspiracy theorists believe includes high-profile names in politics and business.
“They were going to expose Epstein with no understanding that if they expose Epstein, it is very likely they are going to expose Donald Trump,” Wolff said. “So therefore they made a mistake by announcing that they were going to do this. Then Trump got p---ed at them for this. Then they tried to cover over their mistake by saying, ‘No, there’s nothing here. Pay no attention.’ And now we are where we are with this.”
MAGAworld erupted in outrage earlier this month after the FBI announced in a memo that there is, in fact, no client list, and that Epstein indeed died by suicide in detention in 2019.
Trump’s base was quick to demand Bondi’s head for failing to deliver the files that she had been talking up for months. But she brushed off the criticism in a recent Cabinet meeting: “My response [to Fox News] was, ‘It’s sitting on my desk to be reviewed,’ meaning the file, along with the JFK, MLK files as well. That’s what I meant by that.”
“I think for one, truly he’s at war with his own Justice Department,” Wolff said of Trump. “This is a problem of their own making. And I think that Trump has been determined to ignore the subject of Epstein for years and years and years.”
Trump and Epstein were good friends for over a decade. Epstein told Wolff in a 2017 interview: “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.” The president similarly told New York Magazine in 2002: “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
“Because of what ultimately happened to Jeffrey Epstein and what ultimately he became and what ultimately he became a symbol of, [it’s] a very precarious thing to be Jeffrey Epstein’s closest friend, which Donald Trump is,” Wolff said. “So he wants to ignore this. He wants to just push this away.”
Over the weekend, Trump poured more gasoline into the Epstein fire by publishing a lengthy Truth Social post that downplayed the scandal—claiming that the notorious files were made up by prominent Democrats like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—while congratulating Bondi for doing a “fantastic job” at the Justice Department.
“We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening,” he wrote. “We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again.”
The post did little to quell MAGA fury over the flop, with popular right-wing influencers like Nick Fuentes burning their Make America Great Again hats in protest.
Wolff said Trump has been wondering why his own supporters are still talking about the Epstein files.
“His mood is pure denial. ‘Why are people talking about Epstein? There’s nothing there. I’m not a part of this. This happened a long time ago.’ And so, again, denial, denial, denial. And, you know, Trump is very good at that,” he said.
Some of Trump’s biggest mouthpieces, however, have agreed to tone down their criticism of the administration over the flub. Conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk told his audience that he was “done talking about Epstein for the time being” after Trump reportedly gave him a call on Saturday.
“I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration, I’m gonna trust my friends in the government to do what needs to be done, solve it, ball’s in their hands,” he said.
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