Epstein and Michael Wolff discussed how to deal with Trumppublished at 14:43 GMT
Two of the alleged exchanges in the emails released today by House Democrats are between Epstein and the author Michael Wolff, who has written four books on Donald Trump and interviewed Epstein.
December 2015 email exchange
“I hear CNN planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you–either on air or in scrum afterwards,” Wolff allegedly says in an email to Epstein dated 15 December 2015, six months after Trump had declared he was running for the 2016 US presidential election.
Epstein replied to Wolff: “If we were to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?”
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff wrote the following day. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt. Of course, it is possible that, when asked, he’ll say Jeffrey is a great guy and has gotten a raw deal and is a victim of political correctness, which is to be outlawed in a Trump regime.”
At the time, Epstein had already pleaded guilty to sex offences in Florida as part of a deal with prosecutors.
January 2019 email
In a separate email from 31 January 2019, Epstein denies the US president’s claims that he had banished him from Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida estate.
“Trump said he asked me to resign, never a member ever,” Epstein told Wolff. “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” he added, an apparent reference to Epstein’s former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who is now serving a 20-year sentence for trafficking girls to Epstein.
Trump said earlier this year that he fell out with Epstein after he “stole” young women who worked at his Mar-a-Lago beach club spa.
Image caption,
An email from Michael Wolff to Jeffrey Epstein, as released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee
