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Editor’s note, June 5, 2025, 4:25 pm ET: On Thursday, amid an apparent feud between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the tech billionaire posted on X that Trump was “in the Epstein files,” saying, “That is the real reason they have not been made public.” The story below was originally published on November 5, 2024.

In media and politics, timing is everything — which leaves many people wondering why journalist and author Michael Wolff waited until mere days before the presidential election to drop a bombshell: what he says are recordings of Jeffrey Epstein discussing his intimate friendship with Republican candidate Donald Trump.

Wolff, author of Fire and Fury, a bestselling 2018 book about the Trump White House, dropped a brief clip from the tapes last week on his Fire and Fury podcast, on which he and co-host James Truman gab about the news and political insider gossip. In the clip, Epstein chit-chats about how Trump played mind games with his staff. After it made headlines over the weekend, Wolff shared a wider selection of the “hundred hours” of his Epstein recordings with the Daily Beast, which published excerpts Monday.

On the tapes — which, it must be noted, feature only Epstein’s version of events — Epstein proclaims he was Trump’s “closest friend.” He depicts the pair as bros who partied together for over a decade, and Trump as a dedicated womanizer and adulterer.

“The only thing I really like to do is fuck the wives of my best friends,” Trump allegedly told Epstein after a tryst. “That is just the best.’”

The Trump campaign has responded to the tapes by accusing Wolff of outright lying and “blatant election interference on behalf of [Trump’s opponent] Kamala Harris.”

What’s striking about the allegations Epstein makes in the tapes is that they aren’t anything we haven’t heard before, about Trump’s friendship with Epstein or Trump himself.

The pair’s “bromance” has been a matter of public record since the ’90s, with plenty of accompanying salacious gossip. No fewer than 28 women have come forward to publicly accuse Trump of sexual misconduct against them over the decades. The two most recent allegations were made within days of each other, with the 27th accuser, Stacey Williams, claiming that Epstein had introduced Trump to her and that the two men seemed to be treating her like the object of a “twisted” game.

Wolff said on the podcast that he was motivated to release the Epstein-Trump clip after the 28th accuser, former Swiss pageant queen Beatrice Keul, also made a recent allegation of sexual assault against the former president.

Wolff claimed to the Daily Beast that he’d attempted unsuccessfully to interest various media outlets in the tapes at various points in the past. Those editors likely passed on the clips due to the difficulty of fact-checking them or verifying any of the claims made by Epstein, who died in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex........

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