{"id":279772,"date":"2024-11-11T12:00:05","date_gmt":"2024-11-11T12:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=279772"},"modified":"2024-11-05T06:03:04","modified_gmt":"2024-11-05T06:03:04","slug":"this-is-why-i-am-releasing-the-epstein-trump-tapes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/11\/this-is-why-i-am-releasing-the-epstein-trump-tapes\/","title":{"rendered":"This Is Why I Am Releasing the Epstein-Trump Tapes"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Animated GIF by Thomas Levinson\/The Daily Beast\/Getty<\/p><\/div>\n

The Predator and the President: The author of <\/em>Fire and Fury has caused shockwaves with his recordings of Epstein talking about Trump. Here is their true story.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

2 Nov 2024 <\/em>– Starting in the Summer of 2016 and then through the first year of the Trump administration, as I wrote my book Fire and Fury<\/i> about the first months of the Trump White House, I spoke periodically to Trump\u2019s longtime and now estranged friend, Jeffrey Epstein.<\/p>\n

Epstein, of course, would go on to be branded as among the world\u2019s most famous sexual predators and, in 2019, died, most likely a suicide, under federal indictment and as a prisoner in New York\u2019s Metropolitan Correctional Center, a federal prison.<\/p>\n

But in 2016 and in the nascent days of the Trump administration, Epstein, although the subject of many allegations and lawsuits, was still a free man, living alone in extraordinary splendor in one of the largest private residences in Manhattan.<\/p>\n

Among the reasons he agreed to talk to me was his own incredulity that Donald Trump<\/a>, a man who, in their friendship, had displayed so many disqualifying attributes to high office, was on his way to becoming president\u2014indeed, who became president. In short, even Jeffrey Epstein<\/a> was appalled.<\/p>\n

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Read More: Jeffrey Epstein Tapes–<\/em>\u2018I Was Donald Trump\u2019s Closest Friend\u2019\u00a0 <\/span><\/a>The Predator and the President by <\/em><\/a>Hugh Dougherty<\/span><\/a><\/em><\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

Our conversations took place in the dining room in the back of his house on East 71st Street, where he customarily conducted something like an ongoing colloquium with a long and now notorious list of the rich, powerful, and celebrated. Or we would sit, up a grand staircase, in the baronial study which ran the length of the mansion.<\/p>\n

Epstein was, clearly, obsessed with Trump, and I believe personally afraid of him. He was not the only one who knew the real Donald Trump, he told me, but he did, surely, know<\/i> him, really<\/i> know him, he would emphasize.<\/p>\n

Now, he was groping for a way to explain how the man he knew\u2014a man who had hardly ever tried to hide his blatant moral flaws\u2014had risen to the very top of American politics.<\/p>\n

Last week, on the podcast I host with James Truman for iHeart, Fire and Fury\u2014The Podcast<\/a>, we first broached the Epstein-Trump subject after the model Stacey Williams came forward to discuss<\/a> how Trump had abused her when she was Epstein\u2019s girlfriend in the 1990s. The response to the podcast was immediate and overwhelming, suggesting a hunger to know about a story, the Trump-Epstein relationship, that has seemed for so long to hide in plain sight.<\/p>\n

\"Portrait
The friendship between these two men ended in 2004 but has never been fully explored. <\/span>Davidoff Studios Photography\/Getty Images <\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Fire and Fury podcast has partnered with the Daily Beast, which has helped with the myriad technical difficulties of bad recordings (my fault here), to publish, in Epstein\u2019s own words, some of the highlights of his experiences with and observations about what I think can be fairly described as his fellow predator.<\/p>\n

During the podcast I noted the glaring and confounding circumstance that one of these predators ended up in the country\u2019s darkest prison and the other in the White House.<\/p>\n

We still need to understand how that came to pass.<\/p>\n

__________________________________________________<\/p>\n

\n

\"\"<\/a>Michael Wolff is the author of best-sellers including<\/em> Fire and Fury, the explosive 2018 account of Donald Trump’s White House, and<\/em> The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch. He appears regularly on his podcast,<\/em> Fire and Fury.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Go to Original – thedailybeast.com<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2 Nov 2024 – The Predator and the President: The author of Fire and Fury has caused shockwaves with his recordings of Epstein talking about Trump. Here is their true story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":279774,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[1057,2950,550,1034,1652,651,802,98,109,2452,249],"class_list":["post-279772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america","tag-child-protection","tag-children-prostitution","tag-corruption","tag-human-traffic","tag-jeffrey-epstein","tag-justice","tag-morality","tag-pedophilia","tag-politics","tag-sexual-violence","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279772"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":279779,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279772\/revisions\/279779"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279774"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}