XPost: alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, alt.atheism, alt.home.repair
XPost: rec.arts.tv

1/11
Hugh Dougherty
Listen To The Jeffrey Epstein Tapes: ‘I Was Donald
Trump’s Closest Friend’ thedailybeast.com/listen-to-the-jeffrey-epstein-tapes-i-was-donald-trumps- closest-friend

THE PREDATOR AND THE PRESIDENT
Explosive tapes recorded by author Michael Wolff show Epstein
claiming Trump liked to “f---” his friends’ wives and first slept with
Melania on the “Lolita Express.”
Exclusive
Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Getty Images
Jeffrey Epstein described himself as Donald Trump’s “closest friend” and claimed intimate
knowledge of his proclivity for sex, including cuckolding his best friends, according to
recordings obtained exclusively by the Daily Beast.
The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now- wife Melania
by claiming, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” which was dubbed the Lolita
Express.
Epstein spoke at length about Trump with the author Michael Wolff in August 2017, two
years before being found dead in his jail cell. Wolff was researching his bombshell bestseller
Fire and Fury at the time.
The recordings cast more light on Trump’s long relationship with Epstein,
and will add to
debate over the character of the Republican candidate, especially his
attitudes and conduct
toward women, just days before the election.
The tapes tell Epstein’s version of the relationship between two former
friends and their very
different paths: One toward infamy, prison and suicide; the other toward
power, the Oval
Office and his own criminal conviction for paying hush money to a porn
star.
Trump’s camp referred to the tapes’ release as “false smears” and “election interference.”
The tapes also offer unusual insight into the friendship of two wealthy, powerful men who
frequently went out on the town together, prowling for women in New York
and Atlantic City.
2/11
Epstein painted a complicated portrait of Trump. He called
him “charming,” and “always fun,” capable of extraordinary
salesmanship, and suggested he was personally in favor of
Trump’s policies on“the transgender stuff.” But he alleged
Trump was a serial cheat in his marriages and loved to “f---
the wives of his best friends.”
He also claimed that while Trump has friends, he was at heart a friendless
man incapable of
kindness. And he alleged that Trump had undergone scalp reduction surgery
for baldness
and called himself “The Trumpster.”
The new tapes shed light on a barely explored part of Trump's past, his long-term friendship
with a man who would become one of America's most notorious sexual
predators. Trump was
in the last three days of campaigning on Saturday in Salem, Virginia. Brian Snyder/Reuters
Asked by Wolff, “How do you know all this?” Epstein replied, “I was
Donald’s closest friend
for 10 years.”
Wolff shared the tape with the Daily Beast ahead of discussing it on his
Fire and Fury
podcast on Monday. Last Thursday he caused shockwaves by revealing a few seconds of a
separate recording in which Epstein spoke in detail about the inner
workings of the Trump
administration. Wolff also said Thursday that the pedophile showed off
photos of Trump with
topless young women sitting in his lap.
3/11
Wolff, a veteran journalist and author who was also the biographer of
Rupert Murdoch, has
long attracted praise and bromides. When Fire & Fury was published in
January 2018,
Trump tried to stop it with a failed cease and desist order, then
threatened to sue. No case
ever materialized, and it sold 5 million copies worldwide. Wolff, who
appears regularly on his
Fire and Fury podcast, wrote two more books on Trump after Fire and Fury,
and about
Epstein in 2021’s Too Famous.
Wolff says he has up to 100 hours of recordings of
interviews with Epstein, including from using him as a
source for Fire and Fury, and from years of meetings when
the disgraced financier appeared to want Wolff to write a
biography of him. Wolff said he decided to release parts of
the archive after a new accuser, a former Miss Switzerland,
alleged last week that Trump had groped her in 1992.
The new recording offers extraordinary insights into Epstein, who in 2017
was shuttling freely
on his two private jets between his Manhattan townhouse, his Palm Beach, Florida, estate
and Little St. James, a private island in the Virgin Islands.
In 2017, Epstein was free to travel between his properties on a choice of
two planes—this
Gulfstream, and his Boeing 727, dubbed the “Lolita Express,” on which he claimed Melania
and Donald Trump first had sex. U.S. Department of Justice
Epstein had been convicted in 2008 in Florida of procuring a child for prostitution and
soliciting a prostitute in a plea deal thatallowed him to escape
prosecution for victimizing
multiple underage girls, in return for an 18-month sentence. He spent the
years after his
release associating with billionaires—including Leon Black, the co-founder
of Apollo Global
4/11
Management who paid him more than $150 million for financial advice, and Microsoft
founder Bill Gates—and dining behind closed doors with members of the
financial and
political elite.
In July 2019, however, he was arrested by the FBI and charged with child
sex trafficking. Six
weeks later Epstein’s body was found hanging in his prison cell;
authorities said he had died
by suicide.
Wolff told the Beast he interviewed Epstein, then 64, in a “gargantuan”
study in his
townhouse on East 71st Street in Manhattan two years before his death. The Beast has
reviewed the entire recording, which is one hour, 44 minutes long. The
voice on the
tapeclearly matches recordings of Epstein’s voice from depositions in 2012
and 2016.
The Trump campaign has already attacked Wolff for releasing audio of
Epstein, calling the
author “a disgraced writer who routinely fabricates lies in order to sell fiction books because
he clearly has no morals or ethics.”
A spokesperson renewed that attack Saturday, and said, “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.” Sources in the Trump camp also suggested it was “widely known”
that Trump had
“kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago” when he learned about the sex- trafficking
allegations.
5/11
Wolff interviewed Epstein at his vast Manhattan townhouse on a day in
August 2017. Just short
of two years later it was raided by the FBI. Eduardo Munoz via Reuters
Trump’s long friendship with Epstein, which spanned the late 1980s, 1990s
and early 2000s
has been well documented. In the 1990s, the two publicly partied at Mar-a-
Lago and went to
a Victoria’s Secret Angels show together. In 2002, Trump told New York
Magazine of
Epstein, “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.”
Epstein’s infamous leaked addressbooks had Trump’s own phone number as well
as
Melania’s, while Trump’s name appeared seven times in the passenger logs of Epstein’s
planes. (The books and logs also included princes, politicians and
potentates such as Bill
Clinton, former British prime minister Tony Blair, former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, Prince
Andrew and celebrities and billionaires including Mick Jagger and Les
Wexner.)
6/11
The long friendship between Trump and Epstein saw them party at Mar-a-Lago, including in
February 2000 when they posed with their then-girlfriends, Melania Knauss
and Ghislaine
Maxwell. Melania became First Lady; Maxwell is serving 20 years in federal prison. Davidoff
Studios/Getty Images
In 2022 Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who procured him underage girls,
would be sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for the sex trafficking of minors. Upon
hearing of her arrest in 2020, Trump, then president, said he wished her
well. “Her friend or
boyfriend was either killed or committed suicide in jail. Yeah, I wish her well… Good luck.”
In 2004, Epstein and Trump fell out when they both tried to buy a Palm
Beach estate, Maison
de L’Amitié, out of bankruptcy. The next year, the FBI began investigating Epstein for child
sex trafficking.
In 2019, on the day after Epstein’s arrest, Trump said in the Oval Office,
“I was not a fan of
his, that I can tell you,” and that they had not been friends for 15 years.
He said it “did not
much matter” what the fall-out had been over. This September, asked about Epstein by the
tech podcaster Lex Fridman, Trump said: “He was a good salesman. He was a hailing,
hearty type of guy. He had some nice assets that he’d throw around like islands, but a lot of
big people went to that island. But fortunately, I was not one of them.” However, the financier’s version of their relationship has never been heard until now.
7/11
The two men fell out in 2004 over the purchase of the Maison de L'Amitié,
an estate and
mansion in Palm Beach which Trump bought from under Epstein.
He offers a portrait of Trump womanizing, yelling at staff and living a basically friendless life
with only his daughter Ivanka, his secretary and his bodyguard truly loyal
to him.
Trump, he said, was almost “functionally illiterate” but did read the Page
Six gossip column in
the New York Post. He was “incapable” of reading a balance sheet, and any
“act of kindness”
would have been an accident, Epstein said
But it is Epstein’s description of Trump’s conduct toward women which is
likely to attract most
attention, given the pair’s long friendship, and the 28 women who have made accusations
against the former president of sexual misconduct (all of which he denies). Many of the
attacks are alleged to have occurred when he and Epstein were friends.
On the tape Epstein can be heard saying, “He’s a horrible human being. He
does nasty
things to his best friends, best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries
to gain their trust and
uses it to do bad things to them.”
On one occasion, Epstein alleged, Trump took a woman to what he called “the Egyptian
Room” in an Atlantic City casino. Epstein alleged, “He came out afterward
and said, ‘It was
great, it was great. The only thing I really like to do is f--- the wives
of my best friends. That is
just the best.’”
8/11
He alleged that he and Trump would pick up women by combining to split them from their
male companions. “We always used to go to Atlantic City to try to find
girls in the casino,” he
said. “And if there was a guy, I would say, ‘I’m here to invite the guy to
go out to dinner.’ And
he’d say, [to the woman], ‘Let me show you the casino.’ And as he walked
out, he put his
arm around the girl’s shoulder, and the bodyguard would walk up and Donald, whoosh, take
the girl away.”
Epstein also alleged that Trump had an elaborate scheme to procure sex with
his friends’
wives. He would call the men into his Trump Tower office to ask them about their sex lives
and offer them sex with beauty pageant contestants, the pedophile said. He would do this
while the wives were—unknown to their husbands—listening on speakerphone,
so that he
could then seduce the wives on the basis their husbands had betrayed them, Epstein
claimed.
“You must have had a better f--- than your wife, tell me about it”
— What Epstein alleges Trump would ask his friends
Epstein can be heard acting out what he alleged was Trump’s elaborate
seduction technique
to Wolff, using Wolff’s name and that of his wife, Victoria, to demonstrate
it. Epstein said,
“And he’d say, ‘What’s it like to do that?… Do you like having sex with
your wife? How often
do you have sex with her?’” Epstein claimed Trump would also say, “You must have had a
better f--- than your wife, tell me about it.”
Then, the pedophile alleged, Trump would say, “We can, you and I can go upstairs or
tomorrow, come over, there’s this girl’s coming in from Los Angeles, part
of the, whatever
Hawaiian Tropic contest, so come over, we can have a great time. I promise
you, Michael,
you know, it’s just me and you, we can have a great time.” Epstein added,
“The whole time,
your Victoria’s with us on the phone.” Then he would use the wives’ anger
to seduce them,
he claimed.
9/11
In April 1997, Trump and Epstein went to the Victoria's Secret Angels party together in
Manhattan. Outside Trump posed with Belgian model Ingrid Seynhaeve. Sonia Moskowitz/Getty Images
The Epstein tape includes an allegation—which is impossible to verify—that Trump had an
affair with a politician while in the White House. Epstein offered no proof
or sourcing for the
claim. He also alleged that Trump cheated on both his first wife Ivana and second wife Marla
Maples with “a Black girl.” At one section, Epstein used a Yiddish racial
slur to refer to Black
women and alleged Trump boasted to him, “I’m f---ing all these Black
women.”
The tape mixes sexual allegations with other aspects of Trump’s life. Early
in the recording
Epstein is heard to say, “You probably know he had a scalp reduction. He’s getting the same
male pattern baldness that we all have. He had his scalp reduced. It’s hysterical.” Trump has
long refused to release full medical records while his White House medical reports did not
disclose any prior surgeries.
“He’s charming. In a devious way, he’s charming. To some extent it’s a
typical tragedy where
he believes his own bulls---”
— Epstein on Trump
And Epstein offers his eyewitness account of Trump Tower and Trump’s office where, he
said, Trump had “fake honors” on the wall. Trump, he claimed, would yell at
his personal
assistant Rhona Graff, “who’s a loyal, perfect, secretary,” as well as
Matthew Calamari Snr.,
his bodyguard, and Michael Cohen, his attorney who is now an enemy. Epstein compared
Trump to “an emotionally challenged 9-year-old,” and said, “He screams and yells at Rhona
10/11
more than anybody else. His screaming is how he treats people. He has a tantrum, not a
temper. If you don’t understand him, it’s frightening. Once you understand
him, it’s sort of
silly.”
Epstein also told Wolff he had positive things to say about Trump. “He’s charming. In a
devious way, he’s charming,” he said. “To some extent it’s a typical
tragedy where he
believes his own bulls---. He has delusions of grandiosity, then he takes
it on board.” He
added that he had a “self-deprecating nature” and was “not vulgar.”
“He’s funny,” Epstein said. “Self-awareness means you’re self-aware. He’s
aware of that
person, Donald Trump. He talks about The Trump, The Trumpster. ‘Trump’s
getting laid.’”
Despite Epstein speaking of his “Democratic friends,” he offered praise for some aspects of
Trump’s time in office, and said, “I think he’s doing a pretty good job at certain things and
he’s not getting credit for it. All the transgender stuff, the bathroom
stuff, giving police back
their weapons.”
This is the last public picture of Epstein, the mug shot taken when he
entered federal custody
after his attest in July 2019. He died weeks later in his cell. Authorities said it was by suicide.
Kypros/Kypros
11/11
On the tape Epstein, speaking in a New York accent, also mentioned the rich
and powerful.
(In a deposition released after his death Epstein admitted under oath that
he dropped the
names of people he had never met.) The names he mentioned on tape include: Former
president Bill Clinton; Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner; then- Defense
Secretary James Mattis; and the billionaires Carl Icahn and Tom Barrack,
both of whom are
friends of Trump.
Clinton was a long-standing friend of Epstein but has denied any
association after the
pedophile’s disgrace in the mid-2000s. Mattis has no known association with him. Ivanka
was photographed with him as a child but Kushner has never been known to be linked to
him. Barrack appeared in a leaked appointment diary for Epstein from 2016, while Carl
Icahn, a corporate raider and long-time Trump friend, was in Epstein’s 1997 address book.
Startlingly for a man who became one of the world’s most notorious sex offenders, Epstein
on the tapes offers a damning judgment of Trump, telling Wolff, “The moral compass just
does not exist.”

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)