Michael Wolff Advised Predator Jeffrey Epstein on Targeting Trump Per Emails

(AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey)

Newly released emails show Michael Wolff advising Jeffrey Epstein on how to use President Donald Trump’s ties as “PR and political currency,” raising serious ethics concerns.

The emails released by Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee have rightly focused on the enduring connection between Trump and Epstein. But within them lies an unsettling parallel narrative: the role of Wolff, a journalist who built his reputation claiming to hold the powerful to account, now seemingly advising one of the most notorious sexual predators of the era on how to exploit information about a future president.

In December 2015 — years after Epstein had pleaded guilty to sex crimes and registered as a sex offender — Wolff wrote Epstein: “If he [Trump] says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house … then that gives you valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him.”

This goes beyond reporting; it’s direct instruction, aimed at maneuvering rather than uncovering facts.

As a journalist, one’s job is to expose the mechanisms of power, not help them operate more efficiently. At a minimum, these emails show Wolff crossing out of professional neutrality and into collaboration. He appears to have advised a convicted predator on how to leverage private knowledge for maximum reputational damage.

Yes, other emails may come out to exonerate his role here. As of now, however, there is no suggestion of confronting the underlying crime, no effort to surface the truth, no acknowledgment that the “currency” in question derives from the exploitation of underage girls. Instead, Wolff adopts the logic of power itself: the information is valuable because it can be weaponized.

That alone is a serious breach. But it’s also part of a deeper problem in how elite journalism functions. Wolff is but one example of this larger issue. For decades, he has sold himself not as a shoe-leather reporter but as someone “inside the room,” a participant in the social and political circuits of Manhattan, Palm Beach, and Washington. That closeness is his brand, even if it has turned his reputation into nothing more than that of a shameless gossip. These emails show the corrosion that proximity enables: the journalist drifts from observer to player. He doesn’t just witness the machinery of influence, he oils the gears.

Whether Epstein ever acted on Wolff’s guidance is not the central question. What matters is that Wolff offered it. We should not require a completed extortion scheme to recognize ethical collapse. The emails make clear he was willing to help a known predator manipulate the truth for mutual benefit, without a glimmer of regard for those harmed. That willingness alone disqualifies any claim he still speaks from a place of scrutiny rather than complicity.

Why would Wolff do this? The most plausible explanation is transactional: access for relevance. Proximity to figures like Epstein and Trump helped Wolff cultivate the insider aura that fuels his books and feeds his public persona. The advice he offered Epstein looks less like moral blindness than professional opportunism; he was maintaining his position by demonstrating his usefulness. Wolff wasn’t just receiving information; he was contributing strategy. That isn’t journalism that seeks facts for reporting; it’s more like advice and consultancy designed to maintain access.

Too often, this is how power reproduces itself. The journalist, meant to scrutinize, becomes entangled. Social access becomes editorial advantage. Accountability blurs into alliance. And victims— girls whose exploitation enabled the very leverage Wolff called “currency” — are rendered abstract, background noise in a game among powerful men.

And that’s a systemic indictment. The Wolff-Epstein correspondence is not just a story about one journalist behaving badly; it reveals a professional culture that too often rewards access over ethics and performance over principle. This is what happens when the watchdog decides being invited inside is more important than keeping watch.

Wolff built a career narrating institutional decay. Now, these emails suggest he wasn’t just chronicling rot, he was participating in it. His words to Epstein were clear: information is currency; harm is irrelevant; power is the point. If journalism abandons its obligation to center truth and the people harmed by its absence, it becomes merely another branch of the influence economy. And that is a betrayal of purpose.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.