'Should be looking over his shoulder': White House insider warns author on Epstein claims

A White House insider issued a warning Wednesday to journalist and author Michael Wolff following several claims of his connecting President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

"Michael Wolff should be looking over his shoulder," said a “source close to the first lady,” speaking with Axios in a report published Wednesday.

Wolff has frequently spoken on the Trumps’ ties with Epstein, and claims to be in possession of more than 100 hours of recorded conversations he had with the disgraced financier, who died in 2019 while awaiting sex-trafficking charges and was known for his deep connections with powerful figures, including Trump.

Among Wolff’s claims has been that Epstein was instrumental in introducing Trump to the first lady in the late 1990s, a claim that sparked fury from the White House and saw the Trumps’ attorneys target outlets for publishing what they called “falsehoods” about her connection with Epstein. Melania extracted a retraction and apology from The Daily Beast for its reporting on Wolff’s claims.

And on Tuesday, Melania managed to extract another apology, this time from book publisher HarperCollins UK which published a book that repeated Wolff’s claims. Melania has yet to name Wolff directly, though a source close to her was happy to issue him the warning, which Wolff himself shrugged off.

“Yeah, what else is new, the Trumps threaten to sue the media?" Wolff told Axios when asked about the warning.

Wolff has made a number of claims about Trump’s relationship with Epstein, such as that the two once competed to see who could sleep with the late Princess Diana leading up to her death in 1997. Melania has targeted others that have repeated Wolff’s claims with legal threats, such as Hunter Biden, who she threatened with a $1 billion lawsuit.

Trump’s ties with Epstein have plagued his second term in office following a bombshell report from The Wall Street journal in July that revealed new details about the two’s relationship, suggesting it to have been more intimate than previously known.

The Trump administration’s subsequent handling of its supposed investigation into Epstein has also faced scrutiny, particularly after the Justice Department concluded that Epstein did not maintain a “client list” of powerful figures, despite the top DOJ official previously claiming that Epstein’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk.”

Wolff himself has also been the source of some controversy. High-profile people like Tony Blair and Sean Hannity have denied quotes published by Wolff in his books.