Bill and Hillary Clinton were among names subpoenaed before the summer recess, as the House committee seeks information about the so-called Epstein files, records on the deceased financier and sex offender the Trump administration first said it would release, then said it would not.
That decision has led to weeks of speculation about Trump’s relationship with Epstein, with whom he was friends for years.
Amid spiraling scandal, Trump vehemently denies wrongdoing.
Epstein was arrested in 2006 and sentenced in 2008 for offenses related to sexual exploitation of underage girls. He was again arrested in 2019, amid scandal over his lenient treatment by Florida authorities. In August 2019, Epstein killed himself in custody in New York.
Ghislaine Maxwell, his sometime partner, was convicted on sex trafficking charges in 2021. Maxwell's interview with Deputy Attorney General and former Trump lawyer Todd Blanche, and transfer to a less onerous jail, has this month generated significant controversy amid speculation Trump may hand her a pardon.
Blumenthal asked Wolff: “Who should be subpoenaed, who might have information, by this committee? Because the people they've subpoenaed almost certainly know nothing.”
Wolff said: “Well, Steve Bannon for starters.”
Bannon was Trump’s campaign chair in 2016 and White House strategist in 2017. After leaving that role he remained an influential far-right voice and Trump ally.
Bannon is known to have conducted hours of interviews with Epstein, which he says will form the basis of a documentary.
Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA), the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, has said he wants Bannon to be subpoenaed.
Wolff said Bannon “was extremely close to to Epstein for the better part of two years before he died, they were brought together because … they both had had a close relationship with Donald Trump, and they both had significant animosity toward Donald Trump, and they spend hours and hours, countless hours, talking about Donald Trump.
“So if there is anyone who knows about that [Trump-Epstein] relationship from the horse's mouth, it certainly would be Steve Bannon.”
Trump and close aides have attacked Wolff repeatedly, since his first Trump bestseller, Fire and Fury, was released in 2018, charging that he is at best an unreliable narrator. Wolff has written three more Trump books, most recently All or Nothing, about the 2024 election.
Wolff has said he has seen photos of Trump with Epstein and young women, and has hours of tapes of his own interviews with Epstein — excerpts having been published, though Wolff says major publishers regard them as “too hot to handle.”
“I know literally everything,” about Bannon and Epstein’s conversations “because I was there,” Wolff told Blumenthal and Wilentz. “And I have tapes of Bannon tapes … Bannon maintains, of course, that he was making a documentary … this is entirely 100% not true. Bannon was coaching … Epstein for a theoretical mea culpa media appearance.
“I mean, this was at a moment in time when, when forces were closing in on Epstein, where the public perception of what he had done could not have been worse. And the proposition was that Epstein should go on a national news show, 60 Minutes, something like that, and bare his chest.
“And Bannon took it upon himself to train Epstein in how to do this. And there were three separate sessions in which Bannon worked on coaching Epstein.”
Saying Bannon “believed that Epstein was not an unsympathetic narrator of his own life story, and that this might play to his benefit,” Wolff said that judgment was “frankly … pretty dicey stuff.”
Wolff also said Bannon acted as a “hostile” questioner, in an attempt to prepare Epstein for an interview on national TV.
Blumenthal asked: “Did Bannon prepare him to discuss the Trump relationship?”
Wolff said: “Somewhat, but … that was not a key part of these tapes. But you know, it … certainly was touched on and was a factor in terms of who might be called before Congress. Certainly, as I say, Bannon was well versed in all aspects of Epstein's relationship with Trump.”
Wolff added that it was “interesting that at that point in … 2019, in the several months before Epstein was re-arrested, the Trump-Epstein relationship was certainly in the media, and … that was not looked at as a major part of the Epstein story … the media was reluctant to take an interest. This key aspect of the significance of Jeffrey Epstein was overlooked or denied.”
Blumenthal asked: “What did Epstein tell Bannon about his relationship with Trump?”
Wolff said: “They compared notes … they had a lot of enjoyment doing this because they both thought that Trump was a moron, and neither could ultimately believe that Trump had become the president of the United States. So it was a back-and-forth sharing of anecdotes about the deficiencies, let's call them, of Donald Trump as a manager, as a politician and most of all as a human being.”
Blumenthal asked: “Did Epstein talk about [Trump’s] deficiencies … with his relations with women and how he approached them?”
Wolff said: “He did at great length, and that was one of the things that one can find somewhat chilling in hindsight, is that Jeffrey Epstein deeply disapproved of Trump's treatment of women.
“I think he found him, well, as he said to me, ‘Donald has no scruples.’ And he went on at some length, which in part was amusing length, about Trump's efforts to sleep with the wives of his friends that Epstein billed as one of Trump's compulsions.”
