Trump team condemns Wolff’s book, calls new Epstein allegations ‘fiction’

President-elect Donald Trump’s team issued a strongly worded statement Wednesday denying allegations made by author and journalist Michael Wolff that Mr. Trump had stronger ties to the late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein than had previously been reported.

Mr. Wolff discussed excerpts of his upcoming book, “Trump’s FBI,” last week on his podcast. He made several inflammatory allegations about the relationship between Mr. Trump and Epstein, who died in 2019 in an apparent suicide in a Manhattan jail cell where he was being held on federal sex trafficking charges.

Mr. Wolff “is a known peddler of fake news who routinely concocts situations, conversations and conclusions that never happened,” the Trump camp said in a statement. “As a group, we have decided not to respond to his bad-faith inquiries, and we encourage others to completely disregard whatever nonsense he eventually publishes.” 

The statement, signed by incoming White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, campaign manager Chris LaCivita, senior adviser Danielle Alvarez and others slammed Mr. Wolff’s allegations as “fiction.”

Mr. Wolff said his source for the allegations was Epstein himself, claiming the disgraced financier was “a secret source” for his previous books about Mr. Trump. He claims that he has more than 100 hours of tapes of Epstein talking about the inner workings of the Trump White House during the president-elect’s first term in office and about his longstanding friendship with Mr. Trump before he entered the White House. 

Describing the pair as “brothers in arms,” Mr. Wolff said the Trump-Epstein relationship was much deeper than anyone knew.

While Mr. Wolff did not say that Mr. Trump was involved in sex trafficking or other crimes committed by the billionaire financier over the years, he contended that the president-elect was aware of “girls” being at Epstein’s home. He also alleged that embarrassing photos had been found of Mr. Trump in Epstein’s safe.

“And the young girls are topless in some of the pictures; they’re sitting on his lap. And there’s one I especially remember where there’s a telltale stain on the front of Trump’s pants, and the girls are pointing at him and laughing,” Mr. Wolff said. 

He said the photos disappeared when the FBI raided Epstein’s house and seized the safe in 2019.

Mr. Wolff also claimed that Mr. Trump and Epstein shared a girlfriend and even had a friendly wager over which one would be the first to sleep with Princess Diana.

However, the friendship fell apart in 2004 over a real estate deal. According to Mr. Wolff, Epstein placed a bid on a house in Palm Beach Florida for $36 million and then asked Mr. Trump for advice about how to move the property’s swimming pool. The president-elect allegedly went around Epstein’s back and put in his own $40 million bid for the house. 

Epstein’s death has left numerous unanswered questions about his ties to powerful figures, including Mr. Trump and others. Although his death in prison was officially declared a suicide, the public has remained skeptical and Epstein’s lawyers have challenged that claim.

Mr. Wolff has had a history of walking back or being challenged for making explosive claims that were later proven to be untrue.

His lengthy expose of the first Trump administration, entitled “Fire and Fury,” was criticized for multiple inaccuracies prompting The Washington Post to ask how “it got past fact-checkers,” saying “parts are up for debate and a few points in the book are clearly wrong.” 

At one point the author acknowledged that some of the accounts in “Fire and Fury” were “boldly untrue,” saying he settled on “a version of events I believe to be true.”