Donald Trump accidentally revealed his fears about the Jeffrey Epstein files during a rant against author Michael Wolff, who is threatening to question him under oath.
Wolff suggested on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that his lawsuit against Melania Trump has rattled the 79-year-old president. The author said Trump’s jitters were evident when he was cornered over the Epstein files on Monday.
“I have nothing to hide. I’ve been exonerated. I have nothing to do with Jeffrey Epstein,” Trump told reporters on Air Force One, before falling back on his oft-repeated claim that Wolff “conspired” with Epstein against him.
“Jeffrey Epstein was fighting that I don’t get elected with some author—a sleazebag, by the way—and I’ve been totally exonerated,” said the president, who is mentioned in more than 5,300 Epstein files, according to The New York Times.
Wolff, 72, who was in frequent email conversations with Epstein in the years before his death, argued that Trump’s insistence that Epstein was plotting against him exposes a deeper fear about what might surface about his relationship with the convicted sex trafficker.
“He’s kind of focused in on that, and when he focuses in on things, actually, he has an antenna for what is true,” Wolff said. “In other words, when he singles that out, he is saying, ‘Yeah, that could have been harmful to me.’”
The author, who went inside the Trump White House to write his 2018 bestseller Fire and Fury, suggested that the president can’t stop mentioning him because, “I am under his skin with this Melania lawsuit.”
Wolff is suing the 55-year-old first lady under laws designed to protect free speech after she threatened him with a $1 billion lawsuit for speaking about her ties to Epstein. He is planning to use his subpoena powers to question both Trumps under oath about their decades-long entanglement with the pedophile.
“This lawsuit is a problem for them. I mean, they screwed up to get themselves in a position where I could pursue them. They’re not pursuing me. I’m pursuing them,” Wolff said. “So that’s a screwup, the lawsuit, getting themselves in this position is a screwup with my name on it.”
Melania has resisted being served and filed a petition to move the case to federal court. Last week, Wolff challenged her claim that her primary residence is in Florida after coming to the conclusion that New York is where she calls home. He previously revealed that when his legal team tried to serve her at Trump Tower in New York City, the front desk confirmed she lives there. They, like her lawyer in Florida, would not accept the papers.
Meanwhile, Trump has floated half-baked threats of suing Wolff over his allegation that he “conspired” with Epstein against him.
Wolff spent large amounts of time with Epstein before his death in 2019, and released recordings before the 2024 election of Epstein calling himself Trump’s “closest friend.”
The first tranche of Epstein files, published in November 2025, showed Wolff apparently offering advice to Epstein in 2015 on how to get Trump to “hang himself” with his own words if asked about the duo’s relationship, and how Epstein could engineer a situation to have the then-presidential candidate in “debt” to him. Wolff was also shown to have urged Epstein to “finish” the then-Republican nominee just before the 2016 election.
After their publication, Wolff said on the Inside Trump’s Head podcast that the emails were certainly “embarrassing” in hindsight, but showed that he was trying to get at the truth of the relationship between Trump and Epstein long before others were pursuing the story.
Trump has falsely claimed that Wolff’s emails to Epstein about Trump were “the only thing” mentioned about him in the files, declaring, “So that takes care of Epstein as far as Trump is concerned.”
The latest tranche of Epstein files included more than 38,000 references to Trump, Melania, Mar-a-Lago, and other words and phrases related to the president, according to the Times.
When reached for comment, the White House called attention to Wolff’s communications with Epstein, which he has explained.
“When will the Daily Beast report on their podcaster Michael Wolff’s extremely close relationship with Jeffrey Epstein after he was convicted as a sex offender?” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
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