In January 2026, we got our biggest batch of files, over 3 million, including 1,830 hits for “from Michael Wolff.” It was the motherlode of information, when both men completely let their guard down, never assuming their interactions would be part of one of the biggest, and most controversial investigations in American history.

And so I dug in, completely invested in their off-the-record conversations that appeared to start in 2009. But I knew there would be more. In Wolff’s own words, he’d traveled on Epstein’s private plane in the early 2000s to attend a TED conference on the West Coast. At the time he’d noticed Epstein’s propensity for “very tall girls.” It’s notable that he has since changed his statement to “model-tall young women.” But either way, it didn’t bother Wolff enough to stray from the friendship, because in 2003 he attempted to facilitate the sale of New York Magazine to Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Donny Deutsch, and Nelson Peltz. They would ultimately be outbid by billionaire banker, Bruce Wasserstein.

The emails begin in 2009, with large gaps including the entirety of 2010, and all conversation prior; inevitably missing from our portion of the files. But by 2011, Epstein was sending Wolff pairs of his favorite sneakers, cementing the basis of their friendship by mid-summer.

In June 2011, Wolff introduced Epstein to Ian Osborne, a young PR guy with connections, telling Epstein they could effectively wipe the internet of his sexual history in 3-9 months, including “a rejiggering of search results through SEO and strategic content creation and replacement.” 

 

Over the next eight years, Wolff would add Ken Frydman, Matt Hiltzik, Oliver Lloyd, and Juleanna Glover to the PR team, working day and night to bring Epstein back into the fold of wealthy society and global leaders and strategists. 

 

In 2017, the PR shifted to covering Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, in hopes to “shape the story” in a more positive light.

But Wolff didn’t stop there, merely documenting the conversations as he claims. By November, Epstein was sending over financial proposals, asking Wolff if he wanted to work as his full-time documentarian, a ghostwriter perhaps. Wolff responds that he’s “allergic to all money discussions,” but the idea intrigued him, leading to their first on-tape interviews. By spring of 2019, Wolff was writing “counter-narratives” to the Miami Herald’s investigation into Epstein, which ultimately led to Epstein’s arrest.

But PR didn’t just mean building Epstein up; it meant discrediting any stories that came out about Epstein, his first trial, his financial dealings, and the long list of accusations from minor Jane Does. When the Daily Beast began investigating Epstein in the early 2010s, Wolff offered methods of “neutralizing” editor-in-chief Tina Brown, while discrediting senior investigative reporter, Wayne Barrett.

Over the course of their 20-year friendship, Wolff fed into Epstein’s argument, that he was innocent, that his buddy Woody Allen was framed, and that he simply liked a “rub-and-tug” from adult women every once in a while, and what’s the big deal? Meanwhile, Wolff enjoyed the intel, meeting Epstein’s bigger connections, and hobnobbing with New York’s wealthy elite.

With Epstein’s first trial in the rearview mirror, Wolff had no problem recommending a young “girl I know,” a graduate student from Columbia, to apply as Epstein’s new assistant. 

 

And, when leaked information about Epstein hit the media, Wolff recommended he pay off his doorman, the likely leaker. And those Melania Transcripts? The stuff Epstein had on New York Times chairman “Pinch” Sulzberger? 

 

Those conversations would be held offline, perhaps in 100 hours of recorded interviews. As Wolff bounced back and forth to the White House, gathering quotes from Donald Trump and the cabinet for his book Fire and Fury, Epstein added anecdotes, read drafts, and edited to his liking.

But the biggest and most beneficial connection to both men, with an equal hatred of the now-President of the United States, was Steve Bannon, whom Wolff referred to as “spectrumy” and unfocused, always late, and paranoid. And yet, more than Wolff, Bannon seemed to know the most and have the most concrete connections with Donald Trump’s inner circle. And thus Michael Wolff introduced Bannon and Epstein in October 2017, a friendship that would last until Epstein’s death.

 

 

 

3. The bond structured through Saudi Aramco rather than the kingdom, which would route the debt around the legal exposure created by the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act, and a year and a half later the kingdom did issue its first international bond through Aramco.

 

4. A $100 billion option for China on a stake in Saudi Aramco, structured so that China would pay for it by handing over the United States Treasury bonds China was already holding, which would let the deal settle directly between Saudi Arabia and China, bypassing American banks, American currency, and the regulatory oversight that comes with both.

 

5. Qatar recognizing Israel as the diplomatic ground for a regional investment corridor between the Gulf states and Israel, with the first gesture of that corridor being Qatari money paying for Gaza’s electricity infrastructure.

 

Every one of those things seems to describe a system designed to operate around the United States rather than through it, and the way Epstein describes his work to the Royal Court is the way someone proposing an exit from the American financial order might describe it.

The Position
Two months before the American election, Epstein wrote to Aziza Alahmadi at the Royal Court and told her that the Podesta Group, registered as a Saudi foreign agent and run by the brother of the chairman of the Clinton campaign, was obsolete because “it is the social media that controls votes,” and what the kingdom needed in the next administration was someone young, digitally native, politically connected, and unbothered by the lobbying firms of the 1990s. 

Six days before that election he flew to Riyadh on the invitation of the Royal Court, met Mohammed bin Salman on November 7, 2016, and a year later wrote MBS a letter that opened with the line “November 7 will mark one year since you and i met and laughed.”

Three days after the American election, with Donald Trump’s victory now in hand, Epstein sent a formal pitch to the Royal Court addressed to “His Excellency,” in which he proposed himself as Financial Confidant to Mohammed bin Salman with biweekly access to the Crown Prince, with zero compensation for the first year and the Prince to decide payment thereafter, and with a scope of oversight that included the Public Investment Fund, the central bank, and the royal purse. 

The detail in that pitch that explains what the relationship really was is the zero compensation, because historical analysis of many major intelligence service across the twentieth century names the same model as the most durable form of asset relationship, which is the asset who refuses payment because their loyalty is presumed to be ideological, and Epstein, in his October 2017 letter directly to the Crown Prince, made the model explicit when he wrote: “I do not want any money from you or the kingdom.”