#Michael Wolff

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Hugh Dougherty at The Daily Beast:

Jeffrey Epstein described himself as Donald Trump’s “closest friend” and claimed intimate knowledge of his proclivity for sex, including cuckolding his best friends, according to recordings obtained exclusively by the Daily Beast. The convicted pedophile even boasted of his closeness to Trump and his now-wife Melania by claiming, “the first time he slept with her was on my plane,” which was dubbed the Lolita Express.

Epstein spoke at length about Trump with the author Michael Wolff in August 2017, two years before being found dead in his jail cell. Wolff was researching his bombshell bestseller Fire and Fury at the time. The recordings cast more light on Trump’s long relationship with Epstein, and will add to debate over the character of the Republican candidate, especially his attitudes and conduct toward women, just days before the election. The tapes tell Epstein’s version of the relationship between two former friends and their very different paths: One toward infamy, prison and suicide; the other toward power, the Oval Office and his own criminal conviction for paying hush money to a porn star. Trump’s camp referred to the tapes’ release as “false smears” and “election interference.” The tapes also offer unusual insight into the friendship of two wealthy, powerful men who frequently went out on the town together, prowling for women in New York and Atlantic City. [...]

Asked by Wolff, “How do you know all this?” Epstein replied, “I was Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.” Wolff shared the tape with the Daily Beast ahead of discussing it on his Fire and Fury podcast on Monday. Last Thursday he caused shockwaves by revealing a few seconds of a separate recording in which Epstein spoke in detail about the inner workings of the Trump administration. Wolff also said Thursday that the pedophile showed off photos of Trump with topless young women sitting in his lap. Wolff, a veteran journalist and author who was also the biographer of Rupert Murdoch, has long attracted praise and bromides. When Fire & Fury was published in January 2018, Trump tried to stop it with a failed cease and desist order, then threatened to sue. No case ever materialized, and it sold 5 million copies worldwide. Wolff, who appears regularly on his Fire and Fury podcast, wrote two more books on Trump after Fire and Fury, and about Epstein in 2021’s Too Famous.

Wolff says he has up to 100 hours of recordings of interviews with Epstein, including from using him as a source for Fire and Fury, and from years of meetings when the disgraced financier appeared to want Wolff to write a biography of him. Wolff said he decided to release parts of the archive after a new accuser, a former Miss Switzerland, alleged last week that Trump had groped her in 1992.

[...] Trump’s long friendship with Epstein, which spanned the late 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s has been well documented. In the 1990s, the two publicly partied at Mar-a-Lago and went to a Victoria’s Secret Angels show together. In 2002, Trump told New York Magazine of Epstein, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Epstein’s infamous leaked addressbooks had Trump’s own phone number as well as Melania’s, while Trump’s name appeared seven times in the passenger logs of Epstein’s planes. (The books and logs also included princes, politicians and potentates such as Bill Clinton, former British prime minister Tony Blair, former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew and celebrities and billionaires including Mick Jagger and Les Wexner.)

[...] In 2022 Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s former girlfriend who procured him underage girls, would be sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for the sex trafficking of minors. Upon hearing of her arrest in 2020, Trump, then president, said he wished her well. “Her friend or boyfriend was either killed or committed suicide in jail. Yeah, I wish her well… Good luck.” In 2004, Epstein and Trump fell out when they both tried to buy a Palm Beach estate, Maison de L’Amitié, out of bankruptcy. The next year, the FBI began investigating Epstein for child sex trafficking.

In 2019, on the day after Epstein’s arrest, Trump said in the Oval Office, “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” and that they had not been friends for 15 years. He said it “did not much matter” what the fall-out had been over. This September, asked about Epstein by the tech podcaster Lex Fridman, Trump said: “He was a good salesman. He was a hailing, hearty type of guy. He had some nice assets that he’d throw around like islands, but a lot of big people went to that island. But fortunately, I was not one of them.”

[...]

The Epstein tape includes an allegation—which is impossible to verify—that Trump had an affair with a politician while in the White House. Epstein offered no proof or sourcing for the claim. He also alleged that Trump cheated on both his first wife Ivana and second wife Marla Maples with “a Black girl.” At one section, Epstein used a Yiddish racial slur to refer to Black women and alleged Trump boasted to him, “I’m f---ing all these Black women.” The tape mixes sexual allegations with other aspects of Trump’s life. Early in the recording Epstein is heard to say, “You probably know he had a scalp reduction. He’s getting the same male pattern baldness that we all have. He had his scalp reduced. It’s hysterical.” Trump has long refused to release full medical records while his White House medical reports did not disclose any prior surgeries.

“He’s charming. In a devious way, he’s charming. To some extent it’s a typical tragedy where he believes his own bulls---”

— Epstein on Trump

And Epstein offers his eyewitness account of Trump Tower and Trump’s office where, he said, Trump had “fake honors” on the wall. Trump, he claimed, would yell at his personal assistant Rhona Graff, “who’s a loyal, perfect, secretary,” as well as Matthew Calamari Snr., his bodyguard, and Michael Cohen, his attorney who is now an enemy. Epstein compared Trump to “an emotionally challenged 9-year-old,” and said, “He screams and yells at Rhona more than anybody else. His screaming is how he treats people. He has a tantrum, not a temper. If you don’t understand him, it’s frightening. Once you understand him, it’s sort of silly.” Epstein also told Wolff he had positive things to say about Trump. “He’s charming. In a devious way, he’s charming,” he said. “To some extent it’s a typical tragedy where he believes his own bulls---. He has delusions of grandiosity, then he takes it on board.” He added that he had a “self-deprecating nature” and was “not vulgar.” “He’s funny,” Epstein said. “Self-awareness means you’re self-aware. He’s aware of that person, Donald Trump. He talks about The Trump, The Trumpster. ‘Trump’s getting laid.’”

On the tape Epstein, speaking in a New York accent, also mentioned the rich and powerful. (In a deposition released after his death Epstein admitted under oath that he dropped the names of people he had never met.) The names he mentioned on tape include: Former president Bill Clinton; Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner; then-Defense Secretary James Mattis; and the billionaires Carl Icahn and Tom Barrack, both of whom are friends of Trump. Clinton was a long-standing friend of Epstein but has denied any association after the pedophile’s disgrace in the mid-2000s. Mattis has no known association with him. Ivanka was photographed with him as a child but Kushner has never been known to be linked to him. Barrack appeared in a leaked appointment diary for Epstein from 2016, while Carl Icahn, a corporate raider and long-time Trump friend, was in Epstein’s 1997 address book. Startlingly for a man who became one of the world’s most notorious sex offenders, Epstein on the tapes offers a damning judgment of Trump, telling Wolff, “The moral compass just does not exist.”

The Daily Beast reported that Jeffrey Epstein was Donald Trump's closest friend for about 10 years, according to tapes obtained from the outlet that featured Michael Wolff interviewing the late pedophile.

[trump666traitor]

[lisamarie-vee]

[tomorrowusa]

« In all its ugliness, Fox News is not, as Michael Wolff would have it, Roger Ailes' runaway distortion of what his boss ordered up. It is Rupert Murdoch's very own Dorian Gray portrait. And Donald Trump, on the rise once again, is Murdoch's Frankenstein monster. »

— Tina Brown at The New Statesman casting a couple of biting literary references at Rupert Murdoch and his far right media empire.

Ms. Brown had been editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Daily Beast.

[nawolff]

Adorable!

[paletapessoal]

Travelling Clock in the form of a Book, 1567, by Martinus Fenich & Michael Wolff, Museum of Applied Arts

Made in Nagyszeben, Sibiu County, Romania,

[jacobwren]

“I could call up Arianna and confirm the best story I know about these dinner parties. But I don’t want it not to be true. I tell my children this story as an example of savvy and pluck. (I have heard it from three different people.)

Arianna set about having dinner parties, inviting the most prestigious New Yorkers who would come and, at an appointed hour, she would deliver an impromptu toast, fifteen minutes or more of sweeping, seamless, knowing, witty observations, the likes of which no awkward table in New York had ever heard before. Grown men, those attracted to ambitious women anyway, swooned. When, ultimately, it got out that these toasts were written and rehearsed, that only added to the allure. Indeed, this is what I tell my children: it’s not the effortlessness but the effort that goes into making it effortless. In praise of artifice, if you will.”

– Michael Wolff, Too Famous

[spiderlegsmusic]

So Trump was still friends with Epstein while he was president. Bill Barr visited Epstein’s prison shortly before he died. Hardly anyone is talking about it because media is owned by the billionaires who benefit the most if Trump wins tomorrow. Pretty damning stuff.

[maxillness]

⎯⎯ ୨ Character Masterlist ୧ ⎯⎯

ˏˋ Toto Wolff ˊˎ

ˏˋ Susie Wolff/Stoddart ˊˎ

ˏˋ Christian Horner ˊˎ

ˏˋ Lorenzo Leclerc ˊˎ

ˏˋ Logan Sargeant ˊˎ

ˏˋ Mark Webber ˊˎ

ˏˋ Daniel Ricciardo ˊˎ

ˏˋ Lando Norris ˊˎ

ˏˋ Sebastian Vettel ˊˎ

ˏˋ Nico Rosberg ˊˎ

ˏˋ Kimi Räikkönen ˊˎ

ˏˋ Michael Schumacher ˊˎ

ˏˋ Pierre Gasly ˊˎ

ˏˋ Sergio Perez ˊˎ

ˏˋ Fernando Alonso ˊˎ

ˏˋ Charles Leclerc ˊˎ

ˏˋ Lance Stroll ˊˎ

ˏˋ Kevin Magnussen ˊˎ

ˏˋ James Hunt ˊˎ

ˏˋ Jenson Button ˊˎ

ˏˋ Nico Hülkenbergˊˎ

ˏˋ Max Verstappen ˊˎ

ˏˋ Lewis Hamilton ˊˎ

ˏˋ Mick Schumacher ˊˎ

ˏˋ Carlos Sainz ˊˎ

ˏˋ Oscar Piastri ˊˎ

↳˗ˏˋKintoberˊˎ˗ ↴

ˏˋ 2024 ˊˎ

↳˗ˏˋDiscord Linkˊˎ˗ ↴

[ncrsbrg]

He’s so pretty 🤍

[natpetittblog]

ARE YOU KIDDING ME 😭😭😭

[raikkoberg]

I saw this meme format and I had to do it.

[kazzle-dazzles-side-eyes]

12 things in F1 I consider to be my Roman Empires because I think about them all the time:

1. The whole brocedes story, every detail of it.

2. Toto & Lewis and Toto & Nico’s relationships that go on for so long and has become so special. Especially Toto & Lew right now because of the tense situation inside of the team.

3. Max’s daddy issues and how much I relate to him; and no one deserves this kind of things. Jos is not a good father, never been.

4. The fact that Max still has his terrible father around, but Mick doesn’t have his good dad near. He said he would give up everything just for that.

5. The whole Michael-Seb-Mick situation is very traumatic and tragic, makes me cry and wonder how it would have been if the ski accident hadn’t happened. The way Mick said, “What my dad was to Sebastian, he is for me.”

6. How everyone compares Mick to Michael.

7. Sebastian had had a dream to win a championship with Ferrari in honour of his hero and his friend Michael Schumacher, but he never did. He said he had failed.

8. How everyone easily forgets about Sebastian Vettel and never mentions him, never speaks about him as if he has never existed.

9. Alonso had his last win back in 2013 and that almost everyone he had raced against in the past and had been close to retired.

10. How everyone sexualises drivers, especially Charles Leclerc as if it is a normal thing to do.

11. People tend to forget that drivers are not robots and have feelings—they feel all the pressure and hate, and that’s actually hard to bear.

12. How many controversial things happen in F1 every day, but no one really cares: when someone talked bad about Lewis skin colour behind his back; this whole christian horner thing; the fact no one openly judges jos for what he did; the way girls being called wags and “Toto Wolff’s wife” but never Susie Stoddart Wolff, a former professional racing driver and a current managing director of F1 Academy.

[logray]

ALEX WOLFF as Reuben in: A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE (2024) dir. Michael Sarnoski

[maxedes]

FORMULA SKIPPY

skippys list x f1

(part I) (part II)

[lostinthemarinarasaucejpeg]

Here they are. The full collection. The F1 Major Arcana.

What a journey. What started as an assigned to do 10 cards turned begrudgingly into 22 and I couldn’t be more grateful. I learned A LOT. Came up with a lot of tips and tricks. And I’m proud. I may not feel it yet, I may not feel the need to celebrate but I’m satisfied.

There were a lot of weird coincidences that happened with this project that I’m just going to say was the universe. And a lot of unexpected love too. I’ve never really used Tumblr or involved myself in fandom because I believed I had nothing to offer and was always ignored but damn. The amount of love I’ve received is ridiculous and none of you who reblogged, liked or commented will ever know how much it meant to me and kept me going.

Thank you <3