David A. Graham writes:

In her classic book The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm studied how the author Joe McGinniss buttered up the accused killer Jeffrey MacDonald—formally joining his legal-defense team and sending fawningly supportive letters after his conviction—only to turn around and publish a scathing book portraying him as a sociopath. Observing McGinniss’s approach, Malcolm draws a distinction between the reporting phase, when a journalist courts her subject, and the writing phase, when she betrays them. Many reporters take offense at this depiction of their trade as shamelessly exploitative, but Michael Wolff seems to take inspiration from it.

Wolff is the author of several best sellers, including 2018’s dishy Donald Trump chronicle Fire and Fury, but he’s in the spotlight this week because he shows up in newly released emails to and from the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein. In the emails, Wolff appears to be positioning himself less as a reporter than as a media adviser to Epstein.

“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff wrote to Epstein about Trump in December 2015. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.” In October 2016, after the release of a tape in which Trump boasted about sexual assault, Wolff wrote to Epstein that he could speak about Trump “in such a way that could garner you great sympathy and help finish him.”

The emails seemed to concern even Joanna Coles of The Daily Beast, with whom Wolff has a podcast on Trump. In a discussion on Wednesday, she told Wolff: “What I want to say is, in this particular email, it sounds like you’re advising a convicted pedophile about what to do, and you’re colluding with him against a potential presidential candidate.” Wolff spun his wheels a bit in answering: “What emails sound like—would one have rewritten them in hindsight? Yeah. Of course. You know, emails always are: Oh, that’s embarrassing.”

When I emailed Wolff yesterday, he was more forthright. “You ingratiate yourself so that people—your subject—will talk to you,” he wrote. To some degree, this is unquestionable. Journalists work to get sources to talk to them, including by suggesting what’s in it for the source. To what degree, though? Here, Wolff was coaching a sexual offender on how to look good. Surely, I suggested to him, there is a point at which currying favor simply goes too far. “I think you draw the line at what you write—ingratiation stops there,” he replied, citing his damning reporting on Epstein in an essay in his book Too Famous. “That’s what the ingratiation earned me.” In a video on Instagram this week, he lamented that his release of tapes of Epstein talking about Trump before the 2024 election had little impact.

One reason for the tapes’ muted effect may be that Wolff’s credibility was already damaged. [Continue reading…]