Michael Wolff arrived on Substack like a hero. He had 100 hours of recorded interviews with Jeffrey Epstein, insider access to the darkest corners of the network, and the credibility of a bestselling author who had gone toe-to-toe with Donald Trump. Then 1,800 pages of his emails with Epstein were released, and the picture changed completely. “You start to see this different side of Michael Wolff,” Leonard said. “He’s getting manuscripts for books about Epstein before they’re published and trying to warn Epstein. He’s helping with Wikipedia cleanups. He’s trying to crush Nick Kristof’s reputation. You realize he has become Jeffrey Epstein’s fixer.” Wolff arranged dinners with Woody Allen, caught and killed stories about Epstein’s sex trafficking history, and coached Epstein on counter-narratives — all while presenting himself as a journalist. He even tried to discredit Julie K. Brown’s Miami Herald investigation, the very reporting that led to Epstein’s arrest. And those 100 hours of interviews? Nobody has ever heard them. Leonard believes the recordings contain material that would damage Wolff’s reputation and undermine his franchise of writing about Trump — who was, after all, the subject Epstein was most willing to discuss.
Then came the podcast. Wolff appeared on Michael Cohen’s Mea Culpa, where the two men dismissed Shalev, Leonard, Lev Parnas, and Dean Blundell as “conspiracy buffs” and “far left wing activists” who live in a “fantasy world.” Cohen, who spent 12 years as Trump’s personal attorney during the height of Epstein’s power, continues to insist he knew nothing about any of it. DOJ documents tell a different story. Cohen tried to separate the Katie Johnson rape allegation into two different cases during a Patrick David podcast appearance, but his own timeline collapsed — the same lawyers represented the accuser across all filings, and the private investigator Cohen sent to the accuser’s address described a “vacant parking lot” that turned out to be a house. “All you’re doing is literally just pulling up documents that already exist and turning them around and showing people,” Leonard said. “There’s no opinion involved.”
The deeper question is why Wolff would even appear with Cohen. Shalev argued it only makes sense as a network operation: Cohen is pursuing a pardon deal, offering to recant his Stormy Daniels testimony in exchange for Trump cleaning his record. The network needs Cohen credible, which means the people reading the files need to be discredited. “They’re coming after the people who are exposing the truth about them,” Shalev said. “Because they don’t want the truth out there.” Leonard and Shalev noted that Wolff and Steve Bannon operated as parallel personalities in Epstein’s orbit — both claiming 100 hours of interviews, both offering the same cover story of image rehabilitation, both serving as go-betweens in a world where friendships were transactional intelligence operations. Leonard is continuing her work on the Wolff emails, the Hilton Head South Carolina investigation that gained mainstream pickup this week, and what she describes as things happening behind the scenes. The invitation to both men remains open: come on the show and answer questions from the conspiracy buffs.
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