But the details of why Trump appears to have turned on Epstein are key too. Wolff lays out the details starting just after minute 32 in
this interview, which you can watch on Youtube. There’s a lot going on here. So I’ll try to walk you through the key points. (For more detail and flavor, I strongly recommend watching that five or six minute part of the interview.)
Epstein was trying to buy a South Florida estate. He brought Trump along to see it one time. A short time later Epstein found out that Trump had gone behind his back and placed a higher and ultimately successful bid on the property. He’d snatched it out from under him with a much higher bid. The problem was that Trump’s entire empire in 2004 was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It made no sense that Trump was coming up with $41 million to buy this property. Epstein suspected that Trump was acting as a front for a Russian oligarch as a money-laundering scheme. And in fact Trump
did purchase and flip the estate two years later to a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million, or a
profit of over $50 million dollars.
Two of these points are well-known. The transaction with the Russian oligarch has been written about extensively and was the subject of criminal probes. Of course, Trump denies it was money-laundering. But that part of this story is well-known. It’s also well-known that Trump and Epstein fell out over this real estate transaction. Those two parts of what I’m explaining are established parts of the Trump story. What’s new is the idea that Trump was either the key source who started the Epstein investigation or one of them and that he did this to retaliate against Epstein’s threats and protect himself from being exposed in a money laundering scheme.
I can’t stress this point enough: You can’t tell what you don’t know. This isn’t an accusation. It’s formal logic. So even if we accept the idea that Trump played a role in Epstein’s downfall, it’s not exonerating. It shows what we’ve long suspected: that Trump had known about Epstein’s operation for years and was fine with it. (That’s assuming for the moment he wasn’t a direct participant — it’s the weekend, I’m being generous.) He only made a call when Epstein was threatening to expose a money laundering scheme.