Few independent journalists have worked the Epstein beat as assiduously and tenaciously as Ellie Leonard. Since joining the fray two years ago, she has pored over the Files, finding key pieces of evidence others have missed. In particular, her investigations into the two Michaels—Cohen and Wolff—have helped us view both of those sycophantic men in a different and less flattering light.
Her latest finding—a meeting between Jeffrey Epstein and Donald trump at Trump Tower a few days after the 2016 election—calls into question every riposte from Trump and his PR team on the subject, and, if true, shows that Donald’s “I have had no contact with Jeffrey since I threw him out of Mar-a-Lago” is a lie.
Ellie was kind enough to sit down with me Thursday afternoon. A transcript, edited for length and clarity, is below. (Note: There was an issue with the last few minutes of the video, so I had to swap out the cloud recording at the very end. Sorry about that.)
I encourage you to subscribe to her excellent Substack, The Panicked Writer. You can also find her at her website or on Twitter, Bluesky, Threads, or Instagram.
GREG OLEAR
Ellie Leonard, welcome to PREVAIL.
ELLIE LEONARD
Thanks, Greg. It’s nice to be here.
GO
It’s nice to to have you on finally. I feel like this is long overdue, and that’s on me. That’s my bad.
I was writing down your name and I realized that “Eleanor Leonard” is almost the same letters, like both ways. Do you do that thing where you just stare at it and make Scrabble words with it?
EL
It’s funny because my my maiden name is Leinart, and it’s so similar. It’s like two letters different than my married name. And so when I switched everything, I just confused every insurance company, anything with a form; everything was messed up for a good year. Things would go to the wrong address, everything. So I just I like to make things complicated.
GO
You know, the ability to hyphenate was right there and that would have been the thing to do, I think. You could also spell Olear, my last name, with Leonard. I also found out as I was staring at the Scrabble tiles.
EL
Mm. Yes. Very popular letters.
GO
This is what I do. This is what I do. So you’ve been doing really good work for a while now. And every time I open my email, it seems, there you are, talking. It’s like you live in a box on my screen.
EL
No! You can turn those notifications off, Greg. Do it.
GO
No, I like it. It makes me feel like you’re you’re the sentry on the watchtower, and I feel safe and secure knowing that you’re up there. Seriously.
EL
Okay. One if by land, two if by sea. Okay.
GO
But you started doing this—it feels probably like twenty five years ago, but it wasn’t that that long ago. So what I’m curious about is what your origin story is. Why did you decide to hone in on all the Epstein stuff? What made you want to write about this, and write about it now? Were you bitten by a radioactive spider? Like, what happened?
EL
wish. And yeah, I don’t know if this is what I, you know, quote unquote “wanted to do.” It’s kind of like one of those, “You make plans, God laughs,” kind of things. I
For a long time I’ve had a transcription company, where I work in this vein. I work with journalists, and I did a lot of these kinds of stories—never on this level, but I quietly working on Weinstein and Woody Allen’s story and a lot of those big, hot-button issues that used to be in the New York Times. I worked on people’s books. And so this wasn’t new. People ask me, like, “How do you sleep at night and and go over all this information?” And it’s like, well, this is not my first rodeo. I’ve been doing cases like this for a long time.
But as with a lot of things, AI has really taken that business over. You can now press a button and do the last 10 years of my career in a minute. And it was time for me to move on. And then on the side, the thing the thing that I’m passionate about that made no money at all was, I’m a writer and I write fiction. I have two sadly unpublished books that are sitting on my hard drive that I love very much. And I think I was just going through the throes of the publication process and how harrowing and disappointing that process is for a debut writer. And a friend of mine said, “Well, why don’t you just go Substack and just write for you? Just write for no point at all. Just go write because you love to write.” And so I did that.
And it was in August of 2024, so it was right before the election. And we had just moved to the area. We had all these opportunities to show our kids the world and what’s happening in the world on their level. So I was taking them to the women’s march in DC and doing these different things and then just basically writing about our experiences.
And then Trump was elected, things were disappointing again, and I started hearing about the Epstein files and the Epstein story. And it had been around a while, but I just didn’t know about it at that point. And for me, a lot of the things with politics and the news is, I am very grounded in facts as much as humanly possible—because I was not raised that way. And with the advent of the internet, it just got a little bit worse. And so I have always been very careful when somebody tells me something to make sure that what I’m hearing is true, that it can it be backed up. And so what I was hearing a lot of was, “I don’t like Donald Trump. I don’t like his politics. I think he’s a bad guy,” but I’m also hearing about him being involved with this notorious sex trafficker of children. How much truth is there to that?
And so I just sat down one night, and I decided to find all the pieces of factual evidence and conversations and articles and actual evidentiary information that showed time and place that put those two guys together in a room. And it was a really, really long list. And I went, “Okay.” So I just created this kind of timeline and I backed it all up with the links of the locations and the witness testimony.
And then I just put it on Substack, because I was like, “I’ll just publish it. Who cares?” And that opened up a world that was something I’d never expected. I never expected to work in journalism. I never expected to be working in investigative journalism on top of that. And then the things that I’ve learned along the way and the people that have mentored me led to me to say, I can do this too.
I don’t have a law degree. I don’t have a journalism degree. I could be considered like an armchair quarterback, right? But how do I do this properly and accurately and convey information to people in a way that the everyman can sit down and understand? You know, Project 2025 or the Big Beautiful Bill or something that can seem so complicated that goes over the American public’s head? How do we convey that information so that everybody can participate and everybody can understand and everybody knows how to verify information? And I think it just kind of turned into that. And then obviously I became very heavily invested into the Epstein files story.
GO
So what you’re telling me, what I’m hearing, is—this actually is a good origin story, so take a little note for when you write a novel about this. You know, the bad guys created AI, and in creating AI, they they screwed over your transcription career, forcing you down the path to go get ‘em. So they inadvertently created you, their tormentor. It’s good. It’s a good story.
EL
Shit. I mean, yes. Yes.
GO
You know, it used to be in the early days of Twitter, like 2016, 2017, 2018, there were a lot of people on there that claimed to know things. And some of them really did and some of them were just full of shit. But over time, it became pretty evident who knew what what they were doing and who didn’t. You clearly know what you’re doing. That became clear to me very, very early on. She got the the receipts, she’s not gonna write just anything and she’s not gonna pull stuff out of her ass. She’s gonna go with the facts and and frame it in a way that, you know, legacy media publications don’t seem to want to frame it in anymore. It’s a valuable service that you’re that you’re providing people.
EL
Thank you.
GO
So I think anybody watching this or reading it that that doesn’t follow your Substack, which is called The Panicked Writer—although you’re the you’re you don’t seem very panicked to me.
EL
I’ve got anxiety like everyone else.
GO
I do sleep well at night though. Even with all this horrible stuff, I sleep fine. I’m not the one doing the evil. I’m just reporting on the evil.
EL
I do too. I do too. I mean, I’m still at the stage of life where my schedule is not my own. I’m surrounded by small children. So I can drink, you know, a carafe of coffee and then lay down and take a long nap in the middle of World War Three. I’m still able to do that. I have no problem falling asleep at night. But yeah, informationally this stuff is wild. It can make your dreams a little funny. But otherwise, yeah, I I’m doing okay.
GO
Okay, so we’re gonna stick to facts. We’re gonna try to not go into the speculative realm. There’s two guys that that come up when looking at your work on Epstein, and they’re both named Michael. I don’t wanna get too too too far afield, but you basically called out Michael Cohen. You should tell the story about what happened with him. I want you to know that I called him a rat and said we shouldn’t trust the guy in twenty eighteen. So I was right.
EL
It’s interesting because I’ve been very politically minded. I knew how to vote—the way I wanted to vote. I knew how to look things up before I voted. I try to pay attention, but for a long period of time, my whole life was just diapers and babies, for like a decade.
And so I couldn’t really focus in and hone in on the minor personality stories in the news. But I did know that Michael Cohen—during that whole period of time and when he went to jail—I knew that his reputation was that he was a liar and that he threatened people and that he bragged about it. And so he didn’t have a great track record. When he came to Substack, you know, claiming to have turned over a new leaf since leaving prison—I give people the benefit of the doubt, if they’re saying that and they’re showing that. You know, it takes time to gain trust, but if if they’re consistent, over time you start to say, “Okay, they’re using their knowledge and the things that they know and the stuff that they learned working for bad people, they’re using it for good.” His time was very short-lived.
He came to Substack. He was really, really trying to hawk a book. I think that became the central focus of what he was doing. And then at some point, I think in December, we were just kind of doing one of those typical livestreams where Trump had just given a speech and it was just sort of the breakdown of a nothingburger. And I was invited on, and Michael Cohen was invited on. And I’d never been in an interview with him before. And I was a little shell-shocked, you know. I was still rather new at that point. And so I was more listening than talking.
But at some point the Epstein Files came up in that conversation, and he said that he had never heard Epstein’s name in all the 12 years he had worked for Donald Trump seven hours a day, right? And I think like my jaw just dropped because, even if you’re on the best side of history, if you worked for Donald Trump for twelve years, the name would have come up. It would have come up in social circles, it would have come up in the news: Oh my gosh, did you hear about you know the headline? Like, it comes up.
And I remember thinking, “My gosh, he just lied. Like that has to be a lie.” And then they started bringing up this case of Katie Johnson, which is one of the more controversial cases in the Epstein files that involves Epstein and Donald Trump and a 13-year-old girl. And he got really angry and got really defensive—and I got really uncomfortable and I wanted to go home. So anyway, after that conversation, the tone really changed with him and how people perceived him on Substack.
And then somebody brought me an email that they found in the Epstein files. There was a conversation with Michael Cohen’s lawyers, and it was during 2019 while he was in prison. And it said that he was vying for something called a Rule 35. And a Rule 35 means I’m gonna give you information about somebody that matters enough that you will reduce my sentence because of what I’m telling you. And he said that he wanted to do a Rule 35 because of information he had about Epstein that he had heard from Donald Trump. So that was really big news.
As soon as that came out, he turned—I mean, he flipped—and he started going on all the conservative media junkets and saying, you know, “I was coerced” and “Leticia James told me to do this and I don’t have any information.” And it became like this flip where everybody goes, “Hold on—how could you not know anything about this case?” And then he goes on Joy-Ann Reid and he says that he did know that case and that he dropped the file on Donald Trump’s desks, but he didn’t know it was about Epstein. And it’s like, you can open the file and there’s Epstein’s name.
So it just kind of fell apart and now he’s back working for Trump’s people. And I don’t think either of them trust each other, but it’s sort of like, keep your enemies close. And he’s got a Trump-centered radio show now in New York and all that stuff. So it just sort of fell apart pretty quickly.
GO
He needs his pardon, too. He didn’t get pardoned. He’s gotta get his pardon.
EL
That is, I’m guessing, very high on his priority list at this point. Yeah. It’s just both of them both of them know a lot about each other, and it’s better for them to hang out than it is to be enemies at this point. So I’m sure that’s helpful for both of them.
GO
You know, when someone who you think almost certainly has knowledge of Epstein claims not to have knowledge of Epstein, they’re either lying or they’re the CEO of JP Morgan. It’s like one or the other, I think. It’s gotta be, you know.
EL
Or they’re the CEO of JP Morgan and they’re lying. I know. It just feels like these people all live in a box with their head in the sand and and didn’t know anything ever.
GO
I don’t know. It’s just very strange. It’s all very weird to me. Yeah.
This is a good segue into Michael Number 2 here, who you wrote about earlier this year. I don’t understand how you can read or observe certain people and walk away trusting them. And Cohen is one of them but Michael Wolff, I mean, like, I listened him talk for thirty seconds. I’m like, I don’t believe a word this guy says.
EL
Yeah. It’s the little sockless shoes.
GO
He’s a good writer, technically—like, he writes nice sentences, he’s funny and all this kind of stuff. And I don’t think he lies as much as he omits, you know, and frames things in a certain way, which is something that you’ve gotten into in your very rigorous study of him. So talk a little bit about that.
EL
Yeah. Michael Wolff wants to make Michael Wolff look great. And that is a lot of the intent. The important thing about Michael Wolff that I have just tried so hard to get people to understand is that there are eighteen hundred and thirty-two emails from him in the Epstein files to Epstein. And all you have to do is look up “Michael Wolff,” and you will find all of them. And I have them in order. And I have sent them everywhere that I can think of.
But it’s not just that he was somewhere that he shouldn’t have been. He led the PR campaign for Epstein for at least a decade to keep him out of the news as a sex offender. He brought five PR firms to Epstein to wipe his Wikipedia page so that he only looked like a philanthropist. Like, he was he was contacting the publishers for James Patterson’s book to try to get the manuscript before it was published so that he could get it to Epstein. And like he’s signing NDAs, but then he’s saying he’s forwarding all his emails to Epstein. He is trying to meet with MBS and the Saudis, and he’s like, “Why don’t you tell them that I’ll tell them everything about White House operations off the record? Just let them know that,” which is sketchy territory. We don’t do that. And it was just this very long list of things where where it was pretty clear that he was being paid by Epstein.
Epstein wanted him to be his ghostwriter. They were creating a documentary together. It is my belief that when Epstein was arrested for the final time, Michael Wolff was writing a book about Epstein, and that was his next big plan. And it wasn’t a book that we would think about reading about Epstein. It wasn’t something that talked about his wild sexual history and criminal history. It was something more to talk about this guy who’s the biggest guy in New York City, because that’s who Michael Wolff wanted to be around.
There’s just a lot of like little smarmy things, like Epstein’s talking about, “Let’s create a financial package for you to work for me.” And he goes, “I’m allergic to talking about money. I don’t want to do that.” And then later on he goes, “I jumped a tax bracket. What do I do? I’m a millionaire!” Like he’s just so wildly uncomfortable.
And so I wrote this article after six months of research on him, and I sent it around and it was in The Nerve. And I sent it to the Daily Beast, and I sent it to all the publishers of places like New York magazine, that Michael Wolff is going behind their backs and changing the story of something that they thought that they were publishing. And I said, “Look, I just want you to know what was happening. That entire time that you thought you were working with Michael Wolff, this was the story behind the scenes.” And some people have written back to me, some people have not. The one that has just stayed very consistent with Michael Wolff is the Daily Beast, which originally—he was going after a woman named Tina Brown who was at the Daily Beast. And he was trying to find ways to neutralize her during the time that Epstein had some of this more criminal record in the newspapers.
Now that is his really his only platform, other than his Instagram. I do like to poke fun at little things—like, his little sockless shoes totally remind me of Andrew Tate. Like, that look is just not good for anybody at this point. You know, put some socks on, wear longer pants, like let’s all let’s all move along.
GO
You’ve got something against capris. Okay. All right. Good to know.
EL
I think I do. But the other thing with him is he interviewed Epstein for years. And he has, in his own words, he has a hundred hours of interviews with Jeffrey Epstein that he has never given to anybody. He has never made them public. He has little drips and drabs of a couple minutes here or there. But the one thing that Epstein was willing to talk about was Donald Trump and the things that he did that were illegal. And so you have to imagine that between those interviews with Epstein and between the two hundred plus interviews he gave at the White House with the Trump Administration, there’s a lot of information there that has never been made public. And nobody’s asking him for it, nobody’s subpoenaeing him, nobody’s demanding those interviews. They’re in some sort of secure location at this point, is what he says. So I mean, I don’t even know where they are. I believe beyond those interviews, he also had a good chunk of a book that he was writing about Epstein that never was published. And nobody nobody seems to be looking at those things right now. And I feel like they would be pretty important in the long run.
GO
Does Todd Blanche know about this? I bet as soon as he hears about it, he’s gonna go get that material!
EL
Yeah, you know what? Tonight. And then he’ll just redact the whole thing.
GO
There was a a bit on SNL when Fire and Fury came out where Fred Armisten played him, played Michael Wolff, and you know, I I can’t remember the exact setup of the bit, but they were like, “Is it true that blah blah happened?” And he just goes, “I guess.”
EL
Yeah, because his track record for getting it completely, truthfully, and right isn’t real good. I mean, Yes, and like Yeah.
GO
There’s the whole Nikki Haley thing. I mean, Wolff wrote in the book that Trump was bragging about his sexual escapades with Nikki Haley, and that sort of went away. And it’s like, “Is that true?” It’s weird.
EL
Yeah. And I wonder who he’s benefiting with those books. Like it was about Trump and it’s supposed to make him look bad, but at the same time, I think Trump kind of likes that kind of thing. He loves the attention, even the negative attention. So I don’t think he hated Michael Wolff’s book. I think he liked that people were talking about him. And so it’s just like an “everybody’s sort of happy but doesn’t totally trust Michael Wolff” kind of a thing.
And then you add Steve Bannon to the mix. Michael Wolff introduced Steve Bannon to Epstein in 2017. And then there becomes this little bit of a competitive romance of who’s better friends, Bannon and Epstein or Wolff and Epstein.
GO
My God, it’s The Gilmore Girls.
EL
Yeah. And both of them are making a documentary, and Epstein didn’t tell the other person, so nobody knew that there were two. So it’s very interesting to just read through the emails, but I think it’s shocking. I think when people read them for the first time, they go, “Like, how can he get on Instagram and talk about being an advocate for survivors when in the emails he says he doesn’t believe Virginia Guiffre, and he thinks that the British media is really gullible for believing all these survivors?” He was he was not out for survivor justice, he was out for Epstein.
GO
Epstein and himself. These guys are all that way. Michael Wolff is working for Michael Wolff, Jeffrey Epstein is working for Jeffrey Epstein. People are like, “Which intelligence service is he working for?” He’s working with all of them, but he’s working for himself. That’s that’s the answer to that.
EL
Yeah, they’re working for him. Yeah.
GO
Yeah, exactly. That’s the answer to that question. And I was thinking, as you were talking about Cohen being on the TV just lying, how there’s certain people around Epstein who are lawyers—and then in the case of Wolff, journalists—and these are people who enjoy special protections under the law and in the Constitution based on what jobs they have. But if a lawyer is on TV, you can say whatever you want. You’re not obligated to tell the truth. You’re lawyering.
EL
Right, right. And what Wolf does all the time is, he brings up the ethics of journalism and sourcing, and the “you can’t ask me for this information because I have rights and free speech” and, you know, blah blah blah blah blah. But then he’ll be like, “But I’m not a journalist.” So I go, “Well then that kinda negates the thing that you just said.” But if it’s to the detriment of the abuse of children, as a journalist, it should be pretty easy to just hand that stuff over. He’s not a Catholic priest. It’s not confession. If you know that a child is being abused, you hand that stuff over. But he just wasn’t willing to do that.
And you have to remember, Wolff started hanging out with Epstein years ago. We have many, many years of missing emails prior to 2009. They just don’t exist. But he started hanging out with him in the early 2000s. He flew on his plane. Originally his quote was, “There was a lot of very tall teenagers on the plane.” And then later on, ten years later, he said “tall young women.” And I thought, “That’s an that’s a not insignificant change of verbiage.”
But he did. He flew to a TED conference on Epstein’s plane, and then, you know, when they jump back into the emails, which you you clearly know there’s been a conversation happening before. But again, we have like nine years of missing emails. He’s like, “I would do anything. I’m always on your side. I would do anything to make life better for you, Epstein.” Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
What we have on record is ten years of of conversations and close meetings and dinners and everything, every day. But there’s likely another ten that we don’t have.
GO
Yeah, and God knows what they were all up to at that time, because they had more leeway because the people weren’t shining a spotlight on them quite so much.
You mentioned Ian Osborne in your piece. I wrote a whole big thing about him. I did a deep dive on Ian. But nobody talks about him at all. Like I have asked people in Britain, where he’s from—nobody knows who this guy is. And he did come into the Epstein universe as a PR guy, but he’s very much a finance guy now.
EL
Mm-hmm. He’s a bro.
GO
He’s raising venture capital, all this kind of stuff. And he and Epstein did their little project to get Jes Staley installed as the head of of Barclays in the UK. And you know, Osborne seems to be fine. He’s not involved with any of the sex trafficking stuff, but he’s still—
EL
But his job was PR to cover up the sex trafficking information. So, like, he’s aware.
GO
That’s how he got in the door. He sent him a pitch email. “I can help you,” you know, whatever he wrote. Yeah, yeah.
EL
Yeah, yeah. He sent him a pitch. Michael Wolff was writing pitches to send to PR people and also had to get Bill Gates to fall in love with him. “Here, I’m gonna send this email to Bill Gates for you.”
That’s the thing. You have the actual actors in this who are very clearly abusing children, which they’re still walking around with a yacht and an island too. But then you have the people who were just hanging around for a decade and going to dinner at the house every night and going like, “Wow, you have so many young assistants,” turning a blind eye, look over here. There’s a lot of that. And those people, to me, are accountable on some level—if nothing else, to stand before Congress and let them know what they know. And most of them, I think, most people like Glenn Dubin, Eva Dubin, those type of people, will say, “We were there, but we weren’t involved…We didn’t know anything.” “I’m Leslie Groff. I didn’t know anything.”
But there’s so many people who knew more than they’re willing to tell. And this idea that they’re bringing them all before the House Oversight Committee, not under oath. Like there’s no subpoenas. You know, what are we doing? Like, why? That’s pointless. Like, why are we even here?
GO
They they interviewed Alex Acosta and the word intelligence does not appear in the transcript, even though that’s the only question to ask the guy is, “What’s the deal? Who told you the thing about intelligence, that Epstein belongs to intelligence?” It’s ridiculous.
I don’t want to let you go, before we talk about the the Epstein meeting at Trump Tower that we are reasonably certain happened on November 13th, 2016, which was my forty-fourth birthday, incidentally. So what happened, basically, you have uncovered evidence in the files, in the emails, suggesting very strongly that Jeffrey Epstein met with Trump in Trump Tower on that day—which, if true, would basically negate a lot of the “I didn’t talk to the guy. I threw him out of my club, and I didn’t have any other dealings with him,” and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And I wanted to throw one thing at you before I let you talk and tell everybody what you found. But Carter Page—do you remember Carter Page? Carter Page is an American businessman, so called. He’s actually from up here, from Poughkeepsie. And he did a lot of work—I guess he was a lobbyist for oil companies—but he did a lot of work in Russia, in Moscow, where he would like try to ingratiate himself with these Russian businessmen. And he seemed to be pretty, you know, okay with the government there. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but he was seen in 2015, 2016 as a sympathetic Putin guy.
And he was kind of named to Trump’s first foreign policy team. It was him, somebody else, and that George Papadopoulos, who got approached by a spy in almost record time. I don’t know if they give out awards for this, but the spy should have gotten some sort of award for how quickly he was at a bar with George after George was named the foreign policy guy.
EL
Coincidence, I’m sure.
GO
So Carter Page is in the Mueller Report. He was under investigation. It turns out he didn’t really have that much to do with anything, but he was still kind of around. And at the time he had an office next door to Trump Tower, in his own words, and there was an atrium that connects the two buildings on the fifth floor. So to the point where you ask, Can someone enter Trump Tower without being seen entering Trump Tower? The answer is resoundingly yes, because Carter Page fucking said so, in his own words, by his own admission.
And we know that Sergei Kislyak also got snuck into Trump Tower when he met with Michael Flynn and Jared Kushner in December of 2016, when Jared proposed the idea that they should have a backchannel at the Russian embassy. Which by the way, Russian collusion is is not a thing. That’s just a hoax.
EL
No. Yeah. Did you did you hear all the missing foreign language files they talked about today in the hearing? They didn’t translate any. There’s no foreign language files, so all the Russia stuff is gone. Yeah.
GO
Funny, that. All the Russia stuff. Anyway, but what did you find about Epstein? And then, you know, let that once you talk about that, let’s talk about what that might mean in the bigger picture.
EL
Okay. So there there are little tidbits along the Epstein Files where, you know, he’s indicating he’s having meetings with Trump. Some I can sort of explain away, because a lot of it is, his pilot would say when the Trumps are in Palm Beach because it had to do more with their flight patterns and if he could go in and out on his plane. So sometimes you’ll see an email that says the Trumps are in town, and that’s more to say like we can’t fly out between these hours because the planes are landing.
But there are things where they say we’re having a lunch today with the Trumps, or the Trump boys are doing this or that, that are sort of like little crackers along the way that that may indicate there were meetings. But it also could be this idea of Epstein puffing himself up, dry humor. You know, you have to sort of like read between the lines with Epstein a little bit.
And so we have some emails on the 13th that indicate that he may have been at Trump Tower, but that was just kind of it. It was kind of like, he’s sort of saying that, but is it true? Who knows? And then somebody brought to me a few nights ago, they brought to me this text thread. So it’s an SMS text thread between Ken Mapp, who was the Governor of the US Virgin Islands, and an unknown, right? It’s not redacted, it just is unknown. And in this text exchange, he’s saying, “I’m meeting with Trump’s people today. It’s November 13th. I’ll talk to you about it after.”
They’re discussing Big St. James, which is an island that Epstein did buy in 2016.
GO
That that’s the island that nobody knows about. We know about Little Saint James. Not Great Saint James, yeah.
EL
It was the bigger of the islands. Yeah, between the mainland and Little St. James, he bought Great St. James in 2016, and it was three times the size, and he was building and pouring all the concrete. So they’re talking about permitting, which, you know, I can assume who he’s talking to, but I’m not gonna report on it unless I know for sure who he’s talking to.
He says he’s meeting the Trump people on the morning of November 13th, 2016. So we’re kind of reading through and then later on he says, “I wanna meet with you,” or he says, “I wanna talk about Trump face to face,” or something like that to where you don’t know if he’s talking about talking with Trump or if he’s talking about Ken Mapp, but he’s saying he’s going to be there on November 13th. “That day I’m going to Trump Tower.”
Then you find an email. So what I look for in this text thread is I look for a unique phrase that I could go search for the DOJ files to see if I could figure out who this unknown person is. And and then the phrase, I can pull it up, but the exact phrase that he said in this sentence was, “If I feel a sneeze coming on, I ask for legal advice.” And then there’s kind of a long blurb.
And something that Epstein did is he when he thought he said something cool or important or he wanted to document it, he would email himself the thing that he said. So I looked up this unique phrase, and I found that Epstein sent it to himself on the same day.
So now we know that the unknown recipient in this text is for sure Jeffrey Epstein. And he’s saying that he is going to Trump Tower on November 13th at like 11-something in the morning.
You have another email from Epstein to an a redacted recipient from the very same day saying he’s also going to Trump Tower. It’s somebody saying, “Are you still in Paris?” or “Are you back yet?” And he goes, “No, Trump Tower.” Same day, same morning.
And then you find out later that this is Linda Stone who works at MIT and Microsoft. So you have two pieces of documentation from the morning of 11/13/2016 that put him at Trump Tower. And so I thought, “Okay, so let’s document, let’s go see what Trump is doing on November 13th.” And that’s all over the media. You can look everywhere, you can look at C-SPAN, you can look at CBS. Trump was in his office the whole day picking people for high-level cabinet positions. Linda Stone also asks Epstein, “Are you going to be on the cabinet?” And Trump is in there picking high-level cabinet positions. And if you look at like the C-SPAN video, you know, it was very much a day to be seen. The whole lobby is filled with all the Trump boys and all the people that now Trump hates that he’s fired from his Cabinet. But they were all there going up into the into the elevators.
But not Epstein, right? And so I started asking around. I asked one of the photographers who was there, whose pictures are in Getty Images. I said, you know, is there a way to look back through your photographs to see if you got anything of Epstein? And he said, “No, I’ll look through it because I know for sure he wasn’t there.” But he goes, I know something like the next day, all the like Facebook folks, all the Peter Thiels, all those guys, they were all there for a meeting the next day, which he said didn’t matter then, but he goes, “Looking back, that matters now.”
But he goes, “Here’s the thing, I’ll keep looking to see if I see anything, but there was an entrance also through the parking garage that if you didn’t want to be seen, you went up to Trump’s office through the parking garage.” And then another journalist reached out to me and she said, “That’s how Marine Le Pen used to go in, was up through the parking garage.”
So now I have Epstein there by his own admission, two different occasions. But now I have to figure out if there’s any sort of security footage in the parking garage, which then you’re dealing with Trump’s security people. So that’s a long and probably a very expensive process. So that’s been what I’m working on.
But it is very interesting to think that he would have been there helping in that pick process because I don’t think at that time they would have put his face or his name on any position, because that would have been controversial. I think now they would absolutely do that. They would put Epstein in a position.
GO
He’d be Attorney General right now. He’d be Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Epstein.
EL
Right. Right. They wouldn’t care now. Now they’d be like, fine, great. but at the time I think they were a little more timid.
But you do see over the course of these emails that he did have impact on on different pieces of the government. He was meeting with the Treasury. He was having these sort of UN dinners with leaders at his house. So it’s not unlikely that he would have any sort of a say in these meetings. But again, this is now 12 years supposedly after they stopped hanging out because of their breakup in 2004. But most people know that there are things along the way that put that into question. And this very, very much puts that into question. Like why would he be telling multiple people that he’s at Trump Tower?
GO
No, it it it seems pretty clear. And Epstein was not the kind of guy that would keep quiet about something like that. If he was meeting with the guy that was gonna be president, he would want people to know. You know, that that’s part of his MO and part of the image that he cultivated for himself was, look at me, I’m so powerful, I’m so great.
And there’s the whole Tom Barrack thing. It’s all the same people. They’re all the same people in the same little incestuous pool—but I think I figured it out. You gotta get on the phone with your photographer friend and you have to say, “Was there a catering cart that got pushed in? I think that’s what it was. I think it was the catering cart. How the hell does Trump fit in a catering cart? Come on. Make up something believable.
[end of EL transcription section]
GO
If you’re not convinced by this conversation or just by reading the transcript of this conversation, which, you know, mea cupla, this program will lovingly provide me, it’s the only way it’s the only time I ever use AI for anything. I have to go through it a lot though. [Note: it screwed up the end!]
But the good news is that now you are free to pursue this alternate career that Fate put you into and you’re just doing such a great job with it. Your work has been spectacular, and it’s always good to see you when I open up the old email box. I’m like, “There she is.”
Ellie Leonard, thanks so much for joining me. This was great.
