A trove of emails released by lawmakers reveals how reporters crossed the line with Epstein.
Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks. This week, we look at the breaches of journalistic ethics uncovered by the recent release of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails, and cover more media misses.
Emails Reveal Chummy Relationship Between Epstein, Reporters
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that Jeffrey Epstein, globe-trotting financier who mingled effortlessly with elites across politics, media, and business, would have maintained a cozy relationship with journalists.
But a series of email exchanges released to the public by lawmakers last week reveal a level of familiarity and collaboration between Epstein and several prominent journalists that goes beyond the typical source-greasing reporters engage in as an essential part of their jobs.
In one email exchange from 2017, then-New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas gives Epstein a heads up that journalist John Connolly was “digging around again.”
“Not clear if its [sic] another book/or expanded paperback version. Was asking me all sorts of questions about why you hired Ken Starr. I told him I had no idea — I think he is doing some Trump-related digging too,” Thomas wrote.
Connolly, a retired NYPD detective who passed away in 2022, was working on a book about Epstein at the time.
Not only did Thomas share information with Epstein, a tactic many reporters use to gain favor with a potential source, but he actually served as a character reference for Epstein when contacted by another journalist who was writing a book on Epstein.
“He seems very interested in your relationship with the news media,” Thomas wrote. “I told him you were a hell of a guy :).”
Thomas also expressed concerns to Epstein about Trump’s political ascent in July 2016. “I am getting worried,” he wrote. “Is he ever going to implode?”
Thomas left the Times in 2019 after editors discovered he violated their ethical standards by soliciting a $30,000 contribution from Epstein for a charity Thomas supported.
Thomas wasn’t the only journalist who was ensnared by the release of more than 20,000 of Epstein’s emails last week. The emails cover a time period from 2009, when Epstein was released from the Palm Beach County jail after having served 13 months for a reduced charge of soliciting prostitution, into the summer of 2019, when he was arrested again and charged with sex trafficking. Epstein died by suicide in his cell at Metropolitan Correctional Center in August 2019.
The emails also revealed that journalist and author Michael Wolff offered Epstein public relations advice on several occasions.
In December 2015, Wolff said he heard CNN was going to ask then-presidential candidate Trump about his relationship with Epstein. Epstein then asked, if they could create an answer for him, what it would look like.
“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff replied. “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.”
And in October 2016, after the release of Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape, Wolff wrote to Epstein that he could speak about Trump “in such a way that could garner you great sympathy and help finish him.”
In other emails, Wolff suggests publications that might accept an opinion piece or reporters who may be sympathetic to his cause.
He also advised Epstein to appear on Charlie Rose’s PBS talk show in an attempt to repair his reputation in 2016.
The Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles, who co-hosts a podcast on Trump with Wolff, told Wolff on Wednesday: “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 initially had little defense for his correspondence: “Would one have rewritten them in hindsight? Yeah. Of course. You know, emails always are: ‘Oh, that’s embarrassing.’”
But he later said that part of his role is “play-acting” to get sources to reveal things they would not tell other people.
“These are not people that have written the kind of books that I have written,” he said of his critics, “and I often make the distinction between journalists who do what they do — daily reporters working for organizations, working within a very prescribed set of rules — and what I do. I’m a writer who manages to make relationships that let me tell a story in the ways that the New York Times or other very reputable journalistic organizations are unable to tell.”
But media experts weren’t buying Wolff’s excuse, telling the Associated Press that he was in clear violation of journalistic ethics.
Independence is vital for a journalist, and Wolff compromised it, Northeastern University professor Dan Kennedy told the AP.
Headline Fail of the Week
Speaking of reporters getting too close to their subjects, former New York magazine political correspondent Olivia Nuzzi is back in the public eye as she undertakes her own reputation-repairing efforts, having been forced to leave the journalism world in shame last year after her emotional affair with then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was made public.
The New York Times seems receptive to Nuzzi’s comeback tour. “Olivia Nuzzi Did It All for Love,” the outlet writes in a new headline.
Nuzzi has a new book coming out, American Canto, in which she tells her side of the story. But while she claims that she had already written her profile about Kennedy before the affair began, she was still covering the presidential race while in a relationship with one of the candidates.
And not only does Nuzzi not appear remorseful in the Times profile, she is now making her triumphant return to journalism as Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor.
NR’s Jim Geraghty expresses concerns about the magazine’s decision to welcome Nuzzi back to journalism with open arms despite her egregious breach of reporting ethics:
I think the Times profile of Nuzzi is supposed to make us sympathize with her or relate to her, but there’s something chilling about how Nuzzi can make all the decisions she made — and blow up all sense of journalistic ethics with the calculated determination of J. Robert Oppenheimer — and then walk away describing her experience as a tragic love story, although she concedes, “I had a healthy appreciation for the fact that what had happened was not purely a tragedy.”
Media Misses
• Last week, MSNBC host Jen Psaki said Trump was a “predator,” before quickly walking back her comments. Psaki, while talking about Epstein’s newly released emails that mentioned Trump, talked about the other “predators” tied to Epstein “in addition to Trump.” She immediately backtracked saying, “Not that — I’m not saying he is. We don’t know all the details about that. I just mean, in addition to what we’ve learned about Epstein and others, there’s other predators out there.”
• CNN chief media analyst Brian Stelter went on the defensive for the BBC as the outlet faced widespread backlash over its deceptive edits to a documentary it aired shortly before the 2024 U.S. election about the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. During a discussion with PBS anchor Geoff Bennett, Stelter agreed that there was “this concerted political campaign, mostly from conservatives in the U.K., to undermine the BBC.” He claimed the documentary was actually a “really thoughtful, nuanced film with just one big mistake” and that there is “no indication that it was malicious.”
• Comedian Samantha Bee told Stacey Abrams that civility is “worthless” and “overrated” while living under an “authoritarian” regime. “It’s always people telling you to just, like, be quiet and be nice and, you know, compromise yourself,” Bee said on Abrams’s podcast. “If you’re compromising everything and the people with the power and control are giving up nothing, then I just don’t see . . . I think that civility feels quite worthless in those.” Bee, to her credit, clarified that she was not advocating for political violence.