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Jeffrey Epstein Dishes On Former ‘Friend’ Donald Trump In Unearthed Audio

Disgraced financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein said he was Donald Trump’s “closest friend for 10 years” in newly released audio captured by author Michael Wolff.

Epstein spilled details on his decade-plus relationship with the New York real estate mogul during an August 2017 interview with Wolff, who published audio excerpts from the conversation on The Daily Beast on Saturday.

In the recordings, which were reviewed and authenticated by The Daily Beast, the late businessman describes his one-time friend in disparate terms, calling him both “charming” and a “horrible human being.” The tapes will be discussed in further detail on Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” podcast on Monday.

“He’s charming. In a devious way, he’s charming,” Epstein said in the recordings.

“To some extent it’s a typical tragedy where he believes his own bullshit,” he continued. “He has delusions of grandiosity, then he takes it on board.”

During the conversation, which took place two years before Epstein died by suicide in 2019 after being hit with child sex trafficking charges, he also characterized Trump as an untrustworthy womanizer with a nasty temper.

“He does nasty things to his best friends, best friends’ wives, anyone who he first tries to gain their trust and uses it to do bad things to them,” Epstein said.

Elsewhere in the interview, the late millionaire claimed that, despite Trump being “functionally illiterate,” he was still a “brilliant” businessman.

“With respect to real estate deals, he’s brilliant. He’s a salesman. He knows real estate really well,” Epstein said. “Anything else but that? He knows nothing. No history, no strategy. … He certainly can’t read a balance sheet, which is funny.”

Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 1997. Over the weekend, journalist Michael Wolff began releasing audio excerpts from a conversation he had with Epstein about his former friend, Trump.

Davidoff Studios Photography via Getty Images

While Trump once called Epstein a “terrific guy” in a 2002 interview with New York magazine, he distanced himself from the ex-banker after his 2019 arrest.

“I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” Trump told a team of White House reporters at the time.

The former president’s campaign team attacked Wolff’s reporting in a response given to The Daily Beast, calling the story full of “outlandish false smears” that amount to “election interference.”

HuffPost has reached out to the Trump campaign for comment.

In a separate Daily Beast piece also published on Saturday, Wolff said he decided to release portions of his Epstein interview after a new woman came out accusing Trump of sexual assault late last month.

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