President Donald Trump personally called The Wall Street Journal’s editor in chief to object to its upcoming exposé on his links to Jeffrey Epstein.
The phone call, first reported on by Oliver Darcy’s Status, comes as the paper plans to publish a report that would offer “new material shedding light on the Trump-Epstein relationship.” Epstein—who once described Trump as his “closest friend for 10 years,” according to biographer Michael Wolff—died by suicide awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019.
Darcy did not provide further details of the call with WSJ Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker. It is also unclear if the president has also tried calling Journal owner Rupert Murdoch, according to Status.
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The White House did not respond to an immediate request for comment. Representatives for the Journal and Murdoch also did not respond to immediate requests for comment.
Journalist Mark Halperin alluded to the forthcoming exposé on his 2WAY show earlier on Thursday.
“Everyone I know believes a major newspaper, one of the top three newspapers in the country, is about to publish a piece about President Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, OK?” Halperin said. “Everyone I know knows that. And people in the White House know that, too. When that story drops, if it drops today, and some people think it might, it could drive the day.”
The Journal published its story over the president’s objections at 6:46 p.m. EST Thursday.
Trump’s supporters have been in an uproar over a July 6 memo from the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation finding that Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial, rather than being murdered, and that no “client list” of powerful associates exists—the subject of swirling conspiracies among the president’s supporters. Trump had promised to release all files related to Epstein during his campaign, and Attorney General Pam Bondi said in February that the “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now awaiting review.”
Trump has since tried to calm the waters and come to the defense of his attorney general.
Speaking with far-right Real America’s Voice Network on Wednesday, Trump called the Epstein story a “hoax” and laid the blame on Democrats.
“The Democrats, you know, they have bad policy, they have bad candidates, they have bad everything, but they stick together,” he added. “The Republicans don’t do that, but they ought to look into the Jeffrey Epstein hoax too, because it’s another hoax that’s, frankly put out by the Demo ... pushing the Republicans, and put out by the Democrats.”
