President Donald Trump reportedly called Rupert Murdoch from Air Force One, urging the media mogul to kill the Wall Street Journal’s then-pending report about a birthday note he allegedly wrote to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The phone call is part of a new report from the WSJ, detailing the inside story of how the Trump administration scrambled to handle the Epstein files fallout during a chaotic summer, reportedly characterized by “disorganization,” high-stakes strategy meetings in the Situation Room, “finger-pointing,” and a series of “unforced errors.”
On July 17, the WSJ published its bombshell report about a “bawdy” note allegedly signed by Trump, which features a sexually suggestive drawing and a 50th-birthday wish to the sex-offender financier that read, in part, “may every day be another wonderful secret.”
Trump, who was in the same room as Murdoch last week during a state dinner at Windsor Castle in the U.K., has repeatedly denied writing the letter and also denied that a signature on the document is his.
In the days before the WSJ published the report, Trump and his team desperately tried to get Murdoch and his paper to stop the story from seeing the light of day, the outlet reports.
Trump was traveling back to Washington, D.C. from Pennsylvania when he called Murdoch on July 15, two days before the story was published.
In a brief call with the 94-year-old mogul, Trump “told him the story wasn’t true and that he should handle it,” people familiar with their conversation told the outlet.
On the same flight, Trump’s communications aides also called WSJ editor-in-chief Emma Tucker, The Guardian previously reported.
Despite the efforts of Trump and White House officials, the outlet went ahead with the story and the president subsequently filed a $10 billion defamation lawsuit.
Trump called the WSJ’s story a “false, malicious, defamatory, FAKE NEWS ‘article’ in the useless ‘rag’ that is.”
The president’s short exchange with Murdoch was previously detailed in a court filing from the Trump administration, compelling a federal court to expedite Murdoch’s deposition because of concerns the media titan either won’t live long enough to testify at a potential trial or might not be alive.
Trump “reached out to, and spoke directly with, Murdoch and advised him that the letter referenced in the Article was fake,” the court filing states. “Murdoch advised President Trump that ‘he would take care of it.’”
Lawyers referenced Trump’s Truth Social post where he complained that Murdoch apparently “did not have the power” to stop the story from being published.
In the latest in the legal battle between the tycoons, lawyers for the WSJ blasted the president’s defamation lawsuit as an “affront to the First Amendment.”
Lawyers argued that the suit “does not include a single plausible allegation” that any of the defendants — which include Murdoch and the newspaper’s parent companies — knowingly published false statements about Trump, lawyers wrote Monday.
“The Article is true,” lawyers wrote, and the evidence is publicly available for anyone to see.
“This case calls out for dismissal,” they wrote, and an attempt to “silence a newspaper for publishing speech that was subsequently proven true by documents released by Congress to the American public.”
“By its very nature, this meritless lawsuit threatens to chill the speech of those who dare to publish content that the president does not like,” according to Monday’s filing.
Alex Woodward contributed reporting
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