Author Barry Levine claimed on Saturday that he believed the late convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to President Donald Trump were rooted in animosity rather than in any shared illegal activities.
Levine, author of “The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell,” spoke with CNN host Michael Smerconish about the recently released emails — held up by Democrats as proof the Trump and Epstein were cut from the same cloth — which he said did not necessarily mean what Trump’s critics claim they did.
WATCH:
🚨NEW: Epstein Book Author Barry Levine tells CNN what he thinks Epstein meant in 2011 email about TRUMP🚨
SMERCONISH: “The ‘dog that hasn’t barked is trump.’ What do you think he’s referring to?”
LEVINE: “I think Jeffrey Epstein is referring to the fact that he believes that… pic.twitter.com/aCRhvzBjX3
— Jason Cohen 🇺🇸 (@JasonJournoDC) November 15, 2025
“The ‘dog that hasn’t barked is trump.’ What do you think he’s referring to?” Smerconish referenced an email Epstein sent in 2011.
“I think Jeffrey Epstein is referring to the fact that he believes that Donald Trump talked to Michael Ryder, who was the Palm Beach police chief in 2004 and began the first investigation into Jeffrey Epstein,” Levine said. That investigation began in earnest in 2005, and Trump officially banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago in 2007.
“I suspect that Jeffrey Epstein was saying he was ‘75% there,’ believing that Trump might have been the whistleblower at the time,” Levine continued. “That particular year, the 2 men had a falling out — not only over the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell was taking young women from his spa at Mar-a-Lago for Jeffrey Epstein — but they also had a nasty real estate deal that both men were trying to get … So there was bad blood between the two of them.”
Levine seems an unlikely figure to defend President Trump, however, as his statements come against the backdrop of another book he wrote in 2019 — “All the President’s Women: Donald Trump and the Making of a Predator” — in which he delved into the accusations of sexual misconduct made against Trump. It should noted that those accusations, described in detail in the book, involved women who were not underage at the time they supposedly interacted with Trump.