By Michael Calderone

Journalist Michael Wolff acknowledged on Thursday that newly released emails in which he gives advice to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on media strategy were “embarrassing,” but he defended his journalistic methods as tactics to get close to a rarified source.

“That’s what a journalist, a writer in that situation, does if you want to stay — if you want to be invited back the next day and the next day and the next day,” Wolff said on his “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast, which he co-hosts with The Daily Beast editor in chief Joanna Coles. He added: “As my mother would say, you get more with a little honey.”