What is Steve Bannon hiding about Jeffrey Epstein?

Amidst the fever-pitched online clamor for disclosure of materials related to Jeffrey Epstein (which I agree with in spirit — release everything you’ve got!) it’s truly bizarre that so little attention has been paid to the fact that Steve Bannon is currently concealing what might be the greatest Epstein-related treasure trove of them all.

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Bannon has long acknowledged that for over six years he’s been sitting on 15+ hours of priceless on-camera interviews he personally conducted with Epstein, just months before his arrest and death — the only TV-style interviews Epstein is ever known to have produced. Epstein spent most of his career as notoriously media averse, declining on-record interviews as far back as a 2002 New York magazine profile that rather admiringly painted him as an “international moneyman of mystery.” He evaded journalists almost entirely between the mid 2000s and his eventual demise. Yet there exists a never-published jackpot of interviews with Epstein, on camera, answering explosive questions for 15+ hours — which Bannon has kept hidden since 2019. Why?

I sent a bunch of questions to Bannon. Despite being famously chatty with all flavors of journalists on all manner of subjects — including me, in the past — he hasn’t answered. My questions were as follows:

• Since he’s calling for transparency regarding Epstein, why doesn’t Steve simply release the raw uncut footage of the 15+ hours of interviews he’s confirmed he conducted with Epstein?

• Was Steve ever paid by Epstein for media consulting services?

• Did Steve ever seek payment from either Epstein himself, or Epstein’s estate?

• Did he ever speak to the FBI or other investigators regarding his knowledge of Epstein?

Bannon’s curious allergy to responding to inquiries about Epstein has been observed for several years. Jacob Shamsian of Business Insider does a laudable job staying on top of the story. This makes him a journalistic outlier, which is a bit odd. You’d think that that especially today, given the tsunami of uproar around the purported “Epstein Files,” or lack thereof, journalists (whether “mainstream” or “alternative”) would be beating down Bannon’s door to demand that he finally release the long-awaited footage — or at least answer questions as to why he’s still concealing it from the public. But as Shamsian reports:

Bannon, who frequently speaks to journalists, did not respond to numerous voicemails, emails, and text messages from Business Insider over the course of several years requesting comment about his relationship with Epstein.

According to a curiously under-read chapter in Michael Wolff’s 2021 book, Too Famous, Bannon and Epstein were first “introduced” in December 2017, under circumstances that have yet to be fully elaborated, and which Bannon certainly has never seemed interested in expanding upon. One of their subsequent meetings took place on August 8, 2018, according to the New York Post, at Epstein’s opulent townhouse in Manhattan. Bannon also paid visits to Epstein’s luxury apartment in Paris. When they first met, the two fast-friends were said to have had the following exchange:

“You were the only person I was afraid of during the campaign,” said Bannon, laughing, when they met, meaning he believed Epstein knew dangerous secrets about Trump.

“As well you should have been,” replied Epstein.

Given Bannon’s laughter, maybe this exchange was all meant in good fun, but oftentimes humor can contain a kernel of truth.

**A note on sourcing. There have certainly been past instances in which Michael Wolff has proved somewhat unreliable, and his journalistic methodology can be suspect in terms of how he purportedly reconstructs the events that he floridly narrates. However, it’s not disputed that Wolff has had a conspicuously close bond with Bannon, who became the flagship source for Wolff’s 2018 book Fire and Fury, which sold an absurd boatload of copies. Wolff also has audio recordings, snippets of which have been released in annoyingly piecemeal fashion, of conversations with Epstein. So, to the degree I am relying here on Wolff for an account of Bannon’s relationship with Epstein, that stems from Bannon admittedly furnishing Wolff with information in the past, and not denying — but rather confirming — many of the claims about his relationship with Epstein. Given the apparent fact that Wolff has many of the reported interactions involving Bannon and Epstein on tape, and produced actual transcription rather than reconstructing a fancifully narrated version, I find his account to be largely credible.

Bannon’s interview footage was recorded between 2018 and 2019, before Epstein was arrested for sex trafficking and jailed in New York. All that’s ever been made public from this trove is a brief clip that appeared in a 2021 trailer teased by Bannon as part of some alleged documentary, which was never released. At the very least, the clip confirms that the footage does in fact exist, and is in Bannon’s possession. As reported in the New York Times: “Mr. Bannon confirmed in a statement that he encouraged Mr. Epstein to speak to 60 Minutes, and said that he had recorded more than 15 hours of interviews with him.” In December 2021, a spokesperson for Bannon told Business Insider that the alleged “documentary” would be released by the following Labor Day — which came and went. No “documentary” to be found.

More recently, while raging about Epstein at the Turning Point USA conference and styling himself as on the vanguard of calling for Epstein accountability, Bannon demanded a special prosecutor (later rejected by Trump.) Curiously unmentioned was Bannon’s possession of his own cache of “Epstein Files.” A conference attendee did ask if he’s ever going to publish those interviews, and Bannon once again proffered the same recycled excuse, insisting we should all wait until sometime next year for a “documentary” he’s allegedly going to release.

Wolff, in his book, recounts in astonishing detail an Epstein media strategizing session sometime in late 2018 or early 2019. The participants were Bannon, Epstein, Epstein lawyer Reid Weingarten, and — wait for it — former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak. All while Wolff apparently sat there as a fly on the wall, recording the proceedings.

With Bannon dialed in on speaker phone, Epstein lawyer Weingarten reported that things were looking grim for his client:

“He has prosecutors around the world who might look to prosecute him again. I think there is a Hill piece here—the calls for his head from both sides of the aisle don’t give us much cover. And then there’s what’s happening in civil court—hurtful things. And not least of all there is a public relations piece here. Every time I turn on the television and look for the Celtics score I see that my boy is a monster. Everybody’s favorite monster. The devil. Pedophile. Sex trafficker. Keeping little girls in the basement. Trump friend—”

“That would be the worst,” said Epstein.

“And there is no rejoinder. Ninety percent of what everyone is saying is horseshit. But there is no rejoinder. The New York Times has taken a sex scandal, the fact that Jeffrey has whatever tastes he has, and made it into a human rights tragedy—I am not a naïf, but I have never seen…”

Bannon chimes in:

“So where is the comms piece in this?” asked Bannon over the phone. “Who is handling it? Who’s on point? Are these your people, Reid?”

“Well—okay—in fact there really hasn’t been anything in place because largely the view has been let’s not call more attention to this or antagonize the judges this has been before, and not wanting to be seen attacking the victims, and so we haven’t—”

“Let me get this straight,” said Bannon. “I think I understand this, but it strains credulity—there’s nothing in place? There hasn’t been anything in place? No communications team? What was the response from Jeffrey’s side to the Florida story? Who engaged?”

Bannon eventually proposes that Epstein’s only option is to launch a PR offensive.

“He probably can’t be hated any more,” said Bannon. “We’ve flatlined on this. He can’t get deader. While the chances of reviving him are remote, what’s the alternative?”

Bannon then started to game out the questions Epstein would likely be asked in some hypothetical forthcoming TV interview, such as “What’s the age of the youngest girl?” Ever the PR pro, Bannon suggested the most advantageous tack for Epstein to take: “He’s been branded a pedophile—while in fact these are not underage or barely underage. I’d rather have that discussion about what is a pedophile than for people just to assume he is one. To the extent that anybody was underage, it was slightly underage and they lied about it. None of them were acting under duress—there were no drugs, no coercion. And there was no trafficking—you were a consumer of sexual services and not a provider.”

This goes on and on. Wolff then reproduces raw transcripts of the prep-session interviews that Bannon later conducted with Epstein, which eventually grew into the 15+ hours of primo archival material he’s currently sitting on. Excerpts:

SB: Who are your clients?

JE:  I don’t talk about my clients.

SB: I assume extremely wealthy individuals? When you say you give them advice? On investments? On—”

JE:  Taxes. Security. Philanthropy. Estate planning.

…

SB: You hanging out with guys like Clinton, Trump, Ron Burkle, Prince Andrew, at all the top nightclubs in the world, with all these beautiful women—all this is because you don’t socialize? I’m not supposed to believe my lying eyes?

JE:  What you read is in fact inaccurate.

SB: A thousand pictures of you at the hottest nightspots? With the most beautiful women, with the most powerful people of the moment.

JE:  One picture, not showing what you think it shows, reprinted a thousand times. You should not believe them.

SB: I should not believe them?

JE:  They do not exist.

SB: They don’t exist?

JE:  I know there is an echo in this room, but they do not exist.

SB: So you’re saying—

JE:  I don’t party. I have never partied. I had a Yom Kippur dinner here twelve years ago. And three science conferences.

SB: So all those stories are false?

JE:  Yes.

Why was it that Steve Bannon, of all people, felt that it was so necessary to devote his time and energy to preparing Jeffrey Epstein for prospective interviews with the likes of 60 Minutes (which never happened)? Why was Bannon suddenly interested in aiding these desperation efforts to rehabilitate Epstein’s image? At least one of the strange strategy sessions documented by Wolff occurred after the November 2018 Miami Herald series that breathed new life into the Epstein saga, and generated a firestorm of vituperative publicity — harnessing the then-ascendant cultural power of #MeToo. It was in this context that renewed prosecutorial action was launched against Epstein, culminating in his July 2019 indictment, imprisonment, and death.

Presumably, Bannon’s services were in high demand at the time. He was viewed, rightly or wrongly, as the political svengali who masterminded Trump’s improbable victory in the 2016 election. He’d just served in the First Trump Administration at a senior level. This would naturally enable many opportunities to monetize in 2017-2019, which Bannon duly seized in multiple domains. So — was he compensated by Epstein for these media strategy sessions? Around the same time, according to Wolff’s book, Epstein was paying a $3 million per month retainer to a British PR firm to provide similar services — gaming out how he could save his reputation. The effort was put on hold for obvious reasons after Epstein’s July 2019 arrest.

Of course, a central topic that would most assuredly come up if Epstein ever sat for the 60 Minutes style interview that Bannon was purportedly prepping him for would be… Trump. Epstein would be battered with as many questions as possible about his past relationship with the then-current and future president. After all, Epstein claimed they were the best of friends for 10 or 15 years, from roughly the late 80s to the early 2000s; Trump had long acknowledged palling around with Epstein. There were plenty of photos and videos of them cavorting together.

Presumably, therefore, Bannon has Epstein on video commenting at length about Trump. Might anything of interest have been said over the course of those 15+ hours? Are you kidding?

So much of the current consternation over Epstein exists in the realm of fevered speculation. Was he an intelligence asset? Was he blackmailing prominent third party individuals? How did he really acquire his vast wealth? Did he really commit suicide? I’ve tried to address all these questions, evaluating whether the available facts and evidence substantiate the many tantalizing theories people claim to so confidently believe.

But what’s fascinating is that something concrete, something uncontested, something not relegated to aimless speculation, is that Steve Bannon possesses more than 15 hours of interview footage with Jeffrey Epstein that he’s refused to release for over six years. Why is that?

I was on Breaking Points this week debating the Epstein debacle. Yes, I went into it fully aware that 99% of commenters would violently disagree with me.

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