Like almost everyone these days, Steve Bannon hit the table for the publication of Epstein files, denouncing the financier in disgrace as “aggressor of globalist children” and calling for complete public transparency. It turns out that Bannon has not always been as critical of the billionaire.
Not more recently than 2019 – while the coverage of the press and the renewed surveys ended before its arrest at Teterboro airport for sex traffic, because most of the others in Epstein orbit had already avoided the 66 -year -old man – Bannon was still standing by his man. Trump’s former crumpled assistant advised Epstein of the Shadow, joined strategy calls and finally helped to stage a media -backstage cure behind the scenes, organizing a series of sessions recorded on videotape at the town hall of Manhattan d’Epstein in which Bannon was his interlocutor.
The configuration looked like a documentary shooting – a small crew, professional lighting, with Bannon lubricating difficult questions from the camera’s outside camera. They were a kind of debate, apparently designed to prepare Epstein for an interview that changes image with a media like 60 minutesWith Bannon playing the role of Mike Wallace. But Epstein, The Hollywood Reporter A learned, may have made the invoice for all this, throwing the property of the images in question.
The interview has never taken place – certain rehabilitation of public relations are simply too intimidating – but for months now, Bannon has publicly promoted these images of his former friend – 12 to 3 p.m., by his own account – as the basis of planned documentation, work work title The monster. He launched it as journalism, a raw look in Epstein’s pathology. In fact, however, these recordings seem to be far from journalistic.
According to the author Michael Wolff, who was there for the first recording and examined the transcriptions of others – and who revealed for the first time the existence of these recordings in his book of 2021 Too famous – The point was not an exhibition. It was rotation. “There is no doubt that the recordings were media training,” he said THR. “And there is no possible way of Epstein signed on them being used in a documentary.”
This context – his alleged financial arrangement with Epstein, the role of coaching he played, the objective of recordings – was visibly absent from the Bannon public commentary on the Epstein scandal in recent months. Trump OneTime Advisor was among the noisiest criticisms in Epstein and denounced the administration loudly for his refusal to publish Epstein files.
Bannon, who has not answered repeated calls and emails, has in the past Wolff account and the relationships of his friendship with Epstein. But in the past five years, he has been considerably more misty about the release of Epstein cassettes, waving any questions about their fate. Then, last March, he appeared on The Jimmy Dore show And finally talked about images, saying that he produced a documentary series around them – “maybe for Netflix” or another streamer. “It is a product of the elite,” said Bannon about Epstein, “and everything that has been put in him exactly the truth.”
For Wolff, who knew Bannon and Epstein well, Bannon’s recent attacks against Epstein denies the comfortable nature of their relationship. He claims that the two men were good friends, gathering around 2017, shortly after the Bannon’s forced exit from Trump’s White House, and stayed close to his death in August 2019. During these years, Wolff, Bannon was a frequent visitor of the two days of Epstein, the town of the city of Manhattan and his Paris apartment, and the two Epstein calls and e-mails of Epstein almost every day. Their affinity was not quite surprising: the two men shared a Wall Street background, a taste for the big life and a complicated relationship with Donald Trump – the two were close to the president before being frozen. (Bannon’s break with Trump came shortly after the publication of Wolff’s successful success exhibition Fire and Furyfor which he was largely rumoring as a major source.)
In fact, it was only years after the presumed suicide of Epstein prison cells that Bannon has publicly changed his air on Epstein. At that time, Bannon was faced with his own legal problems, sentenced in 2022 for two outrageous chiefs to the congress and sentenced to four months in prison in 2024.
Since the release of Bannon at the end of last year, he continued to recover as a manufacturer of Kings Maga with a best rated podcast (Bannon’s War Room) and a constant flow of public appearances with closed counters. While the Epstein scandal held up again, it was also on the point of reception of the lags of Maga of supporters who want to see the cassettes become public. During a Turning Point USA event in July, MP Anna Paulina Luna was held on the podium and urged Bannon to publish her own Epstein files. The crowd – not exactly known for its nuance – has an approval rugi.
Bannon did not respond to several requests for comments for this story.
As for the bands themselves, Wolff says that he has no idea where the voluminous images are located – and suggests that Bannon may not have property rights anyway. “Everything that exists technically belongs to Jeffrey Epstein or his succession,” he said. “I had a discussion with Jeffrey and banned separately about the cost, and it was expressly involved in media training. There is no possible way that Epstein allows him to be in the form of a documentary. It was too raw and too revealing. ”
Even if the bands have survived, says Wolff, Bannon may not have access to it. In addition to the rest of the succession of billionaires, he says, they would probably be in possession of Epstein’s co-executors, lawyer Darren Indyke and accountant Richard Kahn. Lawyers, which are based in the American virgin islands, have not answered several calls or emails.
“I really like Steve and I think he is extraordinarily brilliant and insightful,” says Wolff about his former boyfriend. “But undoubtedly, he is the greatest opportunist I have met in a life of meeting opportunists. Bannon’s dream has become the leader of the Maga movement and he uses it [Epstein controversy]. But he also understands that the files will never be published, because if they were released, the person everywhere would be Steve Bannon – in terms of e -mail traffic between the two of these guys. It was constant!
