We seem to be in another Epstein hiatus before the story and obsession again explodes into the center of the political news ecosystem. Presumably the next episode will come when the White House releases the heavily redacted and/or cooked version of the “Epstein files” that Congress ordered the administration to release. But I wanted to note this very weird oddity right smack in the center of the story that continues to be almost entirely ignored. I was reminded of it last night by this story in The Bulwark by Mona Charen. I first heard about in those interviews Sid Blumenthal and Sean Wilentz did with Michael Wolff about Jeff Epstein, which I wrote about back in September. Wolff discussed something that I had never heard before: that Steve Bannon, basically right up to the time Epstein died, was working with him on a combo rebrand/crisis comms effort to rehabilitate Epstein’s reputation. Yes! Bannon was working as Epstein’s image rehab specialist. The man at the center of all the anti-“elite”, anti-“globalist” pedophiles was tight with Epstein and trying to help him come in from the sex offender cold. He’d actually done hours of video interviews with Epstein as prep for either a 60 Minutes or 60 Minutes-style interview to revive his reputation.
Needless to say, when Epstein was indicted and subsequently committed suicide in jail it greatly complicated these plans. When Bannon was later asked about this, he claimed the interview training tapes were actually footage he was compiling for a takedown exposé on all of Epstein’s evil and debauched behavior.
I wrote about this and discussed it with various people back in September. And, unsurprisingly, the responses were all variations of WTF? and, How haven’t I heard about this? Listening to the Wolff interviews, it didn’t even seem to be much of a secret. I think they actually played some clips of those prep interviews. Indeed, in 2021 The New York Post got access to a few clips as part of what Bannon then was claiming was a documentary he would soon release called “The Monsters,” an expose about Epstein’s pedophilia network and the elite. Yes, you got that right — he was planning on repurposing his prep sessions to help Epstein as a takedown documentary about Epstein.
Charen basically makes this same point. How is this not a bigger deal in the political world of DC where Bannon remains a major, major player in the MAGA Cinematic Universe? The big tranche of Epstein emails, which have already singed many public figures and — rightly — scorched what remains of Lawrence Summers’s public reputation to a crisp, are full of correspondence between Bannon and Epstein. The messages confirm and round out Bannon’s close relationship with Epstein and his work to reintroduce Epstein to the public as a perhaps roguish but generally solid guy. Charen marshals some wonderful research. She quotes Bannon on his podcast excoriating the sinister cabal and “ops” behind Epstein and his elite enablers, not long before telling Epstein himself that all the stories popping up in the press about him being a pedophile were also “ops” and part of a conspiracy against him.
Stuff like this is a reminder that what I’m describing here is mostly a media story. It’s no huge surprise that Bannon is an utter sleazebag or someone with a high tolerance for sexual predators. I confess to being perversely wowed by the brazen shamelessness of the switcheroo. But that’s another story. What’s kind of mystifying is how little Bannon or his Epstein image rehab doc project has gotten in the furor over the Epstein emails. It’s not that it’s gone unnoticed. The presence of Bannon-Epstein emails got at least a mention in many reports. But not the sheer volume or really the substance. Indeed, the press reports I was able to find about the image rehab doc tend to be in the entertainment press, like this one in The Hollywood Reporter. There’s much less in the political press.
This is noteworthy first because Bannon is a major figure in national politics. But second because by 2019 Bannon was very much back in Trump’s good graces. There’s a very decent chance that Trump knew Bannon was working to rehabilitate Epstein at the time. Regardless it remains a wild example of the double standards of the national media and how enveloped Epstein’s top critics were with his own corruption.