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.

Let me just start out with the facts: The Economist/YouGov published the results of a poll this week that surveyed 1,500 U.S. adults between March 10–14 on a number of different topics, mostly about people’s feelings on the state of the country.

A few of the questions touched on House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), asking respondents about how favorably they saw him generally and his performance as speaker of the House. Two questions asked about the issue of McCarthy giving Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and his production team exclusive access to all the internal Jan. 6 Capitol security footage for him to use to spread propaganda on his propaganda show. The survey asked if those polled had heard about the issue and if they approved or disapproved of it. The split in approval versus disapproval was relatively close.