On a midafternoon in late June 2019, Steve Bannon sent Jeffrey Epstein an excited series of texts. “Dude!!!!!” he wrote. “Is this real Tell me this is real.”
Epstein had just texted him a headline from The Miami Herald. It reported that victims of Epstein’s sexual abuse had lost a court battle to nullify a decade-old agreement that protected him from prosecution for those crimes.
Off and on for months, Bannon, a leader in the Maga movement and a former top aide to US president Donald Trump, had been advising Epstein on how to handle resurrected allegations that he was a serial paedophile.
Bannon recommended which lawyers to hire – his own – when to lie low and when he should jump on an opening to push his narrative. He scheduled what the two men called “media training”.
“First we need to push back on the lies; then crush the pedo/trafficking narrative; then rebuild your image as philanthropist,” Bannon wrote to Epstein in April 2019. That was five months after a Miami Herald series exposed how prosecutors had ignored evidence of Epstein’s crimes.
The three million pages of Epstein-related documents released by the US justice department on January 30th reveal for the first time the extent of Bannon’s efforts to advise Epstein when many of his friends were abandoning him.
[ Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor should testify in Epstein inquiry, says Hillary ClintonOpens in new window ]
In the six months before Epstein was arrested and charged with the sex trafficking of minors in July 2019, Bannon’s name appears nearly every day in the files, often because the two men exchanged texts.
In a statement, Bannon said his relationship with Epste
Continue Reading on The Irish Times
This preview shows approximately 15% of the article. Read the full story on the publisher's website to support quality journalism.