Pro tip: Don’t rely on Steve Bannon’s advice for rehabbing your reputation.
Listen here, I’m not as think as you are drunk I am.
From the Wayback machine . . .in . . . July:
Like just about everybody else these days, Steve Bannon has been pounding the table for the release of the Epstein files, blasting the disgraced financier as a “globalist child molester” and calling for full public transparency. Turns out, though, Bannon wasn’t always so critical of the late billionaire.
As recently as 2019 — as mounting press coverage and renewed investigations were closing in before his arrest at Teterboro Airport on sex trafficking charges, as most everyone else in Jeffrey Epstein‘s orbit had already shunned the 66-year-old — Bannon was still standing by his man. The rumpled former Trump aide reportedly advised Epstein from the shadows, joined strategy calls, and ultimately helped stage a behind-the-scenes media makeover, arranging a series of videotaped sessions at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in which Bannon served as his interlocutor.
. . . The setup looked like a documentary shoot — a small crew, professional lighting, with Bannon lobbing tough, prosecutorial questions from off-camera. They were a kind of debate-prep, seemingly designed to get Epstein ready for an image-changing sit-down interview with a news outlet like 60 Minutes, with Bannon playing the part of Mike Wallace. But Epstein, The Hollywood Reporter has learned, may have footed the bill for it all, throwing ownership of the footage into question.
The interview never took place — some PR rehabs are just too daunting — but for months now, Bannon has been publicly promoting that footage of his erstwhile friend — 12 to 15 hours, by his own count — as the foundation of a planned docuseries, working title The Monster. He’s been pitching it as journalism, a raw look inside Epstein’s pathology. In fact, though, those tapings seem to have been far from journalistic.
According to author Michael Wolff, who was there for the first taping and reviewed transcripts of others — and who first revealed the existence of these tapes in his 2021 book Too Famous — the point wasn’t exposure. It was spin. “There’s no question the tapes were media training,” he tells THR. “And there’s no possible way Epstein would have signed off on them being used in a documentary.”
That context — his alleged financial arrangement with Epstein, the coaching role he played, the purpose of the tapings — has been conspicuously absent from Bannon’s own public commentary about the Epstein scandal over the past few months. The onetime Trump advisor has been among the most vociferous critics of Epstein and has loudly denounced the administration for its refusal to release the Epstein files.
Bannon, who did not reply to repeated calls and emails, has in the past denied Wolff’s account and reports of his friendship with Epstein. But over the past five years he’s been considerably more hazy about the release of the Epstein tapes, waving off any inquiries about their whereabouts. Then, last February, he appeared on The Jimmy Dore Show and finally spoke about the footage, claiming he was producing a documentary series around them — “maybe for Netflix” or another streamer. “He’s a product of the elite,” Bannon said of Epstein, “and everything that’s been put out about him is not exactly the truth.”
