Steve Bannon: In touch with him till his arrest, actually involved in trying to help Epstein turn around his pedophile image(!!), emails with Epstein about taking down Pope Francis.
NYT article on their relationship today:
"Midafternoon in late June 2019, Stephen K. Bannon sent Jeffrey Epstein an excited series of texts. “Dude!!!!!” he wrote. “Is this real Tell me this is real.”
Mr. Epstein had just texted him a headline from The Miami Herald. It reported that victims of Mr. 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, Mr. Bannon, a leader in the MAGA movement and a former top aide to President Trump, had been advising Mr. Epstein on how to handle resurrected allegations that he was a serial pedophile. Mr. 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,” Mr. Bannon wrote to Mr. Epstein in April 2019. That was five months after a Miami Herald series exposed how prosecutors had ignored evidence of Mr. Epstein’s crimes."
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/16/us/politics/jeffrey-epstein-steve-bannon.html