NEW! The newly released Epstein files contain thousands of emails between Steve Bannon and Jeffrey Epstein—a correspondence so extensive it will require a ten-part series to publish. What emerges from researcher Ellie Leonard’s painstaking work organizing these chaotic, out-of-order documents is a portrait of two men orbiting each other in a dance of mutual desperation, trading favors and access while their respective worlds collapsed around them.
The dynamic shifted over time. When Bannon left the White House in 2017, fired and humiliated after losing the internal war to Jared and Ivanka, he sought out Epstein believing the financier could connect him to the intelligence world. Bannon had always wanted to work in intelligence, and Epstein—with his strange access to government officials no civilian should possess—seemed like the gateway. By 2018 and into 2019, the power had inverted. Epstein was the one seeking approval, asking what he could do, begging for help rehabilitating his image as the FBI closed in.
The emails reveal late-night conversations at 2 AM, 5 AM, hours and hours of correspondence between men who never seemed to sleep. And the ideas they generated were breathtaking in their delusion. In one December 2018 exchange, someone proposes that Epstein establish “THE major center for human trafficking, teenage prostitution” as a charitable endeavor to show the dangers of child exploitation globally. The convicted sex offender would put his name on an anti-trafficking organization. They actually believed this could work.
One email stands out for its timing. On December 6, 2018, Epstein asks Bannon: “do you know bill barr. CIA.” Bill Barr would become Attorney General weeks later. Barr and Epstein’s paths had crossed decades earlier when Barr’s father hired the unqualified Epstein to teach math at the Dalton School. Barr was training at CIA around that time. Now here’s Epstein, under FBI surveillance, asking about the man who would soon oversee the Justice Department—and by extension, any federal investigation into his crimes.
The files also reveal Cathy Rumler, Obama’s White House counsel who later became chief counsel at JP Morgan, maintained a flirtatious correspondence with Epstein. She even drafted the talking points Bannon and Epstein planned to send to the Washington Post about his supposed rehabilitation. This was during the period when JP Morgan was filing suspicious activity reports about Epstein’s transactions—yet their chief counsel was helping craft his media strategy.
Paid subscribers can access a deeper dive by scrolling down.
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Narativ with Zev Shalev to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
