Victory Films/The New York Post

Business Insider’s Jacob Shamsian published a lengthy report on Wednesday that Steve Bannon, a former advisor to former President Donald Trump, apparently recorded over 15 hours of footage of an interview with the late registered sex offender/financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The footage, Bannon claimed, was for a documentary entitled The Monsters: Epstein’s Life Among the Global Elite that was to be released under Bannon’s Victory Films. However, that movie never came to fruition, and those who reportedly knew about the footage found the claim dubious. Another explanation given was that Bannon was helping Epstein improve his public image as allegations of sex trafficking became louder and louder. The interview video was recorded in the months leading up to Epstein’s arrest in July 2019. Epstein was found dead in his jail cell in August 2019; the death was determined to be a suicide.

Even more intriguing, the videos of the recorded conversation have been all but forgotten:

The footage remains under wraps.

It has not surfaced anywhere — not in the criminal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of assisting Epstein’s sex trafficking, nor in numerous civil lawsuits from his victims.

Bannon’s explanation that he was producing a documentary about Epstein was nonsense, according to people who spent time with both men around the time they were in each other’s lives.

According to the article, Bannon became friendly with Epstein in 2017 after the former stopped working at the White House. When the walls started closing in on Epstein’s seedy sex trafficking activities, Bannon reportedly came to the rescue. Epstein’s brother Mark Epstein described the nature of their relationship:

Mark Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein’s brother, said Bannon was trying to help his brother “rehabilitate his reputation” after the Miami Herald in 2018 published a series of articles — which ultimately led to an indictment by federal prosecutors in Manhattan — about his sexual abuse of girls in Palm Beach.

Mark Epstein told BI that his brother had sent him footage of some of Bannon’s interview with him.

In that interview, Mark Epstein told BI last year, “Jeffrey said he stopped hanging out with Trump when he realized Trump was a crook.”

In the 2000s, Trump and Jeffrey Epstein fought over Trump’s purchase of a Palm Beach mansion that Epstein coveted. The Miami Herald also reported that Epstein lost his Mar-a-Lago membership after he harassed another member’s daughter.

Mark Epstein said he inquired about the footage in a meeting with Bannon in New York after his brother’s death but that Bannon refused to share more information.

“He told me he had like 16 hours of videotaping with Jeffrey in his vault,” Mark Epstein said. “And he told me it was protected because it was witness preparation and it was protected under attorney-client privilege. But the thing is, Bannon’s not an attorney.”

In a post on Twitter/X after his story was published, Shamsian also brought up a past comment by Megyn Kelly, who said on her podcast in January:

We’re not done with Jeffrey Epstein. I can tell you that for a fact. I can’t tell you how I know, but I can tell you for a fact we’re gonna hear a lot more about Jeffrey Epstein in the coming year, and you may be even hearing from him directly. More on that as I’m allowed to tell you.

Shamsian referred to the comment as “weird,” and he wondered out loud if she was referring to Bannon’s recordings:

Bannon, who is serving a four-month jail sentence for refusing to comply with a Congressional subpoena, did not respond to Business Insider’s requests for comment.

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