Steve Bannon filmed Jeffrey Epstein for 15 hours. His ‘documentary’ has never surfaced.

• Steve Bannon took 15 hours of video of Jeffrey Epstein in the months before Epstein died in jail.

• He said it was for a “documentary” — a claim that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

• Sources say Bannon was friends with Epstein and was trying to rehabilitate his reputation.

Before his 2019 death in jail, Jeffrey Epstein spent hours being interviewed on camera by Steve Bannon.

A clip published by the New York Post in 2021 shows Bannon verbally sparring with Epstein.

Epstein or on the secure messaging app Signal at JacobShamsian.07.

Mark Epstein said Bannon asked him for money, saying he needed $6 million to complete the documentary. Mark Epstein told BI he declined.

Jeffrey Epstein died in jail before he could go to trial. A years-in-the-making 121-page Justice Department watchdog report published last year found that he killed himself in his cell, but Mark Epstein found it unpersuasive, telling BI last year that it was “blatant bullshit.”

Mark Epstein said his brother told him that Bannon recorded the video to help prepare him for testimony. At the time, Jeffrey Epstein was facing civil lawsuits from accusers that could have led to depositions.

“I have also tried to reach Bannon about it a couple of times since our meeting and get no response,” Mark Epstein told BI in an email this week.

Mark Epstein said Jeffrey Epstein told him he wasn’t subpoenaed for any depositions at that time.

But Mark Epstein said his brother told him that if he had to testify in the future, he “would’ve had fun with it” and “channeled” Brett Kavanaugh during the now Supreme Court justice’s Senate confirmation hearings.

“You know when Kavanaugh was going through his confirmation hearings and he said to the senator: ‘Senator, I like beer. My friends like beer. Do you like beer, Senator?'” Mark Epstein said.

“So Jeffrey said he’s going to channel Kavanaugh and say: ‘Senator, I like pussy. My friends like pussy. Do you like pussy, Senator?'” he said.

The footage hasn’t come up in any of the Epstein lawsuits

If Bannon actually needed money, he didn’t seem to mention it to his usual financial backers.

Mike Lindell, a long-standing sponsor of Bannon’s media empire through his ads for MyPillow, told BI in a recent interview that Bannon never asked him for money to complete the purported documentary.

“I’ve never heard about it in my life,” he said, before launching into a digression about Dominion Voting Systems.

It’s also not clear whether Bannon sought money from Guo Wengui, a Chinese business tycoon who is said to be a billionaire and who was a member of Mar-a-Lago. Guo — who also uses the names Ho Wan Kwok and Miles Guo — served as a financial backer of Bannon, allowing the right-wing firebrand to live on his yacht and promoting Bannon’s various media projects to his social-media audience of Chinese dissidents. Evidence in Guo’s criminal fraud case in Manhattan shows Guo told his followers to watch some of Bannon’s other documentaries, but no discussion of Epstein appears in the records.

A representative for Leon Black, the former CEO of Apollo Global Management who maintained a relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, told BI that Bannon never asked for money from Black, adding that Bannon did not have a camera during the one occasion when Black and others met with Bannon in Epstein’s home. The representative said that the meeting took place shortly after the strategist left the White House and that the group discussed politics.

David Bossie, the president of the right-wing advocacy group Citizens United, who produced other Bannon media projects around this period, didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Though the footage would offer a window into the final months of Epstein’s life, it doesn’t appear to have been subpoenaed for any legal cases involving him or his estate.

Bobbi Sternheim, an attorney for Ghislaine Maxwell, said federal prosecutors didn’t subpoena the footage for Maxwell’s trial, which was part of the same criminal investigation into Epstein.

Gloria Allred and Arick Fudali, two other attorneys who each represent numerous Epstein victims, also each said they were not aware of the footage being subpoenaed in any case. An attorney representing Epstein’s estate executors didn’t respond to a request for comment. David Schoen, an attorney who represented both Bannon and Epstein, told BI in an email that he didn’t know anything about the footage.

Brad Edwards, an attorney who represents dozens of Epstein’s accusers in numerous lawsuits, said the footage hadn’t been a part of any of his cases — yet.

“To my knowledge nobody has served a subpoena on Bannon for them, but I see no reason why not,” he told BI in an email.

However, he wrote, “there are a couple pending cases now where those tapes will likely be subpoenaed.”

Bannon planned to rehabilitate Epstein’s reputation

The New York Post story featuring the purported trailer was cowritten by Emma-Jo Morris, who also worked with Bannon to disseminate the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Morris told BI she hadn’t seen any of Bannon’s other Epstein footage and didn’t know what happened to the project.

Bannon’s time in Epstein’s orbit was recounted in the book “Too Famous,” published in October 2021 by Michael Wolff, who heavily relied on Bannon as a source for his books about Trump’s White House.

In a section titled “Monster,” Wolff wrote that Bannon sought to change the public perception of Epstein.

Bannon believed Epstein needed a public-facing communications strategy in response to Julie K. Brown’s “Perversion of Justice” series in the Miami Herald. Brown reported Alexander Acosta, who, as a US attorney in Florida in the 2000s, oversaw a criminal investigation into the financier, arranged a light plea deal even though law-enforcement agents were aware that Epstein had abused dozens of girls. Acosta resigned from his position as labor secretary in the Trump administration following the publication of the series.

Wolff’s book says that in a March 2019 conference call, Bannon, Epstein, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and Epstein’s defense attorney Reid Weingarten discussed whether Epstein should give a primetime TV interview. They floated the idea of going on CBS’s “60 Minutes” or interviewing with Rachel Maddow or Gayle King, Wolff reported.

At one point, Wolff wrote, Epstein “made the gesture of the noose above his head” to express his distaste at the idea of being interviewed by King.

According to the book, Bannon said that recording videos would help Epstein prepare for an interview that would convince the world “he’s not a monster.”

“He’s got to sit there and watch the tape all the time, that’s how you learn,” Bannon said, according to Wolff. “This is like preparing for a deposition, except this is preparing for the court of public opinion.”

Wolff’s book includes long excerpts of conversations between Epstein and Bannon, as well as descriptions of Epstein’s activities during the time he was close with Bannon. The book does not disclose whether Wolff viewed Bannon’s footage.

Quotes in the book suggest that during sit-down interviews with Bannon, Epstein created an air of mystery: He was evasive about his interactions with girls, declined to name the wealthy people he advised on financial issues, and said he’d “escorted” Princess Diana “on occasion.”

Bannon also said he believed Epstein was an “intelligence asset,” though it doesn’t describe any evidence he offered to support the claim.

Bannon, who was the chairman of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, believed Epstein knew “dangerous secrets about Trump,” Wolff wrote.

“You were the only person I was afraid of during the campaign,” Bannon told Epstein, according to Wolff’s book.

Wolff wrote that Epstein said Trump “regaled him with the torrid details” of his sexual encounter with E. Jean Carroll in Bergdorf Goodman in the mid-1990s. A civil jury last year found Trump liable for sexually abusing Carroll in the Manhattan department store and defaming her by lying about it.

Wolff wrote that Bannon also appeared skeptical of Epstein’s many stories.

“Come on, dude. This is a stinking fish.” Bannon told his camera operator, according to Wolff.

“God, it’s all such bullshit. Nothing makes any sense in this story,” he reportedly said. “Which is what makes it so fucking compelling.”

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