Support our mission to provide fearless stories about and outside the media system

Packed with exclusive investigations, analysis, and features

SUBSCRIBE TODAY

Jeffrey Epstein - long portrayed by the Republican right as part of a deep state liberal conspiracy - was providing strategic, financial and media support to the very heart of Trump's MAGA movement, working directly with Steve Bannon on political planning in Europe and US campaign messaging from 2018 to 2019. The payoff would be a movement that neutralised the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment in the workplace.

For years, Bannon - the architect of MAGA, Trump's first campaign manager and former White House chief strategist - has used his War Room podcast to promote QAnon conspiracy theories about the Democrat Party as a cabal of child molesters.

He once described QAnon as "the elephant in the room"; had Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on his show calling Democrats "the party of paedophiles"; and urged listeners to call their senators and oppose the confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson by relaying "your unexpurgated opinion on what you think of Judge Jackson in this area of child torture, child rape, baby torture, and baby rape."

Yet the new emails released by the House Oversight Committee, reviewed by Byline Times reveal that in contrast, Steve Bannon had worked closely with Jeffrey Epstein, an American financier and convicted sex offender accused of operating a vast international sex trafficking ring involving underage girls.

Jeffrey Epstein's Russian 'Tech Maidens'

As the scandal around the release of the Epstein Files continues to follow Donald Trump, Peter Jukes investigates the late sex offender's ties to Vladimir Putin-linked individuals with a curious career trajectory

Peter Jukes

Resisting #MeToo

Epstein offered potential financial support to Bannon through opaque cryptocurrency schemes designed to evade regulatory scrutiny, along with extensive political networks, strategic planning and routes to European leaders - not to mention advice on pro-Trump video campaign materials.

In return, Bannon offered Epstein something irresistible: to build a right-wing MAGA coalition that would "stave off" the global movement against sexual harassment for more than a decade.

Earlier this year, Steve Bannon repeatedly claimed that the convicted child sex offender was operating as part of a deep state anti-Trump conspiracy. "In that arc of looking at how the deep state has tried to stop Trump and the MAGA movement, you can easily fit in," Bannon told a crowd at a Turning Point US conference in July.

"Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things," he said. "Not just individuals, but also institutions. Intelligence institutions, foreign governments, and who was working with him on our intelligence apparatus and in our government."

However, newly released emails now show Jeffrey Epstein acting as an intimate political fixer for Steve Bannon himself between 2018 and 2019.

Over this period, Epstein arranged access to world leaders for Bannon, proposing opaque crypto-based funding structures, drafting contact lists for the MAGA architect, and even offering the President of the UN General Assembly to guide Bannon's "EU project."

In return, Bannon fed Epstein ideological strategy, media plans and internal Republican thinking - at one point spelling out a right-wing coalition to "stave off Time's Up for next decade plus".

The correspondence also shows Epstein helping to shape Bannon's public image. In one message, he tells journalist Michael Wolff that if Republicans held the House in 2018, "Steve would deserve most of the credit", while Bannon privately reassured Epstein during renewed scrutiny that "there is a crazed jihad against u".

The emails reveal a political partnership across these two years in which MAGA's architect worked hand-in-hand with a convicted sex offender - contradicting everything Bannon has since claimed about Epstein and...