Look who was cavorting with Epstein long after he was first convicted in 2008:
Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon are all named in copies of Jeffrey Epstein‘s daily schedules released Friday by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.
The schedules make reference to Musk possibly flying to an “island” in 2014, and Thiel and Bannon apparently dining with Epstein as recently as 2017 and 2019, respectively.
Musk went to the island? How interesting. Can’t say I’m surprised though. He probably saw an opportunity to spread his valuable seed to some young, fertile, females.
We knew about Bannon, of course, although nobody on the right seems to care:
As recently as 2019 — as mounting press coverage and renewed investigations were closing in before his arrest at Teterboro Airport on sex trafficking charges, as most everyone else in Jeffrey Epstein‘s orbit had already shunned the 66-year-old — Bannon was still standing by his man. The rumpled former Trump aide reportedly advised Epstein from the shadows, joined strategy calls, and ultimately helped stage a behind-the-scenes media makeover, arranging a series of videotaped sessions at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in which Bannon served as his interlocutor.
The setup looked like a documentary shoot — a small crew, professional lighting, with Bannon lobbing tough, prosecutorial questions from off-camera. They were a kind of debate-prep, seemingly designed to get Epstein ready for an image-changing sit-down interview with a news outlet like 60 Minutes, with Bannon playing the part of Mike Wallace. But Epstein, The Hollywood Reporter has learned, may have footed the bill for it all, throwing ownership of the footage into question.
The interview never took place — some PR rehabs are just too daunting — but for months now, Bannon has been publicly promoting that footage of his erstwhile friend — 12 to 15 hours, by his own count — as the foundation of a planned docuseries, working title The Monster. He’s been pitching it as journalism, a raw look inside Epstein’s pathology. In fact, though, those tapings seem to have been far from journalistic.
According to author Michael Wolff, who was there for the first taping and reviewed transcripts of others — and who first revealed the existence of these tapes in his 2021 book Too Famous — the point wasn’t exposure. It was spin. “There’s no question the tapes were media training,” he tells THR. “And there’s no possible way Epstein would have signed off on them being used in a documentary.”
That context — his alleged financial arrangement with Epstein, the coaching role he played, the purpose of the tapings — has been conspicuously absent from Bannon’s own public commentary about the Epstein scandal over the past few months. The onetime Trump advisor has been among the most vociferous critics of Epstein and has loudly denounced the administration for its refusal to release the Epstein files.
[…]
Bannon, who did not reply to repeated calls and emails, has in the past denied Wolff’s account and reports of his friendship with Epstein. But over the past five years he’s been considerably more hazy about the release of the Epstein tapes, waving off any inquiries about their whereabouts. Then, last February, he appeared on The Jimmy Dore Show and finally spoke about the footage, claiming he was producing a documentary series around them — “maybe for Netflix” or another streamer. “He’s a product of the elite,” Bannon said of Epstein, “and everything that’s been put out about him is not exactly the truth.”
To Wolff, who knew both Bannon and Epstein well, Bannon’s recent attacks on Epstein belies the cozy nature of their relationship. He claims the two men were good friends, meeting sometime around 2017, shortly after Bannon’s forced exit from the Trump White House, and remained close right until his death in August of 2019. During those years, Wolff claims, Bannon was a frequent visitor to both Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse and his Paris apartment, and the two exchanged calls and emails almost every day. Their affinity was not altogether surprising: The two men shared a Wall Street background, a taste for the high life and a complicated relationship with Donald Trump — both were close to the president before being iced out. (Bannon’s break with Trump came soon after the publication of Wolff’s bestselling Trump exposé Fire and Fury, for which he was widely rumored to be a major source.)
In fact, it wasn’t until years after Epstein’s alleged prison-cell suicide that Bannon publicly changed his tune on Epstein.
Of course Bannon was an Epstein bud. He’s drawn to money and power like a horsefly to horse dung. Maybe he doesn’t have the rights to the footage but if so the Epstein estate does and they are subject to subpoena. If Bannon has it and hasn’t released it his MAGA followers should really wonder why.