The first time I encountered Steve Bannon was at a Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. in the early 2010s. He was hosting a seminar for aspiring conservative filmmakers, and in my memory, he was just a shaggy guy in a tiny airless conference room in the basement of the Marriott, bitterly complaining about Hollywood liberals.

Had Bannon made it as an auteur in L.A. we might be living in a different world. He certainly never got over the resentment, nor relinquished the dream: He was producing a Jeffrey Epstein documentary starring the man himself when the feds picked up Jeff at Teterboro Airport in 2019.

We know more about all this since the Republicans in the House Oversight Committee, seeking to dilute the impact of three carefully selected, eyebrow-raising Epstein texts about Trump, released some 20,000 pages of documents. It was a panic move that has backfired, as it only added to the DIY conspiracy hunting frenzy. Journalists and couch Miss Marples and Inspector Clouseaus have now produced thousands of articles, podcast discussions, and social media posts — not just Trump-Epstein, but the elite coterie that found Epstein charming and useful in ways we are still trying to understand.

The document dump (from a cache acquired from the Epstein estate, not the DOJ) is so vast and the print so small that it is impossible for your Freakshow guide to convey all the insane revelations. We have to focus on one: let’s call it the Jeff and Steve Show.

Oh, they were buddies. Steve called Jeff “brother” and “grasshopper” – a reference to the faithful pupil in the early 70s TV series Kung Fu. Jeff critiqued Steve’s media appearances, comparing his TV look at one point to the priest in The Exorcist.

More importantly, he shared his global contacts and arranged travel and meetings. For example, in 2018, Epstein arranged for him to fly to meet two Qatari sheiks in Paris, including former Prime Minister Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani (HBJ), a billionaire member of the royal family.

”Short notice for jet charter,” Jeff texted Steve in November 2018. “But can for tomorrow morning to Paris lunch in Paris then fly you to wherever”. Bannon replied, “What a life.” and “u r a pretty good asst.” Epstein responded, “Massages. Not included”.

Epstein made countless connections, from Yemen to Norway. He tried to get Bannon a meeting with Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz, apparently hoping Kurz could help arrange a Putin-Trump meeting. Before another meeting he helped arrange in Abu Dhabi, he gave advice about security: “Tomorrow meeting powerful. Reminder. Phones not secure AT ALL. Wait until you return for downloads.”

In exchange for all that international networking, Steve kept Jeff in the loop on DC action, including the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Trump-Russia investigation. After testifying himself, Steve reported to his pal that the committee was asking everyone about “50 names” – “25 Russian and 25 American” – and that Epstein and Leon Black were numbers three and four on the American side.

Jeff asked whether the committee was also interested in Trump’s casino executive Nick Ribis and Manhattan magnate Tom Barrack (whom Michael Wolff has named as one of the “three musketeers” with Trump and Epstein cutting a feral swath through the New York aspiring model scene in the 90s). Steve said no, but added that the committee did ask about the Epstein-Trump relationship.

“Did they ask you if i had the silver bullet,” Jeff replied.

Lots of “locker room talk” about women of course. “How was Paris fashion week,” Steve inquired in Spring 2018. “There’s nothing left in my testicles but a speck of dust .. and a puff of air,” Jeff replied. “Im putting up a poster of you in my apartment,” Steve wrote back.

Steve titled one missive about his visits with Gulf sheiks “eurabia” and Jeff replied, “more like your labia” adding “they are so like women” – “the worst aspects of women.” They joked about “ugly” Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis – one of Steve’s allies in promoting continental white nationalism – “do you think when she wakes up in the morning she looks a little like Donald?” Epstein wrote. Steve described one of his European female interviewers as “wet,” perhaps convinced that the seductive power of his new Bernard Henri-Levi hairdo was multiplied by orders of magnitude on the other side of the Atlantic.

While nothing in the texts suggests Bannon was indulging in the statutorily forbidden pastimes of other Epstein pals, Jeff did repeatedly offer him a trysting place with a mysterious girlfriend named Miller. “If you and a ‘ms Miller’ ‘want some privacy you can use island. Or palm beach house. Anytime”. Steve replied, “Thanks brother”.

Most of the texts date to the period when Bannon was out of the Trump White House. Taking his MAGA show global, he had grown out his hair into a BHL coif and was presenting as a white nationalist philosophe. As Steve hit the fleshpots of Europe, Jeff kept in close touch, watching his pal’s media appearances and offering advice. After a speech at Oxford, Epstein observed that he “hit all the points” but “btw your close in [sic] protection guy needs tweaking. Spends too much time looking at his phone.”

Male and female Trumpland oafs are obsessed with what Ivanka Trump called “optics” – the sine qua non of the reality show family. Epstein, a registered sex predator, was aware that he posed the greatest optics challenge in modern history.

Steve, apparently, was the man to enter that Augean stable.

The correspondence between the men reveals that they were planning a documentary project for which they needed to acquire “govt approval for casting.” Epstein’s networking power was being curtailed by Miami Herald writer Julie K Brown’s series about his Palm Beach wrist slap and the soon-to-be-public heinous depositions about him in Virginia Giuffre’s defamation suit against Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein was in a panic, insisting the girls were “not 15, not 16” and were “prostitutes.”

Bannon suggested he establish “THE major center for human trafficking; teenage prostitution; etc etc etc; global problem” to which Epstein replied, “The pr guys think that may be seen to be an attempt to buy my way out. What the party of Davos would do.”

Steve wanted money – of course – and Jeff was keen to keep that confidential. The plan was to set the film up to look like legal services or training. The two men were still hashing out the financial details a few months before Epstein’s arrest. In one text, Jeff writes, “we need to talk about Kovel - letter and black bag” (a Kovel agreement cloaks a contract in confidentiality and attorney-client privilege).

“Can we make this deal today so I can pull my crew off other stuff they are working on and get this thing done - Burning daylight,” wrote Steve, to which Jeff replied in his unpunctuated fashion: “YEs do you have a lawyer . ? we need to document past and future, all needs surgical care.”

Bannon responded, “But we are in terms agreed???”

The texts don’t seem to reveal a dollar figure for the film deal. A month before he was arrested, Epstein ordered his lawyer Darren Indyke (now of counsel with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s top advisor Tim Parlatore, as we revealed in The Plumbers of Epsteingate) to fork over $100,000 so that Bannon wouldn’t be flying his crew around out of pocket.

The documentary moved ahead. A trailer for the film, with the producer label “Bannoncam,” is still on Youtube. Epstein is decked in avuncular mufti – peering from behind reading glasses, with whitened hair and beard (the men had discussed the preferred beard length in texts). Jeff sits in a chair across from Steve, who sternly scolds him over his predatory predilections, which the texts make clear didn’t bother them too much. The lighting is dark, the color scheme woody and royal. Things were looking up. Jeff reported that a public legal response to the new allegations against him was coming soon. Bannon rejoiced: “Epic. Epic. Epic.”

But that’s as far as the sanitation project got. (Bannon reportedly has at least 15 hours of Epstein video footage that House Democrats and Epstein’s brother Mark want to see.)

The last message Jeff sent Steve was on a sunny Saturday afternoon, July 6, 2019. His private jet had landed at Teterboro for what would be the last of more than 700 flights in and out since 2013. The feds were waiting on the tarmac.

At 4:32 pm New Jersey time, Jeff shot off a final message: “All cancelled."

Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow