Jeffrey Epstein’s brother on Friday called on Steve Bannon, a former senior adviser to President Donald Trump, to release hours of video footage shot years ago with the now-dead sex offender.
“Let me see the videotapes,” Mark Epstein told NBC News. “He’s my brother.”
Bannon spent 15 hours interviewing Epstein in 2019 for what he described as a documentary. The footage for the documentary, which was never released, was shot shortly before Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial as a convicted sex offender in what authorities ruled as a suicide. The recordings reportedly included conversations between the two men giving details about Jeffrey Epstein’s relationship with Trump. Speculation mounted after the documentary footage was taken that Bannon had grown friendly with Jeffrey Epstein and was trying to help him out “with his public-relations problems.”
Mark Epstein said that he met up with Bannon shortly after his brother’s death in either 2019 or 2020.
“He told me he has like 15 or 16 hours of videotape of Jeff. He was trying to help Jeff rehabilitate his reputation,” Mark Epstein said of Bannon.
Mark’s comments come as the White House is embroiled in a deluge of criticism over its handling of the government’s files on the Epstein case. Trump promised to get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein by releasing all the files. But he has since said that Democrats planted “hoaxes” that lists of prominent clients Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed ever existed after the Justice Department and FBI released a joint memo denying the existence of a “client list” and stating that the New Yorker financier definitively died by suicide. Trump was one of the many notable figures befriended by Jeffrey Epstein in his heyday during the 1980s, 90s, and early 2000s, among the likes of the Clintons, Harvard mathematician and biologist Martin Nowak, Nobel laureates, including physicist Stephen Hawking, and Prince Andrew.
Bannon promised earlier this month to release at least part of the footage in “early” 2026. Bannon also revealed footage will focus on Jeffrey Epstein’s possible connections to the intelligence community, which could foment allegations that the financier image that he built in New York was a front he built as a government agent in order to build a web of connections to powerful leaders, including in the scientific, political, and intellectual communities.
“You’re going to have to name names, and you’re going to have to understand how the elites of the world but also the intelligence services are inextricably linked in the Epstein story,” Bannon said. “That’s the key.”
William Burns, director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2021-2025, had three meetings scheduled with Epstein in 2014, when he was then-President Barack Obama’s deputy secretary of state, according to a 2023 Wall Street Journal investigation. Kathryn Ruemmler, a White House counsel under former President Barack Obama, had dozens of meetings with Epstein in the years after her White House service, the outlet found.
Those accusing Jeffrey Epstein of being involved in a type of deep-state effort on behalf of the intelligence community, possibly in the United States’ CIA or Israel’s Mossad agency, range from right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson, to Virginia Giuffre, said to be one of Epstein’s a sex-trafficking victims that he pawned off to Great Britian’s Prince Andrew for sex. Israel has vigorously denied such claims.
Bannon and other people who have scrutinized whether Jeffrey Epstein held ties to intelligence agencies, including, most recently, notable mathematician Eric Weinstein, have speculated that while the convicted sex offender’s reputation as a pedophile was valid, it represented only one layer of a complicated past.
During an interview on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO podcast earlier this week, Weinstein, who has conducted groundbreaking scientific research into the theory of gravity, suggested that Epstein was a “construct” of intelligence networks interested in scientific development, among a host of other priorities, following reporting, including from the New York Times, that he was unusually interested in the arena.
“Jeffrey Epstein was a construct of something that was running multiple things. One of those things was science. And I don’t think that the science and the pedophilia were necessarily in the same bucket. He was funding all sorts of people,” Weinstein said. “I met him once, but it was enough to know, ‘Holy cow, the Harvard Math Department can’t be what I think it is.’ Why was he there?”
“He wasn’t a financier the day I met him. He was a weird guy who didn’t seem to know a lot about currency trading, claiming to run a multi-billion dollar FX hedge fund,” Weinstein continued. “Epstein knew a tremendous amount about my work when nobody knew anything about my work. And he had a pipeline into me that I didn’t understand, which is that he was connected to my graduate program…I desperately want to know why Jeffrey Epstein knew so much about my work.”
Jeffrey Epstein was known as an enormously wealthy New York financier before his fall from power in 2008, when he was charged with sex crimes.
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Questions have floated for years about the exact details surrounding his financial business and who his clients were, with media accounts in the early 2000s, years before he catapulted into the national consciousness, painting him as a highly-regarded “international moneyman of mystery.”
“It’s like looking at the Wizard of Oz – there may be less there than meets the eye,” a prominent investor told New York Magazine in 2002.