Steve Bannon assured the convicted sex offender that he was coming across great.

“You’re engaging, you’re not threatening, you’re natural, you’re friendly,” the far-right provocateur told the 66-year-old financier Jeffrey Epstein. “[Y]ou don’t look at all creepy, you’re a sympathetic figure.”

That exchange took place in 2019, the same year Epstein died by suicide on Rikers Island. When it was exposed, Bannon admitted to recording more than 15 hours of footage with Epstein for what he claimed was a documentary that he never previously announced. The former adviser to Donald Trump said his intent was not what it appeared to be — prepping Epstein for a series of interviews following an expected arrest for human trafficking — but rather exposing his interview subject.

Epstein’s “perversions and depravity toward young women were part of a life that was systematically supported, encouraged and rewarded by a global establishment that dined off his money and influence,” Bannon told The New York Times.

Bannon never released that documentary. A complicating factor, perhaps, is that Bannon's former boss was himself a part of the elite circle around Epstein, one who now stands accused of assaulting a woman who the deceased sex offender delivered to him at Trump Tower as part of an allegedly "twisted........

© Salon