When Steve Bannon wanted dirt on Donald Trump, biographer Michael Wolff says he knew where to send him: Jeffrey Epstein.
"I introduced Steve Bannon to Jeffrey Epstein," the "Fire and Fury" author wrote in the latest installment of his paid Substack series, The Epstein Diaries, describing a late-2017 meeting that came months after Bannon was forced out of the White House and as Wolff was finishing the book that would roil the administration that January.
Wolff has said he holds roughly 100 hours of taped interviews with Epstein and has publicly urged lawmakers to subpoena Bannon, calling him the person who knows the Trump-Epstein story "from the horse's mouth."
Bannon, Wolff wrote, arrived with obsessions of money and a hatred of Trump. Having lost his billionaire Mercer family backing, Bannon was hunting for a new patron, and Wolff says Epstein's cash "might be as good as anybody's."
But the deeper draw, by Wolff's telling, was the leverage.
"But more compelling was the second: Bannon had a keen sense of Epstein's long involvement with Trump and the dirt he had on him," Wolff wrote. "During the campaign, Bannon had been aware of, and had helped to successfully squelch, a 60 Minutes investigation, spearheaded by the producer Ira Rosen, on the Epstein-Trump relationship."
Epstein was also eager to connect, Wolff claimed. The financier collected anyone with high-level government ties, and "anyone who hated Donald Trump was doubly of interest."
The Bannon-Epstein relationship has drawn fresh scrutiny. House Oversight Democrats released a photo of the two men from Epstein's estate in December, part of a trove that has renewed questions for many figures in Epstein's orbit.
Trump and Bannon have blasted Wolff's credibility for years, branding him an unreliable narrator since "Fire and Fury."