One of the leading figures behind President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement discussed opposition strategies against Pope Francis with disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser to Trump, told Epstein that he wished to “take down” the leader of the Catholic Church.
In June 2019, Bannon wrote to Epstein: “Will take down Francis. The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother.”
This exchange came years after Epstein served a light sentence for his 2008 conviction for child sex offenses in Florida, and just days before Epstein was arrested on federal sex trafficking charges in New York.
The exchange was first reported by the Letters from Leo Substack.
In the text exchange, Bannon references the book In the Closet of the Vatican, which exposed much of the secrecy and hypocrisy at the highest levels of the Catholic Church.
The book created much controversy as the author, French journalist Frédéric Martel, asserted that more than 80 percent of the clergy at the Vatican are gay.
Another text exchange from April 2019 shows Epstein emailing himself “in the closet of the vatican.” He then sent Bannon an article titled “Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose.”
Bannon responded: “Easy choice.”
It remains unclear how serious Bannon was about his proposal to “take out” the leader of the Catholic Church. Epstein, for his part, did not directly respond to Bannon’s threat and instead asked him an unrelated question about the famous professor Noam Chomsky.
Rome and the Vatican were once a very important priority for Bannon. In 2014, the former Trump adviser established a Rome bureau while he was running the right-wing outlet Breitbart News. He also wanted to set up a “gladiator school” for Judeo-Christian political training near the city. Those plans were blocked by the Italian government in 2021; Bannon reportedly was furious.
The Daily Beast reached out to a representative of Bannon for comment.
Bannon has been all over the DOJ’s latest tranche of Epstein files released earlier this month. Between mirror selfies and lewd text messages the pair exchanged regarding one of Trump’s assistants, more details about their relationship have been uncovered.
These particular exchanges between Bannon and Epstein were made during a period of heightened scrutiny on the Catholic Church as sexual abuse scandals plagued the Vatican.
Pope Francis’s worldview was also oftentimes at odds with the Trump administration’s agenda, as the pontiff advocated for migrants and was a strong critic of nationalism.
“A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said of Trump in 2016.
Francis’s predecessor, the American Pope Leo, has taken up the mantle of criticizing the president during his second administration.
