Who stands out for his endeavour to stimulate right wing sentiment to break democracy in Europe?
Epstein files shed light on Steve Bannon’s efforts to influence European politics
Donald Trump’s former adviser told Epstein in 2019 he was ‘focused on raising money for Le Pen and Salvini’ before European elections
Donald Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon with Jeffrey Epstein. Photograph: House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Angela Giuffrida in Rome
Deborah Cole in Berlin
Angelique Chrisafis in Paris
Thu Feb 05 2026
Dozens of messages contained in the latest tranche of Epstein files lay bare the attempts by Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon to tap Jeffrey Epstein for support and funding to bolster European far-right parties.
The messages mostly date from 2018 and 2019, when Bannon, after being sacked by Trump, regularly visited Europe in his quest to forge a movement in the European Parliament uniting ultra-right wing and Eurosceptic forces from several countries including Italy, Germany, France, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and Austria.
Bannon especially set his sights on Matteo Salvini, the Italian deputy prime minister and leader of the far-right League party, who at the time was at the height of his political power. Italian opposition parties this week urged Salvini to clarify whether Epstein influenced the rise of the League after Salvini’s name was cited several times in messages exchanged between Bannon and Epstein.
In France, the left-wing party La France Insoumise also called for a cross-party parliament inquiry after several French figures, including Jack Lang, a former minister for culture, and his daughter appeared in the latest Epstein trove, as did exchanges between Epstein and Bannon in which Bannon spoke of his desire to raise money for the far-right leader Marine Le Pen.
Italian deputy prime minister Matteo Salvini was at the height of his political power when Steve Bannon especially set his sights on him. Photograph: Gabriel Bouys/AFP/Getty Images
In Germany, the files revealed exchanges between Epstein and Bannon promoting Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) while denigrating the then German chancellor, Angela Merkel.
In texts from 2018, Bannon bragged about his influence as an “adviser” to the new right-wing populists and saw the parties’ gains in Europe as a chance to use them to his and Epstein’s benefit.
There is no evidence of any direct relations between Salvini and Epstein, nor any suggestion that Salvini was involved in Epstein’s sex-trafficking network. But what the messages do reveal is Epstein’s interest in European nationalists.
In a message contained in one of the files and dated March 5th, 2019, a couple of months before the European parliamentary elections, Bannon writes that he is “focused on raising money for Le Pen and Salvini so they can actually run full slates”.
Other messages detail Bannon’s travels in Europe at the time and his ambition for increased nationalist power in Brussels, as highlighted in a flurry of exchanges between the pair at the time of the European Parliament ballot in late May 2019.
The messages also refer to Bannon’s meeting with Salvini in Milan in March 2018, just a few days after Italian general elections that culminated in the League forming a government with the populist Five Star Movement (MS5).
Bannon met Salvini again in Italy in September that year when the League joined his anti-EU organisation The Movement. By the following summer, Salvini was in opposition after collapsing the League’s coalition with M5S in a failed attempt to trigger early elections.
There is no evidence that Epstein financed the League, which returned to government in 2022 as an ally in Giorgia Meloni’s ruling coalition, and other European far-right parties. However, it does appear that Bannon tried to tap him for funds.
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In France, Lang, who currently heads Institut du Monde Arabe, a cultural organisation, features in emails discussing meetings and holidays. He admitted knowing Epstein, saying it was “at a time when nothing suggested Jeffrey Epstein was at the heart of a network of criminality”.
His daughter Caroline, a film producer, resigned this week from France’s Union of Independent Producers after the emails showed she had founded an offshore company with Epstein in 2016 to invest in the work of young artists. There was no suggestion of illegality. She said she had resigned from the company when Epstein’s criminal acts were revealed.
The emails also showed extensive communications between Epstein and Olivier Colom, a former diplomatic adviser to the former president Nicolas Sarkozy. One email exchange with Colom in 2018 suggested that the former minister for finance Bruno Le Maire had gone to Epstein’s house in New York at an unspecified date. A person close to Le Maire told Politico that Le Maire had not known whose house he was visiting in September 2013, before he was minister for finance, and quickly left when he saw Epstein at the residence, never seeing him again.
Casu said the issue was not Epstein’s files per se, “because he is dead”, but the questions the messages raise about powerful foreign influences and the networks aimed at weakening Europe.
“These files are getting a lot of attention in the US, as is obvious,” he said. “But in my opinion, they should be given just as much attention for what they represent for Europe today, and for the political situation in which we are in.”
Published date: 2 February 2026 16:09 GMT|Last update: 7 months 6 days ago
Former Donald Trump strategist Steve Bannon boasted he had become an adviser to right-wing British politician Nigel Farage in a message to disgraced child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in March 2018.
This comes as an image has surfaced of Bannon posing for a photo in January 2025 with a smiling Matt Goodwin, the candidate for Farage’s Reform UK in the crucial Gorton and Denton by-election this month.
Newly released files show Epstein and Bannon messaging each other on 10 March 2018, arranging to meet in Paris.
That day, Bannon gave a speech to France’s far-right Front National party, telling the event that “history is on our side and will bring us victory”.
Bannon said: “You are part of a movement that is bigger than that in Italy, bigger than in Poland, bigger than in Hungary.”
“I also attended Nigel Farage’s ‘Stars and Stripes’ party at the Hay Adams Hotel, which was absolutely packed with countless American and British politicians and donors, offering a sharp contrast between Nigel Farage’s visible and growing influence in Washington and Keir Starmer who was nowhere to be seen in Washington.”
Goodwin added that “one of my most interesting discussions was at another party, hosted by Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former (and no doubt ongoing) consiglieri”.
He posted a photo of himself shaking hands with Bannon.
Bannon told him that the Conservative party was “finished”, Goodwin said.
He added that Bannon believed Reform “look much better placed to pick up and run with the ongoing realignment of British politics —to drive home the same kind of rebellion that America is witnessing today”.
Die “Epstein Files” werfen neues Licht auf alte Kontakte: Steve Bannon suchte offenbar gezielt die Nähe zur AfD, traf Parteispitze und plante Netzwerke für Europas Rechte.
Die sogenannten “Epstein Files” könnten für die AfD zum Problem werden. In den vergangenen Wochen hat das US-Justizministerium weitere Dokumente aus den Ermittlungen rund um den 2019 verstorbenen Jeffrey Epstein veröffentlicht.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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