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Norms Impact

Steve Bannon courted Epstein in his efforts to ‘take down’ Pope Francis | CNN

A former White House adviser privately enlisted a convicted sex offender to help “take down” a sitting pope—normalizing political warfare through unaccountable, coercive networks beyond public oversight.

Executive

Feb 14, 2026

Sources

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/14/world/bannon-epstein-take-down-pope-francis-latam-intl

Summary

Newly released US Department of Justice files show Steve Bannon exchanged messages with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2019 about strategies to “take down” Pope Francis. A former senior White House adviser is shown courting a criminal financier as a political collaborator while pursuing transnational influence campaigns against a major religious institution. The practical consequence is a clearer picture of how power networks can attempt to weaponize faith, media projects, and donor-style backing to pressure institutions outside democratic accountability.

Reality Check

This conduct points to a corrosive precedent: influential political operatives treating institutions of conscience as targets and seeking leverage through private, unaccountable intermediaries, weakening the safeguards that protect our civic life from clandestine power plays. On the facts provided, the messaging itself is not clearly a federal crime; it reads as political scheming and reputational warfare rather than an identifiable statutory offense like conspiracy (18 U.S.C. § 371) tied to an unlawful objective. The democratic harm is still acute: courting a convicted sex offender as a strategic partner signals a willingness to subordinate basic governance ethics to raw influence operations, the exact pathway by which our institutions become instruments instead of checks.

Detail

Newly released files from the US Department of Justice include 2019 messages between Steve Bannon, a former White House adviser to President Donald Trump, and Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted sex offender. In the messages, Bannon discussed opposition strategies involving Pope Francis and wrote in June 2019, “Will take down (Pope) Francis,” adding “The Clintons, Xi, Francis, EU – come on brother.”

The documents indicate Bannon continued messaging Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction and shortly before Epstein’s later arrest on sex trafficking charges. The files also show Bannon referencing Frédéric Martel’s 2019 book “In the Closet of the Vatican” and appearing to propose Epstein as an executive producer for a film adaptation, writing, “You are now exec producer of ‘ITCOTV.’”

Epstein had emailed himself the book on April 1, 2019, and later sent Bannon an article titled “Pope Francis or Steve Bannon? Catholics must choose,” to which Bannon replied “easy choice.”