Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is laying some serious shade on his former boss while speaking with Michael Wolff who’s authoring a book entitled “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”.
During that sit down which was revealed by The Guardian, Bannon comments on that now infamous 2016 Trump Tower meeting between high level officials of the Donald Trump Campaign including former campaign chair Paul Manafort, current senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner, Trump’s oldest son Donald Trump Jr. and Russians who promised dirt on Hillary Clinton.
Bannon (who eventually took over the campaign from Manafort) referred to the meeting as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” while also mocking the three high level officials in Manafort, Kushner and Don Jr. for actually believing it was a good idea to have a closed door meeting at Trump Tower with no lawyers present.
The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers.
“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.
Bannon added: “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to … But that’s the brain trust that they had.”
Bannon however wasn’t finished taking jabs at some of his former colleagues and commenting on the Robert Mueller investigation into the Campaign. Bannon, who returned to his top spot at Breitbart in the immediate wake of leaving the White House last year said that “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV”, believes the Mueller investigation is mostly centered on money laundering and that further trouble for the Kushner family is on the horizon.
The New York Times reported that federal investigators had subpoenaed records from Deutsche Bank in relation to Kushner family business relations.
Via Politico:
“It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner s—. The Kushner s— is greasy. They’re going to go right through that. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me,” Bannon said. The former White House chief strategist, who left the administration over the summer and returned to his role as the head of the alt-right publication Breitbart, characterized the White House’s response to the ongoing investigation as “sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.”
Whatever you think of Bannon these latest revelations from the former Trump White House official is pretty significant when you consider the blow back from a number of Trump supporters both in government and outside of it when it comes to the Russian investigation. Instead of being a detractor himself from the Mueller investigation, Bannon certainly seems to side with favoring the continuation of it rather than trying to undermine Mueller and his staff.
To be a fly on the wall when it comes to that next Trump/Bannon phone call. If there is even a phone call between the two.
