At one time, it appeared Steve Bannon could do no wrong in the eyes of President Trump and his supporters. But today, Bannon is forced to leave the MAGA movement in shame over his involvement with Michael Wolff’s new book about the Trump administration, Fire and Fury.
Many Republicans have been silent on the subject of Bannon’s recent attacks on the president. These attacks are revealed in a number of excerpts from Wolff’s book, which the author described in an interview in the first week of January.
First, he made mention of the meeting in Trump Tower quoting Bannon as saying, “They are going to crack Don Junior like an egg. The meeting should have taken place at a Holiday Inn with lawyers…the information could be dumped to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication.”
This explains Bannon’s sudden move to leave his flagship publication behind. But, he goes on to disparage the conservative news publisher further saying, “You never see it, you never know it, because you don’t need to… But that’s the brain trust that they had.”
In the interview, Wolff said Bannon believes it was a mistake for Trump to fire the former FBI director James Comey. He quotes Bannon as having said, “All of this is about money laundering. Mueller chose Andrew Weissmann and Weissmann is a money laundering guy. Their path to screwing Trump goes straight through Paul Manafort, Don Jr, and Jared Kushner … it’s as plain as the nose on your face.”
His accusation of criminality in the administration doesn’t stop there. Bannon continues, “It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner garbage. The Kushner stuff 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 went on to support the already debunked Russian collusion story by suggesting that Trump’s team actually did meet with foreign representatives. “The three senior people in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government in Trump Tower– with no lawyers.”
Bannon also commented on the close involvement of Ivanka and Jared Kushner with the administration saying, “Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
Dan Donovan, a Republican from New York told Fox Business that Bannon has betrayed the president.
“The president gave him access to the White House and his inner circle,” he said. “But Bannon took the information he gained from that relationship and gave it to a second-rate reporter.”
Another New York Republican, Peter King, says that Bannon was leaking negative things from the White House all along. Not only that, but much of what Bannon was doling out to hostile actors in the press was totally fabricated. Worse, King also says Bannon’s reason for leaking sensitive and false information was part of an attempt to push his own agenda.
“People I know in the White House have been telling me all along that Bannon was leaking,” King said. “Bannon was blaming everyone else when something went wrong.”
Both King and Donovan agreed that Bannon should lose his position as the executive chairman of Breitbart.
“I think everybody should move on from Steve Bannon. Leave him out on an island by himself,” he added.
Of course, the left is in love with Wolff’s book — which abandons originality at the front cover with the hideously clichéd title. But, Wolff himself has long been regarded as a fantasist with a propensity for fabricating facts to make his narratives stick together. Even the stridently left-leaning Business Insider says that much of what Wolff claims in the book is questionable.
Now, Trump has filed a lawsuit against the publishing company demanding that publication of the book be stopped. If the claims made in Fire and Fury are verifiability false, then Trump is likely to win the lawsuit.
Bannon has since praised the president, but has not disavowed Wolff’s quotes. We are left with the question of why Bannon would betray Trump. Was it to self-promote, or is Bannon in league with seditious players?
Since this story exploded last week, Trump took to Twitter to give Steve Bannon his new nickname, “Sloppy Steve” — perhaps the president’s most accurate nickname creation yet.
~ Liberty Planet