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White nationalist propagandist and authoritarian clump of cheese Steve Bannon is back at the helm of Breitbart after a brief stint as Donald Trump's top adviser, but that doesn't mean Bannon is out of the adviser business. And he's advising Trump to engage in the intentional obstruction of justice.
[F]ormer White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is pushing Trump to take action against Mueller, urging him in particular to defund the investigation, according to several sources familiar with Bannon’s thinking – a move that would defang Mueller without the president formally firing him.
What we have here is further evidence that Steve Bannon is not half as smart as he thinks he is, if he thinks Donald Trump taking Mueller's staff and office keys from him would be, somehow, less obvious a move to obstruct the investigation into Russian election hacking and campaign collusion than firing the special counsel outright.
That he is urging this just as prosecutors have produced their first criminal charges against a member of the Trump campaign for lying to federal investigators about specific attempts to collude with the Russian government, after being informed that the Russian government had obtained Clinton-related emails, is a nice capper.
As to precisely why Steve Bannon is so vexed over Mueller's investigation, we can only speculate. Bannon is notoriously tight-lipped about the funding for his own ventures, even as his website works tirelessly to promote many of the same conspiracy theories that Russian propaganda teams have themselves pushed. He may simply be operating in his usual political plane: advocating for the instillation of white-nationalist supportive fascism in the Oval Office.
But he also has been in a position to know precisely what federal investigators may find, if they dig into Trump campaign and administration records too deeply. And CNN reporter Dana Bash reports Bannon is explicitly pushing Trump to withhold evidence from the special counsel.
"I’m told Bannon pushing trump to be more aggressive against Mueller: urge gop to cut funding, withhold document production and more," Bash wrote on Twitter.
Bannon seems certain that even a full and public effort to obstruct justice would not lead to Trump's impeachment. He may be right. Senate and House Republican leaders have been ostentatious in their efforts to ignore and dismiss evidence of criminal acts within the Trump campaign and White House, and trusting either Paul Ryan or Mitch McConnell to put their nation above their party even when confronted with direct evidence of that obstruction would be a fool's game.
Bannon might also, however, have a keener idea of where the bodies are buried in the Trump administration than almost anyone else in the country. So if he's furiously demanding Trump hide documents from federal prosecutors, it may have nothing to do with his authoritarianish ideologies. He may just be sweating over what those documents contain.