The May meeting between top Trump campaign officials and Russian representatives does have everything you’d want for a stand-alone, no other evidence required, demonstration of an illegal conspiracy. Hostile foreign power offers to provide leverage to one candidate. Candidate’s team eagerly agrees. Both sides get together and work out the best way to proceed. All right in the middle of their main offices. Conspiracy … done in one.
But it seems odd that this guy would be pointing it out.
Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon has described the Trump Tower meeting between the president’s son and a group of Russians during the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”, according to an explosive new book seen by the Guardian.
Why would the man who took the hand-off from Paul Manafort in the Get The Idiot Across The Line relay veer into reality on this single topic? One: Because there’s a book coming out and pushing a surprising headline is the best way for Bannon to draw attention to his grease-stained chapter of the manuscript. Two: Because there seems to be one man who even Bannon feels is too dumb to be useful.
Bannon, speaking to author Michael Wolff, warned that the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin will focus on money laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV.”
You can bet that if Steve Bannon was still shuffling around the White House in his flip-flops, his warmth toward the man who grabbed an elephant’s ass would be considerably higher. But since Trump made it clear that he has his quota of heirs, plus Tiffany, Bannon is ready to sacrifice surrogate-bro.
Crank up the sad fiddle music. It’s time for more “Republican civil war.”
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, reportedly based on more than 200 interviews with the president, his inner circle and players in and around the administration, is one of the most eagerly awaited political books of the year. In it, Wolff lifts the lid on a White House lurching from crisis to crisis amid internecine warfare, with even some of Trump’s closest allies expressing contempt for him.
Since “moron” and “f*cking idiot” are the affectionate terms that the public already knows about, it will be interesting to learn just how the rest of the Trump White House describes the Cheeto-In-Chief.
And, for the record, it was not the actual commission of treason that bothered Bannon. It was that they simply didn’t do it right.
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”.
See guys? You hold your Russian agent meetings out of town, not in your own offices.
(Note to FBI: You might want to check the Manchester, New Hampshire Holiday Inn registration for the last few months of 2016. Just in case.)
Bannon also has an interesting take on one other thing.
Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication”.
It’s nice to know that even Steve Bannon realizes that Breitbart is not a legitimate publication. Oh, and FBI? Another note on things to check.