Tag: Steve Bannon

  • Omit “semi”

    To the surprise of no one, Steve Bannon says Trump is a crook. You don’t say.

    The former White House adviser Steve Bannon has described the Trump Organization as a criminal entity and predicted that investigations into the president’s finances will lead to his political downfall, when he is revealed to be “not the billionaire he said he was, just another scumbag”.

    Well the two are not mutually exclusive. He would still be a scumbag even if he were a billionaire.

    The startling remarks are contained in Siege: Trump Under Fire, the author Michael Wolff’s forthcoming account of the second year of the Trump administration. The book, published on 4 June, is a sequel to Fire and Fury: Trump in the White House, which was a bestseller in 2018. The Guardian obtained a copy.

    In a key passage, Bannon is reported as saying he believes investigations of Donald Trump’s financial history will provide proof of the underlying criminality of his eponymous company.

    Assessing the president’s exposure to various investigations, many seeded by the special counsel Robert Mueller during his investigation of Russian election interference, Wolff writes: “Trump was vulnerable because for 40 years he had run what increasingly seemed to resemble a semi-criminal enterprise.”

    He then quotes Bannon as saying: “I think we can drop the ‘semi’ part.”

    Reflects well on Bannon, doesn’t it. He did his bit to put the scumbag where he now is, knowing perfectly well what a scumbag he is.

  • Executive privilege starts at birth

    Meanwhile in areas a little bit away from gunshots, Steve Bannon is trying to convince the House Intelligence committee that “executive privilege” extends retroactively, as if Trump were surrounded by a penumbra of executivityhood for months or years or even decades before he actually took office, and thus that anyone he plotted with at any point within that penumbra had a privilege of not saying anything to pesky House committees no matter how hard they asked.

    House Republican leaders are weighing “further steps” to force former top White House strategist Stephen K. Bannon to answer investigators’ questions in their probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election — including potentially declaring him in contempt of Congress — after a Thursday interview they called “frustrating.”

    Bannon came to speak with the House Intelligence Committee under a subpoena the panel issued on the spot last month, when he refused to answer questions related to the transition period and his tenure in the White House. On Thursday, Bannon presented panel members with a list of 25 questions that he would be willing to answer from that time period. But according to the panel’s top Democrat, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (Calif.), the questions had all been “literally scripted” by the White House, and his answer to all of them was “no.”

    He’s there under a subpoena but he thinks he gets to tell them what questions he will and won’t answer. He must think Trump is a monarch, and an absolute one at that.

    When the committee tried to push Bannon to answer questions that were not on his list, he repeatedly told members that the White House had not authorized him to engage on those queries.

    Neither did the pope, I daresay; so what?

    Bannon’s return to the committee was scheduled and delayed three times while the White House hammered out the terms of the interview with the House counsel. On Wednesday night, the White House sent the committee a letter outlining its argument for why executive privilege could apply to the transition period, according to panel members. But lawmakers said that letter was not a formal invocation of executive privilege, and they continue to reject the premise that privilege can apply to the transition period, when Trump was not in the Oval Office.

    One would hope so. He wasn’t the executive then, so what privilege would he expect to have?

    Panel members on both sides of the aisle also stressed that Bannon could not cite nonexistent privilege as an excuse to avoid their questions.

    “That’s not how privilege works,” Schiff said. “That’s how stonewalling works.”

    One would hope so, but these crooks will try anything.

    The House Intelligence Committee’s Russia probe has long been plagued by partisan divisions. But Bannon’s fight with the panel has drawn Democrats and Republicans together in a rare common cause, as they seek to make sure the White House’s efforts to protect Bannon do not erode the power of a congressional subpoena — something that could have “deep implications for any investigation Congress may conduct in the future,” Schiff said.

    Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) led the panel last month in pushing Bannon to answer all of its questions and ultimately deciding to issue him a subpoena. Now several Republicans say that holding Bannon in contempt, if he does not cooperate with their interview, will be necessary to send a message to this and future administrations that they cannot blithely ignore congressional subpoenas and other oversight.

    They’ve been wannabe authoritarians all along.

  • No wait, he’s quit

    According to ABC News.

    Steve Bannon has resigned from his role as White House chief strategist, ABC News has learned.

    A source close to Bannon told ABC News the resignation was effective Aug. 14, exactly one year after he joined the Trump campaign.

    “White House chief of staff John Kelly and Steve Bannon have mutually agreed today would be Steve’s last day. We are grateful for his service and wish him the best,” White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement to ABC News.

    The alt-right invasion will begin at midnight.

  • Bannon will go…one of these days, maybe

    The Times reports that Trump has decided to “remove” Bannon…but also that it may take him some time. (Should we start a pool on whether he can get Bannon out before he himself is “removed”?)

    President Trump has told senior aides that he has decided to remove Stephen K. Bannon, the embattled White House chief strategist who helped Mr. Trump win the 2016 election, according to two administration officials briefed on the discussion.

    The president and senior White House officials were debating when and how to dismiss Mr. Bannon. The two administration officials cautioned that Mr. Trump is known to be averse to confrontation within his inner circle, and could decide to keep on Mr. Bannon for some time.

    Like, say, 3.5 years?

    As of Friday morning, the two men were still discussing Mr. Bannon’s future, the officials said. A person close to Mr. Bannon insisted the parting of ways was his idea, and that he had submitted his resignation to the president on Aug. 7, to be announced at the start of this week, but the move was delayed after the racial unrest in Charlottesville, Va.

    Mr. Bannon had clashed for months with other senior West Wing advisers and members of the president’s family.

    That’s odd. He seems like such a nice guy.

    Mr. Bannon’s dismissal followed an Aug. 16 interview he initiated with a writer with whom he had never spoken, with the progressive publication The American Prospect. In it, Mr. Bannon mockingly played down the American military threat to North Korea as nonsensical: “Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that 10 million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.”

    He also bad-mouthed his colleagues in the Trump administration, vowed to oust a diplomat at the State Department and mocked officials as “wetting themselves” over the consequences of radically changing trade policy.

    Of the far right, he said, “These guys are a collection of clowns,” and he called it a “fringe element” of “losers.”

    Then he slapped on a red clown nose and departed singing The Internationale.

  • Children of the Sun

    What’s on Bannon’s bookshelf? What’s on his list of top most inspiring and influential reads? One item is a clerico-fascist named Julius Evola, whom he name-checked in a speech at a Vatican conference in 2014.

    “The fact that Bannon even knows Evola is significant,” said Mark Sedgwick, a leading scholar of Traditionalists at Aarhus University in Denmark.

    Evola, who died in 1974, wrote on everything from Eastern religions to the metaphysics of sex to alchemy. But he is best known as a leading proponent of Traditionalism, a worldview popular in far-right and alternative religious circles that believes progress and equality are poisonous illusions.

    Stagnation and hierarchy are so much better – provided you have the good fortune to be at the top end of the hierarchy rather than the bottom end.

    Evola became a darling of Italian Fascists, and Italy’s post-Fascist terrorists of the 1960s and 1970s looked to him as a spiritual and intellectual godfather.

    They called themselves Children of the Sun after Evola’s vision of a bourgeoisie-smashing new order that he called the Solar Civilization. Today, the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn includes his works on its suggested reading list, and the leader of Jobbik, the Hungarian nationalist party, admires Evola and wrote an introduction to his works.

    More important for the current American administration, Evola also caught on in the United States with leaders of the alt-right movement, which Mr. Bannon nurtured as the head of Breitbart News and then helped harness for Mr. Trump.

    “Julius Evola is one of the most fascinating men of the 20th century,” said Richard Spencer, the white nationalist leader who is a top figure in the alt-right movement, which has attracted white supremacists, racists and anti-immigrant elements.

    And the president of the US and many people on his staff.

    H/t Rrr

  • Bannon wanted it this way

    Dan Drezner raises the question: was The Ban incompetence or malevolence?

    He starts with saying it was Bannon’s baby, which seems to be generally accepted. Next, The Ban is a disaster. Then he points out that Bannon is definitely not stupid. Agreed…so I wonder what it can be like for him having to baby and cajole the amazingly stupid Trump.

    So why did not-stupid Bannon perpetrate a disaster?

    The most plausible story to assume in this instance is incompetence. Ordinarily, when the federal government does something stupid, it’s best to assume incompetence rather than malevolence. This is Bannon’s first week in a White House job and, like most other really smart people who lack high-level government experience, there will be a lot of rookie mistakes at the outset. The Trump administration will be different from past administrations on a lot of dimensions, but screwing up in the first few months is not one of them. This is particularly true given the abject lack of government experience among Trump’s White House staff. Maybe this is just a case of smart people doing stupid things because they are inexperienced.

    But smart people know when they’re inexperienced, and they know they need to act accordingly, at least to some extent. They don’t barge ahead at 500 miles an hour, dodging a rain of pitchforks and slop buckets. That would go double or triple or more when the experience in question is managing the government of the United States.

    He did it out of malice and “Leninist” destructiveness. He did it because he’s a shit.

    Drezner quotes Kevin Drum:

    In cases like this, the smart money is usually on incompetence, not malice. But this looks more like deliberate malice to me. Bannon wanted turmoil and condemnation. He wanted this executive order to get as much publicity as possible. He wanted the ACLU involved. He thinks this will be a PR win….

    [B]oth sides think that maximum exposure is good for them. Liberals think middle America will be appalled at Trump’s callousness. Bannon thinks middle America will be appalled that lefties and the elite media are taking the side of terrorists. After a week of skirmishes, this is finally a hill that both sides are willing to die for. Who’s going to win?

    I don’t even particularly think Bannon thought it would be good for them – I think he just thought it would be fun. It’s trolling writ large.

  • Off to a great start

    Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown gently suggests that hiring a hate-everybody troll for a top policy job in the White House might be seen as unfriendly to non-troll Americans.

    Ohio U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown (D.) today urged President-elect Donald Trump to reverse his appointment of Steve Bannon, executive chairman of Breitbart News, as chief White House strategist and senior counsel because of his association with the Alt-right.

    “We cannot bring the country together by inviting into the White House the same bigotry and hate speech that divided us on the campaign trail,” Mr. Brown said in a statement released today.

    “This is not about a difference in policy or politics — Steve Bannon has promoted anti-Semitic, racist, misogynistic and dangerous views that have emboldened white nationalist forces and caused some Americans to question whether they can still feel safe in the country we all love. President-elect Trump told us he wants to be a President for ‘all Americans’ and he cannot do that while empowering bigotry that targets and threatens many of them. Steve Bannon must be removed from his position immediately,” Mr. Brown said.

    …

    Ohio Democratic Chairman David Pepper said Monday that Mr. Bannon ”has stoked the flames of misogyny, racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. Americans of every political persuasion and every race, color, and creed should be concerned by Trump’s actions in bringing Bannon into the White House.”

    Good. I hope Congress will unite to tell President Pussygrabber that he can’t be doing this shit.

  • Guest post: Critics see

    Guest post by G Felis.

    New York Times headline: “Critics See Stephen Bannon, Trump’s Pick for Strategist, as Voice of Racism”

    Oh FFS! Steve Bannon’s history of waving the banner of both implicit and explicit racism is not a judgment call or matter of perspective. That’s like saying “Critics See Animal in this Picture as Duck-like.” If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck and calls for the separation of the races like a duck and publishes racist rhetoric like a duck, it’s a racist duck.

    Image result for duck

    (The duck pictured is just a metaphor, of course. I apologize for any implication that the duck in this picture is racist. He isn’t a racist, he just thinks ducks with feathers of different colors would be more comfortable with their own kind.)