Steve Bannon may be the most infuriating person on Team Trump. He is one of the smartest, for sure, but his willingness to shoot from the hip has gotten him into trouble repeatedly. That’s why he isn’t really on Team Trump any more. His wisecracks to author Michael Wolff about President Trump were what put him on the outs, but I really think that his strategic thinking was crucial to Trump being elected in the first place.
So you have to take Bannon with a grain of salt, but he could play a key role in protecting Trump in the coming months as impeachment gets under way. He has started a podcast called “War Room: Impeachment” that has set up an informal, off-the-books advisory committee for President Trump as he navigates the dangerous waters ahead.
Today, he visited with Maria Bartiromo on her “Sunday Morning Futures” show on Fox News, and delivered sage advice on what is coming next.
“The president did nothing wrong. This is all about a policy debate about America first national security policy. … I think the two witnesses that have to be called are Hunter Biden and Joe Biden.
“Joe Biden, this is about him as a constitutional officer, this is about him as vice president of the United States in Ukraine and China, and he’s going to have to answer I think … exactly what he did about bringing American crony capitalism to already what is considered one of the most corrupt nations on earth…”
Bannon sees the entire impeachment fight to be a desperate last-gasp struggle by the entrenched bureaucracy and status-quo establishment to destroy Trump’s America First reform movement.
“If Schiff is gonna sit there and argue that Joe Biden is above the law, Hunter Biden is above the law, the Bidens have to be called [as witnesses]. Joe Biden is a hand grenade and Hunter Biden is the pin. And when that pin gets pulled the shrapnel is going to blow back all over the Democratic establishment,” Bannon told Bartiromo.
Of course Rep. Adams Schiff, the impresario of impeachment, will never allow such questioning, but Bannon is 100 percent right that Trump’s team must demand it. Bannon and Trump are on the same page about fighting back against the Resistance Media and the Deep State Dems, and they need to bring the entire Republican Party along with them.
This stirring defense of Trump comes the day after Buzz Feed somehow was granted access to secret memos from the Robert Mueller special counsel investigation against Trump that painted Bannon in a bad light.
As usual, the behind-the-scenes documents reveal that Bannon was trying to leverage himself into a better position to help Trump by throwing someone else under the bus — in this case Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner.
Bannon told FBI investigators that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner were on vacation in Croatia with a “Russian billionaire” in August 2016 — appearing to confirm a long-suspected and long-denied connection between Trump world and a Russian oligarch.
Messages between Bannon and an unnamed individual with a Breitbart domain email address — exchanged in July 2017, one month before Bannon was fired from his position as White House chief strategist — revealed that they were hoping to leverage this information against Kushner. Bannon cofounded the far-right Breitbart and rejoined it in August 2017.
The messages and information were documented as part of an interview with then–special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigators, and were revealed by BuzzFeed News for the first time Saturday.
Representatives for Kushner and Ivanka Trump didn’t immediately return requests for comment.
In a Feb. 14, 2018, interview with the special counsel’s office, Bannon said that Kushner had been on vacation with a Russian oligarch when he took over the Trump campaign in August 2016.
In the documents released Saturday, Bannon told investigators that Kushner had been in Croatia with the unnamed Russian billionaire, Rupert Murdoch’s ex-wife Wendi Deng, and the Russian’s girlfriend, whom Bannon said his sources in the intelligence community found to be “questionable.”
Bannon and his correspondent at Breitbart think that they can use the information against Kushner, but what is confounding is that the meeting in Croatia was public knowledge. How exactly did Bannon think he could use it against Ivanka and Jared? This is the kind of overreach that got Bannon fired, but I still miss him, especially his whiteboard of promises made and promises kept!
WHO WE ARE
Frank Miele has spent four decades in the news business and now offers conservative commentary to counter the left-wing bias in the national media. If you enjoy reading these daily essays, I hope you will consider purchasing one of my books. They are available at Amazon in paperback or Kindle editions. My new book — “The Media Matrix: What if everything you know is fake?” — shows that Fake News has been around for years. The “Why We Needed Trump” trilogy tackles the politics of the last two decades: Part 1 is subtitled “Bush’s Global Failure: Half Right.” Part 2 is “Obama’s Fundamental Transformation: Far Left.” Part 3 is “Trump’s American Vision: Just Right.” Also consider subscribing to Heartland Diary on YouTube by clicking here for News Every Conservative Can Use.
