Steve Bannon is an awful father and a wife beater

[GreyhoundFan]

46 minutes ago, Cartmann99 said:

If Bannon does get pushed out, will he turn on Trump and start talking about what he knows from his time inside the White House? 

Well, he has lots of media experience...

[47of74]

Well Bannon's fellow reichies are gearing up to get stupid

thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/04/14/alt-right-ringleader-mike-cernovich-threatens-to-drop-motherlode-if-steve-bannon-is-ousted.html

Quote

A week after President Donald Trump began to publicly distance himself from White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, alt-right ringleader Mike Cernovich threatened to release a “motherlode” of stories that could “destroy marriages” if Bannon is formally let go from the administration.

Cernovich made the claims that he’d release a series of “scoops” if Bannon is officially pushed out of the White House on an eleven-minute, self-recorded Periscope Thursday night.

“If they get rid of Bannon, you know what’s gonna happen? The motherlode. If Bannon is removed, there are gonna be divorces, because I know about the mistresses, the sugar babies, the drugs, the pill popping, the orgies. I know everything,” said Cernovich.

“If they go after Bannon, the mother of all stories is gonna drop, and we’re just gonna destroy marriages, relationships—it’s gonna get personal.”

 

[CTRLZero]

56 minutes ago, 47of74 said:

Well Bannon's fellow reichies are gearing up to get stupid

How high are they going to have to go to even achieve the rank of stupid?  I'll look forward to Cernovich airing the dirty laundry of hypocrites, but he doesn't seem to offer much historically in the way of truth.

Junior thinks he is the bestest journalist ever.  Sigh...

"The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted just last week that Cernovich deserved a Pulitzer..."

[47of74]

2 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

How high are they going to have to go to even achieve the rank of stupid?  I'll look forward to Cernovich airing the dirty laundry of hypocrites, but he doesn't seem to offer much historically in the way of truth.

Junior thinks he is the bestest journalist ever.  Sigh...

"The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted just last week that Cernovich deserved a Pulitzer..."

In that case things will get interesting then if Presidunce Tapeworm dumps Bannon and Cernovich decides to unless the shitstorm.  

 

[Childless]

5 hours ago, CTRLZero said:

How high are they going to have to go to even achieve the rank of stupid?  I'll look forward to Cernovich airing the dirty laundry of hypocrites, but he doesn't seem to offer much historically in the way of truth.

Junior thinks he is the bestest journalist ever.  Sigh...

"The president’s son, Donald Trump Jr., tweeted just last week that Cernovich deserved a Pulitzer..."

I guess the apples don't fall far from the tree.  His kids are as stupid as he is.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Steve Bannon Was Doomed"

Quote

If you’re any student of politics, you saw Steve Bannon on the cover of Time magazine in early February — “The Great Manipulator,” it called him — and knew to start the countdown then.

Dead strategist walking.

He’d crossed the line that a politician’s advisers mustn’t, to a place and prominence where only the most foolish of them tread. Or at best he’d failed to prevent the media from tugging him there.

He was fine so long as he was a whisperer. On the campaign trail and on the Potomac, you can whisper all you want.

He was damned the moment he was cast as a puppeteer. That means there’s a puppet in the equation, and no politician is going to accept that designation, least of all one who stamps his name in gold on anything that stands still long enough to be stamped. Or whose debate performance included the repartee: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.”

“I’m my own strategist,” the president told The New York Post early last week, and the message to Bannon couldn’t have been louder and clearer if it included a four-letter word.

Bannon is “a guy who works for me,” he said to The Wall Street Journal a day later, lumping the lumpy tactician together with the concierges at Trump Tower, the groundskeepers at Mar-a-Loco and the makers of the meatloaf in the White House kitchen.

Trump went so far as to suggest that he was barely acquainted with Bannon before August 2016, when Bannon joined his presidential campaign. Wrong. Trump had been a guest on the radio show that Bannon used to host nine times. But his rewrite of history was telling. Bannon needed to be erased because he was taking up too much space on the page.

Politics is a tricky business, Washington is a treacherous place and Trumplandia is downright brutal. In all three realms, you have to strike the right balance of self-promotion and self-effacement. The media’s no help: We love few archetypes better than that of the brilliant mastermind who’s the real power behind the throne. But the savviest operators find ways to resist that assignment, deflecting as much credit as they claim.

It’s important to remember that you’re always a supporting actor, never the star,” David Axelrod, one of Barack Obama’s closest campaign and White House advisers, told me. “And depending on who the star is, it’s even more important. Donald Trump’s self-image doesn’t really allow for co-stars.”

...

Bannon is an amateur masker. While he didn’t give Time any quotes for its “manipulator” story and the photograph of him on the cover had been shot for a different reason three months earlier, he has spent plenty of time talking off the record with political reporters, too little of it actively tamping down his legend.

He wasn’t vigilant enough about patrolling the way his allies inside and outside the administration deified him in their own murmurings to the media, which included the nugget that colleagues awed by his knowledge called him “the encyclopedia.” He didn’t grasp that you can’t be “the encyclopedia” if your president is barely a pamphlet, and didn’t see the traps that would have been obvious to a Washington insider.

He didn’t grapple with who Trump really is. Trump’s allegiances are fickle. His attention flits. His compass is popularity, not any fixed philosophy, certainly not the divisive brand of populism and nationalism that Bannon was trying to enforce. Bannon insisted on an ideology when Trump cares more about applause, and what generates it at a campaign rally isn’t what sustains it when you’re actually governing.

Bannon stupidly picked a fight with Jared Kushner that he was all but certain to lose, and not only because Kushner is kin. Consider Trump’s obsession with appearances, then tell me who has the advantage: the guy who looks like a flea market made flesh or the one who seems poised to pose for G.Q.?

Bannon is still on the job, and Trump may keep him there, because while he has been disruptive inside the White House, he could be pure nitroglycerin outside. He commands acolytes on the alt-right. He has the mouthpiece of Breitbart News. He has means for revenge. He also has a history of it.

But it’s hard to imagine how he ever again ascends to a status as lofty as the one he held; others have rushed into that airspace. SuperJared flies high. Gary Cohn, the director of the National Economic Council, is flapping his own wings.

And “Trump’s got a new favorite Steve,” according to a headline in Politico on Thursday. The story below it charted the rising fortunes of Bannon’s deputy, Stephen Miller, who has been cozying up to Kushner and, according to Politico, complaining that “Bannon tried to take too much credit for Trump’s successes.”

Today’s Steve appreciates where yesterday’s went wrong. He understands that if you want to be the Svengali, you have to play the sycophant. That was a performance beyond Bannon’s ken. He never had a chance.

Mar-a-Loco: what a perfect name for it!

[GreyhoundFan]

Okay, so when we have a nuclear war, cockroaches and Bannon will survive: "Attack, Attack, Attack. Why does Trump double-down every time it seems like he should retreat? Because Steve Bannon is back in his boss’s good graces."

Spoiler

On May 22, just as a strange photo of President Trump, Saudi king Salman, and Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi touching a glowing orb reached the apex of its memehood, Steve Bannon, who was lurking somewhere beyond the orb’s glow, got on a plane in Riyadh and flew back to his book-stuffed apartment in a glass high-rise in Arlington, Virginia.

For Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, the months leading up to the trip had been difficult ones. When Trump became president, Bannon quickly entered the popular imagination as both the dark mastermind of Trump’s upset victory and an ethno-nationalist ideologue who, with Trump, would lay siege to “the administrative state” and remake American government in Trump’s image. That agenda brought an early flurry of activity followed by a series of embarrassing upsets: Federal courts blocked Trump’s travel ban from seven Muslim countries, his national-security adviser Michael Flynn left under a cloud of suspicion, and the White House quickly descended into knife-fighting disarray.

Worse for Bannon was that his portrayal as Trump’s puppet-master — as #PresidentBannon — on Saturday Night Live and elsewhere infuriated a boss sharply attuned to his media image and allergic to sharing the stage, especially with someone thought to be controlling him. The killer blow was a February 13 Time cover featuring Bannon’s menacing visage above the headline “The Great Manipulator.”

Soon after the Time cover, encouraged by his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, Trump humiliated Bannon by stripping him of his position on the National Security Council, cutting him out of key meetings, and declining to voice his faith in Bannon, who he pointedly told The Wall Street Journal was just “a guy who works for me.” He later added that he was his own strategist. Even Bannon’s old friend Matt Drudge turned on him, fanning stories on the Drudge Report that highlighted his fall from power. “Drudge and Bannon have been close forever,” says one outside Bannon ally. “That was a big stab in the back for Steve.” Meanwhile, rumors spread that Kushner was trying to force Bannon out, a claim longtime Trump confidant Roger Stone amplified on Alex Jones’s radio show. Bannon griped to a White House colleague that Kushner was trying to “shiv him and push him out the door,” according to the Daily Beast.

Even as he was bottoming out, Bannon spied the next upturn. On April 6, the New York Times published a story revealing that Kushner had omitted meetings with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak and Sergey Gorkov, the head of Vnesheconombank, the state-owned (and Putin-aligned) Russian development bank, when he applied for top-secret security clearance. Those meetings, Bannon told White House allies at the time, were certain to become a problem. News accounts of White House battles between “nationalists” like Bannon and “globalists” like Kushner began popping up everywhere. When friends from his old life as chairman of Breitbart News warned Bannon about taking on the president’s son-in-law, Bannon scoffed. Watch, he replied, Trump won’t hesitate to sideline Kushner if he has to.

By May, Kushner’s situation had worsened considerably. After months of Trump fuming over the Russia probe, the president was considering firing FBI director James Comey, a move Kushner backed. Kushner and Bannon disagreed about the wisdom of the move. “You can’t fire the FBI,” Bannon told Trump, according to a White House official. Kushner thought you could and argued that Democrats couldn’t criticize the decision, since they’d already attacked Comey for his investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails. But when Trump went ahead and ousted his FBI director, the move backfired, drawing angry condemnation from Democrats and almost everyone else. Trump looked as if he was trying to shut down a Justice Department investigation — and soon admitted as much to NBC’s Lester Holt — all but compelling Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to appoint Robert Mueller special counsel for the Russia probe.

By the time he left for Saudi Arabia on May 19, Trump had awakened to the danger the Russia investigation poses to his presidency. So he brought Bannon out of the doghouse and gave him a familiar mission: to organize a defense, go after his enemies, and head off the latest threat to Trump’s political career. Bannon’s first task was to create an outside war room to “put a prophylactic around the Oval Office,” as a White House official put it, one that would shield Trump from the encroaching crisis.

That agenda took on even greater urgency when a Washington Post report on intelligence intercepts of Kislyak’s conversations revealed that Kushner had discussed setting up a secret communications channel with Moscow inside Russian diplomatic facilities. Soon after, the Post reported that Mueller was investigating Kushner’s financial dealings and scrutinizing the meetings he omitted from his security-clearance application.
(Kushner hasn’t been charged with any wrongdoing and his lawyers say he is eager to cooperate with investigators.) According to advisers inside and outside the White House, Trump grew frustrated with his son-in-law, not just over the Russia stories but over reports that members of Kushner’s family, in an effort to entice Chinese investors seeking EB-5 visas to back a New Jersey real-estate project, hinted at their Trump connection. Both issues hastened Bannon’s resurrection.

His former position largely restored, Bannon is now back in his natural element, at the center of the chaos. He modeled Trump’s war room after the one set up by Bill Clinton to handle Ken Starr’s Whitewater probe. Bannon was convinced that Trump needed his own Lanny Davis — Clinton’s pit-bull lawyer and TV surrogate — to go against Mueller, according to a source familiar with his thinking. (Bannon even called Davis to consult him.) Trump’s new rapid-response team is thus heavier on lawyers than flacks, including Trump’s personal attorney, Marc Kasowitz, with whom Bannon worked closely during the campaign to investigate the women who came forward to accuse Trump of inappropriate sexual advances. But following the Clinton model could be hard for the Trump White House because it would require less obfuscation from the podium and a halt to the unhinged attacks on the press. “Bannon is right that Trump needs a team like Clinton had,” says Davis. “But his boss might kill him if he followed my advice: The way you deal with the media is answer all their goddamn questions and get it over with. The model only works if the person who’s being shoveled all the nasty questions has something to say.”

Recruiting talent has also been a challenge. Several top Washington law firms passed, and Bannon’s first choice for the Lanny Davis role, conservative attorney and radio host Laura Ingraham, ultimately rebuffed him after several in-person meetings. “Defending against Russia is the worst duty you can pull in the Trump White House, an impossible job where you can’t make the boss happy,” says GOP strategist Liam Donovan.

Leading the fight while everyone else is frantically lawyering up is exactly the type of loyalty Trump demands, though, and Bannon is especially poised to deliver. Despite his portrayal as Trump’s Rasputin, Bannon’s return was prompted less by his own influence than by the president’s needs. Nobody has ever really had the power to control Trump for long — a fact beleaguered White House officials can agree on. Bannon is less “The Great Manipulator” than Trump’s indispensable henchman, the man he turns to when everything’s going to hell. Bannon is astute enough to discern Trump’s desires and heedless enough to carry it out. “If the whole White House is backed up against the wall facing a firing squad, Steve will stay there,” says Ken Cuccinelli, president of the Senate Conservatives Fund. “Reince [Priebus] and the other guys will run.”

It’s not that Bannon can’t be a shrewd tactician — he often is — but his tactics are usually directed at tearing down his enemies, something he’s done on Trump’s behalf since the earliest days of the president’s political rise. Mueller looms as the greatest threat to Trump’s presidency, and is therefore the object of his chief strategist’s latest machinations. Bannon told an associate that one reason he set up the war room outside the White House, rather than inside, was so that his team would have more freedom to “throw some fucking haymakers.”

Bannon became a vital figure in Trump’s orbit during the early days of his political rise. The two met late in 2010, when David Bossie, the veteran conservative activist, brought Bannon along on a trip to Trump Tower to offer advice about how Trump might prepare for a presidential run. Like Trump, Bannon was a businessman and born deal-maker. With experience on Wall Street and in Hollywood, he was nothing if not high energy, a mile-a-minute talker with a volcanic temper who rarely slept and possessed a media metabolism to rival Trump’s own. And Bannon, too, had a healthy self-regard. On his office wall hung an oil painting of Bannon dressed as Napoleon in his study at the Tuileries, done in the style of Jacques-Louis David’s famous neoclassical painting — a gift from Nigel Farage.

Perhaps because of this background, Trump, whose habit was to surround himself with obsequious lackeys, took Bannon’s counsel more seriously than he did that of other advisers. Steve “was the only alpha male in his universe,” says one Trump associate. Trump was thus highly receptive to Bannon’s nationalist politics, particularly his hostility to illegal immigration, which flowered after Bannon took over Breitbart News in 2012. Long before Trump declared his candidacy, the billionaire was reading Breitbart articles flagged by Bannon and then printed out on paper (Trump’s preferred medium for reading) and delivered to him in manila folders by his staff.

Bannon also shared Trump’s love of spectacle. According to a former Trump adviser, Bannon was behind a needling stunt Trump pulled two weeks before the 2012 election. Having successfully badgered President Obama into releasing his birth certificate the year before, Trump started insinuating that his passport and college transcripts may also have been forged or missing. “I have a deal for the president, a deal that I don’t believe he can refuse,” Trump said in a blurry video he posted to YouTube. “If Barack Obama opens up and gives his college records and applications, and if he gives his passport applications and records, I will give, to a charity of his choice … a check, immediately, for $5 million.” Bannon told an associate he had lined up a donor, the conservative hedge-fund tycoon Robert Mercer, willing to supply half the sum (Trump would supply the rest). The media, chastened by the birther episode, didn’t bite. But the Trump-Bannon connection was cemented.

When Trump began visiting conservative political conferences, such as Bossie’s annual South Carolina Freedom Summit, he’d make a point of seeking out Bannon. “I remember Trump at the Freedom Summit going, ‘Where’s my Steve? Where’s my Steve?’ ” says Sam Nunberg, a former Trump adviser. “He loved the guy.” It was clear the connection was genuine, says Roger Stone, “because Steve is a slob, and Trump hates slobs.”

By the time Trump entered the presidential race in June 2015, Breitbart’s fixation on race, crime, immigration, radical Islam, and the excesses of political correctness — as well as the website’s dark and inflammatory style — had done much to inform Trump’s populist inclinations and his political vocabulary. (A BuzzFeed analysis of Trump’s campaign tweets showed that Breitbart was far and away his primary source of news.)

Trump’s announcement speech was pilloried for his charge that Mexican immigrants were rapists who were bringing drugs into the country. (“Extraordinarily ugly,” Jeb Bush called it; House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was “sickened.”) Bannon helped organize Trump’s response, defending him in Breitbart but also urging him to amplify — rather than apologize for — his anti-immigrant message. This involved another outrageous stunt: arranging for Trump to visit Local 2455, the Border Patrol union in Laredo, Texas, to deliver his message right to Mexico’s face, as it were. (The union’s Laredo spokesman had been a guest on Bannon’s radio show.) Under pressure from the national union, Local 2455 was forced at the last minute to rescind the invitation. But Trump came anyway, trailing a massive press contingent — and was clearly welcomed by the local border agents.

Trump loved the dropped-jaw reaction Bannon’s ideas produced on cable news. “Throughout the campaign — long before Steve actually joined the campaign — he was active through Breitbart, but also by providing very important and unsolicited advice,” says then–campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. “He would call Mr. Trump, or he would call me, and say, ‘Hey, here’s a recommendation.’ We talked to Steve a lot.”

For Trump, Bannon’s distinctive vocabulary was another point of his appeal. Bannon gloried in the slights and scorn directed at Trump supporters, proudly insisting that elitist Clintonites looked down on them as “hobbits,” “Grundoons,” and — co-opting Clinton’s own ill-advised term — “deplorables.” Anyone who thought otherwise was a “mook” or a “schmendrick.” And Clinton herself was the subject of a steady stream of derision, carefully pitched to Trump’s own biases and insecurities and delivered with the passion of a cornerman firing up a boxer for one last grueling round in the ring. Clinton, Bannon would insist, was “a résumé,” “a total phony,” “terrible on the stage,” “a grinder, but not smart,” “a joke who hides behind a complacent media,” “an apple-polisher who couldn’t pass the D.C. bar exam,” “thinks it’s her turn” but “has never accomplished anything in her life” — and, for good measure, was “a fucking bull dyke.”

Although Trump didn’t dwell on policy details, Bannon pitched in there, too. When Trump came under fire because his campaign hadn’t produced a single policy paper, Bannon arranged for Nunberg and Ann Coulter, the conservative pundit, to quickly write a white paper on Trump’s immigration policies. When the campaign released it, Coulter, without disclosing her role, tweeted that it was “the greatest political document since the Magna Carta.”

Bannon and Breitbart also operated as shock troops for Trump’s on-and-off war with Fox News. Trump’s fixation with the cable network was a powerful force throughout the campaign. Although he had appeared regularly on Fox for years and had staunch backers at the network, Sean Hannity chief among them, Fox wasn’t always friendly. And Trump was stung by a humiliation he’d suffered from Rupert Murdoch. He often told intimates how, as he was preparing to launch his campaign, his daughter Ivanka had arranged a lunch with Murdoch to share the news. Soon after the three of them were seated and the waiter brought their soup, Ivanka spoke up: “My father has something to tell you.”

“What’s that?” Murdoch said.

“He’s going to run for president.”

“He’s not running for president,” Murdoch replied without looking up from his soup.

“No, he is!” she insisted.

Murdoch changed the subject.

Trump nursed the slight for months. “He didn’t even look up from his soup!” he’d complain. Nowhere was Trump’s clash with the network more pronounced than in the aftermath of the first GOP debate — sponsored by Fox News and co-moderated by Megyn Kelly — on August 6 in Cleveland. Trump was particularly worried about Kelly, whose show he had backed out of three days earlier, complaining to a friend that she was out to get him. (Bannon had a special loathing for Kelly, just as some Fox hosts did for him. “Bannon is human garbage,” one of them told me.)

When the lights went up in Cleveland, Kelly went right after Trump, confronting him with his history of sexist statements. “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ ‘slobs,’ and ‘disgusting animals,’ ” she said. “Does that sound to you like the temperament of a man we should elect as president?”

Within minutes of the debate’s end, even as Trump was still nursing his grievances on live television, reporters started to realize that the revelations of his past behavior, so bluntly excavated by Kelly, had caused an intense reaction among Republican voters — not against Trump but against Fox News. Bannon and the Breitbart editors had the same reaction and immediately turned on Kelly with a fusillade of negative articles slamming her as a backstabbing, self-promoting betrayer of the cause. Breitbart soon became the locus of pro-Trump, anti-Fox conservative anger. Between Thursday night, when the debate took place, and Sunday evening, Breitbart published 25 stories mentioning Kelly, and the site’s editor-in-chief, Alex Marlow, went on CNN to accuse Fox News of “trying to take out Donald Trump” and staging “a gotcha debate.”

The intensity of Republican anger stunned Fox News executives. The debate had drawn a record 24 million viewers. Now many of them were apoplectic at the network’s top talent. In a panic, Ailes called Bannon and begged him to call off the attacks. “Steve, this isn’t fair, and it’s killing us,” Ailes said. “You have to stop it.”

“Fuck that, that was outrageous what she did!” Bannon retorted. “She pulled every trick out of the leftist playbook.”

The call ended without resolution. Bannon and Ailes would not speak again for almost a year. Even after Ailes and Trump patched up their relationship, Bannon refused to relent. In fact, Breitbart’s attacks on Kelly grew uglier. “Flashback: Megyn Kelly Discusses Her Husband’s Penis and Her Breasts on Howard Stern,” read a Breitbart headline a week after the debate. Ailes eventually dispatched his personal lawyer, Peter Johnson Jr., to the Breitbart embassy in D.C. to deliver a message to Bannon to end the war on Kelly. When he arrived, Johnson got straight to the point: If Bannon didn’t stop immediately, he would never again appear on Fox News. Bannon was incensed at the threat.

“She’s pure evil,” he told Johnson. “And she will turn on [Ailes] one day. We’re going full-bore. We’re not going to stop. I’m gonna unchain the dogs.” The conversation was brief and unpleasant, and it ended with a cinematic flourish. “I want you to go back to New York and quote me to Roger,” Bannon said. “ ‘Go fuck yourself.’ ”

Bannon remained a loyal outsider for most of the campaign. Then in August 2016, as Trump looked to be spiraling toward a blowout loss, Rebekah Mercer, whose family put millions of dollars into both Breitbart and Trump’s presidential run, helped arrange for Bannon to take over. One weakness of Trump’s campaign was that it was guided almost entirely by the candidate’s impulses. Bannon kept Trump focused on a clear target at which to direct his ample talent for invective: “Crooked Hillary.” And he brought an encyclopedic knowledge of damaging material with which to attack her, gleaned from having masterminded Peter Schweizer’s best-selling 2015 book, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich (another Mercer-backed effort). The book gave Trump an overarching theme in which to fit his attacks, one that the media, thanks partly to Schweizer’s and Bannon’s efforts, was already predisposed to accept: that Clinton was corrupt. And because Bannon’s convulsive extremism was now setting the tone, no one would hold him back. “It’s not going to be a traditional campaign,” he said shortly after his hiring.

It wasn’t. The great test arrived on October 7, when David Fahrenthold, a reporter at the Washington Post, was leaked outtake footage from a 2005 Trump appearance on the NBC show Access Hollywood. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” Trump told host Billy Bush. “You can do anything. Grab them by the pussy.”

It looked like Trump had finally said something that even he couldn’t rebound from, and Republican officials quickly began abandoning the campaign. “I am not going to defend Donald Trump — not now, not in the future,” Paul Ryan told his House colleagues in a private call. As New York reported, Reince Priebus urged Trump to quit or “go down with a worse election loss than Barry Goldwater’s.” Bannon stood firm, although even he feared Trump might be finished. Still, he told an associate, it wouldn’t be a total loss. “Our backup strategy,” he said of Clinton, “is to fuck her up so bad that she can’t govern. If she gets 43 percent of the vote, she can’t claim a mandate.” Psyching himself up, he added, “My goal is that by November 8, when you hear her name, you’re gonna throw up.”

Trump, who never apologized for any offense, took the unprecedented step of expressing remorse about the comments on the Access Hollywood tape in a hastily produced web video. “I said it, I was wrong, and I apologize,” he said to the camera. But at Bannon’s urging, his apology quickly morphed into an attack on the Clintons that made it clear he would not be dropping out. “I’ve said some foolish things,” he said, but “Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed, and intimidated his victims. We will discuss this more in the coming days. See you at the debate on Sunday.” With Bannon by his side, Trump would navigate the greatest crisis of his campaign by putting his foot on the gas. When I reached Bannon to ask about the strategy for the upcoming debate, he didn’t miss a beat: “Attack, attack, attack, attack.”

Bannon had long believed that Bill Clinton’s sexual history and Hillary’s alleged complicity in covering it up was something that “has to be concentrated and brought up,” as he’d once put it. His original thought was that relitigating the scandals would demoralize a younger generation of feminist women unfamiliar with the tawdry details. But with the Access Hollywood tape, Bannon saw that injecting Clinton’s accusers into the race would force the media to devote attention to more than just Trump’s damaging tape. The trick was to do it in a way that couldn’t be ignored. Watching Bill Cosby’s public evisceration by his accusers the year before, Bannon had noticed that their on-camera testimony was especially powerful because most of the victims had been assaulted decades earlier and were now elderly women and thus inherently sympathetic. Bannon thought a similar dynamic would apply to the Clinton accusers.

On Sunday afternoon, 90 minutes before the start of the debate at Washington University in St. Louis, word spread in the press corps that Trump was about to hold an event. As reporters squeezed into a conference room, Trump was seated at the center of a makeshift dais flanked by four women well known to veteran political reporters: Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Kathy Shelton, and Paula Jones. Willey, Broaddrick, and Jones had all accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault or harassment; in 1975, a judge had appointed Hillary Clinton, then a young lawyer, to defend a man accused of raping Shelton, who was then 12 years old.

After brief remarks from Trump, the women took turns defending him and assailing the Clintons. The shock of what was unfolding prompted frenzied live coverage on cable news. As cameras panned the room, they captured Bannon standing in the back, grinning wickedly. The brazenness of Bannon’s gambit, and the visual of Trump seated among Clinton’s accusers, ensured that the primary imagery on TV would cease to be the Access Hollywood footage.

A plan to seat the women at the front of the debate audience to rattle Clinton and assure them a steady presence in the camera shot had to be scuttled. In the end, it didn’t matter. Bannon had always believed that Trump was his own greatest weapon. As 67 million people tuned in to the debate, Trump waited for the inevitable Access Hollywood question and sprung his counterattack. “If you look at Bill Clinton, far worse,” he said. “Mine are words, and his was action. His was — what he’s done to women, there’s never been anybody in the history of politics in this nation that’s been so abusive to women … Hillary Clinton attacked those same women and attacked them viciously. Four of them are here tonight.”

Outside the campaign, the Clinton-accuser gambit was seen as a transparently cynical ploy to change the subject. But Trump’s brain trust was seeing numbers that said attacking Clinton was succeeding. A smattering of public polls indicated the same thing: More respondents improved their opinion of Trump than of Clinton after watching the debate.

Then, within days of the debate, multiple women came forward to accuse Trump of having groped or kissed them without their consent. The wave of new accusers put the campaign on a war footing. The distinction they needed to draw, Bannon told staffers, was between Trump’s “locker room” behavior and what he alleged was Bill Clinton’s sexually violent behavior. “This has nothing to do with consensual sexual affairs and infidelities,” Bannon said in a strategy meeting that week. “We’re going to turn him into Bill Cosby. He’s a violent sexual predator who physically abuses women who he assaults. And she takes the lead on the intimidation of the victims.”

Trump seemed to relish the prospect of ramping up his attacks on Hillary. And then, with just over a week to go until Election Day, he got an unexpected boost when FBI director James Comey announced he was reopening the investigation into Clinton’s private email server. Trump’s internal polls, which showed him already ascending before the Comey letter, now had him turning sharply upward in every battleground state. Out on the stump, he ratcheted up his criticism of Clinton. In speeches and ads, he channeled Bannon’s conspiratorial worldview, accusing Clinton of plotting “the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special-interest friends.” When Trump won the election, the lesson the 45th president took away from the campaign seemed to be that if he fought hard enough, he could survive anything.

Just six months into his presidency, Trump’s faith in that proposition is being tested. His brief tenure has been shot through with turmoil, his legislative agenda is teetering on the cusp of collapse, and Robert Mueller’s special-counsel investigation is an ever-present source of frustration. The Associated Press revealed that Trump’s anger has reached a point where he is yelling at television sets in the White House, upset by the tenor of his coverage.

For Bannon, though, things are looking up. Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord was a sign that nationalism still holds sway, as was his July speech in Poland warning of the decline of the West. The Supreme Court’s decision in late June to allow the administration’s travel ban to take partial effect was another victory for Bannon, its principal architect. The House just passed two immigration bills, and, White House officials say privately, Congress will soon act on four more. Bannon’s feud with Kushner has quieted down. And so far, while at least ten White House officials and former aides, including Kushner, have retained lawyers in the special counsel’s probe, distancing themselves from Trump, Bannon is not among them.

Instead, he’s back in the bunker alongside a boss who is often angry, always under fire, and, on the matter of Russia, increasingly isolated from all but a handful of advisers and family members. Early on, Bannon’s war room displayed characteristic aggression, with Kasowitz holding a press conference to slam Comey in response to the former FBI director’s June 8 testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. “[It] is overwhelmingly clear that there have been and continue to be those in government who are actively attempting to undermine this administration with selective and illegal leaks of classified information and privileged communications,” Kasowitz said. “Mr. Comey has now admitted that he is one of these leakers.”

Many of Trump’s current and former aides cheered this lunge for the jugular. “Kasowitz is a junkyard dog, exactly the guy Trump needs in his corner right now,” says Barry Bennett, a former campaign adviser. In TV appearances, war-room attorney Jay Sekulow — Trump’s Lanny Davis — suggested that Mueller is biased, a charge Trump amplified on Twitter by calling the investigation a “witch hunt” and telling Fox News that he finds Mueller’s long-standing relationship with Comey “bothersome.”

But those personal attacks diminished in late June, after John Dowd, a prominent Washington attorney and veteran of the Justice Department, joined Trump’s defense. References to a “war room” have also been dropped for the more tempered “president’s outside legal team.” And on June 28, Trump’s lawyers decided to postpone filing a Justice Department complaint against Comey for having helped leak memos about his conversations with Trump to reporters — a move Bloomberg News attributed to a new attitude of “professional courtesy” toward Mueller. “It could become an adversarial relationship, but at present the legal team decided it was best to hold off and not file those complaints,” says Mark Corallo, the spokesman for the legal team. Which is not to say that Bannon’s bare-knuckled instincts have vanished, but rather that he’s come to understand that going after Mueller personally isn’t the best move — at least right now.

Davis himself says this was a necessary course correction. “There is huge danger in attacking Mueller directly,” says Davis. “[White House counsel] Don McGahn, Bannon, and the political side of the White House ought to be listening.” For now, they seem to be. And at least for the time being, Trump, too, has shifted his target from Mueller and Comey to Mika Brzezinski and CNN.

One critical element of the Lanny Davis model, says Davis, is having a president who has a firm enough grasp of the legal and political stakes that he’s willing to focus on his day job and let his lawyers do the talking for him. But even some of Trump’s defenders admit that not only is the president unlikely to show such deference, he is never more than a bad news cycle away from firing Mueller.

“Bannon’s a smart guy — he knows the difference between success and political suicide,” says Davis. “But could he even stop him?” When it came to Comey, the answer was no. As Mueller expands his team of investigators, the question now is how long Trump’s advisers will be able to dissuade him from going after the special counsel. “One thing that’s always dangerous is telling Donald Trump that he can’t do something,” says Roger Stone. “Because then he wants to do it.”

If Trump were to fire Mueller, numerous Republicans say privately that they would break with the president. “It would be a repeat of the ‘Saturday Night Massacre’ when Nixon fired Archibald Cox,” the Watergate special prosecutor, says Davis.

There’s no question, though, who would lead the attack on Trump’s critics if such a scenario were to unfold. “At the end of the day,” says Sam Nunberg, “the question is, are we going to stand with Trump when he fires Mueller? Steve will do it.”

 

[47of74]

Steve Bannon thinks Paul Ryan is "A Limp-Dick Motherfucker"

Spoiler

Steve Bannon reportedly called House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) “a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation,” referring to the think tank whose fiscal conservative policies the representative espouses.

The detail is one of many bizarre nuggets in Devil’s Bargain, a new book on White House chief strategist Bannon’s role in President Donald Trump’s political rise, by Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Joshua Green, who has extensively covered the former Breitbart chairman.

Green wrote that Bannon’s comment on Ryan came during the spring of 2016, when it became increasingly possible that Trump would become the GOP presidential nominee, to the surprise and concern of establishment Republicans. Some of them had floated Ryan as a possible alternative if the party’s convention were to become contested.

Well I guess it takes one to know one.

[GreyhoundFan]

@47of74 -- I thought the same thing. I guess he was looking in the mirror when he said it.

[GrumpyGran]

3 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Steve Bannon thinks Paul Ryan is "A Limp-Dick Motherfucker"

  Hide contents

Steve Bannon reportedly called House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) “a limp-dick motherfucker who was born in a petri dish at the Heritage Foundation,” referring to the think tank whose fiscal conservative policies the representative espouses.

The detail is one of many bizarre nuggets in Devil’s Bargain, a new book on White House chief strategist Bannon’s role in President Donald Trump’s political rise, by Bloomberg Businessweek reporter Joshua Green, who has extensively covered the former Breitbart chairman.

Green wrote that Bannon’s comment on Ryan came during the spring of 2016, when it became increasingly possible that Trump would become the GOP presidential nominee, to the surprise and concern of establishment Republicans. Some of them had floated Ryan as a possible alternative if the party’s convention were to become contested.

Well I guess it takes one to know one.

Actually, I'm completely unimpressed with his lack of imagination. A tenth grader could have come up with that. Didn't the Navy teach him better insults than that?  

[47of74]

4 hours ago, GrumpyGran said:

Actually, I'm completely unimpressed with his lack of imagination. A tenth grader could have come up with that. Didn't the Navy teach him better insults than that?  

Or he should have asked the Scots for helpful pointers.  After all they've raised insulting people to an art form.  Just ask Bannon's boss.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hilarywardle/custard-flavoured-jobby

This is why I so often use fornicate or actually describe what I think a person should do to themselves instead of just reach for the word fuck, shit, etc...

[GrumpyGran]

13 hours ago, 47of74 said:

Or he should have asked the Scots for helpful pointers.  After all they've raised insulting people to an art form.  Just ask Bannon's boss.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hilarywardle/custard-flavoured-jobby

This is why I so often use fornicate or actually describe what I think a person should do to themselves instead of just reach for the word fuck, shit, etc...

This was hilarious! Oh, the Scots!  Thanks, @47of74. A whole new level.

[fraurosena]

Steve Bannon's Shadow Press Office May Violate Federal Law

Spoiler

In an arrangement prominent ethics experts say is without precedent and potentially illegal, the White House is referring questions for senior presidential adviser Stephen K. Bannon to an outside public relations agent whose firm says she is working for free.

Alexandra Preate, a 46-year-old New Yorker and veteran Republican media strategist, describes herself as Bannon's "personal spokesperson." But she also collaborates with other White House officials on public messaging and responses to press inquiries. It was Preate who responded when the Center for Public Integrity recently asked the White House Press Office questions about Bannon.

Preate, however, is not employed by President Donald Trump’s administration or paid by the federal government.

The unorthodox setup means Bannon, Trump's chief strategist, is potentially violating the Antideficiency Act, which provides that federal employees "may not accept voluntary services for [the] government or employ personal services exceeding that authorized by law."

The revelations about Preate's work are the latest controversy to embroil the White House Communications Office, which is reeling from a series of high-profile resignations, firings and leadership changes in recent days.

To be sure, it's not uncommon for executive branch employees to hire personal lawyers who aren’t on the government's payroll, but who nonetheless advise their clients on government work-related matters. The difference is that personal lawyers don't step in to help the White House perform its official duties.

Preate, however, “appears to be organizing the administration's response to questions sent to the White House," said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in government ethics. "And the fact that other officials are responsive to her distinguishes this situation from the kind of activity a private lawyer would do."

Said Norm Eisen, ethics czar during the Obama administration: "She seems to be privy to government information, and she appears to be acting on behalf of a government entity, either Bannon or the White House Press Office. If she's doing it for free, then that is a potential violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act."

To date, no one has ever been convicted or indicted for violating the Anti-Deficiency Act, and most of the dozen or so violations reported each year result in little more than administrative penalties. Still, a "knowing and willful violation" of the Anti-Deficiency Act is a Class E felony, punishable by a "$5,000 fine, confinement for up to two years, or both."

As a private citizen, Preate is not subject to the restrictions imposed by the Anti-Deficiency Act, nor would she be liable for any potential violations. White House officials, on the other hand, are subject to the act.

Preate, the White House Press Office, Bannon aides, the White House Counsel’s Office and the Department of Justice all refused to answer repeated questions from the Center for Public Integrity about Preate’s arrangement with the White House, whether she is working for free, and whether her role has been approved by government lawyers or ethics officials.

Eighteen phone calls

The Center for Public Integrity first became aware of Preate's role earlier this month after sending an email to White House Deputy Press Secretary Lindsay Walters with questions about Bannon’s personal financial disclosure.

Minutes later, Walters replied to say the White House Press Office was "working to get you a response." Walters copied Julia Hahn, a White House deputy policy strategist and former Breitbart reporter who works closely with Bannon.

Instead of receiving a response from Walters or Hahn, the Center for Public Integrity received a phone call from Preate, who said that she was calling "for Steve." Preate later arranged a call for the Center for Public Integrity with a member of the White House Counsel's Office, who addressed questions about Bannon's financial disclosures.

From July 11 through July 13, Preate called the Center for Public Integrity 18 times about the story. During these conversations, Preate would only agree to speak off the record, which is why the Center is not reporting on the content of the calls.

“We would never have tolerated this in the Bush White House," Tony Fratto, a former principal deputy press secretary for President George W. Bush, said of the Trump White House’s arrangement with Preate.

In addition to the ethics issues, Fratto said in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity, Preate’s role would have caused problems within the White House Press Office itself.

"From an operational perspective, a situation like this would be difficult to manage, because it's an uncoordinated messaging channel that isn't being overseen by the White House communications office," Fratto said.

"If a comms director doesn't have control over who is doing the messaging, then you get contradictory information and disjointed messaging, and that's a problem,” he added.

Indeed, the struggles of the Trump White House to coordinate an effective communications strategy have been monumental. In just the past week, the White House Press Office has been upended by the sudden resignation of White House press secretary Sean Spicer, the surprise appointment of New York financier Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director and the messy dismissal of senior assistant press secretary Michael Short.

In his first briefing as communications director on Friday, Scaramucci promised a new era of discipline in the White House press office. He also pledged to get the entire communications staff "super-coordinated around here with the president" and his message.

If that's Scaramucci's plan, then Bannon, who reportedly objected to Scaramucci’s hiring, may be in for a fight.

Who's paying the bills?

There are good reasons why the government is required to officially hire, and pay, the people who work for it.

Bannon “took an oath to support and defend the Constitution,” Clark said.

But Preate has not taken such an oath. This means “the public has no idea who, if anyone, is paying this piper,” she added.

Preate is the founder and CEO of a New York-based public relations firm, Capital HQ, whose marquee client is the conservative news and opinion website Breitbart News.

Bannon ran the conservative news site until he joined Trump’s campaign last year. He states on his government financial disclosures that he officially resigned from Breitbart in August, but Breitbart CEO Larry Solov said Bannon didn't resign until after Trump won the election in November.

"If Preate's firm works for Breitbart, then is this arrangement part of a continuing relationship of some kind between Breitbart and Bannon?" Eisen said. "Is Breitbart paying for this?”

In addition to Breitbart, Preate has reportedly represented prominent Republican political donor Rebekah Mercer, whose billionaire family is a part-owner of Breitbart. She has also been quoted in news stories as "a friend" of Mercer.

Bannon has a longstanding personal and professional relationship with the Mercer family, who reportedly convinced Trump to put Bannon in charge of his campaign last summer.

As of March 31, Bannon had not yet sold his stakes in at least two companies he co-owns with members of the Mercer family: The movie production company Glittering Steel LLC, and the influential GOP big data firm, Cambridge Analytica.

Neither the White House nor Preate would confirm whether Bannon has sold his stakes in the two Mercer-linked companies since March.

The Mercers were also among Trump’s most influential bankrollers. During the 2016 election cycle, the Mercers spent $22 million to support Republican candidates, and they funded a super PAC, Make America Number 1, that backed Trump’s general election bid.

Zero-to-60 on the Trump train

Preate may not be a household name, but she has deep roots in Republican politics.

Her father, Ernie Preate, was twice elected Attorney General of Pennsylvania as a Republican. In 1994 he ran for governor, losing the nomination to then-Rep. Tom Ridge, who would go on to win in the general election.

But Ernie Preate's promising career in politics ended abruptly the following year, when he pleaded guilty to mail fraud in a federal case involving illegal campaign contributions. He served 11 months in prison, and has since become an advocate for prison reform.

It's not clear exactly when Bannon and Alexandra Preate's professional relationship began.

In March of 2016, Breitbart spokesman Kurt Bardella abruptly resigned. Almost immediately, publicists at Preate’s firm, Capital HQ, were quoted as representatives of Bannon and Breitbart.

By July of 2016, then-Capital HQ associate Garrett Marquis was busy promotingClinton Cash, a movie based on a book by Peter Schweizer, who runs a Mercer-funded group called the Government Accountability Institute. The film version of Schweizer's book was released on Breitbart.com, and it was co-produced by Bannon and Rebekah Mercer through their joint production company, Glittering Steel LLC.

In August, Preate first appeared in a news story as a spokeswoman for Bannon. This was a few days before Trump officially named Bannon CEO of his presidential campaign. When Politico reported that Bannon had been once been charged in a domestic violence incident, Preate issued a statement in Bannon's defense.

The following day, Preate again spoke on behalf of Bannon. This time, Preate’s flacking came after The Guardian reported Bannon did not actually live at the address where he was registered to vote.

Later on, if news organizations described Bannon as a Trump campaign staffer, it was Preate — not a Trump campaign representative — who would push back, reminding reporters that Bannon was offering his services to Trump for free. "He is a volunteer — as CEO," she wrote to a reporter for The Daily Beast in October.

Throughout the final months of the campaign, Preate appeared in media reports identified only as a "Bannon spokeswoman." But behind the scenes, Preate's team at Capital HQ worked hard to promote Bannon.

This included offering interviews to reporters with people who would say nice things about Bannon, and touting how well Breitbart had performed under Bannon's leadership.

Since Bannon joined the Trump administration, at least one news outlet, New York magazine, has reported that Preate joined the White House with him.

But Preate does not work for the White House, said Chad Wilkinson, the current president of Preate-owned Capital HQ who also serves as Breitbart’s spokesman. Nor has Preate filed any of the government-mandated disclosures required for federal employees.

Preate moved to Washington in January “to work for Bannon after Trump took office,” Wilkinson said in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity. Preate’s Twitter page lists her as living “in DC.”

Wilkinson and other Capital HQ associates began speaking on behalf of Breitbart in Preate’s absence.

Preate "has never received a dime" from Bannon in exchange for her work on his behalf, Wilkinson said.

But as Capital HQ’s founder and chief executive officer, Preate continues to profit from the Breitbart representation, Wilkinson said.

Friends with money

For Virginia Canter, an attorney for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and a former government ethics lawyer, Bannon's situation raises the question of whether Preate's clients are effectively supplementing Bannon's salary.

"The question is whether there is some kind of arrangement among Bannon, Breitbart and Preate that enables Preate to provide public relations services to Bannon and the White House, without compensation from either Bannon or the White House," she said in an interview with the Center for Public Integrity.

Bannon and Preate refused multiple requests from the Center for Public Integrity to answer this specific question.

Canter served as associate counsel to the president during the Obama administration, associate director of the Office of Foreign Assets Control at the Treasury Department during the George W. Bush administration and associate counsel to the president during Bill Clinton’s administration.

According to Eisen, Clark, Canter and others, Bannon's acceptance of Preate's services could also violate 18 U.S. Code section 209, a law commonly known as the salary supplementation ban. This law "prohibits employees from being paid by someone other than the United States for doing their official Government duties," according to the Office of Government Ethics.

"If this gift of valuable public relations consulting services is being provided to Bannon by Preate or by others, then that is compensation that could be viewed as supplemental compensation on top of his salary as a member of the executive branch," Eisen said. "And that is not permitted."

This is not the first time that questions have arisen over whether Bannon is maintaining ties to Breitbart that violate executive branch ethics rules.

Within weeks after Trump took office in January, reports began to emerge that Bannon was contacting Breitbart staffers in an attempt to influence how the site was covering Trump’s administration.

The contact appeared to violate the Ethics Pledge Bannon had signed as a condition of his employment in the Trump White House. The pledge expressly prohibits newly hired officials, like Bannon, from having contact with their previous employers.

In late March, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington sent a letter to White House Counsel Don McGahn, requesting an investigation into whether Bannon had violated the Ethics Pledge.

Rather than reprimand Bannon, the White House in May released what it said was a retroactive, blanket ethics waiver. Such a waiver allowed executive branch employees who had previously worked for media organizations — such as Bannon at Breitbart — to ignore longstanding federal rules that prohibit government employees from communicating with their former employers.

Unlike every ethics waiver that had ever been granted before it, however, this one did not have a signature on it. Nor did it have a date to show when it went into effect.

Friends with benefits

Even if Preate's services were to be viewed as simply a gift, and not salary supplementation, they could still violate executive branch ethics rules that bar government employees from accepting gifts from outside sources, said Brendan Fischer, who leads the federal ethics and election law reform project at the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center.

"There's a more general executive branch prohibition on accepting gifts that seems to apply here," Fischer said in an interview.

This prohibition also contains a number of important exceptions, said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative nonprofit group that promotes transparency and accountability in government.

"The rules allow for the pro bono provision of services when they're from friends," he said in an interview, an exception that he said could prove relevant to Bannon and Preate. It states that a government employee may accept "a gift motivated solely by a family relationship or personal friendship."

Still, Fitton acknowledged that the unresolved questions of who is paying for Preate's services, or whether anyone is, muddying issues around personal gifts.

Also complicating matters: Preate's position as the founder and CEO of Capital HQ, said Walter Shaub, who served as director of the Office of Government Ethics during the first six months of the Trump administration. He now leads the ethics practice at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan political watchdog organization.

Additionally, Shaub said, "If there's a history of Bannon having paid for her professional services, this further undermines the argument that this is a gift motivated solely by Preate's personal friendship with Bannon."

"At a minimum," he said, "this blurs the lines between Preate's firm and her gift of pro bono public relations services."

Still, the prospect that Preate could be gifting her services to Bannon does little to resolve the question of why she is responding to questions sent by reporters to the White House Press Office.

Under President George W. Bush, the issue of how the White House handled ethics questions from reporters was never in question, said Fratto, the former Bush press official.

Fratto recalled the hiring of Ed Gillespie, a Bush adviser who’s now running for Virginia governor. Gillespie had founded a public relations and lobbying firm, Quinn Gillespie & Associates, before joining the Bush administration.

"He had a whole PR firm behind him, but I was the one who handled questions about his personal finances,” Fratto said. “I don't think it ever occurred to anyone to have Quinn Gillespie handle it. Those were ethics questions for the White House.”

In the absence of any explanation from the White House about Preate's role, both Eisen and Clark say they hope other federal agencies and Congress will investigate the situation.

"The Justice Department should look at this,” Eisen said, “and I hope they'll get some answers to these questions."

Nah. The DOJ isn't going to look into this. What on earth would be their incentive? They've been overlooking nepotism, corruption and collusion, and blatant disregard for rules and regulations since the very beginning of this administration. Why would they start now?

[nokidsmom]

On 7/18/2017 at 4:23 PM, GrumpyGran said:

Actually, I'm completely unimpressed with his lack of imagination. A tenth grader could have come up with that. Didn't the Navy teach him better insults than that?  

Not to get OT, but back in my single days, my Navy bf at the time came home and told me all kinds of words/phrases he heard shipboard so yeah, seems Stevie should have been able to draw on that. 

ETA: just looked at the Scottish insults.  Wow, the Scots do have it down.  I will have to remember a few....

Edited July 28, 2017 by nokidsmom

[onekidanddone]

On 4/15/2017 at 0:14 PM, 47of74 said:

“If they get rid of Bannon, you know what’s gonna happen? The motherlode. If Bannon is removed, there are gonna be divorces, because I know about the mistresses, the sugar babies, the drugs, the pill popping, the orgies. I know everything,” said Cernovich.

This is I Claudius playing out in real life.

[fraurosena]

21 minutes ago, onekidanddone said:

This is I Claudius playing out in real life.

I, Claudius is way too tame. 

This is Game of Thrones on steroids.

[nokidsmom]

13 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

This is Game of Thrones on steroids.

I was thinking the other day that this was like Game of Thrones, just cast in the WH.

[onekidanddone]

28 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

I, Claudius is way too tame. 

This is Game of Thrones on steroids.

Never watched Game of Thrones and I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't.  I watched the British version of House of Cards years ago and loved it. I got through 1 1/2 episodes of the American version and had to quit. It was so close to reality it only heightened my near 24/7 state of anxiety

[GrumpyGran]

16 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Never watched Game of Thrones and I'm thinking maybe I shouldn't.  I watched the British version of House of Cards years ago and loved it. I got through 1 1/2 episodes of the American version and had to quit. It was so close to reality it only heightened my near 24/7 state of anxiety

Yeah, I'm just waiting for fall so I can soothe myself with some Designated Survivor. 

[onekidanddone]

15 minutes ago, GrumpyGran said:

Yeah, I'm just waiting for fall so I can soothe myself with some Designated Survivor.

Watching Orange is the New Black or Breaking Bad is calmer than watching the cluster fuck that is White House 45

[GrumpyGran]

3 hours ago, onekidanddone said:

Watching Orange is the New Black or Breaking Bad is calmer than watching the cluster fuck that is White House 45

I've developed the bad habit of occasionally watching Big Brother because I have an odd fascination with Julie Chen. Very similar to the White House.

Oops, this is the Steve Bannon thread! Boring fat fuck. LOL.

[GreyhoundFan]

From the WaPo: "Five myths about Steve Bannon"

Spoiler

Stephen K. Bannon seemed to come out of nowhere in August 2016, taking over Donald Trump’s struggling campaign and leading it to the most shocking upset in U.S. presidential history. Few people, even in Washington, had heard of Bannon before then. And because he liked to cultivate an image of himself as a dark, nationalist political Svengali — a portrait the media mostly accepted — a number of myths have arisen about Bannon and his beliefs. Here are five of them.

Myth No. 1

Bannon is Trump’s Rasputin.

After Trump’s win, Bannon was cast in the popular imagination as a kind of puppet master pulling Trump’s strings, someone who used his wiles to seduce the president into carrying out his agenda. This idea was popularized by the #PresidentBannon meme and a February Time magazine cover that featured Bannon’s brooding image above the headline “The Great Manipulator.”

But Bannon’s influence has waxed and waned — and he’s never been in full control. None of Trump’s advisers can keep the president on message for very long or stop him from attacking people on Twitter. Certainly, Bannon can’t.

Trump chafes at the puppet master portrayal and periodically takes steps to demonstrate that Bannon doesn’t have nearly the sway ascribed to him. For instance, in April, Trump removed his chief strategist from the National Security Council and roasted him in a series of interviews. “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late,” Trump told the New York Post. “I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve.” This wasn’t true — Trump had known Bannon for years — but the president made his point.

Bannon managed to stick it out and return to a position of power. But the recent appointment of Anthony Scaramucci as White House communications director shows the limit of his influence: Bannon opposed the move and was overruled.

Myth No. 2

Bannon hates Muslims.

Although he has a long history of making inflammatory statements about what he calls “Islamic fascism,” and he was an architect of the ban on travelers from six majority-Muslim countries, Bannon is not reflexively anti-Muslim. His nationalist philosophy is built upon ideas drawn from a personal guru of sorts, René Guénon, an early-20th-century French metaphysician who was raised Roman Catholic, practiced occultism and Freemasonry, and later became a Sufi Muslim and observed sharia. Guénon is the intellectual godfather of a movement known as Traditionalism, many of whose followers converted to Islam because they believed that it was the path to esoteric knowledge lost to the West (though he admires Guénon, Bannon is a Tridentine Catholic).

Guénon’s philosophy is built upon the belief that the world has been in decline since the Enlightenment and is now in the midst of a “dark age” — a theme Bannon has echoed and channeled into Trump’s politics and speeches. As Guénon wrote in 1924, he wished to “restore to the West an appropriate traditional civilization.” Trump’s tweets Wednesday saying that transgender people would not be allowed to serve in the military was a gesture in this direction — and a gesture Bannon supported.

Myth No. 3

Bannon is a nationalist.

Bannon’s political brand, like his boss’s, is something he calls “America first” nationalism — a kind of hard-right, muscular populism that thinks of itself as being in opposition to what Bannon calls “globalism.” Globalists, he argues, are members of the “Davos class” who subordinate the interests of their own country to those of the transnational financial elite. “I’m a nationalist,” Bannon told the Hollywood Reporter shortly after Trump won the election. “I’m an economic nationalist. The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get f---ed over.”

But Bannon is a globalist in the sense that he considers Trump’s rise to be the American culmination of a right-wing-populist global uprising that includes Brexit and the ascent of nationalist politicians and parties in France, Italy, Poland and elsewhere. Of course, Bannon’s Traditionalist philosophy also inclines in a globalist direction. While his focus in the White House may be the United States, he thinks in much broader, global terms.

Myth No. 4

‘Seinfeld’ made Bannon fabulously rich.

When I first profiled Bannon for Bloomberg Businessweek in 2015, I included a colorful detail he told me about his time in Hollywood: that he owned a piece of the hit television show “Seinfeld.” As Bannon told the story, he was running a boutique investment firm and helped negotiate the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment (which owned “Seinfeld”) to Ted Turner. In lieu of his full adviser’s fee, he accepted a stake in five TV shows. One of them was “Seinfeld.” “We calculated what it would get us if it made it to syndication,” Bannon told me. “We were wrong by a factor of five.”

After my piece was published, speculation ran rampant as to just how rich Bannon had gotten from the show, which has earned more than $3.1 billion in syndication. As the Wrap pointed out last November, if Bannon owned just 1 percent of the show, he’d have netted $31 million. But in a May profile of Bannon, the New Yorker’s Connie Bruck went looking for evidence of his “Seinfeld” residuals and couldn’t find any, noting that “neither CBS nor Castle Rock nor Warner Bros. has records of payments to Bannon, if those records are as they were described to me.” Bruck seemed to wonder if Bannon’s claim was even true.

To find out, I tracked down Kim Fennebresque, who was the chief executive of SG Cowen, a subsidiary of the French bank, Société Générale, that bought Bannon’s firm and who was later his boss. “I know he got a piece of ‘Seinfeld,’ ” Fennebresque told me. “Steve told me about it one night in ’98 or ’99 when we were on the subway to a Yankees game.”

A source familiar with the deal told me that the “Seinfeld” rights went to Société Générale when Bannon sold his firm, but that he and his partner still receive payments. Sure enough, Bannon’s White House disclosure form showed income from Société Générale of between $50,000 and $100,000 last year. Another source said the number was closer to $100,000. It’s been 20 years since Bannon struck the fateful deal, meaning that he’s probably collected as much as $2 million. That’s hardly pocket change, but it also means “Seinfeld” has had a relatively small impact on Bannon’s net worth, which may be as big as $48 million, according to financial disclosure forms.

Myth No. 5

Bannon knows what he’s doing.

After Bannon created chaos with the original travel ban, the Washington Monthly’s David Atkins wondered what he was up to and noted: “His actions are seldom random and always deliberate.” When a White House visitor tweeted a picture of Bannon in front of a white board displaying the administration’s to-do list, a writer for the Guardian said, “It would be naive to think Bannon’s great whiteboard reveal is a gaffe.” The notion is that every apparent blunder can be explained by a grand strategy.

But for all his success as an investment banker, film producer, conservative publisher and campaign strategist, Bannon — who had no prior experience in government — has had a much tougher time succeeding in the White House. Although he was credited with being a tactical genius at critical junctures in the campaign, helping Trump battle back from crises such as the leak of the “Access Hollywood” tape, Bannon hasn’t shown nearly the same facility in manipulating the levers of government.

The travel ban he supported was blocked by the courts (although a revised version has been allowed to take partial effect). He appears unlikely to get the “border adjustment tax” that he hoped would be a key component of tax reform. On Thursday, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Republican leaders announced that they were dropping it. Bannon’s strategy of making an enemy of the media may be keeping some Trump supporters in the fold, but it hasn’t done anything to advance Trump’s legislative agenda — a black mark for the chief strategist’s image as Machiavelli.

I hadn't heard about Seinfeld.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Stephen Bannon once guided a global firm that made millions helping gamers cheat"

Spoiler

Stephen K. Bannon had already been successful in Hollywood and on Wall Street when he flew to Hong Kong in mid-2005 to learn more about a promising new opportunity.

A start-up called Internet Gaming Entertainment, or IGE, had found a novel way to make millions of dollars each month in the exploding online video game industry. Working from the 19th floor of a skyscraper in Hong Kong, the company sold virtual goods for real money — magical swords and capes and other accoutrements that granted video game players power and access in more than a dozen popular online role-playing games.

There was one problem, though: The companies that owned and operated these fantasy games prohibited what IGE was doing, and even considered it illegal. Several IGE executives told The Washington Post that they thought Bannon could help change that. Bannon agreed to become the company’s vice chairman. 

“The whole reason Bannon came on was to try to legitimize the business,” said David Christensen, who was hired as the company’s vice president of business development about the same time as Bannon. 

In the end, it didn’t work.

The story of Bannon’s six years with IGE and its successor companies has remained largely unexplored, even as Bannon has become one of the most influential political figures in the White House. His affiliation with the company cuts against his current image as a crusading champion of blue-collar manufacturing jobs and as a fierce opponent of globalism. It also shows Bannon’s willingness to be part of a company that operated in what one legal expert called “a classic gray market.”

Bannon helped persuade private equity firms, including his former employer Goldman Sachs, to invest tens of millions of dollars in the venture, which relied partly on labor from low-wage video game players in China to earn the credits that IGE then sold to gamers around the world. In 2007, however, IGE faced pressure from gaming companies, a class action lawsuit, an investigation by authorities in Florida and financial stress. Bannon soon steered IGE away from its virtual goods business.

Interviews with a half a dozen former employees and executives of IGE, and hundreds of internal company documents, reveal for the first time how the company worked to avoid detection by gaming operators — for example, using the identities of unwitting U.S. residents to create gaming accounts and connecting to proxy servers so its activities would be harder to trace to its Hong Kong office.

It is not clear how much Bannon knew about these tactics, which were in place before he started and continued afterward. He did not respond to requests for comment or an email with detailed questions.

A former child actor’s big idea

IGE was the brainchild of Brock Pierce, a former child actor in Hollywood who had roles in the 1990s family films “The Mighty Ducks” and “First Kid.” 

Precocious and quick-witted as a teenager, Pierce was also an avid gamer who had an entrepreneurial streak. In 2003, at 22, he and a partner opened an office in an industrial district of Hong Kong. The small office was a round-the-clock operation, its 15 employees taking orders from gamers around the world, former employees said. 

Pierce, reached by phone, asked a reporter to email questions to him but did not respond to subsequent emails or multiple messages on his cellphone.

For wealthy gamers, IGE offered an alluring proposition. Instead of toiling for days, weeks or months to advance beyond the early stages of an online role-playing game, they could simply buy the virtual goods that granted advanced powers or unlocked new virtual realms.

“It wasn’t unheard of for gamers to come to our website and spend $10,000” on a fully-outfitted character in a video game, said Greg Jelniker, who joined the company in 2005 as its vice president of operations but said he was later pushed out by Bannon. 

In April 2004, according to internal company records, IGE took in more than $2.7 million in revenue for virtual goods in four popular online games, including “EverQuest” and “Lineage II.” A year later, revenue for that same month rose to $6.7 million, those records show.

Flush with cash, IGE snapped up competitors in the emerging industry. It moved to a sleek glass skyscraper called Oxford House that also housed CNN’s Hong Kong office. It began recruiting seasoned executives from gaming and other industries, who were dazzled by what they saw in the cash-for-credits business. 

Most of the companies that owned the online games prohibited trading virtual goods for real money — IGE’s core business — and they worked to stop the practice, closing down accounts by the hundreds. These companies charged gamers a monthly subscription to access and play the online role-playing games. 

James Grimmelmann, a professor at Cornell who specializes in Internet law, said IGE was operating in “a classic gray market,” meaning that selling virtual goods for real cash — though not necessarily illegal — was not intended or authorized by the gaming companies.

Four former employees interviewed by The Post all acknowledged as much and reiterated a common sentiment that prevailed at the time.

“The idea was, let’s take it out of the gray market and make it legitimate,” Jelniker said.

IGE executives thought they could do this by persuading the game companies to support the practice. They reasoned that if they showed the gaming companies how much money players were willing to pay and agreed to share it with them, the companies would drop their objections and partner with start-ups like IGE. 

Bannon became a key part of that effort in 2005.

At the time, Bannon was a Hollywood financier and former Goldman Sachs banker who had branched into documentary filmmaking. 

“Bannon's role was fundraising and eventually trying to take the company public,” Christensen said.

Bannon lived in Laguna Beach, Calif., at the time and was also serving on the board of another company. But he took time to learn about IGE’s business, Christensen said.

“He familiarized himself with the business pretty deeply because he was talking to outside finance groups,” said Christensen, who was based in IGE’s Los Angeles office. 

A former executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private details of the arrangement said Bannon was given a small ownership stake in the company in exchange for his advisory role.

Bannon began working closely with Pierce and visiting Hong Kong to learn more about IGE’s operations, according to former employees. 

Michael Angeles, an operations manager in Hong Kong at the time, said Bannon was introduced to him in mid-2005 as “a big investor who would come in and start to help with the company.” At the time, Bannon was touring the Hong Kong office, sitting in on management meetings and introducing himself to the senior management, Angeles said.

Bannon visited the Hong Kong operation every few months, former employees said, sometimes bringing businessmen that employees imagined might be the big investor IGE needed.

“We sort of felt something big was going to happen,” Angeles said.

Low-paying ‘gold farms’

The month Bannon joined, IGE opened an office in Shanghai. The new office became an important hub in the network that supplied the virtual currency that IGE sold, often referred to as “gold.” That supply chain was also part of what made IGE so controversial.

“Gold farms” were popping up across China at the time. Low-wage Chinese workers accumulated gaming credits by playing around the clock and selling the credits to brokers. The “gold farms” paid young workers as little as 25 cents per hour, according to a 2005 New York Times story that examined conditions inside what it said had become known as “virtual sweatshops.”

...

While these “gold farmers” were not under the direct employ of IGE, it was an open secret inside the company that IGE bought credits from them, former employees said.

“The reality is, most of the gold was being farmed in China by a bunch of guys in tiny little cubicles who played these games for a couple of bucks a day,” said Jelniker, the former IGE executive, an account that was echoed by another former executive with direct knowledge of the arrangement. “Our operation in Shanghai would consolidate all these farming accounts and transfer [the gold] to the operation in Hong Kong.”

IGE’s growth, its entire business model, rested on a simple truth.

“Players in the West didn’t have time, but they had money,” said Lars Lien, who joined IGE in 2004 as head of customer support and worked there for about a year. “The reverse was true in China. People didn’t have money, but they had plenty of time.”

Employees in Hong Kong handled the retail side of the business, a combination of customer service in both the real and virtual worlds. 

Most of the online games allowed players to trade or give other characters virtual loot. IGE employees controlled hundreds of accounts in these games and would have their avatars meet customers’ avatars inside the games to transfer the virtual goods after receiving a real-world credit card payment.

Gaming companies regularly banned accounts that were suspected of being linked to real-money transactions. 

Former employees described a cat-and-mouse game.

IGE employees were instructed to conceal their activities both inside and outside the games, according to two former employees and company documents. They did this by taking steps that would shield their locations in Hong Kong and China, as well as their identities, from gaming companies.

“There was a lot of effort to conceal our operations both in China and Hong Kong,” Jelniker said. 

An undated employee-training presentation obtained by The Post instructed IGE workers never to type certain words in public forums inside the games. The list included “IGE” and “Names of any of our affiliated sites.”

...

Additionally, IGE employees in the Hong Kong office created accounts for the company’s delivery avatars using the names and home addresses of unwitting U.S. residents picked at random in a phone directory, Angeles said. The company used dial-up phone service that connected to servers in the United States, making it appear that they were using computers there rather than in Hong Kong, according to Angeles and Jelniker. 

“We were spending $20,000 a month on dial-up service,” Jelniker said. 

Neither Jelniker nor Angeles recall whether Bannon was ever briefed on these measures. 

Internal company documents show why IGE was being so careful. Gaming companies were banning their accounts by the hundreds. IGE kept a tally. In a four-week period between January and February 2006, for example, gaming companies closed down more than 800 accounts controlled by IGE, internal documents show.

...

Even so, business was skyrocketing. By October 2005, IGE’s monthly revenue had risen to $8.5 million, more than $5 million of that coming from purchases related to the hugely popular game “World of Warcraft,” corporate financial records show. 

‘The adult in the room’

In February 2006, IGE and Bannon celebrated a major coup.

A group of private equity firms, led by Goldman Sachs, agreed to invest $60 million, according to former IGE employees. 

Some of the investors had doubts given the prohibition from gaming companies but decided to jump in after seeing the explosive revenue growth, according to a person familiar with the investment who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“There were issues and concerns about how owners of the games would react,” the person said. “But there was also a consumer reality where hundreds of thousands of gamers were doing this. . . . We thought it was going to be very lucrative.”

Goldman’s $30 million came through its Principal Strategies group, a now-defunct division that traded using the firm’s own money, according to the former IGE executive. Oak Investment Partners contributed $20 million and Maverick Capital another $10 million, according to this person. Goldman, Oak and Maverick declined to comment.

The person familiar with the investment said that Bannon gave the Wall Street investors confidence, especially given the relative youth of Pierce, the company’s chief executive. 

“Bannon was the adult in the room,” the person said. “You’re dealing with the gaming community, you’re dealing with kids. He did inspire confidence.”

But the company was finding little success in its most important task: persuading game operators to accept real-money transactions inside their games. The biggest of their targets was Blizzard Entertainment, maker of the game “World of Warcraft,” which had become the largest moneymaker for IGE. Christensen met with executives at Blizzard, but they demurred.

“They felt this isn’t the right thing for us to be doing,” Christensen said.

Another shady venture.

[GreyhoundFan]

"Breitbart's war on McMaster bites Bannon"

Spoiler

The conservative news site Breitbart has waged a nonstop campaign against national security adviser H.R. McMaster, but so far it seems to have done the most damage to someone else: Steve Bannon.

A Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this week accused Bannon of using the right-wing media to go after his ideological foes, questioning his loyalty to the president and placing blame for White House dysfunction squarely on his shoulders.

The attacks on McMaster have put Bannon in an especially awkward position with his new boss, retired Marine general John Kelly, who has been increasingly defensive of McMaster, a longtime friend and fellow general, according to interviews with 10 administration officials and people close to the White House. McMaster, who pushed Bannon off the National Security Council principals’ committee, hasn’t spoken to Bannon in weeks, one senior administration official said.

Trump’s chief strategist has been suspected in the past of orchestrating stories against his colleagues in Breitbart, which he ran before joining Trump’s campaign last August. Kelly has told West Wing staff that he won’t tolerate the infighting or anonymous comments to the press that characterized the tenure of Kelly’s predecessor Reince Priebus.

The continuing flood of negative stories targeting McMaster has served as a constant reminder that the problem was bigger than Priebus, who resigned two weeks ago.

“Fair or not, common sense would dictate that Steve Bannon has reach and influence and communication with these alt-right platforms whose editorial bent more often than not, aligns with Steve’s agenda,” said Kurt Bardella, a former Breitbart spokesperson. “I think [the stories] gave ammunition to his detractors internally, to either ID him or his people as part of the problem.”

Bannon has grown more isolated without his ally Priebus in the West Wing. He remained in Washington this week while the president and other top staff have decamped to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., and spends his days either holed up in his office or attending meetings. He avoids openly scuffling with his colleagues, as he often did in the past, and has moved to align himself with Kelly, telling allies inside and outside the White House that the arrival of the former secretary of Homeland Security was a win for Trump’s nationalist supporters.

“The guy is desperately trying to lay low and keep his fights from spilling out into the public,” said one White House official. “Because he knows that he gets blamed.”

A White House spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. Bannon declined to comment.

When he joined the administration, Bannon filed an ethics waiver so that he could continue to communicate with Breitbart. But it’s not just Breitbart stories that Bannon gets blamed for. When gotnews.com and blogger Mike Cernovich’s call deputy national security adviser Dina Powell and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn “globalists,” all eyes were on Bannon, who privately coined the term.

“Bannon is being portrayed as the puppeteer behind right-wing media picking and choosing between who they like and don’t like,” said the White House official.

In the first two months of the administration, Bannon’s early disagreements with Priebus were a regular Breitbart storyline, often painting both men in a negative light.

In February, Bannon publicly called a Breitbart piece attacking Priebus “totally absurd,” telling the Daily Beast in February that he was furious with Washington political editor Matt Boyle over it. But anti-Priebus stories remained a regular feature on Breitbart until his dismissal last month. Breitbart defenders said these stories were a sign of their independence from Bannon.

The same dynamic played out with Breitbart’s coverage of Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, which remained negative even after Kushner and Bannon came to a truce at Mar-a-Lago in April. The site has routinely published updates on his role in the Russia probe and been critical of his efforts to craft foreign policy or drive government innovation.

“Do you think Steve wanted Breitbart putting bad stuff out there about Jared? No, because he knows he’s going to have to pay for it,” said a White House staffer.

A Breitbart spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

In June, Trump started telling aides that he suspected that Bannon was a source of negative stories, according to aides. After a slew of stories about Bannon “winning” policy wars in the White House—like Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord—the president told Bannon to “knock it off,” according to the senior administration official.

Priebus at one point also warned Bannon. “You’ve got to get people to stop writing this shit, because people know it’s you,” the senior administration official said.

Bannon was cut out of meetings on tax reform in July, after his proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy appeared in the press, and again when his idea to hire contractors in Afghanistan rather than expanding troop levels got publicity—just as McMaster was pushing for a mini-surge in the region.

A person close to Bannon said that the tax proposal likely leaked out because he was consulting with business leaders about it.

Bannon allies say right-wing media like Breitbart, GotNews and Mike Cernovich’s blog are ideologically like-minded and see Bannon as an icon. They tend to go after the same political foes with or without Bannon’s direction.

“You have to realize that in many debates, it’s Steve and the president against everyone else in the room, so oftentimes outlets like Breitbart don’t view themselves as taking Steve’s side, they think they’re taking the president’s side,” said one of the White House officials.

Two aides suggested that the stories are useful for Bannon since they create an echo chamber that is often picked up by Fox News, creating a narrative for Trump, who is easily influenced by what he sees on T.V. They also show that Bannon retains influence independent of Trump. “If they ever want to let him go they can see how dangerous he is from the outside,” said an outside adviser to the White House who is close to Bannon.

But one senior colleague said that even if Bannon isn’t leaking directly, he should be willing to disavow negative stories or at least put out public statements in support of his colleagues.

Last week, Trump stepped in to offer public support for McMaster, via a statement. “General McMaster and I are working very well together,” Trump said. “He is a good man and very pro-Israel. I am grateful for the work he continues to do serving our country.”

He reiterated his support on Thursday: “General McMaster? He’s our friend. He’s my friend and he’s a very talented man. I like him and I respect him.”

I wouldn't shed a tear if he is forced out.

[GrumpyGran]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

"Breitbart's war on McMaster bites Bannon"

  Hide contents

The conservative news site Breitbart has waged a nonstop campaign against national security adviser H.R. McMaster, but so far it seems to have done the most damage to someone else: Steve Bannon.

A Wall Street Journal editorial earlier this week accused Bannon of using the right-wing media to go after his ideological foes, questioning his loyalty to the president and placing blame for White House dysfunction squarely on his shoulders.

The attacks on McMaster have put Bannon in an especially awkward position with his new boss, retired Marine general John Kelly, who has been increasingly defensive of McMaster, a longtime friend and fellow general, according to interviews with 10 administration officials and people close to the White House. McMaster, who pushed Bannon off the National Security Council principals’ committee, hasn’t spoken to Bannon in weeks, one senior administration official said.

Trump’s chief strategist has been suspected in the past of orchestrating stories against his colleagues in Breitbart, which he ran before joining Trump’s campaign last August. Kelly has told West Wing staff that he won’t tolerate the infighting or anonymous comments to the press that characterized the tenure of Kelly’s predecessor Reince Priebus.

The continuing flood of negative stories targeting McMaster has served as a constant reminder that the problem was bigger than Priebus, who resigned two weeks ago.

“Fair or not, common sense would dictate that Steve Bannon has reach and influence and communication with these alt-right platforms whose editorial bent more often than not, aligns with Steve’s agenda,” said Kurt Bardella, a former Breitbart spokesperson. “I think [the stories] gave ammunition to his detractors internally, to either ID him or his people as part of the problem.”

Bannon has grown more isolated without his ally Priebus in the West Wing. He remained in Washington this week while the president and other top staff have decamped to the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J., and spends his days either holed up in his office or attending meetings. He avoids openly scuffling with his colleagues, as he often did in the past, and has moved to align himself with Kelly, telling allies inside and outside the White House that the arrival of the former secretary of Homeland Security was a win for Trump’s nationalist supporters.

“The guy is desperately trying to lay low and keep his fights from spilling out into the public,” said one White House official. “Because he knows that he gets blamed.”

A White House spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment. Bannon declined to comment.

When he joined the administration, Bannon filed an ethics waiver so that he could continue to communicate with Breitbart. But it’s not just Breitbart stories that Bannon gets blamed for. When gotnews.com and blogger Mike Cernovich’s call deputy national security adviser Dina Powell and National Economic Council director Gary Cohn “globalists,” all eyes were on Bannon, who privately coined the term.

“Bannon is being portrayed as the puppeteer behind right-wing media picking and choosing between who they like and don’t like,” said the White House official.

In the first two months of the administration, Bannon’s early disagreements with Priebus were a regular Breitbart storyline, often painting both men in a negative light.

In February, Bannon publicly called a Breitbart piece attacking Priebus “totally absurd,” telling the Daily Beast in February that he was furious with Washington political editor Matt Boyle over it. But anti-Priebus stories remained a regular feature on Breitbart until his dismissal last month. Breitbart defenders said these stories were a sign of their independence from Bannon.

The same dynamic played out with Breitbart’s coverage of Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, which remained negative even after Kushner and Bannon came to a truce at Mar-a-Lago in April. The site has routinely published updates on his role in the Russia probe and been critical of his efforts to craft foreign policy or drive government innovation.

“Do you think Steve wanted Breitbart putting bad stuff out there about Jared? No, because he knows he’s going to have to pay for it,” said a White House staffer.

A Breitbart spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

In June, Trump started telling aides that he suspected that Bannon was a source of negative stories, according to aides. After a slew of stories about Bannon “winning” policy wars in the White House—like Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord—the president told Bannon to “knock it off,” according to the senior administration official.

Priebus at one point also warned Bannon. “You’ve got to get people to stop writing this shit, because people know it’s you,” the senior administration official said.

Bannon was cut out of meetings on tax reform in July, after his proposal to raise taxes on the wealthy appeared in the press, and again when his idea to hire contractors in Afghanistan rather than expanding troop levels got publicity—just as McMaster was pushing for a mini-surge in the region.

A person close to Bannon said that the tax proposal likely leaked out because he was consulting with business leaders about it.

Bannon allies say right-wing media like Breitbart, GotNews and Mike Cernovich’s blog are ideologically like-minded and see Bannon as an icon. They tend to go after the same political foes with or without Bannon’s direction.

“You have to realize that in many debates, it’s Steve and the president against everyone else in the room, so oftentimes outlets like Breitbart don’t view themselves as taking Steve’s side, they think they’re taking the president’s side,” said one of the White House officials.

Two aides suggested that the stories are useful for Bannon since they create an echo chamber that is often picked up by Fox News, creating a narrative for Trump, who is easily influenced by what he sees on T.V. They also show that Bannon retains influence independent of Trump. “If they ever want to let him go they can see how dangerous he is from the outside,” said an outside adviser to the White House who is close to Bannon.

But one senior colleague said that even if Bannon isn’t leaking directly, he should be willing to disavow negative stories or at least put out public statements in support of his colleagues.

Last week, Trump stepped in to offer public support for McMaster, via a statement. “General McMaster and I are working very well together,” Trump said. “He is a good man and very pro-Israel. I am grateful for the work he continues to do serving our country.”

He reiterated his support on Thursday: “General McMaster? He’s our friend. He’s my friend and he’s a very talented man. I like him and I respect him.”

I wouldn't shed a tear if he is forced out.

Can't imagine what could possibly happen to him that WOULD make me shed a tear.