Trump Slams Bannon "He Lost His Mind"
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NEW YORK (CBSMiami/CNN) - President Donald Trump has come out fighting after former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon called out Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner in a new book.
Michael Wolff, the author of "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," based the book on hundreds of interviews, including ones with President Donald Trump and his inner circle.
According to the book, which was obtained by The Guardian, Bannon addressed the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Russian operatives who offered damaging information about Hillary Clinton. He called the meeting "treasonous."
"The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor -- with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers," Bannon continued, according to the Guardian. "Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s***, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately."
Bannon also reportedly told Wolff that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign's potential ties to Russia is centered on money laundering, saying that the White House is "sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five" hurricane.
"You realize where this is going. This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose (senior prosecutor Andrew) Weissmann first and he is a money-laundering guy," Bannon reportedly said. "Their path to f***ing Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner. It's as plain as a hair on your face."
Bannon said he believes Kushner, the White House senior adviser and the President's son-in-law, could be convinced to cooperate if Mueller probes his financial records.
"They're going to go right through that. They're going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me," Bannon is reported as saying, apparently referring to Trump Jr. and Kushner.
The Trump Tower meeting has been of intense interest to the congressional Russia investigators as well as Mueller.
On Wednesday, the White House released a statement from President Donald Trump in which slammed Bannon:
"Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican Party.
Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn't represent my base — he's only in it for himself.
Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.
We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down."
