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.
Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.
Bannon goes on to say that such a treasonous meeting should have taken place away from Trump Tower with people who could provide deniability to the campaign, after which you'd launder the information through the media. He added, “The chance that Don Jr did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero.”
Notice that he said "the chance," which I take to mean that he doesn't know for a fact whether this happened, just that it's the way such things worked in the campaign.
It has always seemed unlikely that Donald Trump Jr. didn't tell his father about the meeting, particularly since candidate Trump gave a speech the next day in which
he said, "I am going to give a major speech on probably Monday of next week and we’re going to be discussing all of the things that have taken place with the Clintons. I think you’re going to find it very informative and very, very interesting." (He never delivered that speech and gave an anodyne foreign policy address instead.)
Trump was very unhappy with the Bannon quotes and released an angry
statementsaying that Bannon had "lost his mind" and was a liar. But keep in mind that Bannon
told "60 Minutes" months ago that Trump's firing of Comey was "the biggest mistake in modern political history," so it's not as if this is the first time he's publicly condemned the president and members of his team. Perhaps saying that he thought Donald Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort committed treason by not notifying the FBI takes it to another level, but notions of Trump's tremendous "loyalty" to his family are overblown. (See
this article in Vanity Fair about how Trump really treats Don Jr., if you doubt it.)
The real source of Trump's ire is likely something that hits him personally, which is truly the only thing he cares about. Bannon was quoted saying something else that plays into the current state of the Mueller investigation in a way that puts Trump in serious danger:
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. 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. It goes through Deutsche Bank and all the Kushner shit. The Kushner shit is greasy. They're going to go right through that. They're going to roll those . . . guys up and say play me or trade me.
Bannon doesn't say that he knows anything specific, just that he's seeing what other close observers are seeing. But it's likely to make Trump see red to hear his former confidant and chief strategist chattering about this with such confidence, especially since the media then blared it all day long.
On Tuesday night, before Trump posted his weird tweet about his "yuge" nuclear button, The New York Times had published
an op-ed by the proprietors of Fusion GPS, the research firm that originally hired former British spy Christopher Steele to look into Trump's ties to Russia. In order to clear their reputation, which is being smeared daily by Trump partisans in Congress, the Fusion GPS owners asked that the House Intelligence Committee release the transcript of their testimony, in which they said under oath that they did not believe the Steele dossier was the genesis of the Russia investigation.
More importantly, they also wrote that they had alerted the Intelligence Committee that it should look into Deutsche Bank, adding that they had found "widespread evidence that Mr. Trump and his organization had worked with a wide array of dubious Russians in arrangements that often raised questions about money laundering."
No doubt Trump did not enjoy hearing the words of his former close associate Steve Bannon echoing those claims all over television the next day. Bannon was right, after all. Mueller did choose the
money-laundering expert Andrew Weissmann for a reason, and Trump undoubtedly knows it. Until now the president has been hoping that the investigation would wind up quickly without getting into all those unpleasant financial questions from his past. That hope is fading and he's getting very worried.
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