BANNON, S
==
mercer, bossie conway
wapo: Bannon and Trump were introduced in 2010 by David Bossie, who rose as a hero on the right when as a congressional staffer in the 1990s he helped to investigate Bill Clinton and went on to become president of Citizens United, a conservative group whose work includes a movie pillorying Hillary Clinton. Bossie did not respond to a request for comment.
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MMA
05/12/25
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May 12, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
STEVE BANNON (HOST): This hurtling towards a constitutional crisis, which we are hurtling towards, it must be resolved by the end of June. When the Supreme Court leaves for the summer, they're not back until October. This cannot fester over the summer. This issue, particularly about the deportations.
Something else, I believe certain members of Congress should be arrested this afternoon for their activities on this situation up in Newark. The mayor was already arrested.
I think Stephen Miller, as we started here on the show with Rogan O'Handley, DC Draino, to talk about the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus like President Lincoln did during the Civil War, that this is something that has to be on the table.
I believe that this is going to be even a bigger part of the controversy. I think it's gonna become part of the conversation. I know Stephen Miller and the crack team over there, he's deputy White House counsel — chief of staff for policy, I think Stephen and his team are all over this. Remember Stephen ran America First Law, which is outstanding, did so much of the great work.
This is the convergence of the crises, right? You have the constitutional crisis on the mass deportations and really President Trump's power under Article 2. The judge in San Francisco on Friday said he doesn't have the ability to either cut costs of personnel at 21 separate federal agencies, so the whole Article 2 powers of the president now being challenged by, let's face it, radical Marxist — neo-Marxist, a judicial supremacists in the federal judiciary, it's got to be taken care of.
They asked me at the Financial Times situation on Saturday night, what happens to the Supreme Court's rules? I said, hey, we're going to see at the time. It's that open a question.
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December 10, 2024, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room
STEVE BANNON (HOST): Here's what we're going to turn the page on. We're going to fire everybody in this illegitimate regime on moment one. Everybody, every battlefield commission, every historical society, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, every person that was put in by this illegitimate regime is going to be shown the door. Shown the door.
And we dare you, if you're listening, we dare you, because we know you are. We dare you to give a blanket preemptive pardon on these criminals. Yep, on Fauci. Yep, on shifty Schiff. Yep, on Milley. Yep, on Liz. Liz had a big long thing yesterday. She came back with President Trump, you know, President Trump said something about that – about J6. No.
We're going to pardon all the J6 people who have been in the prisons and then they can get the civil suits and come after you people personally, which they have to do.
…
I'm sure there'll be a couple of, three, you know, investigations and see where that gets. Maybe a special counsel. Maybe. I think that'd be pretty cool. But, hey, that's all decisions guys are got to make. I'm not - I'm just sitting here in front of a microphone screaming like a madman.
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Clay Travis: “We’re in a real war. Legal warfare is afoot and it’s time to return fire.”
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- ### CNN and MSNBC fact-checked Trump's complaints about his guilty verdicts. Fox News repeated them.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/03/trump-linked-christian-fundamentalists-are-pouring-dark-money-into-europe-and-boosting-the-far-right/
**Claire Provost**and **Mary Fitzgerald**
According to a :{new analysis released by openDemocracy:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, Christian-right fundamentalists linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured at least $50 million of dark money into Europe over the last decade.
Infographic courtesy of openDemocracy.
Between them, these groups have backed armies of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as well as so-called family values campaigns against LGBTQ rights, sex education and abortion—and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far right.
They are spending money on a scale “not previously imagined,” according to lawmakers and human rights advocates, who have called openDemocracy’s findings “shocking.”
Among the biggest spenders is a group whose chief counsel is also Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow. Another organization has collaborated with a controversial Rome-based institute backed by Steve Bannon.
None of these American groups discloses who its donors are—though at least two have links to famous conservative billionaires, such as the Koch brothers (who helped bankroll the Tea Party movement) and the family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
‘Nobody should be in any doubt as to the insidious nature of these fundamentalist groups’
The increasing ties between some of these Christian conservative groups and the European far right will be on display this weekend at a summit of the World Congress of Families (WCF): a network of American, Russian and other ultra-conservative activists.
Right-wing politicians and their supporters from across Europe are expected to attend the event in Verona, Italy—including the Italian deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, who has described the WCF as a showcase for “:{the Europe that we like:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.”
A cross-party group of more than 40 members of the European Parliament (MEPs) has called on the EU’s transparency tsar Frans Timmermans to look into the influence of “U.S. Christian fundamentalists… with the greatest urgency” ahead of May’s European Parliament elections.
In a letter reacting to openDemocracy’s findings, and copied to the presidents of the European Council, European Commission and European Parliament, the MEPs have demanded action to protect European democracy “against nefarious outside influences.”
Scottish National Party MEP Alyn Smith, who sits on the European Parliament’s foreign affairs committee and signed the letter, said on Wednesday: “This investigation by openDemocracy is extremely timely and shines a light on a major challenge facing democracy in Europe.”
OpenDemocracy’s findings “are highly alarming, and nobody should be in any doubt as to the insidious nature of these fundamentalist groups,” he continued. “No group of any kind should be able to use dark money to distort debate and to subvert democracy in Europe, least of all groups such as these whose causes are deeply regressive.”
‘The Europe we like’
OpenDemocracy has examined :{a decade of U.S. Christian organizations’ financial accounts:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and found that several of them appear to have significantly increased their spending in Europe over the past five years.
These findings come as far-right parties aim for big wins in the upcoming European Parliament elections in May, and show how large amounts of foreign money have supported the spread of their “traditional values” messages.
OpenDemocracy has reviewed hundreds of pages of financial filings for a dozen religious conservative groups that are registered as tax-exempt non-profit organizations, and thus are required to disclose some information about their foreign spending.
Some of these groups have been previously accused of supporting campaigns to criminalize homosexuality in Africa, :{“draconian” anti-abortion laws in Latin America:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and controversial projects to encourage gay people in the United States to :{“leave homosexuality.”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:
But the extent of their European activity has—until now—received little scrutiny. The new investigation reveals that some of these groups have:
- Sent teams of lobbyists to Brussels to influence EU officials
- Challenged laws against discrimination and hate speech in European courts
- Supported campaigns against LGBTQ rights in the :{Czech Republic:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and :{Romania:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:
- Funded a network of seemingly grassroots anti-abortion campaigns in Italy and Spain
- Deployed ambulance-chasing evangelists after tragedies such as the Grenfell Tower fire, and in the wake of terrorist attacks ???
Five of the conservative groups have previously been listed as :{partners of the World Congress of Families (WCF):(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: network, which is meeting in Verona this week.
It’s not just European politicians who are concerned about them: These groups are controversial in America too. The WCF itself has been described as an “:{anti-LGBT hate group:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:” by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which monitors extremist movements and tracks this network’s :{increasing connections with the far right:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.
The SPLC :{explains:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: that “viewing homosexuality as unbiblical or simply opposing same-sex marriage” is not enough to be categorized as a “hate group.” Groups on this list go further—claiming that homosexuality is dangerous, linked to pedophilia, and should be criminalized, disseminating “disparaging ‘facts’ about LGBT people that are simply untrue.”
This is, says SPLC, “no different to how white supremacists and nativist extremists propagate lies about black people and immigrants to make these communities seem like a danger to society.”
Joseph Grabowski, a WCF spokesperson, told openDemocracy: “We dispute entirely the premise [of the ‘hate group’ designation]… It’s an unfortunate slight for the countless Americans and the people around the world who hold the same views as we do on marriage, the nature of family and the right to life, that are part of the fabric of Christianity and also other traditional points of view,” he said.
The WCF is a project of the :{International Organization for the Family:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and the Illinois-based Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, whose :{directors:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: include :{:{an :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{ultra-conservative Spanish activist linked to the leader of the far-right Vox party:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.
Other directors include :{a close associate:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: of a Russian oligarch who sponsored a 2014 :{“secret meeting”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: in Vienna with key French and Austrian far-right leaders—and an :{Italian politician:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: facing corruption charges in his country.
Over the last decade, the WCF has hosted at least seven major meetings in Europe, attended by hundreds of religious right activists and a growing list of far-right politicians. Its 2017 meeting in Budapest was :{opened:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán.
Among the :{conveners:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: of this week’s event in Verona is an Italian anti-abortion group :{linked:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: to the neo-fascist Forza Nuova party, whose leader is also expected to attend the WCF.
Trump, the far-right and the Christian ‘legal army’
Two of the Trump-linked groups examined by openDemocracy are Christian-right legal powerhouses:Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) and the American Center for Law and Justice. Together, they have spent more than $20 million in Europe since 2008.
They don’t disclose their funders, but journalists have previously traced at least $1 million in grants to ADF from a foundation controlled by the billionaire family of Betsy DeVos, Trump’s education secretary, and Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater mercenary firm.
ADF was co-founded by Alan Sears, a Christian-right leader who co-authored a book against “the homosexual agenda.” It is increasingly active internationally, including in Latin America. It supported a 2016 law in Belize making gay sex punishable :{with 10 years in jail:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.
This group tripled its annual spending in Europe between 2012 and 2016, to more than $2.6 million a year. It now has :{offices:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: in Belgium, France, Austria, Switzerland and the UK, and spends :{hundreds of thousands of euros:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: lobbying EU officials, according to separate transparency data.
Among its European projects, the group supported the defense of a notorious German activist who :{compared abortion to the Holocaust:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and accused specific doctors of murder.
This year, ADF International also co-hosted :{an event:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: with the French group La Manif Pour Tous, which has been previously been linked to the far-right party :{Front National:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.
Ahead of the last European Parliament elections in 2014, La Manif Pour Tous launched a “:{Europe for Family:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:” campaign that got 230 French candidates to sign a pledge opposing marriage equality, trans rights and sex education.
Speaking to openDemocracy, a spokesperson for ADF International said they are “exclusively privately funded by people from all over the world, who care about human rights” and that their activities include “advocating for freedom of speech in Europe.”
Asked for more detail about whom the group gives its money to, they said: “Since our advocacy involves court cases in countries where people are harassed, stigmatized, and even killed because of their religious convictions, it is our general policy not to disclose any recipients of funding in order to protect their personal safety and livelihoods.”
The second of the two Trump-linked groups, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ),also operates through the courts. It was founded in 1990 by American televangelist Pat Robertson to :{oppose the American Civil Liberties Union:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.
The group’s current chief counsel is Jay Sekulow, a conservative talk-show host who has been described as “:{the top lawyer:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:” on Donald Trump’s legal team in the Mueller inquiry.
This group has had an office in Strasbourg, France—home of the European Court of Human Rights—for more than 20 years, from where it has :{intervened in numerous cases:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:on issues including same-sex marriage, abortion rights and artificial insemination.
The director of its Strasbourg outfit :{has also represented the Holy See at the Council of Europe:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, while its Moscow center :{has praised:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: Putin’s laws banning “gay propaganda.”
Trump, Franklin Graham and U.S.-sanctioned Kremlin officials
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association is another major spender. It is led by the famous evangelical preacher’s son, Franklin Graham, who said Satan is the :{architect of same-sex marriage:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: and described Islam as an “:{evil and very wicked religion:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.”
Franklin Graham, who has supported Trump as someone who “:{defends the faith:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:,” was in Russia earlier this month :{meeting with Kremlin officials under U.S. sanctions:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, on a trip that he said was personally signed off on by Vice President Michael Pence.
In 2018, his group organized :{festivals:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: in England and Scotland amid protests from Muslim and LGBT rights groups. It also supports “rapid response chaplains” that target crises and :{have been accused:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: of “chasing ambulances” and “exploiting tragedy.”
Its filings disclose more than $23 million spent in Europe through two different U.S. entities between 2008 and 2014—making it the largest spender in this region, of the American groups analyzed by openDemocracy.
However, 2014 is the latest year for which openDemocracy was able to find public documents for this group, which has offices in the :{UK, Germany, France and Spain:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:, so the true extent of its influence in the region is not yet known.
Training Europeans, on the ‘front lines of the Culture War’
A number of groups spending smaller amounts of money appear to have increased their activities in Europe in recent years.
The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, which combines a conservative Christian worldview with free-market economics, has received :{hundreds of thousands of dollars:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: from the Koch family foundations.
This group spent more than $1.7 million in Europe since 2008, with its spending in the region rising in recent years (from around $166,000 in 2008 to almost $240,000 in 2017).
In Italy, it has collaborated with the :{Dignitatis Humanae Institute:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:—of which Steve Bannon is a trustee—that has locally controversial plans to use a monastery outside Rome as a :{“gladiator school for culture warriors.”:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:
Also on the list is the U.S. branch of the Tradition, Family and Property (TFP), an ultra-conservative transnational Catholic movement that :{says it’s:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: “on the front lines of the Culture War, peacefully defending the values of tradition, family and private ownership.”
This group said it spent about $100,000 in Europe since 2010. Its filings don’t detail where this money went, but the TFP has been linked to :{a controversial think tank:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: in Poland that has helped develop policies for far-right Law and Justice (PiS) politicians.
A ‘wake-up call’ to prevent ‘foreign interference’
Under U.S. law, the groups analyzed by openDemocracy are required to publicly disclose some information about their foreign spending, but not the names of their overseas recipients, details of what activities they fund—or the identities of their own funders.
The $50 million figure drawn from :{openDemocracy’s analysis:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: is also a likely underestimation of the resources that U.S. conservatives have channeled into Europe in recent years.
Data for 2018 is not yet available; meanwhile, there are some important loopholes. Religious organizations registered as churches, for example, don’t need to file the same disclosures.
A number of other U.S. Christian conservative groups appear to be spending money in Europe, but do not disclose this on their U.S. filings—including the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society, which has coordinated the WCF network.
Reacting to openDemocracy’s findings, German Green MEP Terry Reintke, who sits on equality-related committees at the European Parliament, said: “This extreme extent of financial support flooding the EU is shocking—especially with the European elections ahead of us.”
The SNP MEP Alyn Smith has said he and his fellow parliamentarians who signed Wednesday’s letter have called for the mobilization of “EU institutions and member states in preventing malign actors such as those identified in the investigation from interfering in the European Parliament elections in May—and beyond.”
Caroline Hickson, regional director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s European Network, said: “The scale of this meddling by U.S. extremists is shocking, but sadly no surprise to us. Every day European societies face concerted attacks by outside forces seeking to impose reproductive coercion… This is utterly at odds with the European values of democracy and human rights.”
“This is dark money coming into Europe to threaten human rights, and we’re not doing anything about it,” warned Neil Datta, secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum on Population and Development, describing the amounts of money involved as “staggering.”
“It took the Christian right 30 years to get to where they are now in the White House,” he said. “We knew a similar effort was happening in Europe, but this should be a wake-up call that this is happening even faster and on a grander scale than many experts could have ever imagined.”
Additional reporting by :{:{Peter Geoghegan:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.
This article was produced by :{:{openDemocracy:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}: in partnership with the :{:{Independent Media Institute:(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}::(style="box-sizing:border-box;outline:none;margin:0px;padding:0px"):}:.
https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/trumps-ag-nominee-helped-perpetrate-steve-bannons-uranium-one-hoax/
Certain figures in Washington develop a gold-plated image over the years, praised so often in reputable media outlets as men (almost always men) of integrity that their reputations become unassailable. Nobody criticizes them, because they are defined above criticism. Often enough, these figures prove less perfect than advertised — think Clark Clifford or Kenneth Starr.
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Such a fellow is William Barr, whose nomination by President Trump for United States attorney general will come before the Senate Judiciary Committee next week. His name is almost invariably adorned with adjectives like “prominent” and “respected.” These days, it is also usually noted that he is one of the youngest lawyers who ever served in the office to which he again aspires, named by the late former President George H.W. Bush, of blessed memory, et cetera.
Given this uplifting consensus, it may seem churlish to mention some basic facts about Barr. Contrary to the sugar coating routinely applied by pundits to the Ronald Reagan-George H.W. Bush era, the Justice Department that Barr once headed was rife with political intrigue. (An attorney general predecessor of his — one Edwin Meese, still at large — barely escaped prison.)
The most blatant episode occurred one month before the 1992 presidential election, when Barr suddenly seized control of a minor matter in Little Rock, Arkansas. He ordered FBI agents in the Little Rock office to open an investigation of tiny Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan — no later than Oct. 16! — a move that was clearly designed to set up Bill and Hillary Clinton for embarrassment. Barr issued this order despite the fact that Charles Banks, the U.S. Attorney in eastern Arkansas, had determined there was no plausible evidence of any wrongdoing by the Clintons.
Barr’s partisan directive plainly violated Justice Department strictures against any legal action that might influence a federal election. His intrusion enraged Banks — a Republican appointee — who dictated a sharply worded letter that left no doubt about his suspicions.
Banks declared that he would not participate in this “intentional or unintentional attempt to intervene into the political process of the upcoming presidential election” and warned that this “amounts to prosecutorial misconduct and violates the most basic fundamental rule of Justice Department policy.” He closed by promising to direct “any press inquiry from any source whatsoever” to Barr.
Almost a quarter century later, Barr is the same partisan hack indulging in the same political mischief. And he is still targeting the Clintons.
Before he was nominated by Trump, he auditioned for the job by suggesting publicly that special counsel Robert Mueller has no legal basis to investigate the president for obstruction of justice. This worrisome opinion will no doubt be explored by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who fear that Barr will interfere with the Russia investigation.
They should also ask Barr why he believes that the Uranium One conspiracy theory — which claims that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton approved a Russian takeover of U.S. uranium reserves in exchange for donations to The Clinton Foundation — merits investigation by the Justice Department. “To the extent it is not pursuing these matters,” he said last year, “the department is abdicating its responsibility.”
Uranium One is a political hoax, albeit a hoax that Steve Bannon once contrived to place on the front page of The New York Times.It is false in every aspect, from the motives of the Clintons, to the process for approving the uranium asset sale by federal officials — which Hillary Clinton could not have controlled as secretary of state, and which continued after she left office. So for Barr to promote this fraud means either that he is very stupid or that he is willing to misuse the Justice Department’s investigative authority. And nobody thinks Barr is stupid.
So senators on the judiciary committee should ask why he uttered that remark. What evidence does he possess about Uranium One? What sources have informed his strange opinion? And will he pursue investigations to vindicate a political agenda?
It wouldn’t be the first time.
To find out more about Joe Conason and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.
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kranish
president Trump's dismissive description Wednesday of Stephen K. Bannon as "a staffer" who had "very little to do with our historic victory" marked his latest effort to cast his onetime confidant as a bit player who never had any real influence on the president's politics or policies.
It was the kind of story-shaping statement that, not so long ago, Trump and Bannon might have written together.
In reality, Bannon has been a guiding figure for Trump for years as the New York developer began seriously to consider running for president, according to associates of both men.
Sam Nunberg, who said he arranged numerous telephone calls between Bannon and Trump dating to 2013, said it did not take long for the two to become ideological soul mates. At a time when Trump was widely dismissed as a credible candidate, Nunberg said, Bannon took him seriously and publicized him on the Breitbart News website, which Bannon oversaw.
From those earliest days, Bannon encouraged Trump to run for the White House, and then, in the race's final months, he effectively took over a campaign that appeared to have almost no chance of succeeding.
"The only candidate who could have won this past election on the message of populism and conservative nationalism is Donald J. Trump," said Nunberg, who worked for Trump as a political and public affairs adviser before he was fired in 2015. "However, at the time Steve took a formal role, the campaign was in dire straits, and I don't believe the president would have been able to pull off that upset at the end without Steve Bannon.
no lnx
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is possible, if not likely, that Trump and Bannon will reunite again soon — the president has a long history of making up with associates against whom he has lashed out. But for now, at least, Trump and Bannon are on the outs, following revelations in a new book by Michael Wolff, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House," in which Bannon is quoted as saying that Donald Trump Jr.'s meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in June 2016 was "treasonous."
Bannon declined to comment Wednesday.
John Thornton — a former co-worker of Bannon's at Goldman Sachs whom Bannon has described as a "mentor" — saw Bannon work closely with Trump during the transition and the early months of the administration. He said in an interview Wednesday that he was impressed at how smoothly they got along and by how the president listened closely to Bannon's advice on issues ranging from the economy to China.
"It was a very healthy, highly engaged, intimate relationship that you would expect to see between the person who had just won the presidency and the person who had run the campaign," Thornton said. "There's no question he was clearly a central figure helping the president achieve his goals."
Bannon and Trump were introduced in 2010 by David Bossie, who rose as a hero on the right when as a congressional staffer in the 1990s he helped to investigate Bill Clinton and went on to become president of Citizens United, a conservative group whose work includes a movie pillorying Hillary Clinton. Bossie did not respond to a request for comment.
Outwardly, the two did not seem to have much in common — one making his fame and fortune in front of the cameras, the other building a power base behind them.
Trump cared deeply about his looks, his clothing and his hair, and he promoted himself in his reality television show, "The Apprentice." He had toyed with the idea of running for the presidency since 1987, but had always backed down when he concluded he had no chance of winning.
Bannon had a wild-looking demeanor, often dressed shabbily, uncombed and unkempt, despite his background in the Navy, Harvard Business School and Goldman Sachs. He made millions of dollars working in Hollywood for his boutique firm, Bannon & Co., on a variety of investments, as well as the sale of television properties that wound up giving Bannon a payoff from Seinfeld reruns. He made deals around the world, profiting from the globalism he later demonized. He produced films that criticized Wall Street, the political establishment and "Islamic fascism," and he gave speeches around the country promoting the tea party agenda.
The two men bonded over their rare ability to be members of the coastal elite while representing themselves as champions of the downtrodden working class — as well as over a shared anger at the Republican establishment.
That bond gelled shortly after Mitt Romney lost the presidential race in 2012. Trump began tweeting that Republicans had been robbed: "This election is a total sham and travesty. We can't let this happen. The world is laughing at us." Foreshadowing his campaign, Trump also tweeted: "We should march on Washington and stop this travesty. Our nation is totally divided."
During that same year, Bannon became executive chairman of Breitbart News and reshaped the website into one promoting more-nationalistic views, later declaring that it was "the platform for the alt-right." Bannon's Breitbart attracted white nationalists, although Bannon denied accusations that he was fomenting racist views.
It was after the 2012 election, as Trump went through his quadrennial exercise of pondering a bid for the presidency, that he began talking to Bannon on the phone more regularly. By 2015, their conversations became public, as Trump took turns as a guest on a radio broadcast called the Breitbart News Daily. Bannon has said that he was "mocked and ridiculed" for talking about a Trump candidacy on the show but that he realized that Trump had an uncanny ability to attract support.
During the radio interviews, Bannon sometimes seemed to be tutoring Trump about how to frame issues. For instance, in one interview, Trump said he wanted to build a border wall but allow some immigrants who graduated from U.S. universities to stay in the country.
"I still want people to come in. But I want them to go through the process," Trump said.
Bannon responded, "You got to remember, we're Breitbart. We're the know-nothing vulgarians. So we've always got to be to the right of you on this."
"Oh, that's okay," Trump said.
As Trump's presidential campaign unfolded, Bannon regularly advised Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, while also pushing the candidacy on the Breitbart website. Then, as the campaign seemed headed for defeat, Trump in August 2016 hired Bannon as the campaign's chief executive, which gave him significant control over message and strategy. Just as he had on his radio show, Bannon pushed Trump to go further to the right and to hammer Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton mercilessly.
The strategy worked, and Trump rewarded Bannon by making him the White House chief strategist, a powerful role that put him in conflict with Kushner, who was named Trump's senior adviser. Bannon had worked well with Kushner during the campaign but often was at odds with him in the White House, as Bannon pushed policies such as pulling out of a global-warming treaty, which Kushner and his wife, Ivanka Trump, reportedly had supported.
Bannon announced his arrival at the White House with an attack on the media.
"The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while," Bannon said in an interview with the New York Times. "I want you to quote this: the media here is the opposition party. They don't understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States."
That pleased Trump. But then Bannon appeared on the cover of Time magazine, with the headline, "The Great Manipulator," a portrayal of him as the brains behind the president. Trump famously collects magazine covers of himself on the wall of his office at Trump Tower, and he takes offense when others take credit for his accomplishments. The Time cover prompted Bannon's enemies in the White House to attack him. Kushner privately joined in the criticism, according to a White House official familiar with the matter.
Thornton said that while the relationship between Trump and Bannon may baffle some, there is a "larger picture" that makes sense to Bannon.
"Bannon sees himself as the head of a movement, and he sees Trump as the beneficiary of that movement at this point in time," Thornton said. "Bannon sees himself as helping Trump stay true to that movement. If Trump or his administration deviates from the movement, Bannon will go on the offense. If Trump stays true, Bannon is all in."
Another associate of both men, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that "no matter what the president says now, Steve during the transition and rolling forward was critically important. He was a very consistent voice of the far right .?.?. when others wanted to fade or fold."
The relationship seemed to have fallen apart in August, shortly after Bannon was quoted in an interview with the American Prospect saying "there's no military solution" to North Korea's nuclear capability, "they got us." Trump fired him, although Bannon said he resigned. In any case, Bannon later told the Weekly Standard, "The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over. We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over. And there'll be all kinds of fights, and there'll be good days and bad days, but that presidency is over."
Bannon then returned to running Breitbart News and, in effect, began laying the groundwork for the next phase of his war against the Republican establishment, of which he now viewed Trump as a captive. Still, the two remained in touch and had talked on the telephone at least five times since Bannon's departure, according to the White House. Bannon persuaded Trump to endorse Roy Moore, the failed U.S. Senate candidate from Alabama who was accused of inappropriate sexual contact with a 14-year-old girl when he was in his early 30s.
Then came the news Wednesday of Wolff's book, and the president, having played a crucial role in making Bannon one of the best-known political figures of the day, said that his former chief strategist had "lost his mind" and that he was done with him.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2017/02/23/bannon-trump-administration-is-in-unending-battle-for-deconstruction-of-the-administrative-state/
Bannon, President Trump’s reclusive chief strategist and the intellectual force behind his nationalist agenda, said Thursday that the new administration is locked in an unending battle against the media and other globalist forces to “deconstruct” an outdated system of governance.
In his first public speaking appearance since Trump took office, Bannon made his comments alongside White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus at a gathering of conservative activists. They sought to prove that they are not rivals but partners in fighting on Trump’s behalf to transform Washington and the world order.
“They’re going to continue to fight,” Bannon said of the media, which he repeatedly described as “the opposition party,” and other forces he sees as standing in the president’s way. “If you think they are giving you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”
Atop Trump’s agenda, Bannon said, was the “deconstruction of the administrative state” — meaning a system of taxes, regulations and trade pacts that the president and his advisers believe stymie economic growth and infringe upon one’s sovereignty.
“If you look at these Cabinet nominees, they were selected for a reason, and that is deconstruction,” Bannon said. He posited that Trump’s announcement withdrawing from the Trans-Pacific Partnership was “one of the most pivotal moments in modern American history.”
[Alt-right leader expelled from CPAC, after organizer denounces ‘left-wing fascist group’]
Bannon and Priebus advanced the administration’s war against the media in a joint appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where they were interviewed on stage by Matt Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the gathering. Last week, Trump tweeted an extraordinary condemnation of the media, calling news organizations “the enemy of the American People."...
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http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/bannon-makes-stunning-threat-media-were-going-make-it-worse-you-every-day
...Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon shockingly admitted Donald Trump’s goal (Bannon’s goal) in appointing new precarious cabinet members to head protective government agencies like the EPA — is to dismantle and “deconstruct” those organizations altogether. You can read that Daily Kos story by Dartagnan here.
On thesameday, during a joint CPAC press conference with Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Bannon threatened the media with a quote that is undeniably one of the most odious and perilous public statements made against the free press by a White House official, on record. Chris Cillizza with The Washington Post cites Bannon.
“It's going to get worse every day for the media,” Bannon said, insisting that the “corporatist” media would continue to see Trump pursue exactly the sort of economic nationalism that journalism allegedly despises. Then he added this call to arms:“If you think they are giving you your country back without a fight, you are sadly mistaken.”
Cillizza says the message from Bannon was unmistakable: The enemy of Donald Trump and his team, is not really the Democratic Party, it’s the media. He adds that presidential administrations and the press have often experienced adversarial positions.
But what Bannon and, by extension, Trump are up to is something very different than simply an adversarial working relationship with the media. Bannon doesn't want to change the media. He wants to totally dismantle the media. He wants to break its back and leave it for dead by the side of the road.
What is somewhat ironic, more than disturbing, and almost comical, is that Bannon is telling reputable reporters, including those at the Washington Post, that the White House plans to destroy them. And rather than stand up to him, reporters rush back to their laptops to write up the story, staying respectfully neutral, while indirectly serving as a right wing echo chamber.
Bannon and Trump are using the press to threaten and berate — the press. ...
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Bannon was the CEO of Trump’s campaign. He ran Breitbart, a far right website known for publishing sexist, racist and homophobiccontent. Politico reports Breitbart employees described constant mistreatment under his leadership. He believes we are at war against “jihadist Islamic fascism.” He’s called liberal women “a bunch of dykes.” He’s cited Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl as an inspiration.
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The two political operatives chosen earlier this month to lead Donald Trump’s presidential campaign after two former managers departed have been members of the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP), Hatewatch has learned
Longtime Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway and Stephen Bannon, executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News operation, were named on Aug. 17 as, respectively, the Trump campaign’s manager and its chief executive officer. The appointment of Bannon was by far the more controversial choice, given his role at a “news” outlet known for bashing immigrants, Muslims, women and others.
The CNP is an intensely secretive and shadowy group of what The New York Times once described as “the most powerful conservatives in the country.” It is so tight-lipped that it tells people not to admit their membership or even name the group. Revealing when or where the group meets, or what it discusses, is also forbidden. The organization, which can only be joined by invitation and at a cost of thousands of dollars, strives mightily to keep its membership rolls secret.
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which publishes Hatewatch, obtained a copy this spring of the CNP’s 2014 membership directory, a closely held document. It shows that Conway was a member of the CNP’s executive committee that year, and that Bannon was a regular member. It is not known if they remain.
The CNP is not controversial so much for the conservatives who dominate it — activists of the religious right and the so-called “culture wars,” along with a smattering of wealthy financiers, Congressional operatives, right-wing consultants and Tea Party operatives — as for the many real extremists who are included.
They include people like Michael Peroutka, a neo-Confederate who for years was on the board of the white supremacist League of the South; Jerome Corsi, a strident Obama “birther” and the propagandist hit man responsible for the “Swift boating” of John Kerry; Joseph Farah, who runs the wildly conspiracist “news” operation known as WorldNetDaily; Mat Staver, the Liberty Counsel leader who has worked to re-criminalize gay sex; Philip Zodhaites, another anti-gay activist who is charged with helping a self-described former lesbian who kidnapped her daughter from her former partner and fled the country; and a large number of other similar characters.
As the SPLC noted when it published the 2014 directory in May of this year, the CNP has every right to keep its membership secret. But, as the SPLC wrote then, “it also provides an important venue in which relatively mainstream conservatives meet and very possibly are influenced by real extremists, people who regularly defame LGBT people with utter falsehoods, describe Latino immigrants as a dangerous group of rapists and disease-carriers, engage in the kind of wild-eyed conspiracy theorizing for which the John Birch Society is famous, and even suggest that certain people should be stoned to death in line with Old Testament law.”
Bannon was already controversial. His Breitbart news operation has specialized in extreme-right propaganda that is summed up in some of the headlines it ran while under his stewardship: “Bill Kristol: Republican Spoiler, Renegade Jew,” “There’s No Hiring Bias Against Women in Tech, They Just Suck at Interviews,” “Birth Control Makes Women Unattractive and Crazy,” “Lesbian Bridezillas Bully Bridal Shop Owner Over Religious Beliefs” and so on. Breitbart also recently published a defense of the “Alternative Right” that included defending well-known white supremacist ideologues Jared Taylor and Richard Spencer.
It’s not known how their contacts within the CNP may have affected Conway and Bannon. But as the SPLC concluded in its May report on the CNP: “At a time of extreme political polarization in our society, in the middle of an ugly presidential contest which has featured an almost unsurpassed record of ethnic, racial and sexual insults and lies, Americans deserve to know who their ostensible leaders are mixing with as we collectively decide our country’s future.”
That is as true of campaign leaders as it is of political candidates.
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https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2016/08/31/revealed-conway-bannon-members-secretive-group
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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/11/stephen-bannon-facebook-group-racist-material-obama-death-threats
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Stephen Bannon, whom Donald Trump tapped as his chief strategist in the White House, has come under fire for his self-admitted promotion of the alt-right, a haven of white nationalists, when he was head of far-right Breitbart News. His defenders have insisted Bannon is no racist or anti-Semite. But Mother Jones has uncovered another clue about Bannon's political personality: Bannon joined a conservative Facebook group that has featured racist and extreme material. This material includes posts urging a military coup against President Barack Obama, featuring an image of the president dressed as an SS officer, celebrating the Confederate flag, highlighting a photoshopped picture of Obama with watermelons, praising a police officer who called Obama a "F*cking Nigger," and calling for Obama to be "executed as a traitor."
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This Facebook group is for an outfit called Vigilant Patriots, which claims its goals are defending and upholding the Constitution and preserving "our history and culture." As of Friday morning, it listed nearly 3,600 members, including Stephen Bannon, who apparently joined the group seven years ago.
Vigilant Patriots is a collection of right-wing Facebookers, including members who hail militias and decry Muslims, immigration, progressives, sellout Republicans, and the president with hateful, violent, and racist rhetoric. It has an active Twitter feed that is virulently anti-Islam. Its website does not seem to be functioning currently.
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Bannon has not engaged in much public activity on Facebook. He is listed as a member of 31 groups, most of them conservative, with several comprising supporters of Sarah Palin. (Bannon once made a gushy documentary about the tea party star.) A search of Facebook turned up only a handful of posts attributed to Bannon, none on the Vigilant Patriots page.
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With Facebook, there is always the chance an account could be a spoof or phony. But the Facebook account attributed to Bannon—the one that joined the Vigilant Patriots group—does appear to be legitimate. The Facebook page for the Breitbart radio show that Bannon once hosted contains a post from Matthew Boyle, a Breitbart editor, that linked to Bannon using this particular Facebook account. The Facebook page for Bannon's Palin documentary also linked to this Facebook account for Bannon. And a private and official Facebook group for media professionals lists Bannon as a member using this Facebook account. Bannon had to be added to this group by a Facebook staffer. (Facebook would not confirm whether this account belongs to Bannon.)
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This Bannon Facebook page joined a group that has provided a platform for extremism and racism. The Vigilant Patriots page on Facebook pushes a vicious mix of agitprop and conspiracy theory. It has published calls to arrest, impeach, and execute Obama. A 2012 post declared that Obama must be arrested as a "terrorist" for "Treason, Espionage, Sedition and Fraud" and derided him as "an Illegal Commander-in-Chief." A long anti-Obama rant from a member in 2011 called for hanging the "traitor." A different member referred to Obama as "the muzzie usurping lying POS traitor." ("Muzzie" is a derogatory term for a Muslim.) A group member in 2013 said Obama "must be tried, convicted, and executed as a traitor." One member railed, Obama "still occupies the office because white members of Congress are too afraid of being branded racist to file Articles of Impeachment against him. It's time to stop the charade. He is destroying America. Black, White, Green, Brown, or Purple, the man is a traitor. IMPEACHMENT NOW!"
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One Vigilant Patriot offered this critique of Obama:
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America is in danger of a complete take-over by the Muslim Brotherhood. Our military and governmental resources have been subverted to benefit the cause of Islamic Jihad…As RADICAL as that sounds, an Islamic take-over is the ONLY fact that snaps all of the puzzle pieces together and makes sense of the last 25 years of American History. Barrack Obama is a Muslim Brotherhood TRAITOR to America. He stands convicted in the eyes of all true American Patriots.
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A group participant claimed that Obama wants to "enforce Marshall [sic] law" to stay in the White House." And one post contended that US troops were purposefully bringing back Ebola from Africa.
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There's a lot of hate among the Vigilant Patriots. A participant assailed Obamacare as "totalitarian socialist" and claimed that Rahm Emanuel, an Obama aide who became mayor of Chicago, had "justified mistrust of Jews by the KKK." Another proposed putting the "criminal news media into prison" (with Obama and Hillary Clinton). One post suggested adopting the Confederate flag as a symbol of resistance. Another declared that the Koran is a "declaration of war on you, your family, your friends, all you hold dear."
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Mother Jones sent a Trump spokeswoman and Trump's presidential transition team a request for comment and a series of questions. The questions included the following: Did Bannon create this Facebook account? Does he personally control the account? Why did he apparently join the Vigilant Patriots group? Does he agree with the views expressed on this Facebook page? Does Donald Trump believe it would be appropriate for his senior staff to associate with a group that promotes racist material and death threats directed against Obama? The Trump spokeswoman and the transition team did not respond.
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Bannon appears to have been rubbing Facebook elbows with racists and haters. On Thursday morning, Kellyanne Conway, Trump's campaign manager, said Bannon "treats everyone kindly" and "has the ear and trust" of Trump. For those claiming Bannon is getting a bum rap on the white nationalist issue, this Facebook connection between Bannon and the Vigilant Patriots will not make their work any easier.
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Here is a sample of the content posted on the Vigilant Patriots Facebook page:...
wow pix
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guard uk no links
Data firm in talks for role in White House messaging – and Trump business
Trump strategist Steve Bannon apparently involved in talks despite being on board of Cambridge Analytica, which helped president-elect to victory
Peter Stone in Washington
Wednesday 23 November 2016 12.20 EST Last modified on Wednesday 23 November 2016 12.42 EST
A data mining company that helped Donald Trump win the presidency is in early talks to snare two potentially lucrative new contracts, one to boost the incoming Trump White House’s policy messaging and the other to help the Trump Organization expand its sales, the Guardian has learned.
Trump disavows the white nationalist 'alt-right' but defends Steve Bannon hire
Read more
Cambridge Analytica, a data company that uses personality profiling and boasts billionaire Trump backer Robert Mercer as a key investor, is in discussions about potential deals with the Trump Organization and Steve Bannon, the CEO of the campaign and now Trump’s senior counselor and chief strategist,according to a conservative digital strategist familiar with Cambridge. Despite his apparent role in the talks as a representative of Trump’s incoming White House team, Bannon is also on the board of Cambridge Analytica, the source said, an assertion also reported elsewhere. Mercer’s daughter Rebekah, who ran a pro-Trump Super Pac that plowed $2m into digital ads and other efforts backing Trump, andAlexander Nix, chief executive of Cambridge, are playing lead roles in the talks with the Trump Organization and with Bannon, the digital source said.
Historically, the Republican National Committee has picked up the tab for White House communication and messaging consultants, which means that Bannon – who has said he will step down from his job as executive chairman of the far-right Breitbart News when he starts his White House job – would have to get the RNC to approve such a deal.
Alternatively, there has been discussion about possibly creating an outside advocacy group that would focus on messaging and communications to support White House goals, which Cambridge might work for, according to the source.
The talks with the Trump Organization and Bannon underscore the rising influence of the reclusive Mercers as mega-donors on the right, and their tight ties to Trump’s inner circle.Rebekah Mercer, who oversees much of the family’s political philanthropy, is on the 16-person Trump transition executive committee.
If the deals in discussion come to fruition, some outside watchdogs say they could create new controversies over conflicts of interest for Trump.
“The web of potential conflicts between President Trump and the Trump Organization will only be made stronger and more difficult to untangle” if Cambridge winds up working for the president’s business interests and crafting messages to push the White House’s agenda, said Larry Noble, the general counsel for the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
For both the Trump Organization, which has already been criticized for a visit to the president-elect by business partners from India, and for generating support for Trump’s policy goals, Cambridge Analytica could prove useful. The London-based company claims it has key marketing and psychological data on some 230 million Americans, information that might help increase the size and value of a real estate empire, or build backing for Trump’s policy agenda.
Cambridge’s data could be helpful in both “driving sales and driving policy goals”, said the digital source, adding: “Cambridge is positioned to be the preferred vendor for all of that.”
Cambridge and the Trump Organization both declined requests for comment. A spokesman for the Trump transition said Cambridge would not be working for the White House, but did not address whether it might work for the RNC or an outside group to help the new president.
The potential windfall for the company comes after the Mercers and Cambridge played key roles in Trump’s victory. Cambridge Analytica was tapped as a leading campaign data vendor as the Mercers, who originally backed Senator Ted Cruz in the presidential race, flexed their muscle after endorsing Trump. The Mercers reportedly pushed for the addition of a few top campaign aides, including Bannon and Kellyanne Conway, who became campaign manager. In September alone Cambridge was paid $5m by the Trump campaign for its services.
Trump did not ask Argentina's president for business favor, spokesman says
Read more
Robert Mercer, his wife and his daughter have donated more than $40.1m to political committees and Super Pacs since the start of 2012 presidential election cycle, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. This year, the Mercers gave $13.5m to a pro-Cruz Super Pac run by Conway and then $2m to Make America Number 1, the pro-Trump Super Pac led by Rebekah Mercer.
Bannon and the Mercers have deep ties: Robert Mercer has reportedly donated $10m to Breitbart News. And this year, Bannon was in London at least once and met with Cambridge Analytica top brass, according to the digital source who noted that Bannon was on the company’s board. (Before Cambridge secured office space in Virginia it worked out of a Bannon office on Capitol Hill, the source said.)
Make America Number 1 paid Glittering Steel, a film company that Bannon heads which made an anti-Clinton film, $187,000 in October and November while Bannon served as Trump’s campaign CEO, unpaid.
“These payments appear to be clear evidence that the Super Pac was subsidizing Bannon’s work at the campaign,” the Campaign Legal Center’s Noble said. Super Pacs are not allowed to coordinate their spending with campaigns.
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/16112016/steve-bannon-trump-white-house-climate-conspiracy
President-elect Donald Trump has famously called climate change a hoax invented by the Chinese, but the man he has chosen as his chief White House strategist advances a far more elaborate conspiracy.
Stephen Bannon has called government support of alternative energy "madness." His conservative website, Breitbart News, relentlessly pursues the idea that global warming is an invention of activists, university researchers and renewable energy industry profiteers determined to assert global governance for their own gain.
"Pure scum" is how Breitbart News describes the alleged schemers, and the site suggested that the Vatican had been taken over by Marxists after Pope Francis urged the world to protect the environment and slow climate change. Bannon has cited a faked TIME magazine cover, purportedly from the 1970s, as evidence that scientists once thought the world was cooling.
Global warming hoax theories are among a wide range of extremist views that were circulated on the pages of Breitbart News under its executive chairman, Bannon.
The site's at times overtly racist, anti-Semitic and sexist content has prompted many to protest Trump's selection of him for a key post, and one that does not require Senate confirmation. The outcry has come from civil rights advocates, top Democrats and even some Republicans. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate group activity, reported in Aprilthat there had been a noticeable shift at Breitbart to more overt anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and racist rhetoric, making it, in effect, "the media arm of the alt-right."
"Steve Bannon's appointment should make us very nervous," Sen. Bernie Sanders posted on Twitter. "We're going to tell him and Trump that we will stand together and not be divided up."
There's been less attention to Bannon's denial of climate change science, and the conspiratorial views on clean energy he has promoted via Breitbart. Advocacy against climate change action has been a key aim of a major financial backer of Breitbart, the reclusive hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer. He reportedly playeda key role in installing Bannon at the top of the Trump's campaign in an August shake-up. Mercer, a major donor to the Heartland Institute, Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation and other conservative organizations that deny climate change, was among the top campaign contributors of the 2016 election. He spent $23.5 million to help elect Trump and other Republican candidates.
With overheated rhetoric and mischaracterization of fact, Breitbart has repeatedly said climate change is a corrupt swindle that is damaging the economy.
"We could be energy independent," Bannon said in a radio interviewhe conducted for Breitbart's radio program on Sirius XM Patriot. "There is an American renaissance, and an industrial renaissance in front of us, if we can just get the government out of our way."
In the interview, which followed Trump's energy speech in May in North Dakota, Bannon was questioning Trump economic adviser, Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, who had just published a book, Fueling Freedom: Exposing the Mad War on Energy. But the interview gave Bannon a chance to expound on his own views on energy policy and provides a window into the energy policy direction Bannon will push Trump to pursue in the White House.
Bannon, whose new job will involve developing strategy for working with Capitol Hill, is particularly harsh on Republicans in Congress. He criticizes them for agreeing to include support for renewable energy—"much of this nonsense"—in the omnibus budget bill passed at the end of 2015. (The legislation extended multi-year tax incentives for wind and solar generation as part of a deal that also lifted the 40-year-old ban on U.S. crude oil exports.)
"Whether you believe in alternative energy or not, one thing we can tell you for a fact—whether it works or not, that's all to be seen in the progress of time—it's up to its neck in crony capitalism," said Bannon. "The venture capital guys getting bailed out, the private equity guys getting bailed out, subsidies for these things.
"Why [have] the Republicans not had a more full-throated saying, 'No, we're just going to shut this stuff down. We don't care if the president vetoes it or not, but we're not going to fund this continual madness?'
"And by the way it is madness, at least according to your book, this alternative energy which really tries to compete with dollars for fossil fuel," Bannon said to Moore.
Moore countered by saying, "I'm not against renewable energy. I'm just against taxpayer subsidies."
In fact, worldwidesubsidies for fossil fuels are currently $493 billion, more than four times more than those for renewable energy, according to the International Energy Agency. In the United States, current direct budget subsidiesfor renewable energy are larger than those for fossil fuels, but oil, gas, and coal continue to receive $3.4 billion annually and benefit from decades of taxpayer subsidies, including those that led to an electric grid reliant on centralized, mainly fossil-fueled power.
In one attempt to quantify the subsidy advantage fossil fuels have enjoyed,DBL Investorsestimates that the cumulative value of federal subsidies for oil and gas have totaled $447 billion since 1918, compared to the $6 billion in subsidies for renewables since 1994.
Bannon introduced Moore, who is a Trump adviser, as "one of the great economic thinkers of our day." Moore's book, which urges allowing the energy to build the pipelines it wants to build, opening up public lands to drilling, and putting restraints on the Environmental Protection Agency, lays out "the case for what the country has to do," said Bannon. Moore argued EPA's regulations "are intentionally designed to shut down our domestic energy industry."
Bannon also asked Moore to weigh in on what he called "the globalists" who designed the Paris treaty on climate change. "None of these countries are going to abide by the Paris accord, just like they didn't abide by the Kyoto treaty," said Moore. He added he did not believe in climate change, and remembered that in the 1970s, scientists thought the Earth was cooling.
"TIME magazine had the cover, 'The Next Ice Age,'" said Bannon, laughing. (In fact, a photoshopped TIME cover that has circulated widely on the Internet is a fake. The emerging consensus of atmospheric scientists in the 1970s was that increasing carbon dioxide did pose a warming risk, despite a nine-paragraph Newsweek storyin 1975 on some climatologists' calculation of a cooling trend. Scientific studies since then have shown that soot and aerosolswere responsible for cooling, and that greenhouse gas-driven warming has overwhelmed that trend.)
After Pope Francis issued his encyclical on climate change and the environment, "Laudato Si" last year, Breitbart broadcast on its Sirius XM radio program an interview with one of the world's most prominent climate deniers, Lord Christopher Monckton, headlined, "Climate Expert: Marxists, Global Warming Extremists Control Vatican."
After the Paris climate accord last December, Breitbart News criticized negotiators' design of the agreement to avoid the need for Senate ratification (The agreement, legally binding under international law, is based on the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which ratified by the U.S. Senate in 1992.) " ClimateChange Deal a Threat to U.S. Sovereignty," said the Breitbart headline.
Most coverage and commentary on climate change in Breitbart News is written by the chief of the web site's London operation,James Delingpole,a former columnist for The Daily Telegraph, whom Bannon described as one of the "real hell fighters in the Breitbart tradition" when he appointed him in 2014.
At the start of this year, Delingpole wrote that global warming as an issue "is so totally over," because, among other things, "Temperature records from around the world do not support the assumption that today's temperatures are unusual." The piece ran right after the close of 2015, a year that NASA, NOAA, and the United Kingdom's Met Office agreed was the warmest on record.
Delingpole blames the concept of global warming on "activists and crony capitalists of the political system in order to advance the cause of global governance."
"They are pure scum," he wrote. "They have not a single redeeming quality and everything they do is worthless."
Delingpole has repeatedly called climate change "a $1.5 trillion-a-year conspiracyagainst the taxpayer,"based not on a government (taxpayer) spending figure, but a calculation quoted in Climate Change Business Journal, a market research newsletter, for the size of the clean energy industry.
He calls wind turbines "bird-slicing, bat-chomping eco-crucifixes."
After the election, Delingpole wrote that the only ones who won't benefitfrom Trump's fossil fuel-focused energy plans, are those in the "global warming industry" who, he repeats, are reaping a $1.5 trillion annual windfall. "It's really happening!" he wrote. "The Green Citadel is falling. And I don't know about you but I'm in no particular rush to take prisoners."
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While publicist Maria Sliwa attempts to mitigate the negative coverage surrounding Stephen Bannon, President-elect Donald Trump’s newly appointed chief adviser and the former head of the “alt-right” Breitbart News, one of the men she suggested could speak on Bannon’s behalf recently claimed that Japanese internment camps are Trump’s “precedent” for a Muslim registry.
A November 16 article from The Wrap explained that after Trump announced Bannon as a member of his administration, Bannon received “lots of bad press, some of it accusing him of racism, sexism and anti-Semitism,” and that Sliwa is working to make over his image (though she says she isn’t working for Bannon but has “a client who is”). While the funding behind the rehab campaign is unclear, the piece said Sliwa “sent out two emails to reporters offering interviews with two men available to talk about Bannon: U.S. Navy Seal (Ret.) Carl Higbie, and Breitbart Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein.”
While members of the media were reading Sliwa’s pitch, Higbie was making his own news. On the November 16 edition of Fox News’ The Kelly File, Higbie justified Trump's possible Muslim registry by suggesting that there is some “precedent” for it because the United States interned Japanese-Americans during World War II. Higbie continued, “Look, the president needs to protect America first, and if that means having people that are not protected under our Constitution have some sort of registry so we can understand, until we can identify the true threat and where it's coming from, I support it.”
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Rebranding Steve Bannon: Inside the PR Campaign to Rehab Trump Adviser’s Image
How a cagey publicist is trying to fight the bad press about the president-elect’s new chief adviser
Tim Molloy | November 16, 2016 @ 3:23 PM
If you see any stories in the next few days about how Steve Bannon was a great boss at Breitbart News and excelled during his time in the U.S. Navy, you’ll know that publicist Maria Sliwa is thriving in her job.
On Sunday, Trump named Bannon, the former executive chairman of Breitbart and CEO of his presidential campaign, as his chief adviser. Since then, Bannon has gotten lots of bad press, some of it accusing him of racism, sexism and anti-Semitism. (A New York Times news story said critics see him as a “voice of racism.” An opinion piece in the Washington Post called him a “dead lizard wrapped in the Confederate flag.”)
So someone decided to take the initiative and get Bannon some good PR. The question is who.
On Wednesday, Sliwa sent out two emails to reporters offering interviews with two men available to talk about Bannon: U.S. Navy Seal (Ret.) Carl Higbie, and Breitbart Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein.
But Sliwa insisted on Wednesday that she isn’t working for Bannon.
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“I’m not working for Bannon,” she told TheWrap in a brief interview. “I have a client who is.”
In two brief talks with a Wrap reporter, Sliwa wouldn’t say who actually hired her. When the reporter noted that she has worked for Breitbart in the past (see press release, below) she replied, “Oh God, please no,” and hung up.
She also asked why it was necessary to ask about the publicist behind a story.
The answer, in this case, is that it illustrates how people push Bannon’s agenda in ways that leave no sign of his involvement.
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It is not unusual for prominent people to hire publicists, or to seek positive stories. But it is unusual for publicists to refuse to say who they work for. (The Public Relations Society of America’s code of ethics says publicists should “reveal the sponsors for causes and interests represented.”)
Higbie and Klein were only part of the effort to rebrand Bannon in a more positive light. The Huffington Post noted that Trump spokesman Jason Miller cast Bannon on Wednesday as someone who has “embraced diversity.”
Sliwa’s emails to reporters on Wednesday were not the first time she has been involved in advancing Bannon’s agenda. She has promoted the work of a group Bannon helped establish in 2012, a nonprofit called the Government Accountability Institute. According to Bloomberg, it “partners with mainstream media outlets conservatives typically despise to disseminate those findings to the broadest audience.”
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Sliwa also helped promote “Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel,” based on the book “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” (The press release is below.) The New York Times cited some of the book’s findings in an April 2015 story.
The book was written by GAI president Peter Schweitzer. Bannon became GAI’s founding chairman in 2012, Bloomberg reports. Schweizer’s e-book, “Bush Bucks: How Public Service and Corporations Helped Make Jeb Rich,” was published during the Republican primaries.
Both books cast an unfavorable light on political rivals of Trump’s as he sought to win the Republican nomination and then the presidency.
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Sliwa’s bio notes that she is the president of Freedom Now Communications, Inc. and M. Sliwa Public Relations, as well as the press agent for the Sudan Campaign, and has “played a major role in publicizing the genocide, slavery and rape of civilians in Sudan and Darfur.” It says she is also part of the adjunct faculty at Columbia University and a former New York City undercover police officer. And she is the sister of Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa.
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Sliwa’s press release about Higbie on Wednesday quotes him saying that Bannon “has excelled in every single role he has held dating back to his service in the US Navy. I cannot imagine a better person to be advising an already successful businessman taking on the biggest business in the world, the US Government.”
On Wednesday night, hours after this story was initially published, Higbie got into a PR crisis of his own: Fox News’ Megyn Kelly gave him an on-air scolding after he said that the Japanese internment camps of World War II helped establish a precent for a national registry of Muslims.
Here are screen grabs of the two press releases from Sliwa:
clinton graphic novel
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http://www.ecowatch.com/steve-bannon-trump-2094347523.html
Prresident-elect Trump's choice of Steve Bannon as his top aide signals that white supremacists will be represented at the highest levels in Trump's White House," a spokesman for Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said about the former Goldman Sachs investment banker.
Even climate-denier Glenn Beck warned that Bannon "is a guy who wants to tear this system down and replace it with a new system. He is a frightening … no, he is a terrifying man. A terrifying man."
While Bannon hasn't specifically talked about his climate plans, he bragged to Mother Jones in July that his site had become "the platform for the alt-right." Well, this platform harbors a clear disgust for environmentalists and environmental policy.
Let's take a look at some of the anti-climate stories and sample quotes published by Breitbart writers.
- Sample quote: "Once other countries see the effects of Trump's anti-renewables, pro-fossil-fuel revolution, they'll find it harder to justify to their electorates the massive costs of the lunatic green energy policy by which the West has been held to ransom these last few decades."
Trump—who believes climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese and literally said, "The wind kills all your birds" and solar is "not working so good"—has made no bones about his support of fossil fuels and vows to undo "all job-destroying Obama executive actions" such as the Clean Power Plan....
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http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/white-house-propagandist-bannons-gravy-train-secretive-radical-right-wing-billionaire
Trump’s elevation of Breitbart News CEO Stephen Bannon to chief White House strategist is prompting many to ominously predict the Trump presidency will be like the worst of the campaign. But there’s an even more disturbing power play in the works.
Before Bannon turned “Breitbart News into Trump Pravda,” as one ex-Breitbart writer put it, Bannon backed 2016’s darkest ideologue, Republican Ted Cruz. Bannon went all-in for Cruz, not just because of his libertarian economics, but because his patron and ally, the family of hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, enlisted him and other Mercer-funded political assets for Cruz.
“Breitbart News was cranking out a stream of favorable Cruz stories,” Politico recounted in September. “And both the Mercer-backed pro-Cruz super PAC, ‘Keep the Promise I,’ and the Cruz campaign signed up Cambridge Analytica [Mercer's data research firm]. And only hours after the Texas senator officially launched his campaign at the Christian university Liberty University, he and his wife appeared at [daughter] Bekah Mercer’s extravagant Upper West Side apartment for a fundraiser.”
The Mercers, led by Rebekah, didn’t quit after Cruz's bid failed. They met with Trump’s children and the nominee, and in August their team, including Bannon and pollster Kellyanne Conway, were running Trump’s presidential campaign. As Politico noted, people who know the Mercers and their team said they were working for a far-right agenda, not any particular Republican candidate.
“I don’t think it’s about Trump. Trump is just a vehicle,” a Mercer family colleague told Politico. “It’s about wanting to be a player and wanting to beat Hillary, in tha
...
===voter fraud rent house exwife?
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Bannon also co-owns a condominium in Los Angeles and is known to stay at the so-called “Breitbart embassy”, a luxurious $2.4m townhouse beside the supreme court in Washington DC, where his website’s staff work from basement offices. A Bloomberg profile of Bannon published last October, with which he cooperated, stated that Bannon “occupies” the townhouse and described it as being “his”.But according to records at the DC office of tax and revenue, the Breitbart house is actually owned by Mostafa El-Gindy, an Egyptian businessman and former member of parliament. Gindy has received favorable coverage from Breitbart News, which styles him as a “senior statesman”, without an accompanying disclosure that he is the website’s landlord.aug 2012Fox News’ “Hannity,” Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon, director of “The Hope & the Change,” David Bossie of Citizens United, producers of the film, and adviser Pat Caddell appeared to discuss the massive disillusionment of Democrats and independents with President Barack Obama – and their film, which details that disillusionment in devastating detail.--Producers Dan Fleuette Stephen K. BannonExecutive Producer Lawrence KadishExecutive Producer Glenn Bracken EvansExecutive Producer David N. BossieProduced by David N. BossieWritten and Directed by Stephen K. BannonMARK HALPERIN (HOST): I think Bannon, probably, should not have let himself be so defined by others. The guy’s got an impressive resume. He is responsible for what goes on Breitbart. He has been since he took over. And there’s a lot of stuff on there that is has defined him as negative, slashing niche, dark. The guy also has a record of accomplishment as a businessman. And I haven't found any clear answer, from what I've read and in my own reporting about what exactly he's going to do. Is he in charge of message? Is he in charge of building some future network? Is he managing the campaign as a business guy? I got no idea. But I can tell you the press, right now the filter they're putting on Bannon is the one a lot of the press wants to put on Trump, which is, he’s given up, he’s just going to go dark and negative and populist and nativist. I don’t think that’s what they’re doing from talking to people in the campaign, but that’s the impression. Previously:The Trump Campaign's New CEO Sees Muslim Brotherhood Connections EverywhereHere's What To Expect From A Breitbart News Infused Trump CampaignCNN's Stelter: Many Conservatives Disavow Breitbart News And Critics Call It A “White Nationalist” PublicationBloomberg's Mark Halperin: Bonafide Trump Apologisthttps://mediamatters.org/blog/2016/08/17/what-you-need-know-about-trump-campaign-s-new-chief-executive-and-his-bigoted-website/212456mma:Trump’s presidential campaign announced today that it has named Breitbart News chairman Stephen Bannon as its new chief executive. CNN’s Brian Stelter reported that the move signals “nothing is off limits now,” and “we're going to see the most fringy ideas, the most right-wing ideas bubble up to the surface.“ Here’s what you need to know about Bannon and the bigoted news empire he has run since 2012.Breitbart Has Embraced The “Extremist Fringe” And Pushed “Racist Ideas” Under BannonThe Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported in April that Breitbart has recently “undergone a noticeable shift toward embracing ideas on the extremist fringe of the conservative right. Racist ideas. Race-baiting ideas. Anti-Muslim and anti-Immigrant ideas -- all key tenets making up an emerging racist ideology known as the ‘Alt-Right.’” The SPLC noted that “Over the past year the media outlet has been openly promoting the core issues of the Alt-Right, introducing these racist ideas to its readership -- much to the delight of many in the white nationalist world who could never dream of reaching such a vast number of people” and pointed out that the site has been “publishing more overtly racist diatribes about Muslims and immigrants” since 2015.The SPLC also detailed how Breitbart has promoted the “popular racist conspiracy theory” that “African-Americans are committing crimes against whites at alarming rates.”Several Employees Left Breitbart After The Site Failed To Defend A Staffer That Was Allegedly Manhandled By Corey LewandowskiIn March (now former) Breitbart reporter Michelle Fields alleged that she had been manhandled by Corey Lewandowski, who was Trump’s campaign manager at the time. After Bannon appeared to defend Trump over Fields, several staffers quit the site. Former editor Ben Shapiro said Bannon had “betrayed” the site’s original mission, stating: "In my opinion, Steve Bannon is a bully, and has sold out Andrew's mission in order to back another bully, Donald Trump; he has shaped the company into Trump's personal Pravda, to the extent that he abandoned and undercut his own reporter, Breitbart News' Michelle Fields, in order to protect Trump's bully campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who allegedly assaulted Michelle."Breitbart Staffers Reportedly Thought Trump Had Paid The Site For Friendly TreatmentLast August, as the Republican presidential primary kicked into gear, BuzzFeed’s McKay Coppins reportedthat several anonymous Breitbart staffers were upset that “the company’s top management was allowing Trump to turn Breitbart into his own fan website” and alleged that the Trump campaign had been paying the site for favorable coverage. (Bannon denied the allegations.) From Coppins’ article:According to four sources with knowledge of the situation, editors and writers at the outlet have privately complained since at least last year that the company’s top management was allowing Trump to turn Breitbart into his own fan website — using it to hype his political prospects and attack his enemies. One current editor called the water-carrying “despicable” and “embarrassing,” and said he was told by an executive last year that the company had a financial arrangement with Trump. A second Breitbart staffer said he had heard a similar description of the site’s relationship with the billionaire but didn’t know the details; and a third source at the company said he knew of several instances when managers had overruled editors at Trump’s behest. Additionally, a conservative communications operative who works closely with Breitbart described conversations in which “multiple writers and editors” said Trump was paying for the ability to shape coverage, and added that one staffer claimed to have seen documentation of the “pay for play.”[…]A spokesperson for Trump did not respond to requests for comment. But my sources at Breitbart said the billionaire has regularly taken advantage of his relationship with the site by placing calls to Bannon and asking for stories to be written about himself. They said his typical requests for coverage in the past tended to center on his serial flirtations with running for office, but they added that his constant presence on the homepage — and his general knack for pandering to the conservative fever swamps — had won him a true following among their readership. According to Vanity Fair, the “pro-Trump coverage [at Breitbart] is rigidly enforced from the top down,” with Bannon personally approving anything written about the Republican nominee.Bannon Called Ailes Sexual Harassment Charges A “Total Dud”Bannon defended disgraced former Fox News chief Roger Ailes against former anchor Gretchen Carlson’s accusations that he sexually harassed her. Bannon wrote a July 8 piece claiming that “Carlson is not the real shark because her ‘bombshell’ is, in fact, a total dud” and “Carlson seems to have no true case.” In a later post, Bannon claimed that the allegations against Ailes were part of a nefarious plot by a wide-ranging cast: “I think it’s virtually the whole of the Democratic establishment, including the Obamas, the Clintons, and their billionaire financiers, such as George Soros. These are the people who are plotting to take down Ailes. And if Ailes goes, I’m afraid, so could America.”Since Carlson filed the suit, at least 25 additional women, including Fox host Megyn Kelly and former hostAndrea Tantaros, have made similar claims against Ailes, triggering his separation from the company. Trump has similarly dismissed charges against Ailes, who is reportedly now advising him.Bannon Helped Launch Anti-Clinton Smear Book And Movie Clinton CashThe book Clinton Cash was written by Breitbart editor-at-large Peter Schweizer. The documentary film based on the book was written and produced by Bannon. Bannon is also the executive chairman and co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute (GAI); Schweizer is the president of GAI. Schweizer thanked Bannon in Clinton Cash, writing: “The Government Accountability Institute has benefited from terrific leadership in our little more than three years of existence. This includes our chairman and CEO Stephen K. Bannon.” A Media Matters review found more than 20 errors, fabrication, and distortions in the book.Bannon Thinks “The Clinton Sex Stuff” Will Help Sink Hillary’s CampaignJoshua Green reported in an October 2015 profile of Bannon for Bloomberg:Bannon does, indeed, have a touch of Clinton Madness. When we met in January, Bill Cosby’s serial predations had just exploded into the news after laying dormant for many years. Bannon was certain this signaled trouble for Bill Clinton, whose own sexual history some conservatives long to revive as a way of hampering his wife’s campaign. His conviction stems from the group of young, female Breitbart News reporters whom he’s dubbed the Valkyries. When I expressed skepticism about the value of reintroducing old scandals, Bannon countered that the Valkyries—a sort of in-house focus group of millennial voter sentiment—were unfamiliar with Clinton contretemps that most older people consider settled. "There’s a whole generation of people who love the news but were 7 or 8 years old when this happened and have no earthly idea about the Clinton sex stuff,” he says.Bannon Directed Palin “Hagiography”In 2011, Bannon released The Undefeated, a documentary that was viewed as trying to pave the way for a Palin presidential run. It was savaged by critics as “a straight hagiography, without nuance or ambiguity,” “fawning,” and “worshipful.”Andrew Breitbart Reportedly Labeled Bannon The “Leni Riefenstahl Of The Tea Party Movement”Green reportedly spoke with Andrew Breitbart, the late founder of Breitbart News, after a screening of The Undefeated, during which Breitbart compared Bannon to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl:Bannon continued making documentaries—big, crashing, opinionated films with Wagner scores and arresting imagery: Battle for America (2010), celebrating the Tea Party; Generation Zero (2010), examining the roots of the financial meltdown; The Undefeated (2011), championing Palin. In the Bannon repertoire, no metaphor is too direct. His films are peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloom. Palin, for one, ate it up and traveled to Iowa, trailed by hundreds of reporters, to appear with him at a 2011 screening in Pella that the press thought might signal her entrance into the 2012 presidential race. (No such luck.) Breitbart came along as promoter and ringmaster. When I spoke with him afterward, he described Bannon, with sincere admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.Glenn Beck, who has been a vocal Trump opponent, accused Bannon and Breitbart.com of “taking orders” from Trump and compared him to Goebbels.Breitbart.com Regularly Uses Anti-LGBT Slurs, Pedals Anti-Gay Conspiracy Theories, And Features Articles By Anti-LGBT Hate Group LeadersBreitbart.com regularly publishes articles with anti-LGBT slurs “trannies” and “faggot” in headlines. Breitbart contributor Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (C-FAM) -- an organization designated as an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center -- is largely the face of Breitbart’s anti-LGBT coverage. In the past, Ruse used his perch at Breitbart to peddle conspiracy theories about the hate-crime murder of gay teen Matthew Shepard. He described Shepard as a "winsome young homosexual," "achingly handsome," and "delicately chiseled," and blasted "Matthew Shepard Inc." for promoting the "lie" that homophobia contributed to his murder. More recently, Ruse headlined a post about HIV rates in the transgender community with the anti-transgender slur "trannies," accompanied by an image of 15 year-old transgender transgender activist Jazz Jennings.Former Breitbart Editor Ben Shapiro: Bannon Is A “Sinister Figure,” Site Embraced “White Supremacist Alt-Right” Under HimFormer Breitbart editor-at-large Ben Shapiro, who left the site amidst the turmoil over the Michelle Fields incident with Lewandowski, published a piece on the Trump campaign “predictably and hilariously” hiring Bannon, whom he labeled a “legitimately sinister figure.” Among Shapiro’s objections was that the site has “embraced the white supremacist alt-right” alongside Bannon’s embrace of Trump: “Now Breitbart has become the alt-right go-to website, with Yiannopoulos pushing white ethno-nationalism as a legitimate response to political correctness, and the comment section turning into a cesspool for white supremacist mememakers.”Shapiro also wrote that some former Breitbart staffers are “afraid of Steve Bannon”:Many former employees of Breitbart News are afraid of Steve Bannon. He is a vindictive, nasty figure, infamous for verbally abusing supposed friends and threatening enemies. Bannon is a smarter version of Trump: he’s an aggressive self-promoter who name-drops to heighten his profile and woo bigger names, and then uses those bigger names as stepping stools to his next destination. Trump may be his final destination. Or it may not. He will attempt to ruin anyone who impedes his unending ambition, and he will use anyone bigger than he is – for example, Donald Trump – to get where he wants to go. Bannon knows that in the game of thrones, you win or die. And he certainly doesn’t intend to die. He’ll kill everyone else before he goes.Other former Breitbart staffers also spoke out about the hiring -- former Breitbart spokesperson Kurt Bardella, who also left after the Fields incident, wrote on Twitter, “From a temperament standpoint #Bannon makes #coreylewandowski look like a golden doodle.”This post has been updated with additional information. ==This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in AmericaSteve Bannon runs the new vast right-wing conspiracy—and he wants to take down both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush.By Joshua Green | October 8, 2015From Bloomberg Businessweek It’s nearing midnight as Steve Bannon pushes past the bluegrass band in his living room and through a crowd of Republican congressmen, political operatives, and a few stray Duck Dynasty cast members. He’s trying to make his way back to the SiriusXM Patriot radio show, broadcasting live from a cramped corner of the 14-room townhouse he occupies a stone’s throw from the Supreme Court. It’s late February, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference is in full swing, and Bannon, as usual, is the whirlwind at the center of the action.Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the crusading right-wing populist website that’s a lineal descendant of the Drudge Report (its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, spent years apprenticing with Matt Drudge) and a haven for people who think Fox News is too polite and restrained. He’d spent the day at CPAC among the conservative faithful, zipping back and forth between his SiriusXM booth and an unlikely pair of guests he was squiring around: Nigel Farage, the leader of Britain’s right-wing UKIP party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty adornment invited after A&E suspended him for denouncing gays, delivered a wild rant about “beatniks” and sexually transmitted diseases that upstaged them all, to Bannon’s evident delight. “If there’s an explosion or a fire somewhere,” says Matthew Boyle, Breitbart’s Washington political editor, “Steve’s probably nearby with some matches.” Afterward, everyone piled into party buses and headed for the townhouse.“Honey badger don’t give a s---” is the Breitbart mottoBannon, an ex-Goldman Sachs banker, is the sort of character who would stand out anywhere, but especially in the drab environs of Washington. A mile-a-minute talker who thrums with energy, his sentences speed off ahead of him and spin out into great pileups of nouns, verbs, and grins. With his swept-back blond hair and partiality to cargo shorts and flip-flops, he looks like Jeff Spicoli after a few decades of hard living, and he employs “dude” just as readily.Ordinarily, Bannon’s townhouse is crypt-quiet and feels like a museum, as it’s faithfully decorated down to its embroidered silk curtains and painted murals in authentic Lincoln-era detail. When I first stopped by in January, about the only sign that I hadn’t teleported back to the 1860s was a picture on the mantle of a smiling woman on a throne with a machine gun in her lap (it was Bannon’s daughter Maureen, a West Point grad and lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division; the throne belonged to Saddam Hussein—or once did). Until Bannon showed up, the only sounds I heard were faint noises from the basement, which might have been the young women he calls the Valkyries, after the war goddesses of Norse mythology who decided soldiers’ fates in battle. More on them later.On this February night, however, the party is roaring. Along with his CPAC triumph, a secret project he’d conceived was nearing fruition: His lawyers were almost finished vetting a book about Bill and Hillary Clinton’s murky financial dealings that he’s certain will upend the presidential race. “Dude, it’s going to be epic,” he tells me. I sip my “moonshine”—his wink at the Dynasty guests—and wonder, as people often do, whether Bannon is nuts. On my way out, the doorman hands me a gift: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” printed above an image of a honey badger, the insouciant African predator of YouTube fame whose catchphrase, “Honey badger don’t give a s---,” is the Breitbart motto.Steve BannonBannon’s life is a succession of Gatsbyish reinventions that made him rich and landed him squarely in the middle of the 2016 presidential race: He’s been a naval officer, investment banker, minor Hollywood player, and political impresario. When former Disney chief Michael Ovitz’s empire was falling to pieces, Bannon sat Ovitz down in his living room and delivered the news that he was finished. When Sarah Palin was at the height of her fame, Bannon was whispering in her ear. When Donald Trump decided to blow up the Republican presidential field, Bannon encouraged his circus-like visit to the U.S.-Mexico border. John Boehner just quit as House speaker because of the mutinous frenzy Bannon and his confederates whipped up among conservatives. Today, backed by mysterious investors and a stream of Seinfeld royalties, he sits at the nexus of what Hillary Clinton once dubbed “the vast right-wing conspiracy,” where he and his network have done more than anyone else to complicate her presidential ambitions—and they plan to do more. But this “conspiracy,” at least under Bannon, has mutated into something different from what Clinton described: It’s as eager to go after establishment Republicans such as Boehner or Jeb Bush as Democrats like Clinton.“I come from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats,” says Bannon, by way of explaining his politics. “I wasn’t political until I got into the service and saw how badly Jimmy Carter f---ed things up. I became a huge Reagan admirer. Still am. But what turned me against the whole establishment was coming back from running companies in Asia in 2008 and seeing that Bush had f---ed up as badly as Carter. The whole country was a disaster.”As befits someone with his peripatetic background, Bannon is a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde figure in the complicated ecosystem of the right—he's two things at once. And he’s devised a method to influence politics that marries the old-style attack journalism of Breitbart.com, which helped drive out Boehner, with a more sophisticated approach, conducted through the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute, that builds rigorous, fact-based indictments against major politicians, then partners with mainstream media outlets conservatives typically despise to disseminate those findings to the broadest audience. The biggest product of this system is the project Bannon was so excited about at CPAC: the bestselling investigative book, written by GAI’s president, Peter Schweizer, Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Published in May by HarperCollins, the book dominated the political landscape for weeks and probably did more to shape public perception of Hillary Clinton than any of the barbs from her Republican detractors.Jeb Bush is about to come in for the same treatment. On Oct. 19, GAI will publish Schweizer’s e-book, Bush Bucks: How Public Service and Corporations Helped Make Jeb Rich, that examines how Bush enriched himself after leaving the Florida governor’s mansion in 2007. A copy obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek examines Bush’s Florida land deals, corporate board sinecures, and seven-figure salary with Lehman Brothers, whose 2008 bankruptcy touched off the financial crisis. “It’s not as cinematic as the Clintons, with their warlords and Russian gangsters and that whole cast of bad guys,” says Bannon. “Bush is more prosaic. It’s really just grimy, low-energy crony capitalism.”While attacking the favored candidates in both parties at once may seem odd, Bannon says he’s motivated by the same populist disgust with Washington that’s animating candidates from Trump to Bernie Sanders. Like both, Bannon is having a bigger influence than anyone could have reasonably expected. But in the Year of the Outsider, it's perhaps fitting that a figure like Bannon, whom nobody saw coming, would roil the national political debate.[Bannon’s Bulldogs, at the “Breitbart Embassy”: Alex Swoyer, Jarrett Stepman, Julia Hahn. Back row: Bigz Aloysious Bigirwa, Jordan Schachtel, Larry Solov, Alex Marlow, Bannon, Matthew Boyle, Edwin Mora.]Most days, Bannon can be found in his Hyde persona, in the Washington offices of Breitbart News. Operating from the basement of his townhouse—known to all as the Breitbart Embassy—Breitbart’s pirate crew became tribunes of the rising Tea Party movement after Barack Obama’s election, bedeviling GOP leaders and helping to foment the 2013 government shutdown. The site has also made life hell for Democrats by, for example, orchestrating the career-ending genital tweeting misfortune that cost New York Representative Anthony Weiner his seat in Congress in 2011. Tipped to Weiner’s proclivity for sexting with female admirers, Bannon says, the site paid trackers to follow his Twitter account 24 hours a day and eventually intercepted a crotch shot Weiner inadvertently made public. The ensuing scandal culminated in the surreal scene, carried live on television, of Andrew Breitbart hijacking Weiner’s press conference and fielding questions from astonished reporters.On occasion, this partisan zeal has led to egregious errors. Just before our lunch in January, a Breitbart reporter published an article assailing Obama’s nominee for attorney general, Loretta Lynch—but went after the wrong woman. She wasn’t, as the site reported, the Loretta Lynch who was once part of Bill Clinton’s defense team. The embarrassed reporter asked for time off. Bannon, allergic to any hint of concession, refused: “I told him, ‘No. In fact, you’re going to write a story every day this week.’?” He shrugs. “We’re honey badgers,” he explains. “We don’t give a s---.”But Bannon realizes that politics is sometimes more effective when it’s subtle. So he’s nurtured a Dr. Jekyll side: In 2012 he became founding chairman of GAI, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research organization staffed with lawyers, data scientists, and forensic investigators. “What Peter and I noticed is that it’s facts, not rumors, that resonate with the best investigative reporters,” Bannon says, referring to GAI’s president. Established in Tallahassee to study crony capitalism and governmental malfeasance, GAI has collaborated with such mainstream news outlets as Newsweek, ABC News, and CBS’s 60?Minutes on stories ranging from insider trading in Congress to credit card fraud among presidential campaigns. It's essentially a mining operation for political scoops that now churns out books like Clinton Cash and Bush Bucks.What made Clinton Cash so unexpectedly influential is that mainstream news reporters picked up and often advanced Schweizer’s many examples of the Clintons’ apparent conflicts of interest in accepting money from large donors and foreign governments. (“Practically grotesque,” wrote Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who’s running for the Democratic presidential nomination. “On any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption.”) Just before the book’s release, the New York Times ran a front-page story about a Canadian mining magnate, Frank Giustra, who gave tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and then flew Bill Clinton to Kazakhstan aboard his private jet to dine with the country’s autocratic president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Giustra subsequently won lucrative uranium-mining rights in the country. (Giustra denies that the Clinton dinner influenced his Kazakh mining decision.) The Times piece cited Schweizer’s still-unpublished book as a source of its reporting, puzzling many Times readers and prompting a reaction from the paper’s ombudswoman, Margaret Sullivan, who grudgingly concluded that, while no ethical standards were breached, “I still don’t like the way it looked.”For Bannon, the Clinton Cash uproar validated a personal theory, informed by his Goldman Sachs experience, about how conservatives can influence the media and why they failed the last time a Clinton was running for the White House. “In the 1990s,” he told me, “conservative media couldn’t take down [Bill] Clinton because most of what they produced was punditry and opinion, and they always oversold the conclusion: ‘It’s clearly impeachable!’ So they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber.” What news conservatives did produce, such as David Brock’s Troopergate investigation on Paula Jones in the American Spectator, was often tainted in the eyes of mainstream editors by its explicit partisan association.In response, Bannon developed two related insights. “One of the things Goldman teaches you is, don’t be the first guy through the door because you’re going to get all the arrows. If it’s junk bonds, let Michael Milken lead the way,” he says. “Goldman would never lead in any product. Find a business partner.” His other insight was that the reporters staffing the investigative units of major newspapers aren’t the liberal ideologues of conservative fever dreams but kindred souls who could be recruited into his larger enterprise. “What you realize hanging out with investigative reporters is that, while they may be personally liberal, they don’t let that get in the way of a good story,” he says. “And if you bring them a real story built on facts, they’re f---ing badasses, and they’re fair.” Recently, I met with Brock, who renounced conservatism and became an important liberal strategist, fundraiser, and Clinton ally. He founded the liberal watchdog group Media Matters for America and just published a book, Killing The Messenger: The Right-Wing Plot to Derail Hillary and Hijack Your Government. Brock’s attitude toward Bannon isn’t enmity toward an ideological opponent, as I'd expected, but rather a curiosity and professional respect for the tradecraft Bannon demonstrated in advancing the Clinton Cash narrative. What conservatives learned in the ’90s, Brock says, is that “your operation isn’t going to succeed if you don’t cross the barrier into the mainstream.” Back then, he says, conservative reporting had to undergo an elaborate laundering to influence U.S. politics. Reporters such as Brock would publish in small magazines and websites, then try to get their story planted in the British tabloids and hope a right-leaning U.S. outlet such as the New York Post or the Drudge Report picked it up. If it generated enough heat, it might break through to a mainstream paper.“From their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus”“It seems to me,” says Brock of Bannon and his team, “what they were able to do in this deal with the Times is the same strategy, but more sophisticated and potentially more effective and damaging because of the reputation of the Times. If you were trying to create doubt and qualms about [Hillary Clinton] among progressives, the Times is the place to do it.” He pauses. “Looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus.”It wasn’t the only one. In June, when the Clinton Cash frenzy hit its apex, Bannon said: “We’ve got the 15 best investigative reporters at the 15 best newspapers in the country all chasing after Hillary Clinton.” There’s more coming, Bannon reveals, including a graphic novel of Clinton Cash, in January, and a Clinton Cash movie set to arrive in February, just as the presidential primary voting gets under way.In the ’90s, right-wing activists enjoyed a long period of ascendancy, and then collapsed. Then, as now, their prime target was a Clinton, their great ally the House Republicans. What halted this uprising was the sheer lunacy of its perpetrators. The classic example is House Oversight Chairman Dan Burton of Indiana, who became convinced that the 1993 suicide of White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster was actually murder—a theory he sought to prove by reenacting the crime in his backyard with a pistol and a watermelon. Democrats seized on the episode to impugn his credibility, branding him “Watermelon Dan.” “We used the watermelon and the phantom Vince Foster sightings again and again," says Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House staffer and field marshal in the partisan wars of the ’90s. "The phrase didn’t exist then, but that’s when the right-wing conspiracy jumped the shark.”Bannon believes that episodes like these killed conservatives’ credibility, and with it, their political influence. He’s set out to balance conservatives’ wilder impulses with professionalism, a running theme in his own life. Born into a working-class family within sight of the naval base in Norfolk, Va., he signed up straight out of college, and spent four years at sea aboard a destroyer, first as an auxiliary engineer in the Pacific, then as a navigator in the north Arabian Sea during the Iranian hostage crisis. By the time he arrived in the Persian Gulf in 1979, the U.S. was preparing its ill-fated assault on Tehran, and Bannon’s faith in his commander in chief had dimmed: “You could tell it was going to be a goat f---.” His battle group rotated out just before Carter’s Desert One debacle.Bannon became a special assistant to the chief of Naval operations at the Pentagon, earning a master’s degree in national security studies at Georgetown University at night. But he was restless. The siren of Reagan-era Wall Street capitalism drained the military life of its luster, so he resolved to make the leap. “Somebody told me,” he says, “if you want to go to Wall Street, you have to go to Harvard Business School.” HBS accepted him, and Bannon, at 29, matriculated in 1983.Bannon’s Harvard stint coincided with Wall Street’s boom, which fueled fantasies among his classmates of the full-on, debauched 1980s investment-banker lifestyle. Bannon became a grind, made first-year honors, and blanketed the top firms with applications for summer associateships. He was universally rejected. Classmates told him that his age and Navy background were obstacles—he hadn’t come up through the right schools.One day, a Goldman Sachs representative invited Bannon to a campus recruiting party: Thinking he could talk himself into a job, he donned a suit and headed over. “I get there, and there’s like 700 people jammed into this tent,” he says. “I said, ‘F--- it. There’s no chance.’ So I stood off on the side with a drink and these two other schmendricks standing next to me. And I talk to these guys. We have the greatest conversation about baseball, and I find out after half an hour it was John Weinberg Jr., whose dad runs the firm, and a guy named Rob Kaplan, who became a senior partner.” That night the Goldman executives gathered to discuss prospective hires. One later recounted the scene. “They said, ‘Well, Bannon, I guess we’re gonna reject him. He’s too old for a summer job,’?” Bannon says. “And these guys say, ‘Oh no, we talked to him. He’s terrific.’ Literally, a complete crapshoot. But I got a job.”Bannon landed in Goldman’s New York office at the height of the hostile takeover boom. “Everything in the Midwest was being raided by Milken,” he says. “It was like a firestorm.” Goldman didn’t do hostile takeovers, instead specializing in raid defense for companies targeted by the likes of Drexel Burnham and First Boston. The first few years, he worked every day except Christmas and loved it: “The camaraderie was amazing. It was like being in the Navy, in the wardroom of a ship.” Later, he worked on a series of leveraged buyouts, including a deal for Calumet Coach that involved Bain Capital and an up-and-comer named Mitt Romney.Two big things were going on at Goldman Sachs in the late ’80s. The globalization of world capital markets meant that size suddenly mattered. Everyone realized that the firm, then a private partnership, would have to go public. Bankers also could see that the Glass-Steagall Act separating commercial and investment banking was going to fall, setting off a flurry of acquisitions. Specialists would command a premium. Bannon shipped out to Los Angeles to specialize in media and entertainment. “A lot of people were coming from outside buying media companies,” he says. “There was huge consolidation.”After a few years, in 1990, Bannon and a couple of Goldman colleagues set off to launch Bannon & Co., a boutique investment bank specializing in media. At the time, investors preferred hard assets—manufacturing companies, real estate—and avoided things like movie studios and film libraries, which were harder to price. Bannon’s group, drawing on data such as VHS cassette sales and TV ratings, devised a model to value intellectual property in the same way as tangible assets. “We got a ton of business,” he says.When the French bank Crédit Lyonnais, a major financier of independent Hollywood studios, almost went bankrupt, Bannon & Co. rolled up its loan portfolio. When MGM went bust, it worked on the studio’s financing. When Polygram Records got into the film business, Bannon’s firm handled its acquisitions.And then, serendipitously, Bannon wound up in the entertainment business himself. Westinghouse Electric, a client, was looking to unload Castle Rock Entertainment, which had a big TV and movie presence, including Billy Crystal’s films. Bannon reeled in an eager buyer: Ted Turner. “Turner was going to build this huge studio,” he says, “so we were negotiating the deal at the St. Regis hotel in New York. As often happened with Turner, when it came time to actually close the deal, Ted was short of cash. ... Westinghouse just wanted out. We told them, ‘You ought to take this deal. It’s a great deal.’ And they go, ‘If this is such a great deal, why don’t you defer some of your cash fee and keep an ownership stake in a package of TV rights?’?” In lieu of a full adviser’s fee, the firm accepted a stake in five shows, including one in its third season regarded as the runt of the litter: Seinfeld. “We calculated what it would get us if it made it to syndication,” says Bannon. “We were wrong by a factor of five.”After Société Générale bought Bannon & Co. in 1998, Bannon, no longer needing a day job, dove into Hollywood moguldom, becoming an executive producer of movies, including Anthony Hopkins’s 1999 Oscar-nominated Titus. He met a hard-partying talent manager named Jeff Kwatinetz who had discovered the band Korn and managed the Backstreet Boys. As Bannon was selling his company, Kwatinetz was launching one of his own, a management outfit called the Firm whose clients included Ice Cube and Martin Lawrence. Newly flush and sensing adventure, Bannon became a partner and a key player in the Firm’s great coup, its acquisition of former Disney chief Ovitz’s company, Artists Management Group. Ovitz had spent $100 million building a media giant he thought would conquer Hollywood, but AMG was bleeding money. Selling to the Firm was a last-ditch bid to save face. Instead, as Vanity Fair recounted, Bannon was dispatched to Ovitz’s Beverly Hills mansion to deliver the final humiliation in person, an offer for AMG of $5 million, less than the value of Ovitz’s home.The Hollywood ether soon convinced Bannon that his passion wasn’t financing films, but making them. He was souring on Wall Street and what it had come to represent. “Goldman in the ’80s was like a priesthood, a monastic experience where you worked all the time but were incredibly dedicated to client services, to building and growing companies,” he says. He underwent a conversion like the one Michael Lewis has described, watching with horror as staid private partnerships such as Goldman Sachs became highly leveraged, publicly traded companies operating like casinos. “I turned on Wall Street for the same reason everybody else did: The American taxpayer was forced to cut mook deals to bail out guys who didn’t deserve it.”Bannon’s political awakening was also spurred by the Sept. 11 attacks, which led him, in 2004, to make a Reagan-venerating documentary, In the Face of Evil (“A brilliant effort?…?extremely well done,” said Rush Limbaugh). This introduced him to Schweizer, a Cold War scholar whose book, Reagan’s War, was the basis of the film. It also brought him into Andrew Breitbart’s orbit. “We screened the film at a festival in Beverly Hills,” Bannon recalls, “and out of the crowd comes this, like, bear who’s squeezing me like my head’s going to blow up and saying how we’ve gotta take back the culture.”His films are peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloomBreitbart, who also lived in Los Angeles, had a profound influence on Bannon. When they met, Breitbart was starting his website, after having worked with Drudge and having helped Arianna Huffington launch the Huffington Post. Bannon lent his financial acumen and office space. He marveled at Breitbart’s visceral feel for the news cycle and his ability to shape coverage through the Drudge Report, which is avidly followed by TV producers and news editors.“One of the things I admired about him was that the dirtiest word for him was ‘punditry,’?” says Bannon. “Our vision—Andrew’s vision—was always to build a global, center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site.” With this in mind, he set out to line up investors.Bannon continued making documentaries—big, crashing, opinionated films with Wagner scores and arresting imagery: Battle for America (2010), celebrating the Tea Party; Generation Zero (2010), examining the roots of the financial meltdown; The Undefeated (2011), championing Palin. In the Bannon repertoire, no metaphor is too direct. His films are peppered with footage of lions attacking helpless gazelles, seedlings bursting from the ground into glorious bloom. Palin, for one, ate it up and traveled to Iowa, trailed by hundreds of reporters, to appear with him at a 2011 screening in Pella that the press thought might signal her entrance into the 2012 presidential race. (No such luck.) Breitbart came along as promoter and ringmaster. When I spoke with him afterward, he described Bannon, with sincere admiration, as the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.In 2010, Breitbart News hit a wall. The site published video, furnished by a conservative activist, of a speech to the NAACP by a Department of Agriculture official named Shirley Sherrod, in which she appeared to advocate anti-white racism. Within hours, she was fired, as the story blanketed cable news. It soon became clear that the Breitbart News video was misleadingly edited—that Sherrod’s point was the opposite of what was portrayed Fox News, which aggressively promoted the video, banned Andrew Breitbart as an on-air guest. Bannon, who was raising capital for the site’s relaunch, suddenly encountered “nuclear winter.”But in a gauge of how media standards have shifted since the ’90s, the ostracization of Breitbart News didn’t last long. Less than a year later, when the site caught Weiner tweeting pictures of his genitals, Andrew Breitbart was welcomed back on Fox News. The experience taught Bannon the power of real news.On the morning of March 1, 2012, with the relaunch just days away, Andrew Breitbart was walking in his Brentwood neighborhood when he collapsed. He died soon after of heart failure, at 43. Bannon got the news while in New York pitching investors. At the funeral, Drudge asked Bannon what he planned to do. “We’re going ahead with the launch,” he replied. Bannon stepped in as executive chairman.[WWF]Breitbart’s genius was that he grasped better than anyone else what the early 20th century press barons understood—that most readers don’t approach the news as a clinical exercise in absorbing facts, but experience it viscerally as an ongoing drama, with distinct story lines, heroes, and villains. Breitbart excelled at creating these narratives, an editorial approach that's lived on. “When we do an editorial call, I don’t even bring anything I feel like is only a one-off story, even if it’d be the best story on the site,” says Alex Marlow, the site’s editor in chief. “Our whole mindset is looking for these rolling narratives.” He rattles off the most popular ones, which Breitbart News covers intensively from a posture of aggrieved persecution. “The big ones won’t surprise you,” he says. “Immigration, ISIS, race riots, and what we call ‘the collapse of traditional values.’ But I’d say Hillary Clinton is tops.”The website, which Breitbart News Network CEO Solov says draws 21 million unique users a month, has often managed to inject these narratives into the broader discourse. It was Breitbart News, for example, that first drew attention to the child migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border last summer that killed any chance of Congress passing immigration reform. “They have an incredible eye for an important story, particular ones that are important to conservatives and Republicans,” says Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican. “They’ve become extraordinarily influential. Radio talk show hosts are reading Breitbart every day. You can feel it when they interview you.”Lately, the site has championed Trump’s presidential candidacy, helping to coalesce a splinter faction of conservatives irate over Fox News’ treatment of the Republican frontrunner.Fighting crony capitalism from Bannon’s Lincoln-esque dining room.Tallahassee is about as far as you can get in the U.S., geographically and psychically, from the circus of the presidential campaign trail. That’s why Bannon chose to locate the Government Accountability Institute there—that, and the fact that Schweizer had moved down from Washington. “There’s nothing to do in Tallahassee, so I get a lot more work done,” Schweizer jokes, on my recent visit. GAI is housed in a sleepy cul de sac of two-story brick buildings that looks like what you’d get if Scarlett O’Hara designed an office park. The unmarked entrance is framed by palmetto trees and sits beneath a large, second-story veranda with sweeping overhead fans, where the (mostly male) staff gathers every afternoon to smoke cigars and brainstorm.Schweizer began his career as a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution, digging through Soviet archives. In 2004 he co-authored a well-regarded history of the Bush family, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, that drew on interviews with many of its members, including Jeb. But Schweizer grew disillusioned with Washington and became radicalized against what he perceived to be a bipartisan culture of corruption. “To me, Washington, D.C., is a little bit like professional wrestling,” he told me. “When I was growing up in Seattle, I’d turn on Channel 13, the public-access station, and watch wrestling. At first I thought, ‘Man, these guys hate each other because they’re beating the crap out of each other.’ But I eventually realized they’re actually business partners.”Schweizer’s interest turned toward exposing this culture, and his books became more denunciatory. In 2011 he published Throw Them All Out: How Politicians and Their Friends Get Rich Off Insider Stock Tips, Land Deals, and Cronyism That Would Send the Rest of Us to Prison. The book caught the attention of 60?Minutes and led Congress to pass a law, the STOCK Act, aimed at curbing the abuses Schweizer documented. Bannon encouraged these investigations and eventually offered Schweizer a job. “He told me, ‘I know people who will support this kind of work,’” Schweizer says. In 2012, GAI set up shop.Schweizer, 50, is friendly, sandy-haired, and a little pudgy, the sort of fellow you’d meet at a neighborhood barbecue and instantly take a liking to. (Bannon nurses this regular-Joe appeal by forbidding him from wearing a tie when he’s on TV.) Bannon and Schweizer had two principles when they conceived the Clinton Cash project. First, it would avoid the nuttier conspiracy theories. “We have a mantra,” says Bannon. “Facts get shares, opinions get shrugs.” Second, they would heed the lesson Bannon learned at Goldman: specialize. Hillary Clinton’s story, they believed, was too sprawling and familiar to tackle in its entirety. So they'd focus only on the last decade, the least familiar period, and especially on the millions of dollars flowing into the Clinton Foundation. Bannon calls this approach “periodicity.”As with many of the Clintons’ troubles, the couple’s own behavior provided copious material for investigators. When Clinton became secretary of state, the foundation signed an agreement with the White House to disclose all of its contributors. It didn’t follow through. So GAI researchers plumbed tax filings, flight logs, and foreign government documents to turn up what the foundation withheld. Their most effective method was mining the so-called Deep Web, the 97 percent or so of information on the Internet that isn’t indexed for search engines such as Google and therefore is difficult to find.Bannon “weaponizes” scoops through mainstream outlets.“Welcome to The Matrix,” says Tony, GAI’s data scientist, as he maps out the Deep Web for me on a whiteboard (we agreed I wouldn’t publish his last name). A presentation on the hidden recesses of the Web follows. “The Deep Web,” he explains, “consists of a lot of useless or depreciated information, stuff in foreign languages, and so on. But a whole bunch of it is very useful, if you can find it.” Tony specializes in finding the good stuff, which he does by writing software protocols that spider through the Deep Web. Since this requires heavy computing power, Tony struck a deal to use the services of a large European provider during off-peak hours. “We’ve got $1.3 billion of equipment I’m using at almost full capacity,” he says. This effort yielded a slew of unreported foundation donors who appear to have benefited financially from their relationship with the Clintons, including the uranium mining executives cited by the New York Times (who showed up on an unindexed Canadian government website). These donations illustrate a pattern of commingling private money and government policy that disturbed even many Democrats.Clinton Cash caused a stir not just because of these revelations, but because of how they arrived. GAI is set up more like a Hollywood movie studio than a think tank. The creative mind through which all its research flows and is disseminated belongs to a beaming young Floridian named Wynton Hall, a celebrity ghostwriter who’s penned 18 books, six of them New York Times best-sellers, including Trump’s Time to Get Tough. Hall’s job is to transform dry think-tank research into vivid, viral-ready political dramas that can be unleashed on a set schedule, like summer blockbusters. “We work very long and hard to build a narrative, storyboarding it out months in advance,” he says. “I’m big on this: We’re not going public until we have something so tantalizing that any editor at a serious publication would be an idiot to pass it up and give a competitor the scoop. ”To this end, Hall peppers his colleagues with slogans so familiar around the office that they’re known by their abbreviations. “ABBN — always be breaking news,” he says. Another slogan is “depth beats speed.” Time-strapped reporters squeezed for copy will gratefully accept original, fact-based research because most of what they’re inundated with is garbage. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” says Bannon. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”The reason GAI does this is because it’s the secret to how conservatives can hack the mainstream media. Hall has distilled this, too, into a slogan: “Anchor left, pivot right.” It means that “weaponizing” a story onto the front page of the New York Times (“the Left”) is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart.com. “We don’t look at the mainstream media as enemies because we don’t want our work to be trapped in the conservative ecosystem,” says Hall. “We live and die by the media. Every time we’re launching a book, I’ll build a battle map that literally breaks down by category every headline we’re going to place, every op-ed Peter’s going to publish. Some of it is a wish list. But it usually gets done.”Once that work has permeated the mainstream—once it’s found “a host body,” in David Brock's phrase—then comes the “pivot.” Heroes and villains emerge and become grist for a juicy Breitbart News narrative. “With Clinton Cash, we never really broke a story,” says Bannon, “but you go [to Breitbart.com] and we’ve got 20 things, we’re linking to everybody else’s stuff, we’re aggregating, we’ll pull stuff from the Left. It’s a rolling phenomenon. Huge traffic. Everybody’s invested.”Over the summer, Hillary Clinton failed to emerge as the overwhelming frontrunner everyone expected. She’s been weighed down by the Clinton Foundation buckraking and the revelation that she kept a private e-mail server as secretary of state and destroyed much of her correspondence. Recently, the scandals have merged. In August e-mails surfaced showing that Bill Clinton, through the foundation, sought State Department permission to accept speaking fees in such repressive countries as North Korea and the Congo. A poll the same day found that the word voters associate most with his wife is “liar.” On Oct. 22, Hillary Clinton will testify on these matters before the Select Committee on Benghazi. Her troubles aren’t going away.Veteran Democrats such as Lehane concede that Bannon and his ilk have been more effective than conservatives who targeted Bill Clinton 25 years ago. “They’ve adapted into a higher species,” he says. There’s more on the way. “We’ve got two more waves of stuff on Clinton corruption," says Bannon, including a focus on how the donors highlighted in Clinton Cash violated many of the principles liberals hold dear: “You look at what they’ve done in the Colombian rain forest, look at the arms merchants, the warlords, the human trafficking—if you take anything that the Left professes to be a cornerstone value, the Clintons have basically played them for fools. They’ve enriched themselves while playing up the worst cast of characters in the world.”While this is surely unwelcome news for Clinton, Lehane argues that where the Clintons are concerned, their opponents invariably become consumed by partisan zeal and undermine their own cause. “Remember the old Pink Panther movies when Clouseau would walk in and the chief inspector would be there, and he’d just start losing his marbles, no matter what?” he says. “That’s how these guys are.”Bannon does, indeed, have a touch of Clinton Madness. When we met in January, Bill Cosby’s serial predations had just exploded into the news after laying dormant for many years. Bannon was certain this signaled trouble for Bill Clinton, whose own sexual history some conservatives long to revive as a way of hampering his wife’s campaign. His conviction stems from the group of young, female Breitbart News reporters whom he’s dubbed the Valkyries. When I expressed skepticism about the value of reintroducing old scandals, Bannon countered that the Valkyries—a sort of in-house focus group of millennial voter sentiment—were unfamiliar with Clinton contretemps that most older people consider settled. "There’s a whole generation of people who love the news but were 7 or 8 years old when this happened and have no earthly idea about the Clinton sex stuff,” he says.It’s impossible to predict how Bannon’s plots and intrigues will ultimately affect the presidential race. It’s not even clear on whose behalf he’s acting—his own or someone else’s? Are Seinfeld royalties enough to take on Clinton and Bush? Or do others have a stake? Solov, the CEO, won’t say. “I can’t go into that,” he says. “It’s privately owned.” Bannon wouldn’t comment either. However, a prominent conservative says Robert Mercer, the reclusive co-founder of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies and a major donor to Texas Senator Ted Cruz, has invested $10 million. Mercer’s daughter, Rebekah, is listed in 2013 tax documents as a GAI board member.Even without knowing the identity of his backers, Bannon’s designs are clear enough. While he’d blanch at the comparison, he’s pursuing something like the old Marxist dialectical concept of “heightening the contradictions,” only rather than foment revolution among the proletariat, he’s trying to disillusion Clinton’s and Bush’s natural base of support, recognizing, as Goldman Sachs taught him, that you’re more effective if others lead the way.To succeed, Bannon will need to activate the anger and disgust with cronyism that’s as powerful among supporters of Sanders as it is among fans of Trump. In Tallahassee, as GAI’s phone keeps ringing, the vehicle for achieving this is clear. Editors and reporters at prominent magazines and newspapers, including ones that had passed when approached with Clinton Cash revelations, are calling to ask when the next salvo will arrive—and might they arrange an exclusive?For many, the answer will be yes. “We’re going to go to the investigative units, not the political reporters, and just give them the stuff,” says Bannon. “We have faith they’ll take the stories and do the additional reporting.” The thought pleases him, and he grins. “Just like last time, we’ll go out and say, ‘Hey, here’s what we’ve got. You guys take it from here.http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2015-steve-bannon/http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/us/politics/donald-trump-stephen-bannon-paul-manafort.html?_r=0no link imgTrump named as his new campaign chief on Wednesday a conservative media provocateur whose news organization regularly attacks the Republican Party establishment, savages Hillary Clinton and encourages Mr. Trump’s most pugilistic instincts.Mr. Trump’s decision to make Stephen K. Bannon, chairman of the Breitbart News website, his campaign’s chief executive was a defiant rejection of efforts by longtime Republican hands to wean him from the bombast and racially charged speech that helped propel him to the nomination but now threaten his candidacy by alienating the moderate voters who typically decide the presidency.It also formally completed a merger between the most strident elements of the conservative news media and Mr. Trump’s campaign, which was incubated and fostered in their boisterous coverage of his rise.Mr. Bannon was appointed a day after the recently ousted Fox News chairman, Roger Ailes, emerged in an advisory role with Mr. Trump. It was not lost on Republicans in Washington that two news executives whose outlets had fueled the anti-establishment rebellion that bedeviled congressional leaders and set the stage for Mr. Trump’s nomination were now directly guiding the party’s presidential message and strategy.Mr. Bannon’s most recent crusade was his failed attempt to oust the House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, in this month’s primary, making his new role atop the Trump campaign particularly provocative toward Republican leaders in Washington.Party veterans responded Wednesday with a mix of anger about the damage they saw Mr. Trump doing to their party’s reputation and gallows humor about his apparent inability, or unwillingness, to run a credible presidential campaign in a year that once appeared promising.“If Trump were actually trying to antagonize supporters and antagonize new, reachable supporters, what exactly would he be doing differently?” asked Dan Senor, a longtime Republican strategist who advised Mitt Romney and his running mate, Mr. Ryan, in 2012.Terry Sullivan, who ran Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign, said Mr. Trump and Breitbart “both play to the lowest common denominator of people’s fears. It’s a match made in heaven.”For Mr. Trump, though, bringing in Mr. Bannon was the political equivalent of ordering comfort food. Only last week, Mr. Trump publicly expressed ambivalence about modifying his style. “I think I may do better the other way,” he told Time magazine. “They would like to see it be a little bit different, a little more modified. I don’t like to modify.”Mr. Bannon’s transition from mischief-maker at Breitbart to the inner circle of the de facto leader of the Republican Party capped the second shake-up of Mr. Trump’s campaign in two months.Kellyanne Conway, a veteran pollster and strategist who was already advising Mr. Trump, will become his campaign manager and is expected to travel with the candidate, filling a void that opened up when Corey Lewandowski was fired on June 20.Mr. Trump’s loyalists put the best possible face on the changes announced Wednesday, but their timing, after a New York Times article detailing his advisers’ frustration at trying to impose discipline on him, underscored why so many in the party have soured on his prospects: His decisions are often made in reaction to news coverage.Paul Manafort, the campaign chairman, will retain his title and focus on the political shop but was widely seen as being sidelined: Mr. Bannon and Ms. Conway have both developed close relationships with Mr. Trump, and Mr. Bannon is likely to be more amenable to letting him run the sort of media-focused campaign he prefers.“This is an exciting day for Team Trump,” Mr. Manafort wrote in an internal staff memo. “I remain the campaign chairman and chief strategist, providing the big-picture, long-range campaign vision,” he added.On a conference call Wednesday morning, Jason Miller, a Trump spokesman, said the moves had been well received, along with a speech on crime reduction that he gave in Wisconsin, pointing to favorable coverage on the MSNBC show “Morning Joe.”Under Mr. Bannon, Breitbart News has been an amen corner for Mr. Trump, and perhaps more relentless than any other conservative outlet in its criticism of the Republican establishment.But what most distresses mainstream party strategists about the union of Mr. Trump’s campaign with Breitbart’s guiding vision is the brand of populism that the website has advocated, and that Mr. Trump has championed.Mr. Bannon has overseen a site that is focused primarily on pushing Republicans away from what it calls a globalist agenda and toward a hard-line and often overtly racial one, railing against what it sees as the threats of free trade, Hispanic migration and Islamist terrorism.“This is Trump going back to the nativism and nationalism that fueled his rise in the primary,” said Lanhee J. Chen, who was Mr. Romney’s policy director in 2012. “But it’s very dangerous to the future of the party because it only further narrows the appeal of a party whose appeal was already narrow going into this cycle.”Mr. Chen called Mr. Trump’s shift “a base reinforcement strategy” and noted that it was very different from the tack of most party nominees, who use the final months of the presidential race to broaden their appeal in hopes of winning over the maximum number of voters.But to those on the right who are hoping to permanently shift Republicans away from free-market conservatism and toward a harder-edged populism, the addition of Mr. Bannon was a victory for the “America First” approachthey want to ingrain in the party.“He doesn’t need any help formulating his message — his message is perfect,” the conservative author Ann Coulter said of Mr. Trump. Referring to Mr. Trump’s policy adviser, speechwriter and warm-up speaker, she added, “Maybe he could use 10 more Stephen Millers.”As comfortable as Mr. Trump may feel with Mr. Bannon’s style of politics, their unconventional alliance, and the possibility that the coming weeks could resemble a conservative publicity tour more than a conventional White House run, fueled speculation that Mr. Trump was already looking past November.In recent months, Mr. Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, have quietly explored becoming involved with a media holding, either by investing in one or by taking one over, according to a person close to Mr. Trump who was briefed on those discussions.At a minimum, the campaign’s homestretch offers Mr. Trump, who has begun to limit his national media appearances to conservative outlets, an opportunity to build his audience and steer his followers toward the combative Breitbart site. Even before announcing the staff shake-up, Mr. Trump intensified his criticism of the mainstream news media in a speech on Tuesday night in which he declared that he was running against the “media-donor-political complex.”Mr. Trump’s elevation of Mr. Bannon and Ms. Conway also highlights the growing influence of Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, conservative donors from Long Island. The Mercers are investors in Breitbart, and their foundation funds a host of other conservative activist groups. They spent millions on Senator Ted Cruz’s behalf during the Republican primary, an effort Ms. Conway helped lead. And they began bankrolling a pro-Trump “super PAC” in recent weeks after becoming friendly with Mr. Trump, his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Mr. Kushner.At Breitbart and its sister foundation, the Government Accountability Institute, Mr. Bannon ran a hybrid between a news organization and an opposition-research operation aimed at discrediting Mrs. Clinton. The institute sponsored a book about Mrs. Clinton’s financial entanglements, “Clinton Cash,” which spawned various articles in mainstream newspapers last year, including in The New York Times.Rival conservative news organizations viewed Breitbart as something of an outlier, which was evident in the title of an article the Weekly Standard writer Stephen F. Hayes wrote on Wednesday: “Trump Has Decided to Live in Breitbart’s Alternative Reality.”“It’s the merger of the Trump campaign with the kooky right,” William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, said of Mr. Bannon’s new role.Mr. Bannon has now joined with Mr. Ailes in a common cause on Mr. Trump’s behalf, a mission that Breitbart never pretended to deny. But Mr. Ailes’s direct involvement casts a new light on how his network handled Mr. Trump’s candidacy.In the weeks before the Fox News host Gretchen Carlson filed the sexual harassment lawsuit that led to Mr. Ailes’s forced resignation, Mr. Ailes had been in regular contact with Mr. Trump and met with him at least twice, people briefed on the sessions said.While meetings between a presidential candidate and the chairman of an influential television network are hardly unheard-of, especially with Mr. Trump, Mr. Ailes’s direct involvement in the campaign raises new questions about whether the sessions involved more than the usual complaints about coverage.Before Mr. Ailes’s ouster, some of the network’s journalists and contributors privately complained that Mr. Ailes was pushing them to be more supportive of Mr. Trump. This drew particular umbrage from longtime Republican staff members and contributors who either opposed Mr. Trump’s candidacy on ideological grounds or believed it demanded tough reporting on journalistic grounds.There was, though, one prominent conservative voice unambiguously in Mr. Ailes’s corner since the beginning of the sexual harassment scandal: Breitbart.The website emerged as a singular defender of Mr. Ailes, with a piece about a planned walkout by network stars loyal to him should he be forced out — it never came to pass — and one by Mr. Bannon ridiculing the “minor Murdochs” (the 21st Century Fox chief Rupert Murdoch’s sons and co-executives, James and Lachlan), who were seen as leading the push for Mr. Ailes to resign.==wikiStephen K. Bannon (born c. 1954) is an American businessman, media executive, and conservative filmmaker who is currently the Chief Executive of the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump.[3][4][5][6] He is the co-founder and executive chairman of the Government Accountability Institute and the former executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, the parent company of the Breitbart News Network.[7] He has been involved in the financing and production of a number of films, including Fire from the Heartland: The Awakening of the Conservative Woman, The Undefeated, and Occupy Unmasked. Bannon, a former naval officer, also hosts a radio show (Breitbart News Daily) on Sirius XM satellite radio channel.[8]Contents [hide] 1Education2Military service3Business and media career4Personal5Filmography6References7External linksEducation[edit]Bannon was born into a working-class family in Norfolk, Virginia. He graduated from Virginia Tech in 1976 and holds amaster's degree in National Security Studies from Georgetown University. In 1983, a 29-year-old Bannon received anM.B.A. degree, with honors, from Harvard Business School.[9]Military service[edit]Bannon is a former Naval officer, having served aboard the USS Paul F. Foster as a Surface Warfare Officer in the Pacific Fleet.[10]Business and media career[edit]After his military service, Bannon worked at Goldman Sachs as an investment banker in the Mergers & Acquisitions Department.[11] In 1990, Bannon and several colleagues from Goldman Sachs launched Bannon & Co., a boutique investment bank specializing in media. Through Bannon & Co., Bannon negotiated the sale ofCastle Rock Entertainment to Ted Turner. As payment, Bannon & Co. accepted a stake in five television shows, including Seinfeld. Société Générale purchased Bannon & Co. in 1998.[12]After the sale of Bannon & Co., Bannon became an executive producer in Hollywood. He executive produced Anthony Hopkins’s 1999 film Titus. Bannon became a partner with entertainment industry executive Jeff Kwatinetz at The Firm, Inc., a film and television management company.[12]In 2004, Bannon made a documentary about Ronald Reagan titled In the Face of Evil. Through the making and screening of this film, Bannon was introduced to academic Peter Schweizer and publisher Andrew Breitbart.[12]From 2007 through 2011, Bannon was chairman and CEO of Affinity Media. From March 2012 to August 2016, Bannon was executive chairman of Breitbart News LLC, the parent company of Breitbart.[5][13] Bannon is also executive chairman and co-founder of the Government Accountability Institute, where he helped orchestrate the publication of Clinton Cash.[7][12]In 2015, Bannon was ranked #19 on Mediaite's list of the "25 Most Influential in Political News Media 2015".[14]On August 17, 2016, he was appointed Chief Executive of Donald Trump's campaign to become President of the United States of America.[3] He temporarily left Breitbart in order to take the new job.[13]Personal[edit]Bannon, age 62,[1] identifies as a conservative.[4][15][16] Speaking about his role at Breitbart, Bannon said: "We think of ourselves as virulently anti-establishment, particularly ‘anti-’ the permanent political class."[17] Bannon has a daughter, Maureen, who is a West Point graduate and a lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division.[12]Filmography[edit]