US President Donald Trump on Wednesday unleashed a spectacular denunciation of one of his closest political allies, describing former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon as insane and irrelevant.
After the release of explosive excerpts from a new book in which Bannon reportedly described Trump’s eldest son’s meeting with a Kremlin-connected lawyer as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” Trump wasted no time in firing back.
“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my presidency. When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind,” Trump said in a written statement.
Photo: Reuters
Trump said Bannon — who engineered the New York real-estate mogul’s link to the nationalist far right and helped create a pro-Trump media ecosystem — was “only in it for himself.”
US media said Charles Harder, a lawyer for Trump, has sent Bannon a cease-and-desist letter accusing him of violating a non-disclosure agreement.
Trump’s fury appeared to have been provoked by the publication of startling extracts from Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff.
Passages published by the Guardian and New York magazine quoted Bannon being highly critical of Donald Trump Jr and daughter Ivanka Trump.
Bannon, who left the White House in August last year, is also quoted as saying that the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election would focus on money laundering.
The probe by Mueller is looking into whether Donald Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to help get him elected — a charge the president has vehemently denied.
Donald Trump Jr took a meeting with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016 after an intermediary promised material that would incriminate Donald Trump’s rival, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort also attended the meeting in New York.
“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor — with no lawyers,” Bannon was quoted as saying. “They didn’t have any lawyers. Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
Trump responded quickly and cuttingly to the reported comments by Bannon.
“Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn’t as easy as I make it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country,” Donald Trump said. “Steve pretends to be at war with the media ... yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was.”
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