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Steve Bannon is
100% right about Russia and the Trump campaign
CNN.com
42 mins ago
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Steve Bannon is 100% right about Russia and the Trump campaign
Washington (CNN)In a new book detailing the wild first year of Donald Trump's presidency,
former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon is quoted blasting top
operatives in the 2016 campaign for their naivete and idiocy in their
dealings with the Russians.
He's absolutely right.
Of the July 2016 meeting
between Donald Trump Jr., Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, then-campaign
chairman Paul Manafort and several Russians -- in which dirt on Hillary
Clinton had been promised to the campaign -- Bannon tells author
Michael Wolff, according to the Guardian, which obtained an early copy of the book:
"The
three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet
with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on
the 25th floor -- with no lawyers. They didn't have any lawyers. Even if
you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s***,
and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI
immediately."
Correct!
The
idea that a meeting between the three top officials in the Trump
campaign and a handful of people with Russian ties could or should be
held in Trump Tower is, on its face, ludicrous. And, that doesn't even
get into the fact that the reason (or a reason) that the
meeting even happened in the first place was that Don Jr. had been
promised dirt on Clinton by Rob Goldstone, a publicist for Russian pop
star Emin Alagarov, whose father is a business tycoon close to the
Russian government.
Whether or not
anything actually happened -- Don Jr. insists the meeting was brief and
uneventful -- the sheer appearance that such a gathering conveys is a
very bad one. Particularly when you consider that two former Trump aides
have already pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about their contacts
with Russia during the 2016 campaign.
"Bannon
went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take
place, it should have been set up 'in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New
Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people'. Any
information, he said, could then be 'dump[ed] ... down to Breitbart or
something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication.'
You never see it, you never know it, because you don't need to ... But
that's the brain trust that they had."
This
is what is known as plausible deniability. As in, senior leadership in
any campaign never get too close to the truly explosive (or potentially
explosive) material that is peddled in the dark channels of opposition
research so that -- if ever it actually blows up -- they can honestly
say they never knew about it.
What
Bannon nails in the last line of his quote above is the fact that the
"brain trust" of the Trump campaign simply wasn't terribly well versed
in the ways that modern campaigns operate. Don Jr. and Kushner are
family; neither man had ever been involved in politics at any sort of
national level prior to this campaign. Manafort hadn't run -- or really
been involved at a high level with -- a campaign in this country in
decades.
These were not, in short,
the best of the best. Why? Because no one thought Trump had a shot in
hell of winning. And, even when it became clear by the spring of 2016
that he actually might win -- that's when Manafort signed on -- no one
who had run a previous campaign at the national level in the last decade
was willing to touch the radioactive Trump.
There
were undoubtedly benefits to the lack of knowledge Trump and his inner
circle had about the way things were done in campaigns. They ran a
different campaign because they didn't know what a normal campaign
looked like.
But, this Trump Tower
meeting is the other side of that coin. It was a colossally bad
decision -- even if nothing at all happened in it.
Say
what you will about Steve Bannon -- and you can say a lot -- but he
gets that. And he gets -- better than anyone in the White House
apparently does -- what is headed their way.
"They're sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five," he told Wolff.
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