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Monday, August 22, 2016
Trump's Bannon:The Most Dangerous Political Operative in America
Anytime
One of the reasons he is the most dangerous political operative in the United States is that he is a Leninist and fiercely against mainstream and even conservative Republicans. And Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News.
So, why does Trump have a Leninist (one of the founders of Communism in Russia in the early days) as his campaign manager. Partly because they tend to agree on almost everything important right now which I find very strange.
This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America. Steve Bannon runs the new vast right-wing conspiracy—and he wants to take down both Hillary ...
4 days ago ... “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.
4 days ago ... Donald Trump has elevated "the most dangerous political operative in America" to a senior role in his campaign, a move that could mean an ...
2 days ago ...
WASHINGTON — If you thought the old Donald Trump campaign was wild and
crazy, just wait for the new Trump campaign now that Breitbart's ...
5 days ago ... Even Republicans are wary of Steve Bannon's tactics.
This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America
Steve 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, 2015
From
Photographs by Jeremy Liebman for 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 motto
Bannon, 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 Bannon
Bannon’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.
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Oct. 12, 2015. Subscribe now.
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 Timesran 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 bloom
Breitbart, 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.
Andrew Breitbart in 2010.
Photographer: Reed Saxon/AP Photo
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.
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.”
“We’ve got $1.3 billion of equipment I’m using at almost full capacity”
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.
Bannon’s motto: “Honey badger don’t give a s---.”
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.’ ” Update, Oct. 13: An earlier version of this story stated that James O'Keefe supplied the videotape of Shirley Sherrod. He did not.
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.
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