President Trump shredded his former strategist Steve Bannon Wednesday afternoon after the Breitbart leader called Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower “treasonous.”
Bannon made the comments in a new book coming out soon, and President Trump wasted no time responding, saying Bannon has “lost his mind” and is “only in it for himself.”
According to Politico:
“Bannon was also critical of the decision by Trump Jr., Manafort and Kushner to meet in the summer of 2016 with a Russian attorney who claimed to have incriminating information about Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton in the form of hacked emails, sourced from the Russian government. He told his interviewer that the meeting should never have happened, especially inside Trump Tower and without any lawyers present.
“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,” he said, adding that if the meeting were to happen, it should have occurred “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people” and then the information “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication.”
Trump says Bannon has lost his mind and does not support him or his agenda.
Here is President Trump’s full statement:
“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. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.
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. Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans. Steve doesn’t represent my base—he’s only in it for himself.
Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, 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. It is the only thing he does well. Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.
We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up, rather than simply seeking to burn it all down.”
