A new book reveals controversial comments Steve Bannon allegedly made about the Trump administration—and Donald Trump's response is vitriolic even for him.
According to Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff, Bannon was ranting to Wolff about a meeting that took place at Trump Tower in 2016 between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskay, and campaign chairman Paul Manafort. Veselnitskay was believed to have incriminating information on Hillary Clinton, The Daily Beast reports.
"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 allegedly said. "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."
After catching wind of Bannon's comments, President Trump shot back with his own string of insults. "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," he responded in a statement.
Not a tweet. An official statement.
Trump added that as his former advisor, Bannon was "only in it for himself" and "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." Trump went on: "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."
Meanwhile, Bannon called Wolff's account "Fake News and taken out of context" and urged his Twitter followers, "don’t believe the liberal propaganda Machine!"
Trump also said though Bannon had "very little to do with our historic victory," but "everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than thirty years by Republicans." The guy realllly wishes Roy Moore had won.
