“Ehhh . . . ehhh . . . ehhh!” screeched Bannon, making the sound of an emergency alarm. “Don’t look here! Let’s tell a prosecutor what not to look at!”
Bannon then described the conversation he’d had with the president earlier that day: “I went right into him and said, ‘Why did you say that?’ And he says, ‘The Sessions thing?’ and I say, ‘No, that’s bad, but it’s another day at the office.’ I said, ‘Why did you say it was off limits to go after your family’s finances?’ And he says, ‘Well, it is . . . .’ I go, ‘Hey, they are going to determine their mandate. . . . You may not like it, but you just guaranteed if you want to get anybody else in [the special counsel] slot, every senator will make him swear that the first thing he’s going to do is come in and subpoena your fucking tax returns.’ ”
Bannon, with further disbelief, recounted the details of a recent story from the Financial Times about Felix Sater, one of the shadiest of the shady Trump-associated characters, who was closely aligned with Trump’s longtime personal lawyer, Michael Cohen (reportedly a target of the Mueller investigation), and a key follow-the-money link to Russia. Sater, “get ready for it—I know this may shock you, but wait for it”—had had major problems with the law before, “caught with a couple of guys in Boca running Russian money through a boiler room.” And, it turns out, “Brother Sater” was prosecuted by—“wait”—Andrew Weissmann. (Mueller had recently hired Weissmann, a high-powered Washington lawyer who headed the DOJ’s criminal fraud division.) “You’ve got the LeBron James of money laundering investigations on you, Jarvanka. My asshole just got so tight!”
Bannon quite literally slapped his sides and then returned to his conversation with the president. “And he goes, ‘That’s not their mandate.’ Seriously, dude?”
Preate, putting out the Chinese food on a table, said, “It wasn’t their mandate to put Arthur Andersen out of business during Enron, but that didn’t stop Andrew Weissmann”—one of the Enron prosecutors.
“You realize where this is going,” Bannon continued. “This is all about money laundering. Mueller chose Weissmann first and he is a money laundering guy. Their path to fucking Trump goes right through Paul Manafort, Don Jr., and Jared Kushner . . . It’s as plain as a hair on your face. . . . It goes through all the Kushner shit. They’re going to roll those two guys up and say play me or trade me. But . . . ‘executive privilege!’ ” Bannon mimicked. “ ‘We’ve got executive privilege!’ There’s no executive privilege! We proved that in Watergate.”
An expressive man, Bannon seemed to have suddenly exhausted himself. After a pause, he added wearily: “They’re sitting on a beach trying to stop a Category Five.”
With his hands in front of him, he mimed something like a force field that would isolate him from danger. “It’s not my deal. He’s got the five geniuses around him: Jarvanka, Hope Hicks, Dina Powell, and Josh Raffel.” He threw up his hands again, this time as if to say Hands off. “I know no Russians, I don’t know nothin’ about nothin’. I’m not being a witness. I’m not hiring a lawyer. It is not going to be my ass in front of a microphone on national TV answering questions. Hope Hicks is so fucked she doesn’t even know it. They are going to lay her out. They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV. Michael Cohen, cracked like an egg. He”—the president—“said to me everybody would take that Don Junior meeting with the Russians. I said, ‘Everybody would not take that meeting.’ I said, ‘I’m a naval officer. I’m not going to take a meeting with Russian nationals, and do it in headquarters, are you fucking insane?’ and he says, ‘But he’s a good boy.’ There were no meetings like that after I took over the campaign.”
Bannon’s tone veered from ad absurdum desperation to resignation.
“If he fires Mueller it just brings the impeachment quicker. Why not, let’s do it. Let’s get it on. Why not? What am I going to do? Am I going to go in and save him? He’s Donald Trump. He’s always gonna do things. He wants an unrecused attorney general. I told him if Jeff Sessions goes, Rod Rosenstein goes, and then Rachel Brand”—the associate attorney general, next in line after Rosenstein—“goes, we’ll be digging down into Obama career guys. An Obama guy will be acting attorney general. I said you’re not going to get Rudy”—Trump had again revived a wish for his loyalists Rudy Giuliani or Chris Christie to take the job—“because he was on the campaign and will have to recuse himself, and Chris Christie, too, so those are masturbatory fantasies, get those out of your brain. And, for anybody to get confirmed now, they are going to have to swear and ensure that things will go ahead and they won’t fire anybody, because you said yesterday—Ehhh . . . ehhh . . . .ehhh!—‘my family finances are off limits,’ and they’re going to demand that, whoever he is, he promises and commits to make the family finances part of this investigation. I told him as night follows day that’s a lock, so you better hope Sessions stays around.”
“He was calling people in New York last night asking what he should do,” added Preate. (Almost everybody in the White House followed Trump’s thinking by tracking whom he had called the night before.)
Bannon sat back and, with steam-rising frustration—almost a cartoon figure—he outlined his Clinton-like legal plan. “They went to the mattresses with amazing discipline. They ground through it.” But that was about discipline, he emphasized, and Trump, said Bannon, noting the obvious, was the least disciplined man in politics.
It was clear where Mueller and his team were going, said Bannon: they would trace a money trail through Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Michael Cohen, and Jared Kushner and roll one or all of them on the president.
It’s Shakespearean, he said, enumerating the bad advice from his family circle: “It’s the geniuses, the same people who talked him into firing Comey, the same people on Air Force One who cut out his outside legal team, knowing the email was out there, knowing that email existed, put the statement out about Don Junior, that the meeting was all about adoptions . . . the same geniuses trying to get Sessions fired.
“Look, Kasowitz has known him for twenty-five years. Kasowitz has gotten him out of all kinds of jams. Kasowitz on the campaign—what did we have, a hundred women? Kasowitz took care of all of them. And now he’s out in, what, four weeks? He’s New York’s toughest lawyer. Mark Corallo, toughest motherfucker I ever met, just can’t do it.”
Jared and Ivanka believe, said Bannon, that if they advocate prison reform and save DACA—the program to protect the children of illegal immigrants—the liberals will come to their defense. He digressed briefly to characterize Ivanka Trump’s legislative acumen, and her difficulty—which had become quite a White House preoccupation—in finding sponsorship for her family leave proposal. “Here’s why, I keep telling her: there’s no political constituency in it. You know how easy it is to get a bill sponsored, any schmendrick can do it. You know why your bill has no sponsorship? Because people realize how dumb it is.” In fact, said, Bannon, eyes rolling and mouth agape, it was the Jarvanka idea to try to trade off amnesty for the border wall. “If not the dumbest idea in Western civilization, it’s up there in the top three. Do these geniuses even know who we are?”