GOP insider: Steve Bannon may have already cut a deal with Robert Mueller
Yesterday, Palmer Report pieced together a series of clues and figured out that Steve Bannon has all but certainly already cut a plea deal with Robert Mueller in the Trump-Russia scandal. It wasn’t simply Bannon’s words in Michael Wolff’s book, but also the rather interesting responses from a certain Senate committee leader in the aftermath. Now a respected Republican insider also believes that Bannon may have cut a deal.
When Bannon’s “treason” accusation surfaced about Donald Trump and his son yesterday, it should have been a golden opportunity for the Democrats investigating the Trump-Russia scandal to demand that Bannon be hauled in to testify. Instead, when Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member Mark Warner appeared on cable news in the aftermath, he refused to explain why his committee hasn’t yet interviewed Bannon. More notably, he refused to say whether or not he now wants to interview Bannon.
The only explanation for this, of course, would be that Bannon has already cut a deal with Mueller. In such case the Democrats on the committee would not want Bannon to come in and testify at all, and they would instead be playing it coy when asked in public – which is precisely what we saw from Warner. That brings us to Richard Painter, a law professor and the former White House chief ethics lawyer for the latter years of the George W. Bush administration.
Painter is saying “Bannon may already be cooperating with Mueller for all we know … He has no incentive to cover up for Trump, or his family members.” (link). He’s a well connected Republican insider, and he often knows things before others do. So is he hinting that Steve Bannon has indeed already cut a deal, or is he merely theorizing? In any case, Mark Warner’s response yesterday all but gave it away.
