Donald Trump may have just tipped off that Steve Bannon is a Trump-Russia conspirator
Donald Trump made a point of publicly throwing Steve Bannon under the bus today in a quote he gave to the New York Post. That’s not surprising, considering that he removed Bannon from the National Security Council last week. But Trump’s specific choice of wording is something I’ve heard from his White House three different times now – and each time it was because the White House was trying to distance itself from a Trump-Russia conspirator whom it knew was about to get outed.
Here is Donald Trump’s quote today about Steve Bannon in the NY Post: “I like Steve, but you have to remember he was not involved in my campaign until very late … I had already beaten all the senators and all the governors, and I didn’t know Steve. I’m my own strategist and it wasn’t like I was going to change strategies because I was facing crooked Hillary” (link). But this particular verbiage is too familiar to simply look past.
The day before the government of Ukraine revealed evidence that Paul Manafort had taken tens of millions of dollars from a Kremlin-connected billionaire, Donald Trump sent Sean Spicer to the podium to (falsely) claim that Manafort had only played a small and brief role in the campaign. Just before the worst evidence leaked out that Michael Flynn was a Russian asset, Trump’s White House tried to write him off as having been a mere “volunteer” for the campaign. A similar strategy was used as Carter Page was being outed as having been a Trump-Russia conspirator.
And now today we have Donald Trump making a point of painting Steve Bannon as – stop me if you’ve heard this before – having only played a brief role in the campaign for a brief period of time. The last three times Trump’s team used this verbiage, it shortly thereafter leaked that the person being diminished was a Trump-Russia conspirator. Is Trump now doing this to Bannon because he knows something is about to leak about Bannon in that regard? Stay tuned. Contribute to Palmer Report
