Washington: Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon has described a meeting between President Donald Trump’s son Don Jr and a Russian lawyer
during the 2016 presidential election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic,” The Guardian reported.
Bannon made the scathing comments in a book to be published next week — Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by journalist Michael Wolff, the
newspaper said.“They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Bannon reportedly said. Bannon, who left the White House in August, was also quoted as saying that the investigation by special counsel Robert Mueller into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election will focus on money laundering.
Bannon, an executive with right-wing news outlet Breitbart News, joined Trump’s White House bid two months after the June 9, 2016 meeting between Russian
lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and Trump campaign officials.
Besides Donald Trump Jr, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and then campaign chairman Paul Manafort attended the meeting at Trump Tower in New York.
“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,”
he said. In reply, Trump unleashed a spectacular denunciation of Bannon, calling him insane and irrelevant.
“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,” Trump said in a written statement. Trump said Bannon was “only in it for himself.”
US media said Charles Harder, a lawyer for Trump, has sent Bannon a cease-and-desist letter accusing him of violating a non-disclosure agreement by speaking to the author of the book.
