Donald Trump issues legal threat to
Steve Bannon after book revelations
Cease and desist letter comes after
claim in new book by Michael Wolff that former chief strategist called Trump
Jr’s meeting with Russians ‘treasonous’
David Smith in Washington
@smithinamerica
Thu 4 Jan ‘18 06.24 GMT Last modified on Thu 4 Jan ‘18 09.22
GMT
Donald Trump’s lawyers threatened legal action on Wednesday
night against his former right-hand man Steve Bannon, marking a fresh
escalation after a day of turmoil that left the White House reeling.
A cease and desist letter accuses Bannon of violating a
non-disclosure agreement by speaking about his time on Trump’s election
campaign to Michael Wolff, whose new book has caused shockwaves in Washington.
Trump’s hopes of turning the page on a chaotic 2017 were
dashed by extracts from Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Wolff,
first made public by the Guardian. It triggered an ugly and unprecedented war
of words between Trump and Bannon.
Charles Harder, the president’s lawyer, told ABC News that
Bannon’s communications with Wolff “give rise to numerous legal claims
including defamation by libel and slander, and breach of his written
confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement with our clients. Legal action
is imminent.”
Harder’s letter to Bannon warned: “You have breached the
agreement by, among other things, communicating with author Michael Wolff about
Mr Trump, his family members, and the company, disclosing confidential
information to Mr Wolff, and making disparaging statements and in some cases
outright defamatory statements to Mr Wolff about Mr Trump, his family members,
and the company.”
The damning portrait of White House infighting and
presidential incompetence dominated cable television news all day as well as the
daily White House press briefing. Wolff’s book soared from 48,449th on Amazon’s
bestselling books list to number one. Veteran political observers said they
could not remember a falling-out so public or rancorous as that between Trump
and Bannon.
The former chief strategist appears to have crossed a line
by criticising Trump’s family: according to the book, he described Donald Trump
Jr’s conduct in accepting a meeting with Russians during the election campaign
as “treasonous”, and referred to Ivanka Trump as “dumb as a brick”. Trump Jr
has in the past repeatedly denied wrongdoing in attending the meeting at Trump
Tower.
“Aides thought they had more time to prepare for the book’s
formal release,” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday night. “Trump spent
much of the day raging about the book to top aides, officials and advisers said
… As he fumed, some aides were still frantically searching for a copy of the
book, and even senior aides like [Hope] Hicks had not seen it by the afternoon,
officials said.”
Press secretary Sarah Sanders described the president’s
reaction to the book: “I think furious, disgusted, would probably certainly fit
when you make such outrageous claims and completely false claims against the
president, his administration, and his family.”
In characteristic fashion the president hit back – but while
he usually targets his foes through Twitter, Bannon earned the dubious honour
of a vituperative 266-word statement. Trump insisted the former campaign chief
executive and White House chief strategist had little to do with his victorious
campaign and “has nothing to do with me or my presidency”, adding: “When he was
fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
Bannon hosted Breitbart News Tonight on Sirius XM radio as
usual on Wednesday night, CNN reported, and made little reference to the
acrimony. But when a caller brought up the issue, Bannon replied: “The
president of the United States is a great man. You know I support him day in
and day out.”
The furious controversy consumed time and energy in the west
wing just as Trump prepared for a weekend retreat at Camp David with Paul Ryan,
the House speaker, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to discuss
Republicans’ plans for 2018. The stakes could not be higher with the president’s
approval rating at rock bottom and mid-term elections looming in November.
Now executive chairman of the conservative Breitbart News
website, Bannon is known to be planning to throw his weight behind several
candidates that share his hardline nationalist agenda.
On Wednesday, Trump Jr highlighted reader responses on
Breitbart that were supportive of the president, tweeting: “Wow, just looked at
the comments section on Breitbart. Wow. When Bannon has lost Breitbart, he’s
left with … umm, nothing.”
But Bannon could yet use Breitbart to hold Trump’s feet to
the fire on issues such as immigration control, building a wall on the Mexican
border and waging a trade war with China.
Joshua Green, author of Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon,
Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, said: “I don’t think Bannon
is going anywhere … He speaks for a wing of the Republican party that is real
and powerful. He reflects and amplifies a sentiment among grassroots Republican
supporters on issues such as trade and immigration that is very real.”
Dan Cassino, associate professor of political science at
Fairleigh Dickinson University in Madison, New Jersey, did not rule out a
possible reconciliation: “Trump has a history of making nice afterwards. We
have to reevaluate after a week.”
The firestorm created by Wolff’s book burned long into
Wednesday night. The author paints a vivid picture of a dysfunctional White
House led by a president who did not actually want to win the election. The
shock of victory left Melania Trump in tears, Wolff writes.
Stephanie Grisham, communications director for the first
lady, rejected the claim.
In another extraordinary section, Wolff writes: “Trump liked
to say that one of the things that made life worth living was getting your
friends’ wives into bed.” To that end, the book claims, Trump would invite the
friend to his office and engage in “more or less constant sexual banter”.
The book goes on to say that, with the friend’s wife on
speakerphone, listening to the conversation, Trump would allegedly ask the
friend: “‘Do you still like having sex with your wife? How often? You must have
had a better fuck than your wife? Tell me about it. I have girls coming in from
Los Angeles at three o’clock. We can go upstairs and have a great time.”
Wolff said in an author’s note that the book was based on
more than 200 interviews, including multiple conversations with the president
and senior staff. But Sanders claimed that Wolff “never actually sat down with
the president” and had spoken with him just once, briefly, since Trump had
taken office. She dismissed the book as “trashy tabloid fiction”.
Ivanka seeks the presidency – and
other big claims from explosive new book
In his book Fire and Fury: Inside the
Trump White House, Michael Wolff reports on clashes between Trump and his inner
circle
Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner reportedly made
a deal about a future presidential run.
Martin Pengelly
@MartinPengelly
Wed 3 Jan ‘18 20.37 GMT Last modified on Thu 4 Jan ‘18 09.22
GMT
The publication on Wednesday of excerpts from a new book on
the Trump administration, first by the Guardian and then by New York magazine,
brought to light a host of explosive reports of internecine fighting and
organisational chaos at the heart of the US presidency.
Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, by the former
Guardian columnist and Rupert Murdoch biographer Michael Wolff, will be
published in full next Tuesday. In December he told the Guardian that in his
approach to researching the book he had been “not particularly hostile”.
“That allowed me to get them to be relatively open,” he
said.
Among other things, the book reveals that former Trump
campaign chair and White House strategist Steve Bannon believes an infamous
June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort and
Russians offering incriminating information about Hillary Clinton at Trump
Tower was “treasonous”, “unpatriotic” and “bad shit”.
Bannon also reportedly believes that Donald Trump knew of
the meeting and met the Russians involved – the president has denied this –
saying: “The chance that Don Jr did not walk these jumos up to his father’s
office on the 26th floor is zero.”
Wolff also reports a conversation between the
president-elect and Rupert Murdoch about immigration policy that allegedly led
the media mogul to label Trump “a fucking idiot”.
The revelations drew a remarkably forceful White House
statement, in which Trump said: “When he was fired he not only lost his job, he
lost his mind.”
By any standard, Wolff’s book has had an extraordinary
impact for an as yet unpublished work.
Here are some other highlights:
The president’s daughter and son-in-law, Ivanka Trump and
Jared Kushner, reportedly made a deal about which of them would one day run for
president. Wolff writes: “The first woman president, Ivanka entertained, would
not be Hillary Clinton; it would be Ivanka Trump.”
Of Bannon’s activities after leaving the White House, Wolff
writes: “Bannon was telling people something else: he, Steve Bannon, was going
to run for president. The locution, ‘If I were president …’ was turning into,
‘When I am president …’” Wolff also writes that Bannon has courted top
Republican donors, “doing his best, as he put it, to ‘kiss the ass and pay
homage to all the gray-beards’”.
Infighting among staff reportedly often featured a group
including Kushner, Ivanka and the economics adviser Gary Cohn against a faction
led by Bannon. Wolff quotes Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry
Kissinger, as saying: “It is a war between the Jews and the non-Jews.”
Wolff writes that Thomas Barrack Jr, a billionaire who is
one of the president’s oldest associates and was reportedly wanted by Trump to
be his chief of staff, allegedly told a friend: “He’s not only crazy, he’s
stupid.” On Wednesday, Barrack denied saying that.
Asked by Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes what Trump had
“gotten himself into with the Russians”, Wolff writes, Bannon answered:
“Mostly, he went to Russia and he thought he was going to meet Putin. But Putin
couldn’t give a shit about him. So he’s kept trying.”
In discussing whom to appoint as Trump’s national security
adviser, Wolff writes, Ailes promoted the former United Nations ambassador John
Bolton, whom he reportedly called “a bomb thrower” and “a strange little
fucker”. Bannon, however, reportedly counselled that Bolton’s moustache would
be “a problem”.
No one in the Trump campaign expected to win the presidency,
Wolff writes, and most including Trump saw his run as leverage for careers in
television or politics. Melania Trump, Wolff claims, was horrified by the
prospect of victory. When on election night it became clear Trump could indeed
beat Clinton and take the White House, according to the book “Melania was in
tears – and not of joy”. The first lady’s communications director rejected that
account and said: “The book is clearly going to be sold in the bargain fiction
section.”
Trump’s first Muslim travel ban, issued to chaos and protest
at airports across the US, caused consternation among White House staff. Bannon
reportedly said the ban was published late on a Friday precisely to anger and
provoke liberals, “so the snowflakes would show up at the airports and riot”.
Trump reportedly argued with the Secret Service over whether
he could have a lock on his bedroom – “the first time since the Kennedy White
House that a presidential couple had maintained separate rooms”, Wolff writes –
and told housekeeping he would strip his own bed and leave his shirts on the
floor. Wolff also says the president, who is known to fear being poisoned, told
no one to touch his toothbrush.
Kushner reportedly offered to marry the TV hosts Mika
Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough – then lunch dates for Trump, now regular
critics – because he said he was “an internet Unitarian minister”.
Disloyalty among the president’s staff was reportedly
mirrored by the president himself. Wolff says Trump called Bannon disloyal and
scruffy, Priebus weak and short, Kushner a suck-up, press secretary Sean Spicer
stupid and adviser Kellyanne Conway a crybaby. Jared and Ivanka, the president
reportedly said, should never have come to Washington.
The Guardian obtained a copy of Fire and Fury from a
bookseller in New England.
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