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Steve Bannon Was Mostly Right About Donald Trump Jr.

By John McCormack

Steve Bannon is a self-described Leninist who wants to destroy The Weekly Standard. Much worse, he’s a notorious creep who promotes even bigger creeps like Paul Nehlen, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Roy Moore. So it is more than a little amusing to watch President Trump furiously attack Bannon in response to Bannon’s comments attacking Donald Trump Jr. in a new book by Michael Wolff.

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An excerpt of Trump’s statement:

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. Steve was a staffer who worked for me after I had already won the nomination by defeating seventeen candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican party.

But just because Bannon is a creep who seeks to harm conservatism and the country, that doesn’t mean his comments that sparked his fight with Trump were wrong.

Here’s the Guardian’s report on Bannon’s comments about Donald Trump Jr.:

“The three senior guys in the campaign thought it was a good idea to meet with a foreign government inside Trump Tower in the conference room on the 25th floor – with no lawyers. They didn’t have any lawyers. “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.” Bannon went on, Wolff writes, to say that if any such meeting had to take place, it should have been set up “in a Holiday Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, with your lawyers who meet with these people”. Any information, he said, could then be “dump[ed] … down to Breitbart or something like that, or maybe some other more legitimate publication.”

Just how bad were Donald Trump Jr.’s actions? We don’t know for sure. But what we do know based on the emails Donald Trump Jr. released is pretty appalling.

Rob Goldstone, the man trying to set up a meeting between a Russian agent and Trump Jr., Manafort, and Kushner, said in an email that Russian officials “offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”

“This is obviously very high level and sensitive information but is part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump,” he continued.

Trump Jr. replied: “if it’s what you say I love it especially later in the summer.”

Trump Jr. later claimed that he had done nothing wrong because the Russian lawyer who showed up to the meeting did not have dirt on Hillary Clinton. We don’t know if that claim is true. But if it is true, his emails still revealed that he had expressed willingness to accept “very high level and sensitive information” obtained from a hostile foreign country. Yes, it’s true that committing murder is much worse than being willing to commit murder, but the latter is still pretty bad. What Trump Jr. admitted to does not at all appear to be treason in a literal sense, as Bannon asserts, but it is indeed some “bad s—-” that should have been immediately reported to the FBI.

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