The Daily - Thursday, Jan. 4, 2018

Episode Date: January 4, 2018

A new tell-all book about the first year of the Trump administration has the White House in a fury. Its key source is Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s former chief strategist, who disparages the president and his children. Mr. Trump responded: “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.”Guests: Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent; Maggie Haberman, White House correspondent. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, a new book has the White House in a fury. Its key source is Steve Bannon. What he said and what the president is saying in response. It's Thursday, January 4th. All right, Peter's in. One sec, guys. Let's get him all set up. Peter.

Hi there. Hello. How are you? I'm good. Peter Baker got an advance copy of the book. The book, called Fire and Fury by Michael Wolff, is a look inside the Trump White House first year, and it's a very sensational account of a White House in basically turmoil,

a dysfunctional White House filled with tribal rivalries and led by a president who, at least in this portrayal, is not a very serious character, not somebody who takes the job seriously, not somebody who really even wanted the job to begin with. For instance, Sam Nunberg, who was an aide to President Trump on the campaign, at one point was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. And he's quoted in the book saying, I got as far as the Fourth Amendment before his

finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head. That's an on-the-record quote and pretty striking, right? And it's part of this overall portrayal of a candidate and later a president who's not very serious about this, you know, unlike any White House probably we've seen in modern times. And how did Wolf actually do this reporting? Well, he says he had 200 interviews with people around the president, people who are key to the president's team. Some of these interviews are on the record, and those are obviously the easier ones to evaluate. Some of these episodes he talks about are not sourced to anyone in particular, not somebody who's named. And there's a harder, of course, to know how accurate they are. There's

already been some pushback by some people around the president saying that things they were reported to have done is not accurate. But certainly the overall portrayal is one that's very, very vivid and one that enhances what we've already seen, I think, publicly in this last year. But presumably, if he was in some or all these conversations, this book was kind of condoned by the White House, right? Well, that's not really clear. The White House would tell you no.

He never actually sat down with the president, just to be very clear. He only had one conversation with the president. There was one brief conversation that had nothing to do originally with the book. A conversation that started anyway as the president calling to thank him for something he had said about a New York Times article that he didn't particularly like. It was, I think, around five to seven minutes in total since the president's taken office, and that's the only interaction that he didn't particularly like? It was, I think, around five to seven minutes in total since the president's taken office, and that's the only interaction that he's had. So, you know, according to the White House version anyway,

he did not have the president's particular cooperation. But what he did have was Steve Bannon's cooperation. And the White House would tell you that 95% of his interactions inside the White House were at the request of Steve Bannon. That's what Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said today. So they're trying to pin at the request of Steve Bannon. That's what Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, said today. So they're trying to pin it anyway all on Steve Bannon.

And other White House officials were not working with him in helping to— Any that did so far, as far as we can tell, did so at the request of Mr. Bannon. So that's what a lot of the controversy is about with this book, the Bannon account of the White House and of the campaign, as told to Michael Wolff. Yeah, certainly Bannon's account flavors this book pretty strongly. And it's a very harsh and caustic view of this White House and of this president and his family. I mean, some of these characterizations are pretty visceral and pretty personal. He calls Ivanka Trump, the president's daughter, dumb as a brick. He says that Donald Trump Jr. was

treasonous and unpatriotic for meeting with Russians during the 2016 campaign. And he basically is very harsh on Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law. So you can imagine that's not, as Sarah Huckabee Sanders said today, the way to curry favor with the president. It's been reported that he was furious when these reports first came out about what Bannon was quoted as saying. Is that an accurate depiction? 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. The one that really seems to have gotten most under the president's skin is this idea that the June 2016 meeting that Donald Trump Jr. convened with Russians who were offering

incriminating information about Hillary Clinton was wrong. You know, the White House point of view is, so what? You know, they were just looking for opposition research during a campaign. But Steve Bannon told the author, no, he said they should have reported it immediately to the FBI. Well, you don't call the president's son treasonous without the president getting upset. And that's one of the things that really ticked him off today. So Bannon is actually accusing the Trump White House of doing something truly wrong when it comes to dealings with Russia. That's exactly right. And he says, look, I can't imagine that Donald Jr. didn't take these Russians up

to meet his father. Now, he doesn't know that to be the case. He's speculating at this point. And that's another thing that would make him angry because that's directly in conflict with the White House explanation that the president never knew about this meeting, did not meet those Russians

and found out about it only much later. One other thing that Banna says is he talks about this probe by the special counsel, and he just suggests that money laundering is the real vulnerability for the president, basically characterizing this investigation as a legitimate, serious effort that could damage, if not destroy, the presidency, as opposed to calling it the witch hunt, the way the president characterizes it. Peter, I'm curious, Bannon's decision to cooperate with Wolf started before Bannon left the White House under pressure, right? So what was he doing giving this kind of access to Michael Wolf, to this author, access that the White House clearly does not appreciate?

upset about is that they point out that here is this figure who has railed against the media, who has called the media the opposition, the enemy, and yet he seems to cooperate with a lot of figures in the mainstream media, including this author, Michael Wolff, including Vanity Fair, including the New York Times, including 60 Minutes and plenty of other outlets. So he has not shied away from talking to the media, even though he has presented himself as an adversary of it. Peter, thank you very much. Thank you very much. And good luck getting through the rest of the book. That's all right.

We'll be right back. Maggie, what are we looking at here? Michael, we are looking at a four-paragraph statement from the President of the United States sent at 1.20 on Wednesday afternoon by the press secretary, Sarah Sanders. This is not released on his Twitter feed. This is an actual formal statement. Clearly work was put into this. And what is the subject of the statement? Oh, the subject is Steve Bannon.

Because of the Michael Wolff book, the president felt compelled to respond, and the White House was scrambling on this throughout Wednesday morning, to not just let this hang out there. They've been very conscious about the fact that Bannon has been creating himself as a power center since he left the White House, almost one on equal footing to the president. They wanted to send a clear message that he is not the same as the president, that the president does not consider him a friend, and to make clear that you cannot blithely take shots at the president's son without there being some ramifications. So this statement is about 10 sentences in total, as you said, four paragraphs.

Let's just break them all down. Sure. Starting with this. 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 17 candidates, often described as the most talented field ever assembled in the Republican Party. That's actually a go-to for Trump to say that this is often described as the best field and yet I won. And calling someone a staffer is also a go-to. I mean, this is where the president

does that thing he does, which is, I hardly know the guy is like Trump's deepest insult. It's when he's decided he's done with someone, he declares he just barely knows them. And that's what he's doing here. It's not true. But they're trying to paint Steve Bannon as crazy. They're trying to paint him as somebody who is out for himself. They're painting him as someone who would be making up tales. That's what this is all supposed to tell you. Okay. So let me move on to the next sentence. This is what the president writes. Now that he is on his own, Steve is learning that winning isn't as easy as I made it look. Steve had very little to do with our historic victory, which was delivered by the forgotten men and women of this country.

Yet Steve had everything to do with the loss of a Senate seat in Alabama held for more than 30 years by Republicans. more than 30 years by Republicans. So that is an effort by the president to do a couple of things, one of which is to continue to act as if he himself did not endorse Roy Moore, who that's talking about, the loser of the Alabama Senate race. He was the Republican nominee. The president endorsed him. The president supported him. The president was swayed by stuff that Bannon was communicating to him, that he should really

get in there and he could make the difference. And Bannon, of course, endorsed Roy Moore heavily. He endorsed Moore heavily. He went to the state twice. But that's basically an effort to sort of spin all loss on Bannon and make him the problem. The president has been having trouble dealing with the fact that his own political power has been diminished through a series of losses, and the Roy Moore one was just the most latest. Well, so how much of this, Trump turning on Bannon as he's doing in this statement, do you think also has to do with what he's referring to in the statement, which is Bannon backing Roy Moore and more than losing to a Vanity Fair interview that Bannon gave a couple of weeks ago, where he was on the record, very, very critical of all aspects about the White House, about how the president

handles himself. That was the prelude to this Michael Wolff book. There's been almost a slow rollout of Bannon over the last several weeks. The president was so angry about it that he wanted to give a public statement on it and had to be talked out of it by his advisors who said, this is a bad idea. You're just going to elevate him. But once this book came out, these excerpts started hitting, there was nothing they could do. So Trump wanted to issue a statement like this before Wednesday. Correct. But waited. But waited. And now there was sort of a sense there was no choice but to do it.

So this one is really interesting. Steve pretends to be at war with the media, which he calls the opposition party, yet he spent his time at the White House leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was. It is the only thing he does well. Well, that's a dagger, and that is a dagger that is coming, I think, not just from Donald Trump, but from his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his daughter, Ivanka Trump, from other staff members within the White House. I think the only thing that they were all unified about by the end of Bannon's tenure was that they all wanted him gone.

But that complaint about Bannon's leak was a massive Kushner and Ivanka complaint. And what can you say about that? I know it's difficult for a reporter to talk about whether somebody has leaked to their knowledge, but is there objective reporting and evidence that Steve Bannon, perhaps like many people, but maybe uniquely, leaks? I think everybody in that White House leaked for the most part.

I don't think that – let me rephrase that. I don't think everybody leaked, but I think that many people leaked. We obviously would not talk about our sources, but certainly there were stories that you saw that were pretty direct quotes from Bannon. So it was either things that he had said directly to a reporter or it was things that he had relayed to an associate who then relayed it to a reporter. And there was lots of stuff that only he would know. A White House aide said to me this morning,

you'll notice that all the leaking stopped after he was gone. That's obviously not true, but it is true that there has been less knife fighting publicly. So you spend a lot of time talking to people in the White House and actually in this White House. So how about this statement, Maggie? Steve was rarely in one-on-one meetings with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue whom he helped

write phony books. So first of all, it's hard to say exactly how many one-on-one meetings Steve Bannon had with the president, but I'm not really sure where that became the qualification. There was a very often in that White House because these aides were all afraid to leave other people alone with the center of power, which was the president, because they'd be able to influence what he thought, there were often these group meetings. There were these group pylons where you would have lots of people. So one-on-ones are sort of a straw man being set up by the president. Okay. So the whole thing up until now has been about Bannon, but not these final sentences, which to me are the most interesting in a statement. Here's what the president wrote.

We have many great Republican members of Congress and candidates who are very supportive of the Make America Great Again agenda. Like me, they love the United States of America and are helping to finally take our country back and build it up rather than simply seeking to burn it all down. What's the message here? So one of the things that has irritated the White House the most and which I was hearing about from people this morning the most was that Bannon is trying to present himself as sort of this kingmaker who is recruiting a bunch of candidates to challenge incumbents in a bunch of different races. In next year's midterm elections. In this year's midterm elections. We are in 2018, as strange as that feels. And this is trying to both reject his abilities to even take people on and to signal to voters, the choices you have are good enough. He's trying to strip Bannon away from a base of voters that

they are both fighting to be the leader of. I mean, that's what you saw Bannon set himself up as when he left the White House. I am the natural inher to be the leader of. I mean, that's what you saw Bannon set himself up as when he left the White House. I am the natural inheritor of the Trump movement. Trump is trying to say, I'm still here. Maggie, tell me if I'm wrong, but this feels kind of like the ultimate message to send to Bannon, whose whole position now is about bringing down the establishment,

going after Republicans in Congress, who he sees as elitist or out of touch, not part of this populist movement that both Bannon and Trump have been leading. And now Trump seems to sort of be saying, nope, plenty of good guys already in the establishment, already in Congress. I'm not with you anymore. It's a message to Bannon and it's a message to the voters. It's a message to both. And it is a message to these insurgent candidates or potential insurgent candidates.

You are going to have a hard time with me and I am not going to do a wink and a nod and be with you. Again, the problem with this statement, which, as I said, feels very staff driven and staff distilled, is it requires a level of discipline that we have not seen the president engage in very often. So it have not seen the president engage in very often. So it's very possible the president will, if let's say one of the insurgents win, the president will then go support that person most likely. So the president is painting himself into a bit of a box that I'm not sure he wants to stay in. So that a candidate for Congress, for example, or the Senate in November of this year answers not to Bannon, but to Trump.

They will always answer to Trump anyway. He's the actual leader of the party. But Trump is basically calling Bannon a false deity. Hmm. Was the White House eager to divide Trump and Bannon? In other words, is this statement perhaps evidence that the White House wanted to see a break in this relationship? Without a doubt.

I mean, the fact that Bannon still lurked around to whatever degree he lurked around, and White House aides would say it was not as much as he claimed, they wanted him gone. He has been a problem for them for a very long time. So the White House has used this Wolf book, which they know the president won't like, as an opportunity to publicly signal that this partnership is not really a partnership anymore. Yes, and they basically used it to force the president into saying it publicly. The president has danced around it in his own comments. They wanted him to make a forceful public declaration.

Does this statement mark the end of the Trump-Bannon partnership? No, but I think it marks the end of this phase of it, and I suspect they won't be talking again for quite some time. Fascinating. Thank you, Maggie. Thank you. On Wednesday night, a lawyer for the president sent a cease and desist letter to Bannon,

claiming he had violated a nondisclosure agreement in speaking to Wolf. The lawyer ordered Bannon to stop he had violated a non-disclosure agreement in speaking to Wolfe. The lawyer ordered Bannon to stop all such communication, warned him of numerous legal claims, including defamation by libel and slander, and told him such legal action was, quote, imminent. imminent. Here's what else you need to know today. On Wednesday, President Trump's former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, filed a lawsuit against special counsel Robert Mueller two months after Mueller indicted him as part of the Russia investigation. Did you collude with Russians? Any reaction to the charges of Mr. Manifort?

Manifort, who was charged with money laundering and not with any activity directly related to the campaign's ties to Russia, is arguing that the Justice Department should narrow Mueller's authority and is asking that his indictment be dismissed. and is asking that his indictment be dismissed. And the president has disbanded a commission on voter fraud, which he created last year to investigate his own claims that millions of undocumented immigrants voted in the 2016 election. In a statement, the White House said that the refusal of states to hand over their voting records was not worth the, quote,

endless legal battles at taxpayer expense. Finally, North Korean officials have announced that the country will reopen a telephone hotline with South Korea three days after Kim Jong-un proposed negotiations to ease tensions between the two countries. North Korea had shut down the line two years ago, refusing to pick up the phone when South Korean officials would make a daily call. Instead, South Korea would broadcast messages to the North using loudspeakers that lined the border. But Wednesday afternoon, Korean news agencies reported that the North called the South on the hotline, and the two sides had a 20-minute conversation.

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.