Wednesday, September 21, 2016

It's Steve Bannon's World, We Just Live In It // Josh Marshall

Very interesting take on Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon of Breitbart.  Turns out he has been the force behind "Clinton Cash" - an assault on the Clinton Foundation.

Though no impropriety has been found the argument for "appearance of impropriety" is strong because the foundation dealt with the governments of nation states while Hillary Clinton was the highest official in the U.S. State Department. - gwc
It's Steve Bannon's World, We Just Live In It
One of the many fascinating things to come out of my chat with Josh Green (for Episode 3 of the podcast) was the still largely unappreciated role of Steve Bannon looming over the 2016 race.
Obviously, being Trump's campaign chairman in itself is a very big deal. Kellyanne Conway is the nominal campaign manager. But Bannon seems to be the top executive in the operation. And to the surprise of many (including myself), rather than signaling Trump going finally totally off he rails, Bannon is the first of Trump's three campaign chiefs to bring some level of discipline to the operation. Not a high bar. But it's been real and important. So that's point one.
Bannon's also the guy running the Breitbart media empire which, all the merited derision and lack of integrity aside, has had a massive impact on Republican base politics. This is one reason TPM has always focused so much on the far right and often what looks like the looney right. It is looney. But elites tend to think it doesn't merit serious attention just because it's crazy. That's a big, big mistake, both journalistically and politically.
But then there's a part I'd forgotten about entirely. Bannon is the guy behind the 'Government Accountability Institute', which funded Peter Schweizer's Clinton Cash, the exposé which was the origin point of a huge amount of the coverage of the Clinton Foundation, Clinton speeches and all the rest.

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