The president was responding to comments attributed to Mr. Bannon in a new book, “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” by Michael Wolff. The forthcoming book was obtained by The Guardian, which first reported Mr. Bannon’s jolting remarks.
In the book, Mr. Bannon was quoted suggesting that Donald Trump Jr., the future president’s son; Jared Kushner, his son-in-law; and Paul J. Manafort, then the campaign chairman, had been “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” for meeting with Russians offering incriminating information on Hillary Clinton during a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower.
“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,” Mr. Bannon said after The New York Times revealed the meeting in July 2017, according to Mr. Wolff’s book.
“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 F.B.I. immediately,” Mr. Bannon continued, according to the book.
According to Mr. Wolff, Mr. Bannon also predicted that a special counsel investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and any coordination with Trump aides would ultimately center on money laundering, an assessment that could lend credibility to an investigation the president has repeatedly called a witch hunt. “They’re going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV,” Mr. Bannon was quoted as saying.
Donald Trump Jr. did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But he jabbed at Mr. Bannon on Twitter on Wednesday when he reposted a message noting that Alabama now had a Democratic senator. “Thanks Steve,” the younger Mr. Trump wrote. “Keep up the great work.”
Read Trump’s Reaction to Steve Bannon’s Comments
Mr. Bannon helped propel Roy Moore to the Republican nomination in Alabama and then stuck by him after the candidate was accused of sexual misconduct with several young women as young as age 14. At Mr. Bannon’s urging, Mr. Trump decided to endorse Mr. Moore even after the allegations surfaced, only to be embarrassed when the Democrat, Doug Jones, won the election last year in a heavily Republican state that had not sent a Democrat to the Senate in a quarter-century.
Mr. Bannon, the architect of Mr. Trump’s nationalist and populist agenda, left the White House in August to return to the far-right Breitbart News. Mr. Bannon had said he planned to back a slew of candidates in Republican primaries this year to take down establishment incumbents he saw as insufficiently conservative, even if it clashed with Mr. Trump’s endorsements.
That did not seem to bother Mr. Trump and indeed struck many as a way for the president to keep Mr. Bannon as an outside hammer pressuring Republican lawmakers to stay in line. But Mr. Trump and Mr. Bannon have grown increasingly estranged, especially since the Alabama defeat. Mr. Trump grew even more upset with Mr. Bannon about an interview with Vanity Fair late last year that painted a poor picture of Mr. Kushner, criticizing his meetings with Russians during the presidential transition.
During his Christmas break at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Mr. Trump stewed over what to say about Mr. Bannon’s comments to Vanity Fair. The president consulted with several advisers and family members about whether he should respond at all, according to three advisers familiar with the discussions. Ultimately, the president decided not to say anything publicly, as aides cautioned that it would draw more attention to Mr. Bannon’s remarks.
But accusing the president’s eldest son of treason crossed the line, even for an inner circle of aides who regularly fought and privately disparaged each other.
An excerpt from Mr. Wolff’s book, published in New York magazine on Wednesday, cites derogatory comments about Mr. Trump from some of the president’s closest allies.
At least one person named in the book pushed back against it on Wednesday. Thomas J. Barrack, a friend and adviser to Mr. Trump, was quoted telling a friend that the president is “not only crazy, he’s stupid.”
Reached by telephone on Wednesday, Mr. Barrack said this account was “totally false.” Mr. Barrack added, “It’s clear to anyone who knows me that those aren’t my words and inconsistent with anything I’ve ever said.” He said that Mr. Wolff never ran that quotation by him to ask if it was accurate.
Mr. Wolff was frequently seen in Mr. Bannon’s office while the Breitbart chairman was working in the White House. According to two advisers to Mr. Trump, Mr. Wolff spoke with the president once, for about 15 minutes, in the first month of the administration, when Mr. Trump called Mr. Wolff to thank him for his criticism of a Times article that the president did not like.
The White House on Wednesday attacked not just Mr. Bannon but the book as a whole, hoping to diminish its reporting. “This book is filled with false and misleading accounts from individuals who have no access or influence with the White House,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary. “Participating in a book that can only be described as trashy tabloid fiction exposes their sad desperate attempts at relevancy.”
The book presents Mr. Trump as an ill-informed and thoroughly unserious candidate and president, engaged mainly in satisfying his own ego. It reports that early in the campaign, one aide, Sam Nunberg, was sent to explain the Constitution to the candidate. “I got as far as the Fourth Amendment,” it quoted Mr. Nunberg as saying, “before his finger is pulling down on his lip and his eyes are rolling back in his head.”
According to the book, neither Mr. Trump nor his wife, Melania Trump, nor many of his aides actually expected to win the election in November 2016 and indeed did not really want to. It describes a distraught Mrs. Trump as being in tears on election night, not out of joy, and said the new president and first lady were fighting on Inauguration Day.
Mrs. Trump authorized her office to rebut the book on Wednesday. “The book is clearly going to be sold in the bargain fiction section,” said Stephanie Grisham, the first lady’s communications director. “Mrs. Trump supported her husband’s decision to run for president and in fact encouraged him to do so. She was confident he would win and was very happy when he did.”
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