Bannon Calls Trump Tower Meeting With Russians ‘Treasonous’

Steve Bannon has described as “treasonous” a 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, campaign chairman Paul Manafort and a Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, who said she had damaging information on Hillary Clinton, according to a new book by Michael Wolff seen by The Guardian newspaper. In Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Wolff writes that Bannon told him: “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.” The June 2016 meeting came about after Trump Jr. was allegedly promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton. Wolff writes that Bannon told him 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.” Bannon told Wolff the investigation into alleged collusion with the Kremlin is likely focusing on alleged money-laundering and predicted: “They’re going to crack Don Jr. like an egg on national TV.”