Why is this such a mystery to other news outlets? –
The Big Picture –
By Glynn Wilson –
If ever there was any doubt that “Sloppy” Steve Bannon was a key architect of Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” strategy and that it was developed even before Election Day on November 3, 2020, new sensationalized news reports should quell any doubt.
The problem is, neither reporters for Mother Jones, which claimed to “break” the story, or The Washington Post, which also moved a story about it crediting the magazine, seem to grasp this fact.
It is being reported as if it was fresh, new revelations, when anybody who was actually paying attention in 2020 knew all about it.
Even in a comment provided to the magazine on Wednesday, the day after the report was published, a spokesperson for Bannon argued that his statements on the recording are not news.
“Nothing on the recording wasn’t already said on War Room or on multiple other shows like The Circus on Showtime,” the spokesperson said. “Bannon gave that lecture multiple times from August to November to counter Mark Elias’ Election Integrity Project.”
But let’s go through the reporting anyway to make things crystal clear.
On the night of Oct. 31, 2020, Bannon told a group of followers that Trump had a plan to declare victory on election night — even if he was losing according to the results being broadcast on television.
Trump, Bannon and the campaign and White House staffs figured that the slow counting of Democratic-leaning mail-in ballots meant the returns would show early leads for Trump in key battleground states. The “strategy” was to use this fact to assert that he had won, while claiming that the inevitable shifts in vote totals toward Joe Biden must be the result of “fraud,” as Bannon explained the plan days before the election.
“What Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory, right?” Bannon said in a conversation that was recorded at the time. “He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
“As it sits here today, at 10 or 11 o’clock, Trump’s gonna walk in the Oval, tweet out, ‘I’m the winner. Game over. Suck on that’.”
“More of our people vote early, that count; theirs vote in mail,” Bannon said. “And so they’re going to have a natural disadvantage. And Trump’s going to take advantage of that.
“That’s OUR strategy,” he said (emphasis added). “He’s going to declare himself a winner.”
Bannon then predicted with apparent glee that this would set off a “firestorm.”
“We’re going to have antifa crazy, the media crazy, the courts are crazy,” he said. “And Trump’s gonna be sitting there mocking, tweeting shit out. ‘You lose. I’m the winner. I’m the KING.’ ”
“Also, if Trump is losing by 10 or 11 o’clock at night, it’s gonna be even crazier.”
A day after these recorded comments, Axios’s Jonathan Swan reported that Trump had told advisers that he would declare victory if it looked like he was ahead at the time — even if the outcome wasn’t final. And even as voters were voting on Election Day, Bannon on his podcast publicly echoed his private prediction that Trump would claim victory between 10 and 11 p.m.
I shared this on Facebook, as did millions of other people. We knew.
We also knew that the Jan. 6 insurrection was foreshadowed as early as Sept. 22, 2020, when I wrote in the New American Journal that while Bannon was out on a special $5 million bail bond that allowed him to travel, he was calling for “war” in the streets starting on November 4, 2020, if Donald Trump was not reelected at the polls on Election Day. He said all the mail in votes should be declared invalid, by the Supreme Court if necessary with a new conservative majority of 6-3 with a new justice confirmed by the Senate before the election.
Bannon was going around saying that only in-person voting should be counted on Nov. 3, and there will be a “war” to “stop Biden from stealing” the election.
Listen to the podcast we ran and quoted at the time on this story. Where is the reporting from Mother Jones and The Washington Post on this?
If Steve Bannon Wants a War, I Say We Give Him One
As mentioned in the Post story, Bannon predicted in an interview with Showtime’s “The Circus” — released in early October — that there would be such uncertainty that Congress would be forced to decide the election. Bannon couched it in terms of Democrats supposedly seeking to overturn the election by counting mail ballots that he described as “uncertified,” but even that framing suggested that this supposed uncertainty could well be manufactured. And the practical effect was him predicting a situation much like the one Trump would ultimately gun for on Jan. 6.
“It’s gonna be crazy lawsuits on naked ballots, on every different aspect of it,” Bannon said. “With this scale of votes, we’ll go into January, and that’s when the firestorm starts.”
Host John Heilemann pressed him on what seemed like a crazy idea at the time.
“Right before noon on [January] 20th, in a vote in the House, Trump will win the presidency,” Bannon predicted.
Virtually every news outlet, and the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection and attack on the Capitol, have reported on Bannon’s declaration that “all hell will break loose on Jan. 6.”
A few days earlier on his show, a former Trump White House official had talked about just such a scenario. The following day, Trump himself talked about the advantage he could have if it ever went to Congress, by virtue of there being more Republican-controlled congressional delegations than Democratic ones.
“We have an advantage if we go back to Congress. Does everyone understand that?” Trump said. “I think it’s 26 to 22 or something, because it’s counted one vote per state.”
The House would award one vote per delegation in such a scenario. And at the time, Republicans had majorities of 26 delegations to Democrats’ 22 — though that was subject to change in the 2020 election.
“So in total, Bannon predicted Trump’s premature victory declaration, which came true. He predicted that all hell would break loose on Jan. 6, which came true. He predicted that uncertainty about election results spurred by a bunch of lawsuits would force Congress to decide the election, which wound up essentially being Trump’s plan. And he suggested that unrest was perhaps desirable and/or could be of some utility in all of this, which evidence suggests Trump might well have agreed with on Jan. 6,” a reporter for the Post summarizes.
“We don’t know just how much coordination there was between Trump and Bannon, though the Jan. 6 committee noted Tuesday that the two men spoke at least twice Jan. 5, including before Bannon’s prediction about Jan. 6,” the Post reports. “It’s certainly possible Bannon was engaging in guesswork. But it also seems possible that he was privy to some of the strategizing about what was to come.”
Guesswork? What?
Bannon was at the Willard Hotel involved in the planning of all of this, as the Post has reported ad nauseam. Where was this reporter, Aaron Blake?
Now look, we have to stop playing games with the news.
ProPublica also reported in Septemter, 2021, that Bannon was one of the loudest voices urging Donald Trump’s supporters to push for overturning the presidential election results.
“We’re on the point of attack,” Bannon, a former Trump adviser and far-right nationalist, pledged on his popular podcast on Jan. 5. “All hell will break loose tomorrow.”
We ran that story in the New American Journal and shared it all over social media at the time.
The day the House committee put up it’s tip line email address and started its investigation of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, I sent this story and others documenting Bannon’s role to the committee, with a note explaining that Bannon should be cited for contempt, placed on trial and sentenced to jail — to prevent his involvement in other election skullduggery in 2022.
This happened.
He had played a role in the campaign to get Republican Glenn Youngkin elected over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia Governor’s race, and was also involved in states around the country to recruit armed election “watchers” in key battle ground states.
Now Bannon is trying to get his trial delayed, by getting Trump to agree to free him of fake “executive privilege” claims to allow him to testify before the committee.
Department of Justice prosecutors argued against any delay of his trial, and a judge agreed.
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
Bannon has publicly dared Attorney General Merrick Garland to indict Trump.
Steve Bannon Dares Merrick Garland to Indict Trump: Me Too
You see, I know a little something about Steve Bannon that apparently other reporters don’t seem to know.
I met him in person in Fairhope, Alabama, back in the fall of 2017, when Bannon came to Alabama to try to help former judge Roy Moore win Jeff Sessions’ seat in the U.S. Senate after Trump appointed Sessions as his first Attorney General. I take it as a point of pride that I acted basically as the online nemesis of Bannon, then editor of the conservative Breitbart News, and literally beat him in that campaign.
Doug Jones Wins Historic Senate Election Over Defiant Judge Roy Moore
What has never been reported anywhere — not in The New York Times, The Washington Post, on MSNBC or anywhere else — is the real reason Bannon was sent out into the wilderness of Eastern Europe right after this election. The Post has gotten it wrong on multiple occasions.
What really happened is that Bannon browbeat Trump into endorsing Moore in that race. But even Trump was so worried about being associated with a pedophile like Moore that he never came to Alabama to campaign for him. He did a toe-touch, fly-in to Pensacola five days before the election.
Trump Campaigns for Roy Moore in Pensacola?
It was right after that when dark money Republican donors Robert and Rebecca Mercer fired Bannon at Breitbart, and he disappeared to campaign for right-wing nationalist politicians in Eastern Europe. He only came back to Washington two years later in 2019 to setup his “War Room” to fight Trump’s impeachment in the House and Senate.
Jump on the Truth Opportunity Bus to Counter Steve Bannon’s Trump Impeachment War Room
I tell the whole story in my book, which has never been reviewed in the Times or the Post, even though I used to report and write for the Times. Why is that do you think? Some people just can’t handle the truth?
Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again
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