Steve Bannon: 'Amnesty Is Non-Negotiable'

Steve Bannon: ‘Amnesty Is Non-Negotiable’

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http://media.breitbart.com/media/201...07-640x480.jpgDan Fleuette

by IAN MASON10 Sep 2017Washingon, DC


In his extensive interview with Charlie Rose for 60 Minutes, Breitbart News Executive Chairman Steve Bannon was unequivocal in his opposition to legislative amnesty to replace DACA.


“[T]here’s no path to citizenship, no path to a green card and — no amnesty. Amnesty is non-negotiable,” Steve Bannon said to Rose in his first TV interview since departing from the Trump administration and returning to Breitbart News last month.

Rose, the veteran PBS and CBS television news interviewer, challenged Bannon on wanting to enforce America’s immigration laws and focus on the plight of American citizens over those who broke them. “[I]t’s what people respect America for, it is [that] people have been able to come here, find a place, contribute to the economy. That’s what immigration has been in America. And you seem to want to turn it around and stop it,” he told Bannon in the parlor of the “Breitbart Embassy” in Washington, D.C.’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

“You couldn’t be more dead wrong,” was Bannon’s reply. “America was built on her citizens.”
Bannon elaborated with an impassioned defense of what he called “the American system” of populist nationalism:

[T]his is the thing of the leftists. Charlie, that’s beneath you. America’s built … on our citizens. Look at the 19th century. What built America’s called the American system, from Hamilton to Polk to Henry Clay to Lincoln to the Roosevelts. A system of protection of our manufacturing, financial system that lends to manufacturers, and the control of our borders.

Economic nationalism is what this country was built on. The American system. Right? We go back to that. We look after our own. We look after our citizen, we look after our manufacturing base, and guess what? This country’s going to be greater, more united, more powerful than it’s ever been. … [T]his is not astrophysics. And by the way, that’s every nationality, every race, every religion, every sexual preference. As long as you’re a citizen of our country. As long as you’re an American citizen, you’re part of this populist economic nationalist movement.

This declaration came as Rose pressed Bannon for his views on President Donald Trump’s decision to phase out Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA). CBS’s voice-over described DACA as “the program that provides legal protections for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children.”

DACA was instituted by President Barack Obama as an executive order in 2012 to exempt illegal aliens who broke American immigration laws before their 16th birthdays, have been in the country illegally since 2007, and are in school or have a GED or high school diploma. Almost all DACA-recipients are adults although, theoretically, the youngest among them are 15.

The DACA executive order follows a similar outline as the so-called “DREAM Act” amnesty bill that was defeated every time it was introduced from 2001 onward. President Obama himself stated 22 times that he did not have the authority pass executive amnesty, yet chose to issue the order, leading to legal challenges and widespread doubts over the order’s constitutionality.

Certain elements of the Republican establishment, which have failed to pass funding for the wall on the southern border or make serious progress passing patriotic immigration reform measures like the RAISE Act, are scrambling to save Obama’s executive amnesty through new legislation, despite the fact one of their number, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI), admitted the lack of authority for DACA in the first place.

Bannon saw using the Republican legislators’ languishing political capital to pass an amnesty as potentially disastrous, and may trigger a “civil war” within the GOP. “[i]f this goes all the way down to its logical conclusion, in February and March it will be a civil war inside the Republican party that will be every bit as vitriolic as 2013. And to me, doing that in the springboard of primary season for 2018 is extremely unwise,” he told Rose.


http://www.breitbart.com/big-governm...on-negotiable/

Exactly. "Amnesty is non-negotiable". Perfect.

Amnesty = more amnesty in the future. Been there done that, doesn't work.

Signing the 1986 Amnesty Bill was Reagan's greatest regret.

We do not need to keep giving amnesty and importing MORE people into our country. Look around all across the country, run down neighborhoods and ghettos everywhere.

We do not need to create more ghettos and welfare bringing these 3rd world, uneducated, baby factories here! Not to mention the multiple diseases they have. More healthcare paid for on the backs of US taxpayers! Ours is about to collapse you traitors!

Clean up Detroit, Chicago, Oakland...many of our cities. Bring back the schools and jobs and get OUR people on a path to success.

Shut it all down for 20 years and no more Student Visa's...give our kids that opportunity to learn and less crowded classrooms...they are all overcrowded now as it is.

So now our own college kids will graduate with massive debt, live at home with mommy and further strain our financial growth but not being able to work, out on their own, buying homes and contributing to the economy. Another "class" of poverty will be created.

Bannon on Trump's worst mistake 'in modern political history'

https://ichef-1.bbci.co.uk/news/660/...i041534636.jpg

Ex-White House chief strategist Steve Bannon says President Trump's firing of the FBI's director was the biggest mistake in "modern political history".

Mr Bannon told CBS News if James Comey had not been sacked, a special counsel would not have been appointed to probe alleged Russian election meddling.

The former presidential adviser called the special counsel inquiry a "waste of time" and "a total and complete farce".

Mr Bannon was himself dismissed from his White House job last month.

The fall of Washington's second most powerful man

But he vowed in an interview with CBS' 60 Minutes programme broadcast on Sunday night to be Mr Trump's "wingman outside for the entire time" in office.

Mr Bannon has returned to his previous role as chairman of Breitbart News, a right-wing outlet.

video at link Media captionSteve Bannon's three goals for the Trump presidency

A keen student of history, he apparently rates Mr Comey's ousting as a presidential error even more egregious than Bill Clinton's liaison with Monica Lewinsky, Ronald Reagan's Iran-contra affair or Richard Nixon's Watergate scandal.

Mr Bannon told CBS: "So the firing of James Comey was the biggest mistake in modern political history."

"I don't think there's any doubt that if James Comey had not been fired, we would not have a special counsel, yes," he added.

"We would not have the Mueller investigation," he said in a reference to special counsel Robert Mueller, a former FBI director, "and the breadth that clearly Mr Mueller is going for."

Mr Mueller was appointed by the US deputy attorney general after President Trump stunned Washington by firing Mr Comey on 9 May.

The special counsel's team is reportedly investigating the president's decision to fire Mr Comey.

"Russian collusion is a farce," Mr Bannon said of suggestions that Trump campaign aides collaborated with a Kremlin plot to defeat Hillary Clinton in last year's election.

But he said he does not believe the special counsel should be fired.

The former White House chief strategist also turned his fire on Republican congressional leaders Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell.

He accused them of "trying to nullify the 2016 election".

"They do not want Donald Trump's populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented," Mr Bannon told 60 Minutes.

"It's obvious as night follows day."

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41230118

8/16/17 article....mcmasters has too much influence. It seems bannon got axed to stop the angry talk @ charlottsville "both sides to blame". The press was saying bannon is a white supremacists and trump has him working in the WH. The press here and abroad were showng nazi salutes by trump etc

.Steve Bannon, Unrepentant Robert Kuttner
August 16, 2017
Trump’s embattled strategist phones me, unbidden, to opine on China, Korea, and his enemies in the administration.

http://prospect.org/sites/default/fi...?itok=qjTkq2Ox
(Rex Features via AP Images) Steve Bannon on the phone, December 9, 2016

What follows is the article that likely pushed Steve Bannon, President Trump’s chief strategist and architect of his white nationalist messaging, out the White House door. Robert Kuttner, the co-founder and co-editor of this magazine, never expected a phone call from Bannon; the Prospect, after all, is a proudly liberal and defiantly anti-Trump journal. Nonetheless, Bannon called him on Tuesday afternoon, and on Wednesday, we posted Kuttner’s piece—a careful report of what Bannon said and an insightful analysis of why he said it. You can read it below.

You might think from recent press accounts that Steve Bannon is on the ropes and therefore behaving prudently. In the aftermath of events in Charlottesville, he is widely blamed for his boss’s continuing indulgence of white supremacists. Allies of National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster hold Bannon responsible for a campaign by Breitbart News, which Bannon once led, to vilify the security chief. Trump’s defense of Bannon, at his Tuesday press conference, was tepid.

But Bannon was in high spirits when he phoned me Tuesday afternoon to discuss the politics of taking a harder line with China, and minced no words describing his efforts to neutralize his rivals at the Departments of Defense, State, and Treasury. “They’re wetting themselves,” he said, proceeding to detail how he would oust some of his opponents at State and Defense.

Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me.

Needless to say, I was a little stunned to get an email from Bannon’s assistant midday Tuesday, just as all hell was breaking loose once again about Charlottesville, saying that Bannon wished to meet with me. I’d just published a column on how China was profiting from the U.S.-North Korea nuclear brinkmanship, and it included some choice words about Bannon’s boss.

“In Kim, Trump has met his match,” I wrote. “The risk of two arrogant fools blundering into a nuclear exchange is more serious than at any time since October 1962.” Maybe Bannon wanted to scream at me?

I told the assistant that I was on vacation, but I would be happy to speak by phone. Bannon promptly called.

Far from dressing me down for comparing Trump to Kim, he began, “It’s a great honor to finally track you down. I’ve followed your writing for years and I think you and I are in the same boat when it comes to China. You absolutely nailed it.”


“We’re at economic war with China,” he added. “It’s in all their literature. They’re not shy about saying what they’re doing. One of us is going to be a hegemon in 25 or 30 years and it’s gonna be them if we go down this path. On Korea, they’re just tapping us along. It’s just a sideshow.”

Bannon said he might consider a deal in which China got North Korea to freeze its nuclear buildup with verifiable inspections and the United States removed its troops from the peninsula, but such a deal seemed remote. Given that China is not likely to do much more on North Korea, and that the logic of mutually assured destruction was its own source of restraint, Bannon saw no reason not to proceed with tough trade sanctions against China.

Contrary to Trump’s threat of fire and fury, Bannon said: “There’s no military solution [to North Korea’s nuclear threats], forget it. Until somebody solves the part of the equation that shows me that ten million people in Seoul don’t die in the first 30 minutes from conventional weapons, I don’t know what you’re talking about, there’s no military solution here, they got us.” Bannon went on to describe his battle inside the administration to take a harder line on China trade, and not to fall into a trap of wishful thinking in which complaints against China’s trade practices now had to take a backseat to the hope that China, as honest broker, would help restrain Kim.

“To me,” Bannon said, “the economic war with China is everything. And we have to be maniacally focused on that. If we continue to lose it, we're five years away, I think, ten years at the most, of hitting an inflection point from which we'll never be able to recover.”

Bannon’s plan of attack includes: a complaint under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act against Chinese coercion of technology transfers from American corporations doing business there, and follow-up complaints against steel and aluminum dumping. “We’re going to run the tables on these guys. We’ve come to the conclusion that they’re in an economic war and they’re crushing us.”

But what about his internal adversaries, at the departments of State and Defense, who think the United States can enlist Beijing’s aid on the North Korean standoff, and at Treasury and the National Economic Council who don’t want to mess with the trading system?

“Oh, they’re wetting themselves,” he said, explaining that the Section 301 complaint, which was put on hold when the war of threats with North Korea broke out, was shelved only temporarily, and will be revived in three weeks. As for other cabinet departments, Bannon has big plans to marginalize their influence.

“I’m changing out people at East Asian Defense; I’m getting hawks in. I’m getting Susan Thornton [acting head of East Asian and Pacific Affairs] out at State.”

But can Bannon really win that fight internally?

“That’s a fight I fight every day here,” he said. “We’re still fighting.

There’s Treasury and [National Economic Council chair] Gary Cohn and Goldman Sachs lobbying.”

“We gotta do this. The president’s default position is to do it, but the apparatus is going crazy. Don’t get me wrong. It’s like, every day.”

Bannon explained that his strategy is to battle the trade doves inside the administration while building an outside coalition of trade hawks that includes left as well as right. Hence the phone call to me.

There are a couple of things that are startling about this premise. First, to the extent that most of the opponents of Bannon’s China trade strategy are other Trump administration officials, it’s not clear how reaching out to the left helps him. If anything, it gives his adversaries ammunition to characterize Bannon as unreliable or disloyal.

More puzzling is the fact that Bannon would phone a writer and editor of a progressive publication (the cover lines on whose first two issues after Trump’s election were “Resisting Trump” and “Containing Trump”) and assume that a possible convergence of views on China trade might somehow paper over the political and moral chasm on white nationalism.

The question of whether the phone call was on or off the record never came up. This is also puzzling, since Steve Bannon is not exactly Bambi when it comes to dealing with the press. He’s probably the most media-savvy person in America.

I asked Bannon about the connection between his program of economic nationalism and the ugly white nationalism epitomized by the racist violence in Charlottesville and Trump’s reluctance to condemn it. Bannon, after all, was the architect of the strategy of using Breitbart to heat up white nationalism and then rely on the radical right as Trump’s base.

He dismissed the far right as irrelevant and sidestepped his own role in cultivating it: “Ethno-nationalism—it's losers. It's a fringe element. I think the media plays it up too much, and we gotta help crush it, you know, uh, help crush it more.”

“These guys are a collection of clowns,” he added.

From his lips to Trump’s ear.

“The Democrats,” he said, “the longer they talk about identity politics, I got ’em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

I had never before spoken with Bannon. I came away from the conversation with a sense both of his savvy and his recklessness. The waters around him are rising, but he is going about his business of infighting, and attempting to cultivate improbable outside allies, to promote his China strategy. His enemies will do what they do.

Either the reports of the threats to Bannon’s job are grossly exaggerated and leaked by his rivals, or he has decided not to change his routine and to go down fighting. Given Trump’s impulsivity, neither Bannon nor Trump really has any idea from day to day whether Bannon is staying or going. He has survived earlier threats. So what the hell, damn the torpedoes.

The conversation ended with Bannon inviting me to the White House after Labor Day to continue the discussion of China and trade. We’ll see if he’s still there.

http://prospect.org/article/steve-bannon-unrepentant

Steve Bannon 60 Minutes Videos CBS News

Sep 11, 2017

https://youtu.be/cd7FJhALR9Q

Sarah Sanders WH Press Briefing on Bannon's 60 Minutes Interview 9/11/17

Fast forward to 26:30 / 36:50

https://youtu.be/LBRIqS4naNs

She's absolutely right. Comey is a dirt-bag and needs to go to jail. For all we know he was involved in the murder of Seth Rich. I wouldn't put it past him and he would be the most obvious go to guy to fix that problem.