Bannon: 2016 Trump Tower meeting was 'treasonous'

By Maegan Vazquez, CNN
Updated 9:33 AM ET, Wed January 3, 2018

(CNN)Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon called the 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer purportedly offering damaging information about Hillary Clinton "treasonous," according to a new book obtained by The Guardian.

The book, "Fire and Fury" by Michael Wolff, is based on hundreds of interviews, including ones with President Donald Trump and his inner circle. According to the Guardian, Bannon told Wolff that special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into the Trump campaign's potential ties to Russia is centered on money laundering.

Referring to the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Donald Trump Jr., then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner, and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Bannon reportedly told Wolff: "They're going to crack Don Junior like an egg on national TV."

"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," Bannon continued, according to the Guardian. "Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad s***, and I happen to think it's all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately."

The White House declined to comment Wednesday about Bannon's reported assertion.

http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/03/politi...ury/index.html