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upon hearing, that he was not a target and would shortly be exonerated. But the lawyers went even further with their feel-good strategy.
Presidents, faced with hostile investigations by the other coequal branches of government, Congress and the judiciary, invariably cite exec- utive privilege both as a legitimate principle and as a dilatory tactic. It’s a built-in bargaining chip. But Trump’s lawyers, hoisted by how often they had to assure the president that he had nothing to fear, supported their confident assessment, to Trump’s delight, by dispensing with any claim of executive privilege and willingly satisfying all the special counsel's requests. Trump, in all his dodginess, had become an open book. What's more, Trump himself, ever believing in the force and charm of his own personality, was, with his attorneys’ apparent assent, eager to testify.
And yet, Bannon knew, it was still much worse. The president's law- yers had sent more than 1.1 million documents to the special counsel, aided by only a scant document production team. It was just Dowd, Cobb, and two inexperienced assistants. In major litigations, docu- ments are meticulously logged and cross-referenced into elaborate and efficient database systems. Here, they shipped over much of the material merely as attachments, and kept minimal or no records of what exactly had been sent. Few in the White House knew what they had given up and thus what the special counsel had. And the haphazard approach didn’t stop there. Dowd and Cobb neither prepared many of the witnesses who had worked for the White House in advance of their testimony to Mueller’s team nor debriefed them after they testified.
Bannon was overcome by the hilarity and stupidity of this what-me- worry approach to federal prosecutors whose very reputations depended on nailing the president. Trump needed a plan—which, of course, Ban- non had.
Bannon swore that he did not want to go back into the White House. He wouldn't ever, he said. The humiliations of working in Trump's admin- istration had almost destroyed Bannon’s satisfaction at having risen so miraculously to the top of the world.
Some, however, were not convinced by his protestations. They believed that Bannon actively fantasized that he would be brought back into the West Wing to save Trump—and that, not incidentally, this would
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be his ultimate revenge on Trump, saving him yet again. Bannon certainly believed that he was the only one who could pull off this difficult rescue, a reflection of his conviction that he was the most gifted political strategist of his time, and of his view that Trump was surrounded by only greater and lesser lummoxes.
Trump, Bannon believed, needed a wartime consigliere. And if, he mused, Jared and Ivanka were finally sent packing . . . But no, he insisted, not even then.
Moreover, Trump would not be able to tolerate it. Bannon under- stood that only Trump could save the day, or at least that Trump believed only he could save the day. No other scenario was possible. He would rather lose, would rather even go to jail, than have to share victory with someone else. He was psychologically incapable of not being the focus of all attention.
In the end, it was easier and more productive to give Trump advice at a distance than up close. It was a safer play to do what needed to be done without Trump himself actually being involved with, or even aware of, what was being done.
The morning Ryan announced his retirement from the House, Ban- non was particularly eager to send some advice Trump's way. Setting up a deft bank shot, he invited Robert Costa, a reporter for the Washington Post, to visit him at the Embassy.
Bannon spent a good part of every day talking to reporters. On some days, perhaps most days, his blind-quote voice—hidden behind a famil- iar attribution such as “this account is drawn from interviews with cur- rent and former officials’—crowded out most other voices on the subject of whatever new crisis was engulfing the Trump administration. These quotes functioned as something like a stage whisper that Trump could pretend he didn’t hear. Trump, in fact, was always desperately seeking Bannon’s advice, though only if there was the slightest pretext for believ- ing that it came from some place other than Bannon. Indeed, Trump was quite willing to hear Bannon say something in this or that interview and
then claim he had thought of it himself.
Costa sat at Bannon’s dining-room table for two hours, taking down Bannon’s prescription for how to save Trump from himself.
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