You can read the US Attorney’s announcement here. Bannon, et al were indicted for defrauding tens of thousands of donors to a crowd funded scam of “We Build the Wall” that collected $25 million.  Bannon and his partners are accused of funneling over $1.5 million to themselves through fake invoices and dummy non-profits.  Bannon himself took $1 million.  The DOJ has got them dead to rights.  Maybe they’ll try to get Bannon to flip on Trump for some unrelated charge, but as JJ said, expect pardons for these thieves.

In early 2018 Steve Bannon gave away the entire game plan for Trump in an interview with Michael Lewis of Bloomberg News.  In that interview, Bannon said a lot of things, but summed up his entire strategy in this one sentence:

“The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

That’s it.  That is the entire strategy for TrumpWorld.  Not surprisingly, that’s Vladimir Putin’s strategy, too.  In fact, he’s the guy who perfected it.  In the bad old days of Soviet communism, propaganda was directed in monolithic terms.  The government had it’s own version of truth, and repeated it 24/7.  But that stopped working as the few large media outlets lost the volume battle to alternative sources of “news” and with the rise of social media.  Putin’s strategy now is to confuse and contradict so much that people get numb to it all and start believing that the truth is unknowable.  In his new book, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, Peter Pomerantsev describes this strategy in the modern Russia which is now completely controlled by Putin.  Putin controls all the mainstream media in the country, and his military hacks into social media around the globe to spread the same misinformation used to control his own people.

The Bannon/Trump strategy keeps Americans off balance by spewing a mountain of bullshit on a daily basis which is why you hear Trump complaining about everything from low water use toilets to windmills killing millions of birds.  He’s done it at least 16,000 times since he became president, and his entire group of enablers from Giuliani to Kellyanne do it in a continuous stream.  There is so much bullshit that people are exhausted trying to keep up, and those he has brainwashed amplify the amount of bullshit circulating television, radio, and social media, repeating said bullshit millions of times.  They did it to Hillary with the debunked uranium story, and they’re trying to do it to Biden right now with the false Ukrainian corruption fiction they’ve whipped up.

The strategy works almost flawlessly.  This is how you get Trumpists, in the face of a tsunami of evidence that Trump illegally extorted Ukraine for his own political benefit, deny he did, and if he did, they say “so what?”    Think about it – what used to be headline news just ten years ago is now just a little dust you brush off your sleeve.  The disinformation is so perfectly delivered and maintained that people actually believe that everyone, including all of the mainstream press, all Democrats, all nonpolitical people, intelligence agencies, law enforcement agencies, and the courts are lying.  The ONLY source of truth is Donald Trump and his talking heads.  Confusion propaganda is designed to sideline the truth and convince otherwise normal people that the only way to get unconfused is to believe only one leader who, in his “great and unmatched wisdom” is the only person to know true truth.

This is how democracy is destroyed.  When the people no longer trust the system, especially when it comes to voting, the news, and the common good, then the bad guys win.  Trump, Bannon, Giuliani, and the rest of the criminals in TrumpWorld want you to be stupid.  And they keep you stupid by feeding you mountains of bullshit. When you believe that bullshit, he’s got you, and you then virtually can’t be saved.

Vanity Fair has just published a scathing piece about Trump saying that officials in the White House talk more and more openly about how Trump has become unhinged; has “lost a step”; is being isolated by Kelly; “hates everyone” in the White House.  There’s even talk of the Cabinet voting to remove him.

Most significant in this piece, though?  Bannon is quoted as giving Trump a “30% chance of making it a full term”.  Now, THAT is impressive.

WH comms staffers just put the TVs on super loud after we could hear yelling coming from room w/ Bannon, Spicer, Sanders

— Adrian Carrasquillo (@Carrasquillo) May 15, 2017

Reporters in the WH are saying they don’t know which way to lean to overhear staff trying to grapple with the tsunami of crises of Trump’s own making.  Monday night, the shoutfest between Bannon, Spicer, and Huckabee Sanders was so loud that comms staff turned up televisions trying to drown it out.

However, their boss is going to assure that the Daily Crisis will continue.  Trump is a moron; he thought it was a good idea to take on the intelligence community?  The FBI?  That’s just plain stupid and simply political suicide by bureaucracy.  Comey was a prosecutor.  These people raise evidence gathering and note taking to an art form.  You know that this snippet from one memo is just the tip of a giant iceberg and that iceberg is only going to get larger.  In the meantime, Trump’s inner circle is getting thrown under the bus one at a time on virtually a daily basis.  The ONLY staffer who carried any weight was H.R. McMaster, but that’s over after his performance in front of the West Wing entrance the other day.

And it’s only going to get worse.  With top staffers at each others’ throats, it’s only a matter of time before the entire West Wing melts down.  If Trump survives this latest crisis, he will be so damaged that his legislative agenda will grind to a halt.  He responds so poorly to perceived slights that you KNOW he’ll tweet out some other stupid declaration that will turn his scandals into a perpetual motion machine.

You have to ask yourself why anyone with any integrity would be a part of this fiasco.  Why are wealthy and influential people staying in, much less groveling like Tillerson did on MTP last Sunday?  It’s mind blowing to watch these otherwise smart people hang on while the WH turns into Fukushima on the Potomac.  The longer they do, the more they will get irradiated from this meltdown.

Uh oh.  Maybe nothing, but maybe something.

President Trump has removed chief White House strategist Steve Bannon from his role on the National Security Council (NSC), according to a regulatory filing dated Tuesday.

Bannon in January was elevated to a position on the NSC principals committee, in a shakeup of the council. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and director of national intelligence had their roles downgraded in the move.

The Joint Chiefs chairman and intelligence director are having their roles on the principals committee restored …

Oh hell, we gotta read tea leaves and tweets to know what’s going on.

My only concern is that he’ll appoint Ivanka.

UPDATE:

Reasons Bannon was taken off the Council:

1.  Did not realize that sobriety was important for the meetings.
2. Kept yelling “Incoming!” at the meetings and making fun of whoever got under the table first.
3. Geography was not his strong suit.
4. His turn to sleep with Putin.
5. Suggested adding one of those “Protected by ADT” stickers on the door and call it a day.

Come on, guys, you can come up with some.

If this is true, and I highly suspect it is, Nunes not only needs to resign as committee chairman, he needs to resign as congressman.

As we suspected, the person who leaked the report to Nunes is Michael Ellis, a former staff member of the Intelligence Committee and closely tied to Nunes.  But, there’s been another official identified.

[Ezra] Cohen-Watnick is a former Defense Intelligence Agency official who was originally brought to the White House by Michael T. Flynn, the former national security adviser. The officials said that this month, shortly after Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter about being wiretapped on the orders of President Barack Obama, Mr. Cohen-Watnick began reviewing highly classified reports detailing the intercepted communications of foreign officials.

What the fool tarnation is Flynn’s guy, who is often described as his protege, still doing there?  And why are we paying our tax money for him to spend time reviewing “highly classified reports” to try to support Trump’s wacko theory?  How do we know he’s not also reviewing those documents to support Flynn?

And here’s why I think that.

After H.R. McMaster was chosen as the new National Security Adviser, The Washington Post reported that McMaster told Cohen-Watnick that he would be moved to another job. U.S. officials told the Post that CIA Director Mike Pompeo told McMaster that those in the intelligence community didn’t think the young Cohen-Watnick was “up to the job.”

According to Politico, which first reported on this incident, Cohen-Watnick then went to Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner. Two days after McMaster told him he would get a new job, Cohen-Watnick was back in the same place Flynn put him in.

So the new National Security Advisor wanted to fire him but Kushner and Bannon wanted him back in his old job.  He’s 30 years old. What the hell? Does anydamnbody know who is in charge?

I am telling you this one damn thing – this Nunes thing stinks like he’s got a goat under each arm and a pocketful of week old crawfish.