Steve Bannon Reveals Real Reason MAGA Is Freaking Out at CNN

Steve Bannon pointed out why the right wing is whining about CNN dismissing Donald Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt from an interview on Monday, and it’s because of Trump’s upcoming debate with Biden.

On his War Room show on Real America’s Voice, Bannon said in an interview with Leavitt that she was owed an apology.

“[CNN’s] Kasie Hunt owes you an apology, CNN owes you an apology today, and if we don’t get that apology to Karoline Leavitt and to the Trump campaign, to MAGA today, President Trump should cancel this,” Bannon said, referring to the June 27 presidential debate that CNN is hosting.

Trump and his allies have already made plenty of excuses to try and either weasel out of the two scheduled debates with Biden or make excuses for his possible poor showing. The former president and convicted felon has tried to push a third debate on his own to give himself an out when it wouldn’t be accepted by the Biden campaign.

Trump’s friend Sean Hannity has floated that Trump shouldn’t take part in any debates until he formally secures the Republican nomination. Trump himself has pushed the idea that Biden will be drugged up to perform well during the debates multiple times, with Hannity and Representative Ronny Jackson echoing this conspiracy theory. Now Bannon is insinuating that CNN won’t be fair to Trump because they have criticized him in the past, and is giving Trump an out, even though Biden and Trump both agreed to the terms of the debate last month.

Bannon should maybe be more worried about his impending four-month prison sentence, which he has bitterly fought and is now trying to weasel out of with a desperate appeal to the Supreme Court. If it goes the way MAGA fellow traveler Peter Navarro’s Supreme Court appeal went, Bannon will end up trying to figure out if he can record his show from a prison like Rikers Island.

Donald Trump may be in trouble for asking oil executives to donate $1 billion to his campaign in April.

Citizen for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit watchdog organization, filed a complaint with the Justice Department alleging criminal bribery regarding Trump’s meeting with industry leaders. The former president and convicted felon told them the $1 billion would be part of a deal in exchange for loosened regulations of the oil industry.

In a statement, CREW’s president Noah Bookbinder said Trump’s actions towards oil executives “follow a pattern.”

“Donald Trump’s actions here follow a pattern of Trump opening himself up to corrupt influence, courting conflicts of interest, and using official positions to enrich himself—and in this case may run afoul of the criminal law,” Bookbinder said. The complaint was sent as a letter to the chief of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, Corey Amundson, as well as FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Senators Sheldon Whitehouse and Ron Wyden, the respective chairs of the Senate Budget and Finance Committees, are also investigating the meeting, with Whitehouse calling it the “definition of corruption.”

And he has a point. Trump is effectively selling laws to big business, with oil executives already drafting executive orders for him to sign immediately if he gets reelected. Trump reportedly promised these executives that he’d scrap a ban on permits for new liquefied natural gas exports on the first day, overturn new tailpipe emission limits designed to help the transition to electric vehicles, and offer more leases for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Trump’s first term was full of giveaways to the fossil fuel industry, so why is he asking for cash now? It’s because he’s short on cash, already funneling his donor contributions to the lawyers concerned with his many legal issues. As much as his rise in politics came from attacking the wealthy elite establishment, he’s fully willing to cozy up to billionaires and wealthy business leaders as long as they are willing to pay up.

Last week, Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry signed into law a controversial bill requiring the Ten Commandments to be displayed in public school classrooms. Shortly before, he told donors at a GOP event in Tennessee, “I’m going home to sign a bill that places the Ten Commandments in public classrooms. And I can’t wait to be sued.” Sure enough, Louisiana parents and a coalition of civil liberties organizations are granting him his wish.

The ACLU, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, along with the parents of children enrolled in Louisiana public schools, filed a lawsuit against the state for violating the religious freedom of students on Monday. The move was widely expected, not just by Landry and religious conservative pugilists, but also by a consensus of legal experts, who claim the law is unconstitutional. Supreme Court legal precedent is on their side; two previous attempts to mandate similar displays were struck down.

But Landry’s giddiness for the upcoming legal fight echoes the attitude of the bill’s co-author, Louisiana State Representative Lauren Ventrella, who, in the midst of a flailing attempt to defend the law on national television, revealed the Christian conservative strategy on which she and Landry will rely.

“Now it is a different bench” on the Supreme Court, Ventrella told CNN’s Abby Philip. With a 6–3 conservative majority—including religious fundamentalist Christians Amy Coney Barrett and Samuel Alito, and multiple justices who have shown a willingness to depart from precedent capriciously—advocates of the law are hoping to move the lawsuit through the courts until it finds a friendly reception at the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, though, they’ll continue to run roughshod over the First Amendment.

Judge Aileen Cannon was poised Monday to do Donald Trump yet another massive favor in his classified documents case, aiming to slow down proceedings and muddy the waters by raising concerns about special counsel Jack Smith’s spending.

Attorneys for the former president have continued to push the claim that Smith’s appointment was constitutionally invalid, and in a hearing Monday, they took aim at the budget for Smith’s investigation. Cannon, who has readily slowed Trump’s trial to a complete standstill, was happy to entertain the defense’s grievances.

Fresh off of his loss in Manhattan criminal court, Trump’s lawyer Emil Bove argued that the Department of Justice had violated the U.S. Consitution’s appropriations clause by improperly funding Smith’s office.

Trump’s defense lawyers had argued in a court filing Friday that Smith was not paid through the Justice Department but through an “off the books” fund reserved for “independent counsels,” which lack the necessary oversight. They alleged that Smith has access to a “permanent indefinite appropriation,” which is otherwise not available to a special counsel.

During Monday’s hearing, assistant special counsel James Pearce responded to the defense’s claims, arguing that the Justice Department could just as easily pay Smith’s bills out of their own pot.

But Cannon didn’t seem convinced. The Trump-appointed judge said that the seemingly “limitless” funding suggested a separation of powers issue, per Bove’s claim.

Cannon called the cost of Smith’s appointment a “significant” amount of money, according to The Washington Post, although it is likely only a small fraction of the Department of Justice’s whopping $40 billion annual budget.

Resolving whether Smith’s appointment is constitutional will only drag out Trump’s classified documents case, making it less likely with every passing day that he will face trial before the November election.

Cannon held a second hearing Monday afternoon over prosecutors’ request that a gag order be placed on the former president, preventing him from making unfounded claims against the FBI. Trump has insisted that federal agents intended to maim or even assassinate him while searching Mar-a-Lago, while in reality, they purposefully timed their search to occur when he was absent.

An RNC staffer is behind the viral doctored videos of Joe Biden appearing senile, a new report from The Daily Beast shows.

According to the Beast’s Jake Lahut, 31-year-old Jake Schneider, a former Trump campaign employee and former intern for Tea Party Minnesota Representative Michele Bachmann, runs the popular RNC Research Twitter account, which has posted several videos of Biden appearing confused or freezing up. RNC Research has also promoted an edited video that suggests that the president pooped himself (it has since been debunked).

Sources close to the Trump campaign called Schneider “the tip of the spear” of the Republican effort to make Biden’s age a central issue of the election. And they’re not wrong. Schneider and RNC Research enjoy high levels of coordination with powerful right-wing media organizations smuggling the interests of the ruling class through seemingly neutral platforms: Sinclair Broadcast Group, the media company buying up local news affiliates and turning them into pro-Trump organs, has been blasting out syndicated news features on Biden’s age using RNC Research videos (including, in at least three articles, the claim that he pooped himself) to nearly 100 local news websites in the past month.

RNC Research’s skullduggery comes in the wake of the total remaking of the RNC in Trump’s image: Trump daughter-in-law Lara Trump and election-denier Michael Whatley were picked to helm the organization in March.