On with the book saga

Donald Trump’s lawyers threatened legal action on Wednesday night against his former right-hand man Steve Bannon, marking a fresh escalation after a day of turmoil that left the White House reeling.

A cease and desist letter accuses Bannon of violating a non-disclosure agreement by speaking about his time on Trump’s election campaign to Michael Wolff, whose new book has caused shockwaves in Washington.

  Guardian

I'm not at all surprised by a threat to sue. This is standard Trump. The "cease and desist" part is meant to stop publication of the book.  And, of course, apologize to the president.  Apparently, they sent a cease and desist to both the publisher and Bannon individually for violating prior agreements.

Charles Harder, the president’s lawyer, told ABC News that Bannon’s communications with Wolff “give rise to numerous legal claims including defamation by libel and slander, and breach of his written confidentiality and non-disparagement agreement with our clients. Legal action is imminent.”

[...]

Bannon hosted Breitbart News Tonight on Sirius XM radio as usual on Wednesday night, CNN reported, and made little reference to the acrimony. But when a caller brought up the issue, Bannon replied: “The president of the United States is a great man. You know I support him day in and day out.”

[...]

Now executive chairman of the conservative Breitbart News website, Bannon is known to be planning to throw his weight behind several candidates that share his hardline nationalist agenda.

Surely they don't want him to cease and desist from that.

“Aides thought they had more time to prepare for the book’s formal release,” the Washington Post reported on Wednesday night. “Trump spent much of the day raging about the book to top aides, officials and advisers said … As he fumed, some aides were still frantically searching for a copy of the book, and even senior aides like [Hope] Hicks had not seen it by the afternoon, officials said.”

[...]

Wolff said in an author’s note that the book was based on more than 200 interviews, including multiple conversations with the president and senior staff. But [spokeswoman Sarah] Sanders claimed that Wolff “never actually sat down with the president” and had spoken with him just once, briefly, since Trump had taken office. She dismissed the book as “trashy tabloid fiction”.

Which liar are we supposed to believe?  Reportedly, Wolff has tapes.  Darn those tapes.  Always getting Old Lard Ass in trouble.

The furious controversy consumed time and energy in the west wing just as Trump prepared for a weekend retreat at Camp David with Paul Ryan, the House speaker, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to discuss Republicans’ plans for 2018. The stakes could not be higher with the president’s approval rating at rock bottom and mid-term elections looming in November.

Think they'll tell him they don't need his services any more?

The Trump administration is also going to start barring White House employees and guests from using their personal cellphones at work, press secretary Sarah Sanders said early Thursday.

Sanders said in a statement that the "security and integrity of the technology systems at the White House is a top priority for the Trump administration."

  The Hill

I bet that's right.

It won't stop the leaking.

And here's that Hollywood Reporter article promised yesterday ( THR's Matt Belloni is going on CNN in a few minutes to talk about it.  You know who will be watching.  We'll be watching for the ensuing tweets.)

Excerpts:

Since the new White House was often uncertain about what the president meant or did not mean in any given utterance, his non-disapproval became a kind of passport for me to hang around — checking in each week at the Hay-Adams hotel, making appointments with various senior staffers who put my name in the "system," and then wandering across the street to the White House and plunking myself down, day after day, on a West Wing couch.

[...]

The nature of the comedy, it was soon clear, was that here was a group of ambitious men and women who had reached the pinnacle of power, a high-ranking White House appointment — with the punchline that Donald Trump was president. Their estimable accomplishment of getting to the West Wing risked at any moment becoming farce.

[...]

Kellyanne Conway, who would put a finger-gun to her head in private about Trump's public comments, continued to mount an implacable defense on cable television, until she was pulled off the air by others in the White House who, however much the president enjoyed her, found her militancy idiotic. (Even Ivanka and Jared regarded Conway's fulsome defenses as cringeworthy.)

[...]

Steve Bannon tried to gamely suggest that Trump was mere front man and that he, with plan and purpose and intellect, was, more reasonably, running the show — commanding a whiteboard of policies and initiatives that he claimed to have assembled from Trump's off-the-cuff ramblings and utterances. His adoption of the Saturday Night Live sobriquet "President Bannon" was less than entirely humorous.

  Hollywood Reporter

And therein lay his downfall, I have no doubt. One is not allowed to be more important, more famous, smarter, or more admired than The Most Notable Loser.

"How much influence do you think Steve Bannon has over me? Zero! Zero!" Trump muttered and stormed.

[...]

Jared and Ivanka were against Priebus and Bannon, trying to push both men out. Bannon was against Jared and Ivanka and Priebus, practicing what everybody thought were dark arts against them. Priebus, everybody's punching bag, just tried to survive another day.

[...]

How to get along with Trump — who veered between a kind of blissed-out pleasure of being in the Oval Office and a deep, childish frustration that he couldn't have what he wanted? Here was a man singularly focused on his own needs for instant gratification, be that a hamburger, a segment on Fox & Friends or an Oval Office photo opp. "I want a win. I want a win. Where's my win?" he would regularly declaim. He was, in words used by almost every member of the senior staff on repeated occasions, "like a child." A chronic naysayer, Trump himself stoked constant discord with his daily after-dinner phone calls to his billionaire friends about the disloyalty and incompetence around him.

[...]

"It's a littleee, littleee complicated …" [Trump] explained to Priebus about why he needed to give his daughter and son-in-law official jobs.

[...]

By July, Jared and Ivanka, who had, in less than six months, traversed from socialite couple to royal family to the most powerful people in the world, were now engaged in a desperate dance to save themselves, which mostly involved blaming Trump himself. It was all his idea to fire Comey! "The daughter," Bannon declared, "will bring down the father."

"Littleee"? So maybe he really does say "bigly".

[Anthony] Scaramucci, a minor figure in the New York financial world, and quite a ridiculous one, had overnight become Jared and Ivanka's solution to all of the White House's management and messaging problems. After all, explained the couple, he was good on television and he was from New York — he knew their world.

[...]

There was, after the abrupt Scaramucci meltdown, hardly any effort inside the West Wing to disguise the sense of ludicrousness and anger felt by every member of the senior staff toward Trump's family and Trump himself. It became almost a kind of competition to demystify Trump. For Rex Tillerson, he was a moron. For Gary Cohn, he was dumb as shit. For H.R. McMaster, he was a hopeless idiot. For Steve Bannon, he had lost his mind.

Aha! Now I see where Trump came out yesterday with the "Steve Bannon has lost his mind" bit.

There was more: Everybody was painfully aware of the increasing pace of his repetitions. It used to be inside of 30 minutes he'd repeat, word-for-word and expression-for-expression, the same three stories — now it was within 10 minutes. Indeed, many of his tweets were the product of his repetitions — he just couldn't stop saying something.

Can we add OCD to his list of mental issues?

By summer's end, in something of a historic sweep [...] almost the entire senior staff, save Trump's family, had been washed out: Michael Flynn, Katie Walsh, Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus, Steve Bannon. Even Trump's loyal, longtime body guard Keith Schiller — for reasons darkly whispered about in the West Wing — was out. Gary Cohn, Dina Powell, Rick Dearborn, all on their way out. The president, on the spur of the moment, appointed John Kelly, a former Marine Corps general and head of homeland security, chief of staff — without Kelly having been informed of his own appointment beforehand.

Okay. I have to stop here a moment. Earlier, I wondered if George Papadopoulos was the person Fusion GPS refers to when they say the Steele dossier merely confirmed things the FBI already knew from intel and "someone inside the Trump camp." Then, I wondered if it could be Bannon. Now I have a third possibility: Keith Schiller. Recall that when he left the White House it was reported that he had testified regarding the Moscow hotel room (Pee Tape) claims. Could he have been"flipped" by Mueller's team early on? He would indeed be someone who knew lots of intimate things about Trump. ??

Insiders believed that the only thing saving Mueller from being fired, and the government of the United States from unfathomable implosion, is Trump's inability to grasp how much Mueller had on him and his family.

[...]

Donald Trump's small staff of factotums, advisors and family [...] came to believe he was incapable of functioning in his job.

At Mar-a-Lago, just before the new year, a heavily made-up Trump failed to recognize a succession of old friends.

And there, Wolff ends the article. Somebody look into that, ok? That's a major problem.