Trump: Steve Bannon ‘lost his mind’ after firing

President responds to former aide’s salvo in book

WASHINGTON – President Trump bashed Steve Bannon in an extraordinary and scathing statement on Wednesday, insisting his former chief strategist “lost his mind” after he was ousted from his White House job.

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency,” Trump said. “When he was fired, he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”

The four-paragraph official White House statement from the president came just hours after the publication of excerpts of a new book, in which Bannon reportedly characterized a June 2016 meeting of top Trump campaign officials and a Russian lawyer in 2016 as “treasonous.”

Trump went on to discredit Bannon — who took over as CEO of Trump’s campaign in the summer of 2016 — saying that he had “very little to do” with Trump’s presidential victory but could be blamed for Republican Roy Moore’s Senate loss in deep-red Alabama.

Bannon, the advocate of hard-line immigration and trade policies that dominated Trump’s campaign message, was pushed out of the administration in August. Bannon, who has vowed to fight for Trump’s populist message from outside the White House, now runs

Breitbart News, the alt-right news website that is a leading source of information for Trump’s base of voters.

In his statement, Trump said Bannon spent his time at the White House “leaking false information to the media to make himself seem far more important than he was.”

“It is the only thing he does well,” he continued. “Steve was rarely in a oneon-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a

few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books.”

In the forthcoming book, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Bannon is quoted as calling his former colleagues “unpatriotic” for taking the now-infamous meeting in Trump Tower to discuss an alleged Russian offer to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Not long after the meeting was first disclosed in July of last year, Bannon told the book’s author Michael Wolff: “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.

“Even if you thought that this was not treasonous, or unpatriotic, or bad (expletive), and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately,” he continued.

The meeting, which took place two months before Bannon joined the campaign, included Trump’s son Donald Jr., his sonin-law and adviser Jared Kushner, and then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort. The officials met with lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and other Russians.

Trump Jr. released emails last year showing he took the meeting in the hopes of getting information from the Russian government that would potentially damage Clinton’s campaign.

It’s now one focal point in investigations by three congressional committees and special counsel Robert Mueller into Russia’s interference in the presidential election and possible collusion with Trump associates, which the president has dismissed as a witch hunt.

The excerpts from Wolff’s book were published Wednesday by The Guardian. The book is to be released next week by publisher Henry Holt and Co.

“Steve Bannon has nothing to do with me or my Presidency.”

President Trump

Steve Bannon