Michael Wolff has a new book about the Trump White House coming out. It is based on interviews with Trump and his inner circle. And, according to reporting in the Guardian, at least one of the interviews was with Steve Bannon, in which Bannon notes that Trump Jr is a traitor to his country:
He is particularly scathing about a June 2016 meeting involving Trump’s son Donald Jr, son-in-law Jared Kushner, then campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya at Trump Tower in New York. A trusted intermediary had promised documents that would “incriminate” rival Hillary Clinton but instead of alerting the FBI to a potential assault on American democracy by a foreign power, Trump Jr replied in an email: “I love it.”
The meeting was revealed by the New York Times in July last year, prompting Trump Jr to say no consequential material was produced. Soon after, Wolff writes, Bannon remarked mockingly: “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 shit, and I happen to think it’s all of that, you should have called the FBI immediately.”
True to form, Bannon goes on to say that REAL error here was not the treason, but the fact that the people handling Trump Jr. at the time did it out in the open. If they had been more clever — like say Bannon himself — they would have arranged it in a manner to maintain plausible deniability.