by Joshua Green
In the meantime, he had other avenues to pursue. While his Mr. Hyde persona ran Breitbart News, Bannon’s Dr. Jekyll side was already posing a much greater problem for Hillary Clinton.
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Tallahassee is about as far as you can get in the United States, geographically and psychically, from the circus of the presidential campaign trail. That’s why Bannon chose to locate the Government Accountability Institute there—that, and the fact that Peter Schweizer, its president, had moved down from Washington. “There’s nothing to do in Tallahassee, so I get a lot more work done,” Schweizer joked to a visitor in the autumn of 2015. GAI is housed in a sleepy cul-de-sac of two-story brick buildings that looks like what you’d get if Scarlett O’Hara designed an office park. The unmarked entrance is framed by palmetto trees and sits beneath a large, second-story veranda with sweeping overhead fans, where the (mostly male) staff gathers in the afternoons to smoke cigars and brainstorm.
Established in 2012 to study crony capitalism and governmental malfeasance, GAI is staffed with lawyers, data scientists, and forensic investigators and has collaborated with such mainstream news outlets as Newsweek, ABC News, and CBS’s 60 Minutes on stories ranging from insider trading in Congress to credit-card fraud among presidential campaigns. It’s a mining operation for political scoops that, for two years, had trained its investigative firepower on the Clintons.
What made Clinton Cash so unexpectedly influential is that mainstream news reporters picked up and often advanced Schweizer’s many examples of the Clintons’ apparent conflicts of interest in accepting money from large donors and foreign governments. (“Practically grotesque,” wrote Harvard Law School professor Lawrence Lessig, who briefly sought the Democratic presidential nomination. “On any fair reading, the pattern of behavior that Schweizer has charged is corruption.”) Just before the book’s release, The New York Times ran a front-page story about a Canadian mining magnate, Frank Giustra, who gave tens of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation and then flew Bill Clinton to Kazakhstan aboard his private jet to dine with the country’s autocratic president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. Giustra subsequently won lucrative uranium-mining rights in the country. The Times piece cited Schweizer’s still-unpublished book as a source of its reporting, puzzling many readers and prompting a reaction from the paper’s ombudswoman, Margaret Sullivan, who grudgingly concluded, while acknowledging that no ethical standards were breached, “I still don’t like the way it looked.”
The effect on Clinton’s popularity was profound: the percentage of Americans who thought she was “untrustworthy” shot up into the 60s. Worse for Clinton was that the Democratic primary offered an attractive alternative. Bernie Sanders was an anti–Wall Street, good-government populist whose liberal purity put Clinton’s ethical shortcomings into sharp relief.
For Bannon, the Clinton Cash uproar validated his personal theory about how conservatives had overreached the last time a Clinton was in the White House and what they should do differently. “Back then,” he says, “they couldn’t take down Bill because they didn’t do that much real reporting, they couldn’t get the mainstream guys interested, and they were always gunning for impeachment no matter what. People got anesthetized to outrage.” What news conservatives did produce about the Clintons in the 1990s, such as David Brock’s Troopergate investigation on Paula Jones in The American Spectator, was often tainted in the eyes of mainstream editors by its explicit partisan association. Now Bannon had found a “business partner” in the same media outlets conservatives had long despised. His intuition about the reporters on the investigative desks of major newspapers was also correct: they weren’t the liberal ideologues of conservative fever dreams but kindred souls who could be recruited into his larger enterprise.
David Brock himself, who renounced conservatism and became a key liberal strategist, fund-raiser, and Clinton ally, was one of the few Democrats in 2015 who saw clearly the threat that the emerging Clinton Cash narrative posed to Hillary Clinton. What conservatives learned in the nineties, Brock said, was that “your operation isn’t going to succeed if you don’t cross the barrier into the mainstream.” Back then, conservative reporting had to undergo an elaborate laundering process to influence U.S. politics. Reporters such as Brock would publish in small magazines and websites, then try to plant their story in the British tabloids and hope that a right-leaning U.S. outlet like the New York Post or the Drudge Report picked it up. If it generated enough heat, only then would it break through to a mainstream paper.
“It seems to me,” Brock warned of Bannon and Schweizer, “what they were able to do in this deal with the Times is the same strategy, but more sophisticated and potentially more effective and damaging because of the reputation of the Times. If you were trying to create doubt and qualms about Hillary Clinton among progressives, the Times is the place to do it.” He paused. “Looking at it from their point of view, the Times is the perfect host body for the virus.”
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Schweizer had begun his career as a researcher at the conservative Hoover Institution, digging through Soviet archives to learn how the Russians viewed Ronald Reagan during the Cold War. In 2004 he coauthored a well-regarded history of the Bush family, The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, that drew on interviews with many of its members, including Jeb Bush. But Schweizer grew disillusioned with Washington and became radicalized against what he perceived to be a bipartisan culture of corruption. “To me, Washington, D.C., is a little bit like professional wrestling,” he said. “When I was growing up in Seattle, I’d turn on Channel 13, the public-access station, and watch wrestling. At first I thought, Man, these guys hate each other because they’re beating the crap out of each other. But I eventually realized they’re actually business partners. Half the people watching know that, the other people don’t know that. But what matters is that they create the spectacle. There’s a lot in D.C. that’s like professional wrestling. It’s done for show, but ultimately there’s a business partnership between the combatants.”
Schweizer, fifty, is friendly, sandy-haired, and a little pudgy, a neighborly sort you’d meet at a barbecue and take an instant liking to. (Bannon nurtured this regular-Joe appeal by forbidding him from wearing a necktie when he’s on television.) Bannon and Schweizer followed two principles when conceiving Clinton Cash. First, it would avoid nutty conspiracy theories. “We have a mantra,” said Bannon. “‘Facts get shares; opinions get shrugs.’” Second, they would heed the lesson Bannon learned at Goldman: specialize. Hillary Clinton’s story, they decided, was too sprawling and familiar to tackle in its entirety. So they focused only on the past decade, her least familiar period, and especially on the hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the Clinton Foundation. Bannon called this approach “periodicity.”
As with so many of the Clintons’ troubles, the couple’s own behavior provided copious material for GAI’s investigators. When Clinton became secretary of state, the foundation signed an agreement with the Obama White House to disclose all of its contributors. It didn’t follow through. So GAI researchers combed tax filings, flight logs, and foreign-government documents to turn up what the Clinton Foundation had withheld. Their most effective method was mining the so-called Deep Web, the 97 percent or so of information on the Internet that isn’t indexed for search engines such as Google and therefore is difficult to find.
“Welcome to the Matrix,” said Tony,* GAI’s head data scientist, as he mapped out the Deep Web on a whiteboard for a visitor. A presentation on the hidden recesses of the Web followed. “The Deep Web,” he explained, “consists of a lot of useless or depreciated information, stuff in foreign languages, and so on. But a whole bunch of it is very useful, if you can find it.” Tony specialized in finding the good stuff, which he did by writing software protocols that spider through the Deep Web. Because this requires heavy computing power, GAI struck a deal to use the services of a large European provider during off-peak hours. “We’ve got
$1.3 billion of equipment I’m using at almost full capacity,” he said. This effort yielded a slew of unreported foundation donors who appear to have benefited financially from their relationship with the Clintons, including the uranium mining executives cited by The New York Times (who showed up on an unindexed Canadian government website). These donations illustrated a pattern of commingling private money and government policy that disturbed even many Democrats.
Clinton Cash caused a stir not only because of these revelations but also because of how they arrived. GAI is set up more like a Hollywood movie studio than a think tank. The creative mind through which all its research flows and is disseminated belongs to a beaming young Floridian named Wynton Hall, a celebrity ghostwriter who’s penned eighteen books, six of them New York Times bestsellers, including Trump’s 2011 book, Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again. Hall’s job is to transform dry think-tank research into vivid, viral-ready political dramas that can be unleashed on a set schedule, like summer blockbusters. “We work very long and hard to build a narrative, storyboarding it out months in advance,” Hall said. “We’re not going public until we have something so tantalizing that any editor at a serious publication would be an idiot to pass it up and give a competitor the scoop.”
To this end, Hall peppered his colleagues with slogans so familiar around the office that they became known by their acronyms. “ABBN—Always be breaking news” was one. Another slogan was “Depth beats speed.” Time-strapped reporters squeezed for copy would gratefully accept original, fact-based research because most of what they’re inundated with from PR flacks is garbage. “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” said Bannon. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”
GAI does this because Bannon decided it’s the secret to how conservatives can hack the mainstream media. Hall has distilled this, too, into a slogan: “Anchor left, pivot right.” It means that “weaponizing” a story onto the front page of The New York Times (“the left”) is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart (“the right”) because the Times reaches millions of readers inclined to vote Democratic. This approach prompted a wholesale change in how Bannon and his confederates think about elite media. “We don’t look at the mainstream media as enemies, because we don’t want our work to be trapped in the conservative ecosystem,” said Hall. “We live and die by the media. Every time we’re launching a book, I’ll build a battle map that literally breaks down by category every headline we’re going to place, every op-ed Peter’s going to publish. . . . Getting our message embedded in mainstream outlets is what gets us the biggest blast radius.”
Once that work has permeated the mainstream—once it’s found “a host body,” in David Brock’s phrase—then comes the “pivot.” Heroes and villains emerge and become grist for a juicy Breitbart News narrative. The story takes on a life of its own. Hillary Clinton became the biggest narrative of all, even though none of the GAI reporting went directly to Breitbart. It didn’t have to. “With Clinton Cash, we never really broke a story,” said Bannon, “but you go to Breitbart, and we’ve got twenty things, we’re linking to everybody else’s stuff, we’re aggregating, we’ll pull stuff from the left. It’s a rolling phenomenon. Huge traffic. Everybody’s invested.”
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As devious as this plot was, it could never have succeeded to the degree that it did had Clinton not abetted it with such vigor. That summer, she failed to emerge as the overwhelming front-runner everyone had expected, weighed down by stories on Clinton Foundation “buckraking” and the revelation that she had kept a private e-mail server as secretary of state and destroyed much of her correspondence. She also refused to release transcripts of highly paid speeches she’d delivered to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. In August, e-mails surfaced showing that Bill Clinton, through the foundation, had sought State Department permission to accept speaking fees in repressive countries such as North Korea and the Republic of the Congo. A poll the same day found that the word voters associated most with his wife was “liar.”
Clinton’s tone-deaf response to the steady drip of revelations only deepened their impact because it conveyed a sense of entitlement that was off-putting even to many Democrats. Confronted over her failure to disclose foreign donors, Clinton and her aides stonewalled, or scolded reporters for not focusing instead on the foundation’s good works, or claimed it didn’t matter. When The Boston Globe discovered that a local branch of the Clinton Foundation had “uniformly bypassed” Clinton’s agreement with the White House to disclose foreign donors, a spokeswoman told the paper that they “deemed it unnecessary” to reveal those names, and refused.
Rehearsed in the rigors of right-wing attacks, Clinton’s aides went after the source of so many of them: Peter Schweizer’s book. They tried to discredit Clinton Cash as they had successfully done to numerous anti-Clinton polemics in the 1990s. But their efforts mostly failed because Schweizer’s book was not filled with outlandish rumors and blind quotes, as the earlier books had been; it contained documentable facts that reporters could check out for themselves. To Bannon’s delight, many did—and decided to pursue them further. “We’ve got the fifteen best investigative reporters at the fifteen best newspapers in the country all chasing after Hillary Clinton,” he exulted that summer.
To the staff of GAI, Clinton looked like someone trapped in quicksand, whose flailing only worsened her plight. “Here we are, sitting here in flip-flops in Tallahassee,” said Hall, “and this massive Clinton operation is coming at our little tiny nonprofit like we’re some huge entity.” He laughed. “We’re up on the balcony smoking cigars and writing press releases, and their heads are exploding. It’s kind of surreal.”
Even amid Clinton’s struggles, however, Democrats were confident she would ultimately prevail. Some were even willing to concede that Bannon and his ilk were more effective than the conservatives who targeted Bill Clinton twenty-five years earlier. “They’ve adapted into a higher species,” said Chris Lehane, a Clinton White House staffer and hardened veteran of the partisan wars of the nineties. “But these guys always blow themselves up in the end.”
Bannon disagreed, and, as always, had a historical analogy to explain why. What he was really pursuing was something like the old Marxist dialectical concept of “heightening the contradictions,” only rather than foment revolution among the proletariat, he was trying to disillusion Clinton’s natural base of support. Bernie Sanders’s unexpected strength suggested to him that it was working. He was sure that Sanders’s rise was destined to end in crashing disappointment. Having thrilled to his populist purity, his supporters would never reconcile themselves to Clinton, because the donors featured in Clinton Cash violated just about every ideal liberals hold dear. “You look at what they’ve done in the Colombian rain forest, look at the arms merchants, the war lords, the human trafficking—if you take anything that the left professes to be a cornerstone value, the Clintons have basically played them for fools,” Bannon said. “They’ve enriched themselves while playing up the worst cast of characters in the world. Bill Clinton is not going around the world with Bill Gates, or the head of GE. By and large it’s guys who need something and can’t get access to the inner sanctums of world power on their own. It’s Third World reputation laundering.”
In the meantime, a new narrative was emerging—Bannon could see it in the Breitbart traffic numbers. Donald Trump had a bigger megaphone than anyone in politics, even Clinton, and he was showing an unparalleled ability to dictate media coverage that Bannon could only marvel at. What he wanted the media to cover, constantly and at length, was only one thing: Donald Trump.
EIGHT
“THE TRAFFIC IS ABSOLUTELY FILTHY!”
Trump is a beast!” Bannon was cackling, practically giddy over what he had just w
itnessed. He still couldn’t believe it. It was June 16, 2015. Trump had just glided down the Trump Tower escalator with Melania in tow, announced his entry into the presidential race—and then proceeded to unload a mind-bending, mostly improvised, forty-five-minute rant during which he casually referred to Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and criminals.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” Trump said, standing at a lectern and pointing to members of the audience. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
To Republican Party leaders, Trump’s performance was a horror show, the very antithesis of the message they yearned to project of a more welcoming, inclusive GOP than the one Mitt Romney had led to defeat in 2012. After that loss, RNC chairman Reince Priebus had commissioned a rigorous postmortem of all that had gone wrong and what the party could do to fix it. The report, which became known as the “Republican autopsy,” concluded that the GOP was committing demographic suicide by insulting and antagonizing the fast-growing population of Hispanic voters, who didn’t take kindly to Romney’s suggestion that illegal immigrants would resort to “self-deportation” if only their lives were made unpleasant enough. The autopsy’s urgent recommendation was to reverse this approach—and fast: “If Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e., self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence.” It continued: “We must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”
