Steve Bannon's Security Council Rival Dies in Darkness
It was supposed to be a new White House power node. Turns out ‘no one [else] wanted to fund a Bannon vanity project that was going nowhere fast,’ an official tells The Daily Beast.
LACHLAN MARKAY
ASAWIN SUEBSAENG
KIMBERLY DOZIER
06.04.17 12:00 AM ET
Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner’s newly-formed White House Strategic Initiatives Group is no more, senior administration officials tell The Daily Beast, thanks in part to infighting between the co-founders.
Critics inside and outside the White House had worried that the SIG—which reported to White House Chief Strategist Bannon, Trump son-in-law and key adviser Kushner, as well as White House chief of staff Reince Priebus—would compete with the National Security Council.
“This is how Bannon will watch [Michael] Flynn,” one person briefed on Bannon’s thinking told The Daily Beast at the time, referring to the now-departed national security adviser. But early controversies, White House internal squabbling, and a lack of funding quickly doomed the project. The group’s mission, has been folded into the White House’s Office of Innovation, two administration officials tell The Daily Beast.
The original Strategic Initiatives Group was intended to generate policy ideas largely—but not exclusively—devoted to domestic topics. Run by Chris Liddell, the former Chief Financial Officer of Microsoft, “it was supposed to be a large, McKinsey-like organization,” said a person familiar with the matter, referring to the global consulting firm.But there was little or no money for the effort, stymieing several would-be White House hires. “They didn’t have the budget,” this person added.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/steve-bannons-security-council-rival-dies-in-darkness
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