Stephen Bannon’s Long Game

[applegrove]

BY JEET HEER at the New Republic

https://newrepublic.com/article/138421/stephen-bannons-long-game

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As Joshua Green noted in an exceptionally shrewd profile of Bannon that ran in Bloomberg Businessweek in October of 2015, Breitbart represented only one arrow in Bannon’s political quiver. Breitbart is useful for stirring up the right-wing masses, but Bannon also realized he had to influence centrist elites. To that end, he created the nonprofit Government Accountability Institute (GAI), which has already had a massive influence on the election by giving Peter Schweizer, president of the institute, the resources to write Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.

The goal of the GAI is to collect plausible opposition research on politicians Bannon opposes (which includes not just Hillary Clinton but Republicans like Jeb Bush). This oppo is explicitly designed to be so plausible it can be taken up by mainstream publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post.

As Bannon told Green, “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs. 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.” By pre-packing reportage that is ready to run, Green noted, Bannon has figured out “how conservatives can hack the mainstream media,” adding that “‘weaponizing’ a story onto the front page of The New York Times (‘the Left’) is infinitely more valuable than publishing it on Breitbart.com.”

Clinton Cash has been one of Bannon’s great successes. Although later subject to devastating criticism, the book made its initial splash in the Times and shaped the idea that the Clinton Foundation is corrupt. Indeed, Clinton Cash is still causing trouble: the Post reported on Thursday that FBI agents in New York relied heavily on the book in an investigation of the Clinton Foundation that the Department of Justice ended up shutting down for lack of sufficient evidence.
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