It was nearing midnight as Bannon pushed past the bluegrass band in his living room and through a crowd of Republican congressmen, political operatives, and a few stray Duck Dynasty cast members. He was trying to make his way back to the SiriusXM Patriot radio show, broadcasting live from a cramped corner of the fourteen-room town house a stone’s throw from the Supreme Court that served as the Washington headquarters for Breitbart News. It was late February 2015, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference was in full swing, and Bannon, as usual, was the whirlwind at the center of the action.
Earlier that day, Trump had made his annual CPAC speech to only middling applause, going on for so long that many people in the audience drifted away. When he finished, Sean Hannity of Fox News, wearing a bright red Trump-branded necktie, strode out to the lectern where Trump stood and awkwardly interviewed him about the likelihood that he would run for president. “One to a hundred, I would say 75 and 80 [percent],” Trump replied. “I want to do it so badly. You know, I have the theme. It’s my theme. It’s ‘Make America Great Again.’ That’s what I want to do.”
But Trump didn’t even rate as the day’s most popular reality-TV star—Bannon outdid him. He’d spent the day at CPAC squiring around an unlikely pair of guests: Nigel Farage, the leader of the right-wing UK Independence Party, and Phil Robertson, the bandanna’d, ayatollah-bearded Duck Dynasty patriarch who was accepting a free-speech award. CPAC is a beauty contest for Republican presidential hopefuls. But Robertson, a novelty adornment invited after A&E suspended him for denouncing gays, delivered a wild rant about beatniks and sexually transmitted diseases that had upstaged them all, to Bannon’s evident delight. Afterward, everyone piled into party buses and headed for the Breitbart town house.
Ordinarily, the town house was crypt-quiet and felt like a museum, as it was faithfully decorated down to its embroidered yellow silk curtains and painted murals in authentic Lincoln-era detail. Bannon slept in an upstairs bedroom when he was in town, while down below, the Breitbart newsroom operated out of the chilly basement. On this February night, however, the furniture was gone, a makeshift bar had been installed to serve “moonshine”—his wink at the Dynasty guests—and the party was jam-packed and roaring. Bannon was in high spirits. Along with his CPAC triumph, the Clinton book he had secretly conceived with Peter Schweizer, a full two years in the making, was almost finished being vetted by his lawyers. Bannon was certain it would upend the presidential race. “Dude, it’s going to be epic,” he insisted to a guest.
Somewhere, Hillary Clinton was carefully charting her path to the White House. Six weeks hence, on April 12, she would formally announce her presidential run and then steel herself, as she always did, for a barrage of attacks from the right. Clinton had long ago identified a “vast right-wing conspiracy” bent on tearing down her and her husband. Still, she could not possibly have imagined quite what she was about to encounter—or that the person at the nexus of the vast new conspiracy against her was, just then, surrounded by drunken, sweaty members of a reality-TV dynasty who were hooting and making duck calls.
Bannon thrived on the chaos he created and did everything he could to make it spread. When he finally made his way through the crowd to the back of the town house, he put on a headset to join the broadcast of the Breitbart radio show already in progress. It was his way of bringing tens of thousands of listeners into the inner sanctum of the “Breitbart Embassy,” as the town house was ironically known, and thereby conscripting them into a larger project. Bannon was inordinately proud of the movement he saw growing around him, boasting constantly of its egalitarian nature. What to an outsider could look like a cast of extras from the Island of Misfit Toys was, in Bannon’s eyes, a proudly populist and “unclubbable” plebiscite rising up in defiant protest against the “globalists” and “gatekeepers” who had taken control of both parties.
Just how Phil Robertson of Duck Dynasty figured into a plan to overthrow the global power structure wasn’t clear, even to many of Bannon’s friends. But, then, Bannon derived a visceral thrill anytime he could deliver a fuck-you to the establishment. The thousands of frustrated listeners calling in to his radio show, and the millions more who flocked to Breitbart News, had left him no doubt that an army of the angry and dispossessed was eager to join him in lobbing a bomb at the country’s leaders. As guests left the party, a doorman handed out a gift that Bannon had chosen for the occasion: a silver hip flask with “Breitbart” imprinted above an image of a honey badger, the Breitbart mascot.
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Bannon’s cult-leader magnetism was a powerful draw for oddballs and freaks, and the attraction ran both ways. As he moved further from the cosmopolitan orbits of Goldman Sachs and Hollywood, there was no longer any need for him to suppress his right-wing impulses. Giving full vent to his views on subjects like immigration and Islam isolated him among a radical fringe that most of political Washington regarded as teeming with racist conspiracy theorists. But far from being bothered, Bannon welcomed their disdain, taking it as proof of his authentic conviction. It fed his grandiose sense of purpose to imagine that he was amassing an army of ragged, pitchfork-wielding outsiders to storm the barricades and, in Andrew Breitbart’s favorite formulation, “take back the country.” If Bannon was bothered by the incendiary views held by some of those lining up with him, he didn’t show it. His habit always was to welcome all comers.
To all outward appearances, Bannon, wild-eyed and scruffy, a Falstaff in flip-flops, was someone whom the political world could safely ignore. But his appearance, and the company he kept, masked an analytic capability that was undiminished and as applicable to politics as it had been to the finances of corrupt Hollywood movie studios. Somehow, Bannon, who would happily fall into league with the most agitated conservative zealot, was able to see clearly that conservatives had failed to stop Bill Clinton in the 1990s because they had indulged this very zealotry to a point where their credibility with the media and mainstream voters was shot. Trapped in their own bubble, speaking only to one another, they had believed that they were winning, when in reality they had already lost.
To stop Hillary, Bannon believed, conservatives needed to exert influence beyond their own movement, which would require them to abstain from indulging every outlandish Clinton conspiracy theory, as they had fallen prey to doing in the 1990s, when important Republican politicians such as Dan Burton were running around shooting watermelons with a pistol. In order to gain the necessary influence, Bannon thought, conservatives needed to build a political case based on documented facts that would discredit Clinton in the eyes of the people whose support she would need to win the election—not just voters, but the media as well.
While Breitbart News could rally conservatives against Clinton, Bannon knew that such an openly partisan organ would never be seen as a credible messenger by Democratic voters or the guardians of mainstream news. “One of the things Goldman teaches you is, don’t be the first guy through the door, because you’re going to get all the arrows,” said Bannon. “If it’s junk bonds, let Michael Milken lead the way. Goldman would never lead in any product. Find a business partner.” That’s where the Government Accountability Institute came into play. Although it was funded by Mercer family money, GAI was, under the letter of the law, a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) research organization whose work, if it had merit, could safely be taken up by reporters and producers at nonpartisan media outlets without exposing them to charges of political bias. Leading GAI required Bannon to assume an entirely different profile from the one he cultivated at Breitbart. But having been so many things already in his career, he had no trouble adding a new role.
As befitted someone with his peripatetic background, Bannon became a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde figure in the complicated ecosystem of the right—he was two things at once. Through Breitbart, he could influence the right, and through GAI, he could exert a subtler influence over the left. This allowed him to marry the old-style attack journalism of Breitbart News with a more sophisticated approach, conducted through GAI, that built rigorous, fact-based indictments against major politicians and then partnered with mainstream media outlets to disseminate those findings to the broadest possible audience. The key was to pique the interest of a group of people every bit as obsessive and driven as hard-core partisans like Bannon: investigative reporters at major newspapers and TV networks.
“What Peter and I noticed is that it’s facts, not rumors, that resonate with the best investigative reporters,” Bannon said, referring to GAI’s president. If they could amass enough unflattering facts about Clinton—ideally ones that hinted at larger stories—then reporters would eagerly chase after them. This would produce an elegant symbiosis. As negative stories sprouted up in the mainstream press, they would dampen enthusiasm among potential Clinton supporters, while serving as fodder for Breitbart News to stoke anti-Clinton outrage on the right.
The biggest product of this system was the project Bannon was so excited about at Breitbart’s CPAC party: Schweizer’s investigative book, Clinton Cash. Its publication was the culmination of everything Bannon had learned during his time in Goldman Sachs, Internet Gaming Entertainment, Hollywood, and Breitbart News. It was, he thought, the key to orchestrating Hillary Clinton’s downfall.
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Most days, Bannon could be found in his Mr. Hyde persona, in the Washington offices of Breitbart News. That’s where he was one day in late May 2015, a few days after Clinton Cash had rocketed to number two on the New York Times bestseller list. The book was creating a media frenzy that was pleasantly familiar to many Breitbart staffers.
Bannon’s elevation to executive chairman of what was officially the Breitbart News Network had been sudden, but his new role was eased by the fact that the site was deeply imprinted with its founder’s DNA. Breitbart had developed a visceral feel for what kinds of stories would resonate and keep readers coming back for more. “To me, that was Andrew’s greatest skill set: knowing what stories would move the masses,” said Alex Marlow, who began as Breitbart’s assistant and later became the site’s editor in chief. “He learned that from Matt Drudge, who is the greatest conversation starter in American history.”
Breitbart’s genius was that he grasped better than anyone else what the early twentieth-century press barons understood—that most readers don’t approach the news as a clinical exercise in absorbing facts, but experience it viscerally as an ongoing drama, with distinct story lines, heroes, and villains. Breitbart excelled at creating these narratives, an editorial approach that lived on after his death. “When we do an editorial call, I don’t even bring anything I feel like is only a one-off story, even if it’d be the best story on the site,” said Marlow. “Our whole mind-set is looking for these rolling narratives.” He rattled off the most popular ones, which Breitbart covers intensively from a posture of aggrieved persecution. “The big ones won’t surprise you,” he said. “Immigration, ISIS, race riots, and what we call ‘the collapse of traditional values.’ But I’d say Hillary Clinton is tops.” Often, the site managed to inject these narratives into the broader discourse.
Although most famous for his outré media stunts, Breitbart could spot stories that others couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see—stories downplayed or buried on the back pages of newspapers—and billboard them with screaming, transgressive headlines. A scathing press critic, he claimed that the greatest manifestation of liberal media bias was the stories that news outlets chose not to tell. “Andrew always said, ‘If you look at the mainstream media, they’re all fishing for stories in one pond,’” recalled Breitbart president Larry Solov. “‘But there’s a second pond, and nobody’s fishing there.’” Only by wresting control of the news narrative away from mainstream outlets, Breitbart believed, could this imbalance be rectified. That was what Breitbart News aimed to do. “Our vision—Andrew’s vision—was always to build a global center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site,” said Bannon.
Yet Breitbart’s definition of “news” differed markedly from that of the wire services in that it also encompassed political activism: it was news with a purpose. Much of the site’s energy was devoted to skewering liberal hypocrisy and highlighting ostensibly outrageous instances of political correctness. Unlike reputable news outlets, Breitbart was willing to publish dubious investigative “sting” videos shot by conservative activists, such as the 2009 ACORN tape or the Shirley Sherrod tape that was misleadingly edited to portray the Obama Agriculture official as an anti-white racist. And there was no parallel anywhere to Breitbart’s orchestration of Anthony Weiner’s downfall, not in his decision to publish an unverified photo of the married congressman’s crotch supposedly tweeted at a young paramour, and certainly not in the Barnum-like scene he created by hijacking Weiner’s press conference after the story turned out to be true. Episodes such as these sent a galvanizing charge into readers that no other conservative site could match.
When Bannon took over, he wanted to ensure that Breitbart lost none of its combative zest. The main discernible difference under his leadership was an amplification of the nativist populism already evident in the site’s coverage and an emboldened desire to attack “globalist” Republicans along with Democrats. Operating from the basement of the Breitbart Embassy, Breitbart’s pirate crew became tribunes of the rising Tea Party movement and champions of Sarah Palin, with whom Bannon was close, bedeviling GOP leaders and helping to drive the 2013 government shutdown.
Bannon made another decision that wasn’t immediately obvious but that would have a significant effect on the size and nature of Breitbart’s audience—and eventually on the 2016 presidential campaign. He wanted to attract the online legions of mostly young men he’d run up against several years earlier, believing that the Internet masses could be harnessed to stoke a political revolution. Back in 2007, when he’d taken over Internet Gaming Entertainment, the Hong Kong company that systemized gold farming in World of Warcraft and other massively multiplayer online games, Bannon had become fascinated by the size and agency of the audiences congregating on MMO message boards such as Wowhead, Allakhazam, and (his favorite) Thottbot. “In 2006, 2007, they were doing 1.5 billion page views a month,” he recalled. “Just insane traffic. I thought we could monetize it, but it turned out I couldn’t give the advertising away.” Instead, the gamers ended up wrecking IGE’s business model by organizing themselves on the message boards and forcing the companies behind World of Warcraft and other MMO games to curb the disruptive practice of gold farming.
IGE’s investors lost millions of dollars. But Bannon gained a perverse appreciation for the gamers who’d done him in. “These guys, these rootless white males, had monster power,” he said. “It was the pre-reddit. It’s the same guys on Thottbot who were [later] on reddit” and 4chan—the message boards that became the birthplace of the alt-right.
When Bannon took over Breitbart, he wanted to capture this audience. Andrew Breitbart had drawn a portion of it enchanted by his aggressive provocations on issues such as race and political correctness. Bannon took it further. He envisioned a great fusion between the masses of alienated gamers, so powerful in the online world, and the right-wing outsiders drawn to Breitbart by its radical politics and fuck-you attitude. “The reality is, Fox News’ audience was geriatric and no one was connecting with this younger group,” Bannon said. But he needed a way to connect. He found it in Milo Yiannopoulos, a gay British tech blogger and Internet troll nonpareil.
Hoping to appeal to the gamer audience, Bannon found Yiannopoulos through a friend while scouting for someone to launch a Breitbart tech vertical. “He sent me a résumé and the title of the book he was working on: The Pathological Narcissism of the Silicon Valley Elite,” Bannon recalled. “I said, ‘Whoa.’ Then I met him. When I saw Milo, it was the first time I saw a guy who could connect culturally like an Andrew Breitbart. He had the fearlessness, the brains, the charisma—it’s something special about those guys. They just had that ‘it’ factor. The difference was, Andrew had a very strong moral universe, and Milo is an amoral nihilist. I knew right away, he’s gonna be a fucking meteor.”
At its essence, the alt-right is a rolling tumbleweed of wounded male id and aggression.* Yiannopoulos showed a flair for manipulating it. In contrast to the gadget reviews and company news that compose tech coverage on other sites, Breitbart focused on incendiary cultural issues such as Gamergate, the controversy over sexism in the video-game industry that involved a loosely organized campaign of harassment against female programmers. Yiannopoulos’s specialty became the intentionally offensive opinion piece that invariably provoked a high-traffic response, an editorial style adopted across Breitbart. Many of the site’s most offensive headlines were his. He was also fluent in alt-right obsessions and iconography, such as the alt-right’s mascot, Pepe the Frog.
Yiannopoulos didn’t hide behind a keyboard; he also brought performative skills to his job. Like Breitbart himself, he delighted in taking the fight over “political correctness” to enemy turf, often liberal college campuses, where his visits would reliably incite an angry counterreaction that pointed out the hypocrisy of a censorious left supposedly committed to ideals of free speech and open debate.
The purpose of all this incitement, at least in Bannon’s mind, was to entice the online legions into the Breitbart fold. “I realized Milo could connect with these kids right away,” he said. “You can activate that army. They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump.” In this way, Breitbart became an incubator of alt-right political energy. Although Yiannopoulos was most interested in cultivating his own celebrity—Bannon thought he looked like “a gay hooker”—he was more than willing to do his part and make the political connection explicit. “How Donald Trump Can Win: With Guns, Cars, Tech Visas, Ethanol . . . And 4Chan” read the headline of an October 2015 article he wrote.
Trump himself would help cement this alt-right alliance by retweeting images of Pepe the Frog and occasional missives—always inadvertently, his staff insisted—from white nationalist Twitter accounts. Before long, denizens of sites such as 4chan and reddit were coordinating support for Trump’s campaign. One aspect of this “support” was flooding the Twitter feeds of prominent journalists, particularly Jewish journalists, with vile anti-Semitic imagery. A study conducted by the Anti-Defamation League found that 2.6 million anti-Semitic tweets, many of them directed at journalists, were sent in the year leading up to the election and that the “aggressors are disproportionately likely to self-identify as Donald Trump supporters, conservatives, or part of the ‘alt-right.’”
Sometimes, Bannon’s impulse to attack led to egregious errors. The site republished as news a satirical story stating that Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate and liberal New York Times columnist, had filed for bankruptcy (he hadn’t). When Obama nominated Loretta Lynch for attorney general, a Breitbart reporter assailed her for having worked on Bill Clinton’s defense team (it was a different Loretta Lynch). “Truth and veracity weren’t his top priority,” said Ben Shapiro, a writer for the site who quit in 2016 over frustrations with Bannon. “Narrative truth was his priority rather than factual truth.” Bannon basically agreed. When the embarrassed Lynch reporter asked for time off, he refused to allow it, allergic to any hint of concession. “I told him, ‘No. In fact, you’re going to write a story every day this week.’” Bannon shrugged. “We’re honey badgers,” he explained. “We don’t give a shit.”
With backing from the Mercer family, Bannon plotted a global expansion, opening Breitbart bureaus in London and Texas. “We look at London and Texas as two fronts in our current cultural and political war,” Bannon announced in 2014. “There is a growing global anti-establishment revolt against the permanent political class at home, and the global elites that influence them, which impacts everyone from Lubbock to London.”
The type of reporters Bannon liked to hire were hyper-aggressive activist-journalists, whom he thought of as foot soldiers in the war he was waging. To lead his Texas bureau, he chose a former anarchist turned FBI informant. He described a pair of London hires as “real hell fighters in the Breitbart tradition.” His Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, was notorious for threatening Capitol Hill press secretaries in both parties with damning headlines about their bosses if they didn’t immediately produce whatever information he was seeking.
Perhaps Bannon’s most unusual Breitbart News reporting team—and one that shaped his thinking about how to go after Hillary Clinton, both before and after he joined the Trump campaign—was a group of beautiful young women whom he proudly referred to as “the Valkyries,” after the war goddesses of Norse mythology who decided soldiers’ fates in battle. They included Michelle Fields, an ambitious television and print journalist who, before joining Breitbart, had won early fame as a conservative YouTube celebrity and later became a Fox News contributor. There was also Alex Swoyer, a blond attorney and former beauty queen who had won the Miss Southwest Florida crown while attending the Ave Maria School of Law in Naples, Florida.
But Bannon’s favorite Valkyrie, and his protégé, was Julia Hahn, a whip-smart twenty-five-year-old who was raised in Beverly Hills and studied philosophy at the University of Chicago, where she’d written a thesis examining “the intersection of psychoanalysis and post-Foucauldian philosophical inquiry.” Hahn’s cherubic visage and impeccably sweet manners belied an intense commitment to Bannon’s brand of populist nationalism and a ferocious pen. Her favorite target was Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, whose devotion to global free trade and open borders drew her scorching disapproval. Hahn charged Ryan with being a “third-world migration enthusiast” and “double agent” secretly pulling for Clinton. Once, while visiting his Wisconsin district to profile a challenger, someone pointed out Ryan’s home, which Hahn immediately noticed was surrounded by a sturdy fence. She leaped out of the car to snap pictures, which later accompanied her classic Breitbart article “Paul Ryan Builds Border Fence Around His Mansion, Doesn’t Fund Border Fence in Omnibus.” Bannon loved it. “When she comes into your life,” he bragged, “shit gets fucked up.”
As he schemed about how to impugn the Clintons, Bannon kept returning to the former president’s sex scandals—a humiliating subject for Hillary Clinton but a dangerous one for Republicans, whose monomaniacal pursuit and impeachment of Bill Clinton was a leading example of the overreach Bannon was keen to avoid. The sudden downfall of Bill Cosby, whose serial predations had come roaring back into the news after the comedian Hannibal Buress brought them up in a show, led Bannon to wonder if the Clintons might not be newly vulnerable as well. Quizzing the Valkyries convinced him that they were. Bannon often used the young women as a kind of in-house focus group of millennial voter sentiment. The Clinton scandals might be old news to his generation, he admitted, “but these girls have never heard most of this stuff.” Furthermore, millennials had just eclipsed baby boomers as the largest voting-eligible demographic in America.
By the time Trump joined the presidential race in June 2015, Bannon was fully convinced. “I’m a big believer in generational theory,” he said one day, sitting in the dining room of the Breitbart Embassy. “There’s a whole generation of people who love the news but were seven or eight years old when this happened and have no earthly idea about the Clinton sex stuff.” While it was still too soon to make hay of this issue, a time would come when it would be ripe to be deployed. “I think that has to be concentrated and brought up,” he said.
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.