Former senior adviser to the president Jared Kushner is laying out the small print of his rocky relationship with former White House strategist Steve Bannon in his new memoir, together with a time when Bannon threatened to to interrupt him “in half” if he turned on him.
According to an excerpt from Breaking History: A White House Memoir obtained by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, Kushner described how Bannon as soon as screamed at him within the Cabinet Room after he confronted Bannon about leaking damaging details about different members of Trump’s White House employees.
Kushner wrote that in response, Bannon accused him of being “the one undermining the President’s agenda.”
“If you go against me, I will break you in half. Don’t f**k with me,” Kushner recalled Bannon yelling at him.
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In his memoir, which is about to publish on August 23, Trump’s son-in-law described Bannon as having “a black belt in the dark arts of media manipulation” and referred to as his presence within the White House “toxic.”
In one other incident, Kushner mentioned Bannon exploded at him after he spoke to the press on the behest of former White House Chief of Staff Reince Preibus.
“How f—ing dare you leak on me? If you leak out on me, I can leak out on you 28 ways from Sunday,” Bannon reportedly mentioned to Kushner.
Kushner described a tradition by which Bannon repeatedly leaked data to the press, which “single-handedly caused more problems for me than anyone else in my time in Washington.”
He mentioned that it was so pervasive that when Bannon was fired by Trump in August of 2017, former Trump adviser Stephen Miller joked that they’d break up up Bannon’s workload by giving Kushner and former White House Communications Director Hope Hicks every an outlet to leak data to.
Despite the “war” that Kushner described Bannon waging on him within the White House, Kushner mentioned he nonetheless felt obligated to assist Bannon safe a presidential pardon earlier than Trump left workplace. Bannon had been charged with defrauding donors as a part of a fundraising marketing campaign associated to Trump’s border wall.
“[Bannon] probably leaked and lied about me more than everyone else combined. He played dirty and dragged me into the mud of the Russia investigation,” Kushner wrote. “But now that he was in trouble, I felt like helping him was the right thing to do.”
Kushner mentioned that even Trump was shocked he did not oppose the thought, asking his son-in-law, “Seriously? You would really be for that? After everything he did to you?”
Bannon was ultimately granted a pardon in a last-minute resolution made simply hours earlier than Trump left the White House for the final time.
“Mr. Bannon has been an important leader in the conservative movement and is known for his political acumen,” White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany mentioned in a press release asserting the transfer.
Newsweek reached out to Bannon for remark.