'Patently false': Bannon says this Trump Cabinet member is either incompetent or 'lying'
Steve Bannon – who was President Donald Trump's chief White House strategist in his first term — is now taking the gloves off in his criticism of one of Trump's most devoted Cabinet members.
The Daily Beast reported Tuesday that Bannon used the most recent episode of his "War Room" podcast to go after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Bannon particularly took issue with Lutnick's failure to explain the Trump administration's new policy of making employers pay a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas (which are used by companies hiring foreign workers). Lutnick said the fee would be $100,000 per year, prompting White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt to intervene and clarify that the $100,000 charge was a one-time fee, not an annual payment.
“These are not tiny details in the document,” Bannon said. “These are not in the footnotes. This is the deal. You’re supposed to be a deal guy. You’ve got to understand your own deal that you put before the president.”
Bannon has consistently maligned the H-1B visa program, arguing that its primarily used by tech companies to take jobs away from Americans and give them to workers brought in from overseas. Earlier this year he battled intensely with Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk over the H-1B visa program, which Musk insisted was necessary for companies who wanted to hire the most capable employees.
While the "War Room" host said he supported Trump's effort to make H-1B visas more costly, he reiterated that if it were up to him, he would axe the program entirely. And he slammed Lutnick for his apparent lack of knowledge about the most important details of the policy, which he chalked up to either stupidity or dishonesty.
"The Secretary [of] Commerce sat up there and gave not just erroneous information, but patently false information,” Bannon said. “During the show, in a hot take, I can sit and go, ‘that makes no sense,’ because, if that’s true, then, hey, we kind of won—the whole program, just shut the program down."
“That’s the heart of the deal,” he continued. “When you make a deal... This is the basic architecture. These are the key points. Those are the key points. You didn’t even know them. Either didn’t understand it or patently lied about it. You pick.”
“Don’t take it from me. See it with your own lying eyes," he added. "So if that’s the Secretary of Commerce, what information is the President of the United States going to get?”
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