Steve Bannon

Steve Bannon (born November 27, 1953) is an American media executive and political strategist who served as executive chairman of Breitbart News from 2012 (after founder Andrew Breitbart's death) through 2016 and again 2017-2018, as vice president and secretary of Cambridge Analytica from June 2014 to August 2016, as chief executive of the Trump 2016 presidential campaign from August 17, 2016, and as White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor to the President from January 20 to August 18, 2017. The Mercer family funded Breitbart, bankrolled Cambridge Analytica, and was instrumental in installing Bannon as Trump campaign CEO.¹²³

Breitbart and the Mercer Funding

Bannon took over Breitbart News after Andrew Breitbart's death in 2012. Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer were the primary funders of Breitbart during Bannon's tenure, providing the financial base for the outlet's expansion as the media backbone of the alt-right and the emerging Trump coalition. Bannon's Breitbart published the coverage that amplified the Gamergate campaign's targets and framed the consumer-revolt narrative. The Breitbart-Gamergate pipeline was the channel through which the 4chan / 8chan imageboard culture entered mainstream conservative media.¹⁴

Mercer's entry was an investment of about 10 million dollars made in June 2011, before Andrew Breitbart's death, in exchange for a stake in the company; Bannon assumed the executive chairmanship of the firm and of the family's broader political vehicles when Breitbart died in March 2012.⁶ The same year, Bannon co-founded the Government Accountability Institute with Peter Schweizer, a Tallahassee-based opposition-research nonprofit that the Mercer Family Foundation funded with more than half its 2013-2015 budget; the Institute produced Schweizer's 2015 book Clinton Cash, whose findings were placed with the New York Times and Washington Post and used to drive negative coverage of Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 race.⁶ The 2017 Paradise Papers later showed Mercer routing political money through offshore accounts to build a war chest reported at roughly 60 million dollars for conservative causes including Breitbart and the Institute.⁶

Cambridge Analytica and the Facebook Data Harvesting

Bannon served as vice president and secretary of Cambridge Analytica from June 2014 to August 2016. The Guardian reporting (March 2018), based on the whistleblower Christopher Wylie disclosures, documented that Bannon oversaw the firm's Facebook data-harvesting project that acquired data on up to 87 million Facebook users through the Aleksandr Kogan academic-researcher channel. The data was used for psychographic profiling of voters in the 2016 Trump campaign. Mercer provided approximately 15 million dollars in Cambridge Analytica funding. Jane Mayer's New Yorker reporting documented Bannon's involvement in Cambridge Analytica's Brexit-related activities before he formally joined the Trump campaign.²⁵

The firm was created in 2013 as a U.S.-facing spin-off of the British military-contracting firm SCL Group, after its chief executive Alexander Nix met the Mercers aboard the family's yacht with Bannon present; Mercer agreed to the roughly 15 million dollar stake, Bannon was given the company name (a nod to the Cambridge academics Nix was recruiting) and a board seat as vice president.⁷ Testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 16, 2018, Wylie said Bannon had engaged SCL, "a foreign military contractor," to build "an arsenal of informational weapons" he could deploy on the American population because he "saw cultural warfare as the means to create enduring change in American politics," and that the firm tested 2014 slogans later used in the Trump campaign and discussed voter-suppression messaging aimed at Black voters.⁷ The harvested data originated in a personality-quiz app built by Kogan, whose firm Global Science Research passed the resulting profiles to Cambridge Analytica in breach of Facebook's platform terms, the disclosure that drove Facebook's stock down and produced a 5 billion dollar U.S. Federal Trade Commission settlement in 2019.²

The 2016 Trump Campaign and the White House

Bannon joined the Trump campaign as chief executive on August 17, 2016, replacing Paul Manafort at the top of the organizational chart, alongside Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager. Rebekah Mercer was reportedly instrumental in installing Bannon. After the election, Bannon received the newly created role of White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor, and a seat on the National Security Council's Principals Committee (later removed). Trump fired Bannon on August 18, 2017, after the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" violence and the documented tensions within the White House staff.¹³

The Mercers had moved their support from Ted Cruz to Trump after the primaries, repurposing their pro-Cruz super PAC Keep the Promise I (seeded with an 11 million dollar Robert Mercer contribution) into the anti-Clinton vehicle Make America Number 1, informally "Defeat Crooked Hillary," run by Rebekah Mercer, so that Bannon's August 2016 elevation brought the campaign both his Breitbart apparatus and the Mercer money in one move, a transition Joshua Green's Devil's Bargain (Penguin Press, 2017) reconstructed from interviews as the culmination of Bannon's years-long project to destroy Clinton.⁸ In the White House, Bannon was placed on the NSC Principals Committee by the January 28, 2017 reorganization in part, per a White House official, to monitor first national security adviser Michael Flynn; after Flynn's resignation and the arrival of H.R. McMaster, McMaster's restructuring removed Bannon from the committee on April 5, 2017 and restored the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs as regular attendees.⁹ Bannon's August 18, 2017 firing came two days after an August 16 interview with Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect, which Bannon's associates said he had not understood to be on the record, in which he declared "there's no military solution" to North Korea and disparaged White House and State Department colleagues, compounding the post-Charlottesville friction.³