Steve Bannon Joins the Tennessee Star Report to Talk About His War Room Impeachment Podcast

 

In a special interview Monday on The Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy – broadcast on Nashville’s Talk Radio 98.3 and 1510 WLAC weekdays from 5:00 am to 8:00 am – Leahy was joined on the newsmakers line by good friend and former Breitbart colleague Steve Bannon to discuss his new War Room podcast which will focus on facts as they pertain to the ongoing ‘impeachment’ hearings.

Towards the end of the segment, Bannon expressed the importance of the War Room podcast because, as he mentioned Nancy Pelosi is running a very strong political warfare campaign against President Trump. In addition to that, Bannon characterized the podcast to be unlike traditional radio shows with a focus on witnesses and testimony in a grassroots fashion. ‘But what it takes is focus, commitment, and hard work. And we’ve got a lot of people in D.C. who are prepared to chip in. You’re going to see the grassroots really put their shoulder to the wheel here,’ said Bannon.

Leahy: We are joined by my good friend, mentor, colleague, the guy that hired me at Breitbart Steve Bannon. Good morning, Steve.

Bannon: Hey how are you doing Micheal? Good to be on the show.

Leahy: Big news. You started this War Room: Impeachment podcast just a few days ago and now we’re going to be carrying it live at the TennesseeStar.com. How did you come up with this idea, Steve?

Bannon: Listen here, Michael, I call into as a guest on talk radio. I call the John Fredricks show once a month.  It’s in Virginia my native state. This is, like, two weeks ago, and I was walking through how Pelosi on a date certain is going to impeach the President – sometime around Thanksgiving – and John, who I know very well, is one of the few guys who came up on radio row on election night at Trump campaign headquarters.

John was sitting there going, ‘But Steve that’s fake news. It’s deep state. It’s not going to happen.’ And I said, ‘John it’s absolutely going to happen. She’s running the tables on political warfare and political disinformation.’ And callers in the next hour lit the boards up saying, ‘Hey, did Steve not get the memo? This is fake news.’

That’s when I said, ‘We’ve got to get focused here.’ I think Matt Gaetz last week, you know Matt Gaetz getting down into the House. The bowels of the House kind of broke the fever.

Leahy: Yeah, the storming of the SCIF room that you’ve been in, actually, previously. (Bannon laughs) Mark Green from Tennessee was part of that. What an adventure that was, huh?

Bannon: I refer to it as the “Star Chamber.”

Leahy: Yeah.

Bannon: It’s a highly secured conference room in the bowels of the capitol where they actually do intelligence briefings for the House intelligence committee. But that’s where all the Mueller classified stuff in the House was all run out of. And so you know this process has been a completely hidden process.

In fact, what we have is issues of precedent, policy, and process. And that’s just what we’ve got to get on the table. And I decided really last Sunday, Sunday a week ago that the best way to do this was to stand up a war room. Let’s get a podcast going. Let’s get information out there. So seven days a week from 9 am to 10 am live.

Leahy: Eastern time.

Bannon: Eastern time. Websites like yourselves and also radio stations – we’ll be announcing some national radio deals, I think. Raheem Kassam who ran the war room for Brexit; Jason Miller who’s a communications director and ran the war room for the Trump campaign; and myself.

And what we do is we talk to the major players. And go through the witness and go through the testimony and we go through the details. Today we got Scott Rasmussen on to talk about the polling. How the polling to date has shifted against President Trump on this topic and what it’s going to take to shift it back.

We had Matt Gaetz on last week. Mark Meadows, David Rifken the constitutional lawyer. Micheal, I think your audience will get a lot from it.

Leahy: Yeah. I think it will be, too. It’s very interesting. You’re doing this from the building called the “Breitbart Embassy” where you live in Washington, D.C. Literally across the street from the Supreme Court.  I’ve been there many a time.

Bannon: (Bannon chuckles) We’ve had many meetings, Micheal, you and I, in that building – yes. It’s going to be the historic center of the populist nationalists. I don’t know if you saw the PBS Frontline special. Zero tolerance came on last week. It talks about the meetings we had there in 2013.

Steve Miller who was a young Senate staffer, Jeff  Sessions, and myself talking about looking for a candidate that could really represent the populist economic nationalist cause. And talking about someone like a Donald Trump who would show up on the scene. So the building has had many many historic events take place in it. And now it’s got a war room to support the President.

Leahy: And your podcast has really taken off in terms of popularity. I think you’re getting all sorts of folks who want to listen live 8 am to 9 am central. 9 am to 10 am eastern to this. What are you seeing in terms of audience growth in the few days you’ve been on?

Bannon: We’re getting up on all national platforms. I think we have got a couple of national radio deals. The traffic has been enormous. The feedback has been enormous on capitol hill. We’ve had people calling that want to come on the show. And here’s the reason. People need a rallying point.

The White House has it’s business to take care of. You saw the raid over the weekend. The President’s got a day job. It’s called Commander in Chief of the United States. (Chuckles) He’s fully occupied. The campaigns doing a terrific job.

But I think the outside groups as you know Michael, I think the key of what you and I have always worked on. Both of us come from the Ivy League. We focus on grassroots. We’ve always been grassroots folks. And this is really for the grassroots. What we’re trying to do is set up a sophisticated war room so that all the Tea Party groups.

All the grassroots groups. All the Trump groups can really get access and information. This is not a traditional talk show where we are giving a lot of opinions. We’re talking about witnesses, talking about the testimony.

Leahy: What to do next on the grassroots side as well.

Bannon: Exactly, what the grassroots are going to need to get engaged. Listen, here’s what’s happening. Nancy Pelosi is running a very sophisticated political warfare campaign here. And her campaign is actually winning right now.

We can definitely turn this thing around. But what it takes is focus, commitment, and hard work. And we’ve got a lot of people in D.C. who are prepared to chip in. You’re going to see the grassroots really put their shoulder to the wheel here.

Listen to the full third hour here:

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Tune in weekdays from 5:00 – 8:00 am to the Tennessee Star Report with Michael Patrick Leahy on Talk Radio 98.3 FM WLAC 1510. Listen online at iHeart Radio.