Yesterdays NYT article tying Sessions, Bannon, and Miller planning all this together

[icymist]

ne night in September 2014, when he was chief executive of Breitbart News, Stephen Bannon hosted cocktails and dinner at the Washington townhouse where he lived, a mansion near the Supreme Court that he liked to call the Breitbart Embassy. Beneath elaborate chandeliers and flanked by gold drapes and stately oil paintings, Jeff Sessions, then a senator from Alabama, sat next to the guest of honor: Nigel Farage, the insurgent British politician, who first met Sessions two years earlier when Bannon introduced them. Farage was building support for his right-wing party by complaining in the British press about “uncontrolled mass immigration.” Sessions, like other attendees, was celebrating the recent collapse in Congress of bipartisan immigration reform, which would have provided a path to citizenship for some undocumented people. At the dinner, Sessions told a writer for Vice, Reid Cherlin, that Bannon’s site was instrumental in defeating the measure. Sessions read Breitbart almost every day, he explained, because it was “putting out cutting-edge information.”

Bannon’s role in blocking the reform had gone beyond sympathetic coverage on his site. Over the previous year, he, Sessions and one of Sessions’s top aides, Stephen Miller, spent “an enormous amount of time” meeting in person, “developing plans and messaging and strategy,” as Miller later explained to Rosie Gray in The Atlantic. Breitbart writers also reportedly met with Sessions’s staff for a weekly happy hour at the Union Pub. For most Republicans in Washington, immigration was an issue they wished would go away, a persistent source of conflict between the party’s elites, who saw it as a straightforward economic good, and its middle-class voting base, who mistrusted the effects of immigration on employment. But for Bannon, Sessions and Miller, immigration was a galvanizing issue, lying at the center of their apparent vision for reshaping the United States by tethering it to its European and Christian origins. (None of them would comment for this article.) That September evening, as they celebrated the collapse of the reform effort — and the rise of Farage, whose own anti-immigration party in Britain represented the new brand of nativism — it felt like the beginning of something new. “I was privileged enough to be at it,” Miller said about the gathering last June, while a guest on Breitbart’s SiriusXM radio show. “It’s going to sound like a motivational speech, but it’s true. To all the voters out there: The only limits to what we can achieve is what we believe we can achieve.”

<snip>
As the Republican primary season progressed, it became clear to Sessions and Bannon that Trump could be the vessel for their brand of Republicanism. Back in August 2015, Bannon emailed a friend, according to The Daily Beast, that while he felt good about other candidates like Ted Cruz, he was ready to pick Trump, because he was “a nationalist who embraces” Sessions’s immigration plan. Six months later, Sessions became the first senator to endorse Trump for president. Last August, Sessions helped create a new immigration policy for Trump, which called for reducing immigration by, among other things, tightening the rules about visas for high-skilled workers. That same month, Bannon took over Trump’s campaign.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/magazine/jeff-sessions-stephen-bannon-justice-department.html

[dalton99a]

1. Great write-up.

[Leghorn21]

2. Holee cow. Sept. '14?? - many thanks for posting, icymist - wowjustwow, I had no idea - eom

[triron]

3. In light of everything tonite this is quite a revelation.

[nikibatts]

4. But how do we know what was said? Was there a witness who leaked this?

[murielm99]

5. The point is that he lied

about the meeting, under oath.

[procon]

6. Republicans excel at nothing if not long term planning.

They've spent decades building rightwing think tanks, media groups and ALEC to take control of state governments and gerrymander in a permanent Republican power grab. Treasonous deals with Russia is not a surprising evolution of their MO.

I suspect they had no expectations of ever being caught, and never investigating anything because they practically control every part of govt. They've worked diligently to marginalize the press and make the public suspicious of truth and skeptical of actual facts when the choice of more lies and deceits that looks much more simple and appealing than the complex issues of the day. Trump is a never ending source of distraction and he has mastered the art of diversion to draw public attention away from him and point to another "attack" by his leftist enemies who are out to get him because we're all sore losers. Its been a convenient, if increasingly threadbare, cover.

[zentrum]

7. The Koch's have

....been building from the bottom up since the 50's. It's taken them and the Bannon-types 60 years to get this all centralized into control of virtually every institution in the country.

It seems to have appeared suddenly, but it's really a long-time underlying plan.

[Ilsa]

10. Sessions, 45, Bannon, Farage, Marine LePen,

and others like them are part of Putin's psy-ops in taking down democratic govts.

[Botany]

8. Lock them up!

n/t

[Buckeyeblue]

9. The irony is ....

That many of our lost tech jobs were lost to people who will never step foot in the country. Most financial institutions outsource IT functions to workers in India. Call centers outsource to many different countries. So tying immigration to jobs is just a smoke screen.

[Ilsa]

11. For my husband, he has noted that

There are so many immigrants doing software work because, like harvesting crops, they can't find enough Americans willing or able to do those jobs. They are high-paying, but the jobs and the coursework are not exciting or sexy.

[Buckeyeblue]

13. I've been with companied where IT workers were severed

And their jobs were off- shored to India. I've worked with off- shore code writers on projects. Good people to work with. But I always come away thinking its8a shame that these jobs are off- shored.

[Ilsa]

16. We've seen some of that, but not recently.

The last time it happened anywhere close to hubbie's job, after six months they moved the jobs back here, but that was just one company.

I think employers really want local people for control of data, people, etc. But it has been difficult to find people (and I mean over the last five years) that want these jobs that are qualified to do the work.

[Buckeyeblue]

17. Big financial institutions still outsource

They keep a small domestic staff to oversee/qa/Approve new code and such. It's interesting. I think with current push to use an agile method for projects it makes it hard to have the technical portion of the team a half a world away.

[Ilsa]

18. Agreed. I suspect much is lost

in coordination of projects when they cannot interact personally with each other. The teams coordinate better when they can socialize (over lunch, etc) occasionally.

[femmedem]

12. I knew Sessions was awful, but didn't realize until I read this that awful is an understatement.

Having him as AG is horrifying.

[Achilleaze]

14. republican treason against America sucks

that is all

[Initech]

15. And they're getting away with it!

[Amaryllis]

19. The Failing NYT is hitting a lot of home runs these days.

[smirkymonkey]

20. K&R