Kushner Book Details ‘War’ With Bannon in Trump White House: ‘I Will Break You in Half. Don’t F*ck With Me’

 

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Jared Kushner, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law who also worked in the West Wing, recently wrote about his “toxic” workplace relationship with Steve Bannon – who ran the early part of Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and also worked in the West Wing briefly.

Kushner writes in his new book, Breaking History: A White House Memoir, about an exchange he had with Bannon, in which he claims Bannon yelled at him in the Cabinet Room.

Kushner writes he confronted Bannon over leaking negative information to the press about Gary Cohn, a senior economic adviser at the time, who Bannon would later dub a “globalist” and “West Wing Democrat” – a term he also reserved for Jared and his wife Ivanka Trump.

“Steve, you gotta stop leaking on Gary,” Kushner writes he said to Bannon. “We’re trying to build a team here.”

“‘Cohn’s the one leaking on me. … Jared, right now, you’re the one undermining the President’s agenda,’ he continued, his eyes intense and voice escalating into a yell. ‘And if you go against me, I will break you in half. Don’t f*ck with me,'” Kushner writes, according to quotes published by CNN.

In the book, Kushner details Bannon’s close relationship with the media and notes he was “woefully unprepared” to handle Bannon, who he wrote has “a black belt in the dark arts of media manipulation.”

Kushner also writes about the West Wing staff taking jabs at Bannon after Trump fired him in August of 2017, after being in his role for only a little over seven months.

Stephen Miller joked to Hope [Hicks] and me, ‘I have a plan to split up Steve Bannon’s extensive workload. Hope, you leak to Jonathan Swan at Axios. Jared, you call Mike Bender from the Wall Street Journal. I’ll call Jeremy Peters from the New York Times, and … we’re done,'” Kushner recalls, hitting Bannon for extensive leaking.

In a later exchange, reported on by CNN, Kushner recalls his conversation with then-President Trump regarding his decision to pardon Bannon over his indictment for a scheme to defraud millions from donors giving to build the border wall.

“Seriously? You would really be for that? After everything he did to you?” Kushner recalls Trump asking him, regarding the pardon for Bannon.

“Bannon single-handedly caused more problems for me than anyone else in my time in Washington. He probably leaked and lied about me more than everyone else combined. He played dirty and dragged me into the mud of the Russia investigation. But now that he was in trouble, I felt like helping him was the right thing to do,” Kushner writes in the book, which is released on August 23rd.

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Alex Griffing is a Senior Editor at Mediaite. Send tips via email: alexanderg@mediaite.com. Follow him on Twitter: @alexgriffing