Mueller Swoops In to Subpoena 'Sloppy Steve'

The blast waves from Michael Wolff’s book Fire and Fury continue to ripple through Washington. Today, the New York Times reported that special counsel Robert Mueller’s team has subpoenaed former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to appear before a grand jury.

In one obvious way, the reported subpoena follows from the Wolff book: Fire and Fury is full of indiscreet—or perhaps more accurately, brutally frank—talk from Bannon, including the assertion that the meeting with Russians Donald Trump Jr. green-lighted was “unpatriotic” and “treasonous.” Given that Wolff doesn’t make a bright-line distinction between fact and fiction, investigators are well advised to put Bannon under oath so that he can clear up what he did and did not say, and whether he stands by his comments and why.

In another, perhaps less obvious way, Fire and Fury can be seen to be what philosophers would call a “predicate cause” of the demand Bannon grace the grand jury with his presence. The book broke all bonds between Trump and the former adviser he now derides as “Sloppy Steve.” Bannon lost the backing of his friendly billionaire. Breitbart showed him the door.

Bannon, you could say, is at a low-point. It’s lesson 7-B in the Junior G-Man Investigative Handbook that a witness feeling abandoned and betrayed is a witness who may not be as reticent as he was before the bonds of loyalty were broken. A bummed-out witness is a talkative witness, especially when the investigators are solicitous confessors.

It is no coincidence that the special counsel’s team produced a subpoena for Bannon, after all these months, days after his ex-boss tweeted “Now Sloppy Steve has been dumped like a dog by almost everyone.”