- A former Trump-campaign aide said Steve Bannon didn't believe Trump's voter-fraud lies.
- Sam Nunberg said Bannon needed a pardon and touted Trump's baseless voter-fraud claims to get it.
- Bannon dismissed Nunberg's comments as "absurd" and said he still believed the election was stolen.
A former Trump-campaign aide said in an interview published this week that he didn't think Steve Bannon believed any of Trump's baseless voter-fraud claims but touted them anyway to secure a presidential pardon.
Sam Nunberg, a Trump-campaign aide turned political consultant, spoke with The Atlantic for an article on Bannon titled "American Rasputin." Bannon and Nunberg both worked on the Trump campaign in 2016, before Bannon became the president's chief strategist.
"Steve was in on the joke," Nunberg said, according to The Atlantic. "He never believed that the election would be overturned. Steve needed a pardon."
He added: "The tragedy of Steve Bannon is that when he leaves the White House, he's known as the great manipulator, the intellectual heavy of the international populist uprising.
"But still he ends up in the fetal position at Donald Trump's feet."
Bannon received a pardon from Trump as one of the latter's last acts in office. At the time, Bannon was facing fraud charges in connection with the "We Build a Wall" online fundraising campaign.
On his "War Room: Pandemic" podcast, the former Trump strategist continues to push the unsubstantiated claim that the election was stolen from Trump.
In the same article, Stephanie Grisham, Trump's former press secretary, also weighed in on Bannon, saying, "His old life, as he knows it, is gone."
"He has gone in sooooo deep on the Big Lie of this election being stolen — he's not gonna go back to, I don't know, doing whatever it was he did before," Grisham said, adding that it was hard for those close to Trump to make it out of his orbit.
The Atlantic reported that Bannon responded to Nunberg's claims. He said it was "absurd" to say he would push a lie about election fraud just for a Trump pardon.
" 'Cause they don't believe it," he told the outlet. "Doesn't mean I don't believe it. I absolutely believe it, to the core of my being."
Bannon is expected to go on trial in Washington, DC, next month. He is facing two criminal charges of contempt of Congress.
In November, the Justice Department formally charged him following his noncompliance with a subpoena handed down from the House panel investigating the Capitol riot.