Shortly after leaving the West Wing documents, Mr. Bannon entered into a financial relationship with Mr. Guo, a former member of Mr. Mar-a-Lago’s private club. Trump, who also bears the name Miles Kwok. That arrangement eventually led to a $ 1 million contract between Mr. Bannon and a media company named Mr. Guo. Both men have said they threw out a report based on a shared contempt for the Chinese Communist Party.
Mr. Guo moved to a $ 68 million Manhattan apartment overlooking Central Park in 2017 and turned against the Chinese government, accusing family members of the top anti-corruption official of secretly controlling a stake in a large conglomerate. The prosecutors were never entertained, and Mr. Guo became the most coveted man in China, accused of a battery of crimes, including bribery and rape.
In New York, Mr. Guo lived a life of luxury, pied guests with Opus One wine and posed with his white bichon frizzy puppy. His constant attacks against the Chinese Communist Party won him the attention of many conservatives, including Mr. Bannon, as well as the admiration of Chinese as opposed to holding the party to power.
Around the same time, Mr. Bannon also returned to the website of Supreme Court Justice Breitbart, trying to create a Trump-style populist movement that targeted moderate Republican senators.
But that fizzled out in December 2017 after he went all in on Roy S. Moore, the former judge accused of sexually abusing teenage girls who ran in a special election for one of Alabama’s Senate seats. Mr. Bannon mocked the accusations, sending Breitbart writers on a mission to discredit the accusers and campaign more enthusiastically for Mr. Moore, who was going to lose in one of the reddest states in the country, than almost any Republican high profile.
In January 2018, he was fired from Breitbart, which he took after the sudden death of his founder, Andrew Breitbart, in 2012.
The billionaire fundraiser, the reclusive Mercer family, told friends they were tired of the impulsive and attention-seeking antics of Mr. Bannon and, according to one associate, said they were concerned about his spending on travel and private safety. Mr. Bannon was also quoted in a book by author Michael Wolff, which disparaging the president’s son (“treacherous”) and daughter (“dumb as a brick”), another important contributing factor to that Mr. Bannon lost his Breitbart job, according to people familiar with the incident, and asked Mr. Trump to publicly deny him if “he lost his mind.”
