Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon says if Donald Trump were to lose the presidential race to Joe Biden next month, he would announce he was running again in 2024.
“You’re not going to see the end of Donald Trump,’’ Mr Bannon told The Australian.
He said the November 3 election was “closer than is being reported” but “Mr Trump will win on election day”.
“I’ll make this prediction right now: if for any reason the election is stolen from or in some sort of way Joe Biden is declared the winner, Trump will announce he’s going to run for re-election in 2024,” he said.
Mr Bannon also predicted that the election result would go to the Supreme Court and may even be kicked into the House of Representatives in January, saying the result “won’t be settled anytime soon”.
He also claimed that lawyers acting for Joe Biden’s son Hunter have made numerous attempts to retrieve his computer hard-drive, even sending legal letters to the owner of a repair shop where the Democratic presidential candidate’s son had reportedly dropped off his laptop for service.
The New York Post has published emails and photographs it said were contained on a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, which he reportedly failed to collect from a repair shop in Delaware.
The emails suggested that Hunter Biden arranged for a top executive at a Ukrainian energy firm, of which Hunter was a director, to meet his father, when he was vice-president and in charge of US policy towards Ukraine.
The emails published by the Post show Hunter Biden pursued a lucrative deal involving China’s largest private energy company that he said in one email would be “interesting for me and my family” and discussed remuneration packages.
Mr Bannon, who alerted the Post to the existence of the laptop, claimed Mr Biden’s lawyers contacted Mr Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, on Wednesday, before publication, in an effort to retrieve the hard-drive.
“His lawyer, Mesires (George Mesires) from Chicago, one of the top lawyers in the country, emailed us. He called the repair shop, he sent us an email, he sent the repair shop an email saying Hunter dropped these off, he forgot to pick them up. That’s an email,” Mr Bannon said.
“In addition, we haven’t released this, Hunter Biden’s lawyer has come to us both with phone calls and with emails saying I’ve got to get the hard-drive back. This is not some Russian intelligence operation, they’ve admitted it’s their hard-drive.
“It was the night before we came out with the first story, I think, because the NY Post went to them for comment … they panicked. One lawyer started calling around and sent the emails.”
Mr Bannon said Mr Biden’s lawyers had sent legal letters via email to the owner of a repair shop seeking the return of the hard-drive.
“We’re breaking news here. He actually in a panic called … because Hunter when he dropped it off, there was two or three of these shops in Wilmington. They called around and he figured out it might be this guy. He called him and when the guy said I can’t remember, I’m going back to my shop, he sent a couple of emails in a panic saying ‘I’ve got to get my hands on this right away’,” Mr Bannon said.
Mr Bannon, who said he was contacted by Mr Giuliani in late August to help with media strategy for the emails along with analysis of Hunter Biden’s Chinese dealings, said he has been holding on to the legal letters and waiting to use them if the Biden camp tried to deny the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden.
“We haven’t released that yet. We’re holding that back to make sure if they walk into the trap, we’re just going to drop it on them,” he said.
“My training under Andrew Breitbart was put it out, let them lie and then bang, drop them on the lie, let them lie some more, drop it again. We have the emails from the lawyer, if we need to release them, we’ll release them.”