Bannon considered resigning. Rebekah Mercer "prevailed upon him to stay" for "long-term play"

[Miles Archer]

http://www.rawstory.com/2017/04/this-is-a-long-term-play-gop-mega-donor-convinced-bannon-to-stay-on-at-white-house/

Longtime confident of Steve Bannon and Republican donor Rebekah Mercer, was behind the decision to stay on as President Donald Trump’s senior aide. Reports late Wednesday night revealed Bannon was considering resigning, after being removed from the National Security Council, but Mercer “prevailed upon him to stay,” Politico reported.

“Bekah tried to convince him that this is a long-term play,” another person familiar involved with the situation confirmed.

Mercer’s family is a major investor in Breitbart News, the right-wing site Bannon once led. She also became a quick supporter of Trump during the 2016 campaign. Bannon also served as vice president for Cambridge Analytica, a data-analytics firm that is largely owned by Mercer’s family along with Bannon.

The White House told Politico that Bannon didn’t take any steps indicating he might be leaving and any suggestion that he was going to resign was “total nonsense.”

[HopeAgain]

1. Of course she did...

She has a lot of money invested in his position.

[DeminPennswoods]

2. She's got lots of $s invested in

Trump, too.

[babylonsister]

3. Does she too have some sort of position in the wh?

So bizarre that I'm even reading this and that her voice is even considered. Yes, I know, $$, but wtf?

[JHB]

4. Not just $$, Bannon & the Mercer family go back a ways...

Basic overview here:
http://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/news/a9204/rebekah-mercer-donald-trump-transition/

Oh, did I mention she's on the Board of Trustees of The Heritage Foundation? And Brent Bozell Jr's Media Research Center?
http://www.heritage.org/article/board-trustees

Rebekah A. Mercer, Heritage Trustee Since 2014
Owner, Ruby et Violette

Mercer is the director of the Mercer Family Foundation, a charitable non-profit organization founded in 2004. She is the founder and chairman of Reclaim New York, a non-partisan, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing a state-wide, grassroots conversation about the future of New York, its economy, and its people. She serves on the boards of a number of other non-profits, including the Media Research Center, the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation, the Moving Picture Institute, and the American Museum of Natural History. With her sisters, she owns and runs Ruby et Violette, an online gourmet ice cream and chocolate chunk cookie company.

Mercer grew up in Westchester County, New York, the second of three girls. She attended Stanford University, where she received a dual bachelor’s degree in biology and mathematics and a master’s of science degree in operations research and engineering economic systems. She worked as a trader for a New York financial firm before retiring to raise her four children.

[Bernardo de La Paz]

5. Very interesting HuffPo HighLine article on Mercers

http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/mercers/
Long interesting article with fascinating details. (emphasis added to excerpts below)

The Blow-It-All-Up Billionaires

When politicians take money from megadonors, there are strings attached. But with the reclusive duo who propelled Trump into the White House, there’s a fuse.

Last December, about a month before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Rebekah Mercer arrived at Stephen Bannon’s office in Trump Tower, wearing a cape over a fur-trimmed dress and her distinctive diamond-studded glasses. Tall and imposing, Rebekah, known to close friends as Bekah, is the 43-year-old daughter of the reclusive billionaire Robert Mercer. If Trump was an unexpected victor, the Mercers were unexpected kingmakers. More established names in Republican politics, such as the Kochs and Paul Singer, had sat out the general election. But the Mercers had committed millions of dollars to a campaign that often seemed beyond salvaging.

That support partly explains how Rebekah secured a spot on the executive committee of the Trump transition team. She was the only megadonor to frequent Bannon’s sanctum, a characteristically bare-bones space containing little more than a whiteboard, a refrigerator and a conference table. Unlike the other offices, it also had a curtain so no one could see what was happening inside. Before this point, Rebekah’s resume had consisted of a brief run trading stocks and bonds (including at her father’s hedge fund), a longer stint running her family’s foundation and, along with her two sisters, the management of an online gourmet cookie shop called Ruby et Violette. Now, she was compiling lists of potential candidates for a host of official positions, the foot soldiers who would remake (or unmake) the United States government in Trump’s image.

...

Robert’s middle daughter Rebekah shares similar political beliefs, but she is also very articulate and, therefore, able to act as her father’s mouthpiece. (Neither Rebekah nor Robert responded to detailed lists of questions for this article.) Under Rebekah’s leadership, the family foundation poured some $70 million into conservative causes between 2009 and 2014.[1] 1. According to The Washington Post, the family donated $35 million to conservative think tanks and at least to $36.5 million to individual GOP races. The first candidate they threw their financial weight behind was Arthur Robinson, a chemist from Oregon who was running for Congress. He was best known in his district for co-founding an organization that is collecting thousands of vials of urine as part of an effort it says will “revolutionize the evaluation of personal chemistry.” Robinson didn’t win, but he got closer than expected, and the Mercers got a taste of what their money could do. In 2011, they made one of their most consequential investments: a reported $10 million in a new right-wing media operation called Breitbart.

That the family gravitated toward Andrew Breitbart’s upstart website was no accident. The Mercers are “purists,” says Pat Caddell, a former aide to Jimmy Carter who has shifted to the right over the years. They believe Republican elites are too cozy with Wall Street and too soft on immigration, and that American free enterprise and competition are in mortal danger. “Bekah Mercer might be prepared to put a Democrat in Susan Collins’ seat simply to rid the party of Susan Collins,” a family friend joked by way of illustrating her thinking. So intensely do the Mercers want to unseat Republican senator John McCain[2] 2. Some have speculated that McCain may have angered the Mercers in 2014, when the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, on which McCain was the ranking member at the time, asserted that Renaissance had used complex financial methods to underestimate its taxes by $6 billion. Renaissance has told The New York Times its tax practices are lawful. that they gave $200,000 to support an opposing candidate who once held a town hall meeting to discuss chemtrails—chemicals, according to a long-standing conspiracy theory, that the federal government is spraying on the public without its knowledge. In short, unlike other donors, the Mercers are not merely angling to influence the Republican establishment—they want to obliterate it. One source told me that, in a meeting with Sheldon Adelson and Robert Mercer a few years ago, the casino mogul asked Robert if he was familiar with certain big Republican players. According to the source, Robert shut him down. “I don’t know any of your fancy friends,” he replied, “and I haven’t got any interest in knowing them.”

....

[ehrnst]

6. Another interesting article on the Mercers from the Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/01/no-one-knows-what-the-powerful-mercers-really-want/514529/