His theory pre-election is that conservatives look weak and can't access mainstream audiences because they run with any wild, unsubstantiated claims. So he, along with Andrew Breitbart and Peter Schweizer, create the Government Accountability Institute to give verifiable stories of corruption to investigative journalists inside of major news sources (e.g. Time, NYT), letting them do the work for conservatives.

Now that the shoe is on the other foot after the election, and liberals are ready to run with any wild, unsubstantiated claims to de-legitimize Trump, what better way to make them look weak than to let Buzzfeed get its hands on a nice, juicy "dossier" filled with sex and scandal?

Excerpt below from this incredibly interesting article that was written almost a year before Bannon became CEO of Trump's campaign.

For Bannon, the Clinton Cash uproar validated a personal theory, informed by his Goldman Sachs experience, about how conservatives can influence the media and why they failed the last time a Clinton was running for the White House. "In the 1990s," he told me, "conservative media couldn’t take down [Bill] Clinton because most of what they produced was punditry and opinion, and THEY ALWAYS OVERSOLD THE CONCLUSION: 'IT'S CLEARLY IMPEACHABLE!' So they wound up talking to themselves in an echo chamber." What news conservatives did produce [...] was often tainted in the eyes of mainstream editors by its explicit partisan association.

"We’re going to go to the investigative units, not the political reporters, and just give them the stuff [from the Government Accountability Institute]," says Bannon. "We have faith they’ll take the stories and do the additional reporting." The thought pleases him, and he grins. "Just like last time, we’ll go out and say, 'Hey, here’s what we’ve got. You guys take it from here.'"