Former Breitbart executive chairman and Trump “advisor” Steve Bannon was arrested by federal officers after his indictment by a grand jury in a case prosecuted by the U.S. Southern District in New York. It probably came as a surprise to most people, since the investigation wasn’t widely publicized. Bannon and three associates—Brian Kolfage, Andrew Badolato and Timothy Shea—were accused of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, falsely claiming to hundreds of thousands of donors to a crowdfunding campaign, “We Build The Wall” that “100 percent” of their donations would go to “building” the “wall” on the southern border.
Personally, I think that all of those xenophobes, nativists and bigots deserved to have a major portion of their “donations” wind-up in the hands of charlatans, and I don’t think they deserve an ounce of our sympathy. On the other hand, the law is the law, and here we go again, with another person (Bannon) tainted by his association with Trump. Unfortunately for Bannon, he has been on the “outs” with Trump personally for the past few years after he was “fired,” and there seems to have been no effort to stop the prosecution of Bannon by the Barr Justice Department. That doesn’t mean Bannon won’t be “pardoned” by Trump at the eleventh hour, but the facts of the case may be too much even for Trump’s warped sense of right and wrong.According to the indictment (with the “crowdfunding” website referred to being GoFundMe),
The defendants, and others, orchestrated a scheme to defraud hundreds of thousands of donors, including donors in the Southern District of New York, in connection. with an online crowd-funding campaign ultimately known as “We Build The Wall” that raised more than $25,000,000 to build a wall along the southern border of the United States. To induce donors to donate to the campaign, Kolfage and Bannon - each of whom, as detailed herein, exerted significant control over We Build the Wall repeatedly and falsely assured the public that Kolfage would “not take a penny in salary or compensation” and that “100% of the funds raised will be used in the execution of our mission and purpose” because, as Bannon publicly ttated, “we’re a volunteer organization.”
The defendants also
…collectively received hundreds of thousands of dollars in donor funds from We Build the Wall, which they each used in a manner inconsistent with the organization’s public representations. In particular, Kolfage covertly took more than $350,000 in funds that had been donated to We Build the Wall for his personal use, while Bannon, through a non-profit organization under his control received over $1,000,000 from We Build the wall, which Bannon used to, among other things, secretly pay Kolfage and to cover hundreds of thousands of dollars in personal expenses. To conceal the payments to Kolfage from We Build the Wall, Badolato, and Shea devised a scheme to route those payments from We Build the Wall to Kolfage indirectly through Non-Profit-l and a shell company under Shea's control, among other avenues. They did so by using fake invoices and sham “vendor” arrangements, among other ways, to ensure, as Kolfage noted in a text message to Badolato, that his pay arrangement remained “confidential" and kept on a “need to know” basis.
The “campaign” was initially wildly successful in conning racists out of their money, but media questions about exactly where the money was going persuaded the management of GoFundMe to demand that the Bannon and company identify the alleged non-profit organization that the money was to be turned over to for the purpose of wall-building, and when this was not forthcoming, suspended the campaign with the threat of “refunding” the money to donors. It is believed that “Non-Profit-1” refers to the Bannon-run organization “Citizens of the American Republic,” and that rather than being used to fund wall building, it was used to launder donations for the purpose “to misappropriate hundreds of thousands of dollars of those funds for their own personal benefit.”
Kolfage apparently demurred in overseeing the day-to-day operations of the “campaign” unless he was paid, and he demanded $100,000 upfront, and $20,000 a month thereafter. Bannon and Shea schemed to pay him through the “Wall” funds laundered through their “third-party” operations, “Non-Profit-1” and the shell company devised by Shea which was falsely claimed to be a “vendor” to which money for actual wall-building was handed to. Shea also apparently pocketed tens of thousands of dollars that was supposed to be used for “media work” that was never done.
The indictment further states that Bannon’s non-profit “received over $1,000,000 from We Build the Wall, and while some of that money was used to pay Kolfage, as detailed above, Bannon used a substantial portion of those donor funds for personal uses and expenses unrelated to We Build the Wall.” None of the payments to the defendants “were ever disclosed to the public. Instead, the defendants repeatedly and intentionally led the public to believe that none of their donations would be used for the personal benefit of the defendants.”
Technically, it is not “illegal” to pay oneself to “administer” the distribution of GoFundMe donations, but Bannon and his associates believed that they could convince many more modestly-incomed white nationalists, for whom stopping immigration from “shit-hole” countries was a “high priority,” to “donate” if they believed that “all” of their money was going to build the wall. What is most remarkable about all of this is the lengths that Bannon and his associates went to conceal from the public and the media how much of the money was actually not going into “wall-building” and going directly into their own pockets. They knew what they were doing was illegal, and they didn’t care; they just thought they were “smarter” than all those rednecks and hicks they were stealing money from. Unfortunately, they were not “smarter” than Southern District prosecutors and grand jurors.
In 2016, Bannon was making a very good living working for Breitbart, the far-right conspiracy-oriented “news” and opinion website. Unfortunately for him, his political views gained the attentions of Trump, who needed people in his administration to “steer” him on the far-right course. Bannon, like many far-right politicos on the fringes, jumped at the chance to exert power over a political and policy novice like Trump. However, as many of like-mind learned, it isn’t smart to brag about being “smarter” that Trump, especially publically.
But although Bannon’s time in the sun didn’t last long, he was still tainted by his association with someone as morally and ethically corrupt as Trump, especially concerning immigration policy. Bannon apparently thought he could still “profit” from that association, given the administration’s anti-immigrant fanaticism. If he winds-up in a prison cell, like Michael Cohen and Paul Manafort, he might well look with “nostalgia” at the time when he was not infected with Trump’s criminal diseases.
No comments:
Post a Comment